The Burden of “Sentimentality”

This article is irritating on a number of fronts. In this book excerpt, the author condemns much of the world outside his religious sphere, consigning faithlessness, insufficient faith, and departure from Church doctrine to the realm of “Sentimentalists.” But he is noncredible, his thesis built on multiple fallacies.

First: the author confuses atheism with hedonism and both with mortals using their inborn capacity for reason. This rather undermines his denunciation of the modern world, I think.

Second: he assumes that belief in an omnipotent, omniscient being unbounded by physical laws is founded on reason. He consigns disbelief in this unseen, unproven being to unreason. I think Anthony Flew’s philosophical journey demonstrates that a reasoning being can reach both conclusions.

Third: The author assumes that morals and scriptures, handed down through generations of man, purposed and repurposed, translated, transliterated, and interpreted over thousands of years, have never been themselves applied in the cause of “Sentimentality,” or even bent to man’s own purpose.

Fourth: The author entreats folks to stay within “the Church” (presumably the Catholic church), to reform it rather than running from it. But that ignores modern realities. In a world contaminated with modern, secular freedom, one may choose. Take a damaged church and rebuild, or else concluded that timbers are rotted beyond repair, and build a new house of worship. Or else conclude that worship is needless, and take those timbers (principally the culture and norms handed down through church) and build a life without faith.

Fifth: The author’s attempt at theodicy toward the end leaves me cold. He writes:

[N]o loving god (or god worth loving) he opines, could allow earthquakes and tsunamis, illness and grief, war and homelessness; he is unwilling to consider that a very loving (and praise-worthy) God inspires the sort of heroic rescue, relief, discovery, and responsive human aid that the Sentimentalist admires.

So this deity inflicts widespread suffering for the purpose of inspiring heroism and relief? In this kind of situation, a simple utilitarian comparison of suffering versus heroism from an earthquake or a tsunami indicates that this man’s god is an immoral being … or that this man is very wrong about his deity.

In the end, I do not find this book excerpt convincing in the least. The author misconceives those outside his circle of faith. He assumes that all outside of his Church are weak-willed simpletons, beholden to the trends of a given age, while his Church has remained a rock, a fortress against the woeful tides of Sentimentality.

But he is wrong.

Outside of his Church, plenty of people live and love, and cleave to such ideals as “equality of men and women,” “equal protection under the law,” and other Sentimentalist piffle, and they follow these ideals to where they lead.

And these “Sentimentalists” do so, I might add, in the face of a world where this man’s Church and its Protestant brethren, which together count a majority of America’s population among their adherents, proclaim that these Sentimentalists are wrong. This is hardly a weak-willed bending of the knee to the precepts of an age.

I do not deny that organized religion has brought good into the world. In point of fact, churches are valuable conservators of both morals and culture. But at the same time, there is a world outside the Church. And to condemn so much of that world as the refuge of “Sentimentality” smacks of (dare I say it) the deadly sin of Pride.