"As a child," writes John Derbyshire in today's National Review, "I was indoctrinated with some basic precepts regarding life among other human beings." One of them? "Don't mock another man's religion." But Derbyshire had been, this week, accused thereof. He was "jolted" and moved to a defense. Whatever my disappointment in his recent divestment from faith, Derbyshire is no active enemy of the churchman.
Even in facetious play as a curmudgeon, Derbyshire has never openly attacked Christianity. He treats the subject gravely. If we are looking for evidence of a contempt for religion, we find it in the writing of Heather Mac Donald and Christopher Hitchens.
Derbyshire bowed out of what appears to be a mischaracterization, by an increasing quarter on the right, of Islam. Refusing to participate cost him professionally. Short story: the New English Review, which he has called "Islamophobic," declined any future contributions from him. He's to be commended. Following guffaws at "the religion of peace" is a specious kind of Kirkpatrick Doctrine, in which American foreign judgment turns on whether something or someone is Muslim or not. It is failure of reason alone, Derbyshire's general opposition one which anyone can share.
A reader, offended in his perception that Derbyshire would "denigrate people who believe in Biblical creation," avowed that "The entire [New Testament's] plan of salvation is founded on creationism." Why drag John into it? Christians have not resolved and will not soon resolve disagreements over whether the Bible's descriptive passages are to be construed literally or phenomenalistically. If Derbyshire's correspondent thinks the rejection of creationism as a salient against him, he should also draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and millions of other believers. Many of the rest of us are satisfied in the conviction that God better demonstrated His power not by transubstantiating here and there, but contriving to make sound and automated that which we precisely comprehend through the sciences. His Gospels read as technical papers, Christ is disparaged.
How can a well-meaning, well-traveled, astute, lapsed Episcopalian vex? By the confluence of inattention and boredom.