The Pope Vs. Pop Culture

By DONALD DeMARCO

The late Antonin Scalia, speaking at a prayer breakfast in 1998, made reference to America’s consistent belief in God, but one that is not a national belief in a particular religion. His address has been reprinted in First Things (April 9, 2019) on the occasion of its inclusion in On Faith: Letters From an American Believer, a collection of reflections on Scalia’s own faith.
At the root of this tradition are the words of George Washington found in his Farewell Address in which he stated that religion and morality are “indispensable supports” of “political prosperity” and that we should indulge “with caution the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”
But we have come a long way since Washington and similar sentiments expressed by various Founding Fathers. We have come a long way even since Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas (hardly a conservative thinker), declared in 1952: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”
A dramatic change occurred, according to Scalia, in a 1968 court opinion which declared that the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and non-religion. In this case, atheism was given a certain parity with theism. Scalia expressed disagreement with that opinion as he did not believe in the principle of neutrality between religion and non-religion on which the ruling was based.
This is not what Washington, the Founding Fathers, or Justice Douglas had in mind. Nor did Lincoln have this in mind then he stated, in his “Gettysburg Address,” that we are a “nation under God.”
That atheism should gain a respectability equal to religion has become more and more integrated in present American society. Consider two popular television sit-coms, The Big Bang Theory and its spinoff, The Young Sheldon. The latter is an attempt to depict the early years of Sheldon Cooper, who stars in the former. Both Coopers, youthful and adult, are brilliant scientists. In both cases, they are heavily portrayed as atheists.
In one episode, the older Cooper, who consistently repudiates the religion of his God-fearing mom, states, “Oh deity, whose existence I doubt, why hast thou forsaken me?” Young Sheldon tries in vain to have the words “under God” removed from his school’s Pledge of Allegiance. In another episode, he articulates his plans for a new religion: “mathology.”
In order to accept God’s, existence, both Sheldons would require convincing scientific proof. They doubt, however, that any such proof could be made available. It is interesting to note that the “Big Bang Theory,” which is based on an initial explosion that has an affinity with “Let there be Light,” has led a number of high-ranking scientists and others to a belief in God.
Astro-physicist Dr. Robert Jastrow confesses the following in his book, God and the Astronomers: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
As someone once said, “An atheist is a person who looks through a telescope and tries to explain everything he can’t see.”
Philosopher Antony Flew writes about his conversion to theism in his 2007 book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind. He became convinced that empirical evidence showed that there must be an Intelligent Creator of the Universe.
Pop culture is immensely influential. Sheldon Cooper is bright, inquisitive, ambitious, and above all — scientific. He is countered, in both sitcoms, by Christians who appear to be unthinking fundamentalists. The stage is set to give atheism, if not agnosticism, a certain appeal. It creates the impression that not believing in God is trendy and forward-thinking.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are papal documents. St. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) comes to mind. If, thinking somewhat mathematically, we could multiply the amount of exposure that Sheldon Cooper gets by its depth of his thought, that product would be comparable with the amount of exposure that Faith and Reason gets multiplied by the depth of its thought. This is a strange pairing, but in the present world, this is the way things are. The best material goes relatively unknown while the feeblest thoughts receive widespread exposure.
Fides et Ratio is John Paul’s longest encyclical and is a response to a tendency in the modern world toward scientism, which separates faith from reason. Contrary to popular sentiment, the Holy Father writes, “Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence. Here the words of the Book of Proverbs are pertinent: ‘The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps’.”
We can learn only so much through science. But science cannot tell us what will happen to us from day to day. The meaning of life and the direction of our own personal journey is not revealed through scientific inquiry. The achievements of science are unquestioned and they are truly both formidable and amazing. Yet, as John Paul states, “scientism consigns all that has to do with the question of the meaning of life to the realm of the irrational or imaginary.”
Scientists themselves, John Paul goes on to say, are well aware that “the search of truth, even when it concerns a finite reality of the world or of man, is never-ending, but always points beyond to something higher than the immediate object if study, to the questions which give access to Mystery.”
The two shows featuring Sheldon Cooper are essentially comedies. Nonetheless, they carry a subtext which is presented, therefore, in a subliminal way. That subtext is the propagation of an unreasonable attack on organized religion and an unwarranted praise of the power of reason. The message, then, is that scientism is the way to go in the twenty-first century and the notion of “one nation under God” is becoming, with the help of the United States Supreme Court, out of fashion.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com. 12 Values of Paramount Importance is in process.)