Frank Schaeffer over at the Huffington Post wrote a blog entry describing how he believes an Obama presidency will be “bad news” for “the new atheists and other fundamentalists.” Note the way that atheists (forget the label new, it’s meaningless) here are grouped together with fundamentalists. This appears to be a rather common move these days. Historically, a fundamentalist was someone who held to the Five Fundamentals of the Christian faith, including a literal understanding of the Bible and a belief that the book is inerrant. Now the term seems to be thrown out whenver someone wishes to label a group of people as dogmatic about anything. 

The only thing fundamentally shared between atheists is a lack of belief in any god or gods. A dogma is a proposition that is held to be true unquestionably no matter what the evidence suggests. I don’t know about Mr. Schaeffer, but I have yet to meet a single atheist who takes his or her lack of belief in a god or gods as a dogma. And that includes the usual suspects that Schaeffer lists as “evangelistic atheists,” Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennet. One wonders how closely he has read these, especially Dennet, who, at least to me, seems to go to great lengths in his book Breaking the Spell to be sympathetic to religious believers. 

Anyway, let’s get to the heart of what Shaeffer is trying to say (and thereby saving you the trouble of reading all of this):

Into the all or nothing culture wars, and the all or nothing wars between the so-called New Atheists and religion the election of President elect Obama reintroduces nuance. President elect Obama’s ability to believe in Jesus, yet question, is going to rescue American religion in general and Christianity in particular, from the extremes. 

There is no way to understand President elect Obama’s victory as anything less than the start of not just a monumental political change but a spiritual revolution as well.

…
 
There is another message in the Maher/New Atheist oeuvre: everyone must think in categories stripped of allegory. Forget the idea that perhaps one may hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, say that none of the stories in the Bible happened as written, but that they are true in more subtle ways than mere historicity, or that we’re nothing but jumped up chimps, but are also connecting to a deeper reality when we say, “the Lord is my shepherd” and hope that he is.

The New Atheists don’t seem to “get” grown up allegory any more than the fundamentalists of the Religious Right do, let alone literary imagination. And both the Religious right and the New Atheists also seems oblivious to serious religious thinkers from Confucius to the Sufi poets, from Reinhold Niebur to one of Reinhold Niebuhr’s biggest fans; President elect Obama.

…

And President elect Obama has a generous enough spirit and a large enough intellect so that he can do with his spiritual life, what the Religious Right and the New Atheists have not done: understand that there is no shame in embracing paradox.

President Obama is about to make reasoned faith fashionable again. It’s about time.

From what I can understand, Schaeffer’s understanding of “reasonable faith” embraces allegory, literary imagination, and even paradox. There is a lot that could be said in response to this. For example, he never once states what it is, exactly, that he believes given his “nuance.” However, I think that the following response left by “A Thinking BUM” hits the nail directly on the head, so I am going to quote it in full:

So…How many Christians think that their salvation is allegorical? Metaphorical?

Or perhaps they think their personal salvation is literal, but the physical resurrection of Jesus was metaphorical?

I haven’t met many people who actually think that they are going to “actual, literal” heaven because of the allegorical resurrection of Jesus. 

When people talk in vagaries — “literal interpretation is silly; the higher approach is to take a nuanced, metaphorical/allegorical interpretation” — without writing down a single specific belief that would demonstrate exactly what this means, I get fairly skeptical. I really want them to actually write a full example of what such a nuanced person believes. Because I don’t think that even the writer of this article would be able to write it down: what is allegorical, what’s metaphorical, what’s literal, and how did you choose?

Noah’s flood gets marked under “literary imagination” because it’s just plain silly…
Jesus’ being born of a virgin — metaphorical because… well, it’s just plain silly…
Jesus dying and coming back to life again 3 days later… that happened because… ??? 
How is any miracle in the Bible more or less silly than another? 

And if they’re all equally silly — and you admit this — what do you believe if you maintain that you’re a Christian?

Supposedly such wishy-washiness represents not only a more reasoned faith but a more sophisticated one. It is difficult to understand why. Rather, it instead appears to be confused, uncertain, and devoid of any real meaning for anyone interested in, say, reality.