Book review: The Idol of Our Age by Daniel J. Mahoney

The first book I read in 2020 is The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity by Daniel J. Mahoney.  The general premise of the book is that humanitarianism has become a secular religion which is not synonymous with Christianity.  I had hoped that this book would give me a better vantage point on an issue I have had with recent books by Christian authors published by Christian imprints which seem to arrive at the same ends as secular publications; i.e., that Christians should work toward the betterment of vulnerable minorities' earthly lives. 

Unfortunately, I was disappointed in this book. For one, it is quite dry and academic.  It surveys selected writings by Orestes Brownson, Vladimir Soloviev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (favorably)  and Pope Francis and Jurgen Habermas (unfavorably), but there is little if any argument why the former is better than the latter, save that the one agrees with the author and the other doesn't.

In addition, Mahoney fails to follow through on his subtitle.  How does humanitarianism subvert Christianity?  It's not until page 68 that he gets around to hinting at an answer.  I believe his point is that humanitarianism serves as a demythologized Christianity, leading culture to identify Christianity with "doing good" and, thus, ultimately to discard the actual beliefs of Christianity as unnecessary, irrelevant, and, in the modern mind, sometimes downright antithetical to the real work of Christianity, which is to make the world a better place.  I think this is what he's saying -- but it would be really great if the point promised in the subtitle received more than a glancing reference halfway through the book.

What vaguely justifies the price of purchase is Mahoney's reprint in the appendix of "The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude," a 1944 essay by Aurel Kolnai which served as an intellectual jumping-off point for the book and thus should really have been printed first with Mahoney's amplifications as an appendix.  Kolnai, while no less academic in prose, does provide distinctions between the two attitudes of the title and draws out the possible implications for societies based on one over and against the other.  It is interesting that, at the time Kolnai was writing, he saw the humanitarian society tending toward the general welfare of the majority over and against individual rights.  Today, of course, the rights of the distinct individual reign supreme -- but it's unsurprising, given the historical trends on display in 1944, that Kolnai saw the future as collectivism, and he does point out that both tendencies to both extremes are compatible with humanitarianism, that is, with making humanity and its perceived needs, whether collectively or individually, the basis for moral judgments.

It's a shame that this book isn't more accessible and clear, as I believe the distinction between humanitarian orthopraxy and religious orthodoxy is important to observers of society today.  It's an important concept to keep in mind, along with Will Herberg's Protestant Catholic Jew, in relation to statistics showing the "decline" of religious faith since the mid-twentieth century. For many in the 1950s, memberships in a religious institution had to do with "doing good" more than with supernatural beliefs (witness Dick Van Dyke's abandonment of organized religion because his church wasn't progressive enough in its policies); it's not clear that statistics of religious decline measure much more than people finding other socially-endorsed methods of charity without a supernatural belief system tacked on. 

The world is not lacking for those who identify religion with its material outcomes on human lives.  From Felix Adler, the Reformed Jew who "called for an end to the trappings of ritual and theology and for a universal religion steeped in morality" in 1874 to Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine, who says "that for him, being a Christian means taking care of the poor, immigrants, and other marginalized communities."  This is how Christianity (or Judaism) is subverted, by making them about what people do rather than about what God does.