Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquistors: The New Attacks on Free Thought was originally published in 1995, but its analysis of two opposite but dangerous trends which he noticed even then, to either silence free thought or treat all opinions as equally valid, could be seen as prescient in light of the recent uptick in campus censorship and even violent acts against those presenting views which challenge the academic progressive consensus.
Rauch’s suggestion is that we should not arbitrate our disputes with violence, nor should we condescend to treat every opinion as just as good as every other opinion. Instead, we should allow gatekeepers invested in the process of discovery to set the terms for the debate. For example, while creationists and scientific racists should not be silenced through the state, they can probably be safely ignored in the public square if the scientific community (those who should know something about this issue and have a process by which the popular view may be challenged by promising upstarts) is unmoved by their pronouncements.
While Rauch’s denouncement of state violence and censorship is commendable, his optimism about the process of critical engagement is at least partly unwarranted. Rauch himself seems to know this on some level as his critiques are often aimed at academia’s unwillingness to budge on its echo-chambering of liberal orthodoxy. This scholarly rigidity to challenges has arguably only gotten worse in recent years as we’ve seen more silencing and physical attacks on college campuses upon perceived ideological enemies (for instance, https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html), often with the tacit or vocal support of the administration. Apart from these more extreme examples, there is also an implicit silencing that happens as the result of efforts to protect political sacred cows; for example, the trend in sex studies to uncritically accept the sometimes questionable orthodoxies of transgender activists (https://reason.com/podcast/2020/08/19/debra-soh-the-end-of-gender).
Of course, none of this changes the fact that free inquiry is still the best means of getting a society closer to truth. It only shows that a culture of rejecting free inquiry can interfere with even the most rigorous processes.
This brings me to another flaw in the book: its uncharacteristic uncuriosity about the process of inquiry and rejection of violence in the Christian tradition.
Rauch connects Christian faith with “the fundamentalist social rule,” that is: “those who know the truth should decide who opinion is right.” He cites Paul’s exhortation in his epistle to the Romans, that God would be right in judging all of us since all of us “suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Romans 1:18-19, NASB) as an example of this fundamentalist social rule. In Rauch’s reading, Paul’s statement is one which stands behind the later “killing, torture, and repression of people who perversely, ‘by their wickedness,’ denied evident truth. Certainly there can be no right to say what is false and what you know is false.”
But is this actually what Paul is saying? This is the same Paul who, eleven chapters later, urges Christians to bless those who persecute them and never avenge or repay evil for evil (12:14-21). Could he be suggesting that Christians should dominate the public square and silence their opponents? No, this is not the course of action that Paul favored. Instead, he went into the public square and argued openly, with pagans by appealing to his day’s philosophical knowledge and with Jews by appealing to the Hebrew Bible. He did not engage in silencing or even suggest that he favored it. That’s what his theologically Jewish and pagan opponents did. Paul was arrested, beaten–sometimes almost to death, and finally killed by the state for freely speaking against and publicly debating the orthodoxies of his time.
Similarly, while the church which gained secular power often abused it by playing politics and silencing–even killing–its opponents, Christianity also has a rich history of non-violence and a suspicion of political power. To begin at the beginning, the early church’s theologians were virtually universally pacifists. After a period of tradition displacing scripture, the church began to revisit the Bible again and restore it to the people in the 16th century. When this happened, a large and outspoken contingent of Christians, called Anabaptists, followed the early church’s model and rejected political power and violence as well.
This is not to say that in the intervening centuries the process of inquiry disappeared. Even the medieval church had a tradition of carefully reading two books–the one being scripture and the other the so-called book of nature–both which came from God. This belief that nature points to God’s creative glory spurred on the Scientific Revolution as Christians believed that the universe reflected a divine creative intent and wanted to know it’s creator better (for further reading, check out Principe’s The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction and Hannam’s The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution).
In addition to this careful reading of the book of nature, a process for reading the book of scripture was also developed that closely parallels the scientific method–hermeneutics. In other words, rules were developed that allowed readers to read the Bible for understanding its authors’ original intent and allowed Christians interpreters to challenge one another to read more carefully.
In other words, despite a tragic history of fundamentalist thinking, Christianity also has not only a deep foundation, but a rich tradition, of rejecting violence and promoting free inquiry.
Finally, Rauch’s contention that religious belief is relegated to the private realm, and therefore that good scientists may appeal to faith for emotional help in private but that it should not influence their scientific work, begs the question. If there are any questions which Christian faith seeks to answer that can be checked using public methods of inquiry and criticism (and there are), then those questions cannot be segregated to the realm of the private. They can and should be put to open inquiry.
While Kindly Inquisitors is an important book on this topic, if one only has time to read one, Haidt and Lukianoff’s more recent The Coddling of the American Mind not only builds on Rauch’s ideas with strong arguments and good research, it’s also more persuasive at making a case for a community of inquiry that’s open to all–even Christians.