Unbelievable. - Review - book reviews

Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety, by Wendy Kaminer (Pantheon, 272 pp., $24)

Wendy Kaminer belongs to that snarky club of embattled liberal intellectuals perhaps best represented by left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens. Aside from making a name for himself as a rapier-tongued Puck on the Sunday talk-show circuit, he has made a cottage industry out of bashing, of all people, Mother Teresa. In recent years Hitchens has written a book, The Missionary Position, and a documentary, Hell's Angel, both of which maintained that the saintly nun from Calcutta was a venal PR machine for the Pope and the Catholic Church. In Sleeping with Extra- Terrestrials, Kaminer, in her own more socially acceptable, less bibulous way, is likewise trying to save us from "the perils of piety"-the pestilence of organized religion and its encroachment on public life. Should we be surprised that Katha Pollitt, atheist-in-chief at The Nation and author of a book called Reasonable Creatures, has given Kaminer's book a gushing blurb? After all, these rearguard rationalists have to stick together, floating perilously as they are on a shrinking iceberg of sense in a sea of credulity.

Faith and belief are easy targets for enlightened ridicule. After all, what could be a flimsier straw man than a phenomenon that has never claimed to be anything but irrational? Why does Kaminer, a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a widely published social critic, and a fellow at Radcliffe College who clearly prides herself on her acumen, impartiality, and reasoned prose, feel the need to write a book that proves irrationality is irrational? Doesn't the truth of this statement count as a priori knowledge, if anything does? We need only consult the dictionary to learn what Wendy Kaminer takes nearly 300 pages to tell us. But it is always the people who think irrationality should wither in the pure light of reason who feel the need to write long books that kill it dead on every page, only to see it rise up again stronger than ever on the next.

Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials is a jeremiad of the most dispassionate kind-an appeal to the sensible among us, a warning that on the eve of this farcical third millennium, our increasingly superstitious, churchy age is in danger of becoming another Salem, Massachusetts, or, worse, another Dayton, Tennessee. Kaminer clearly fancies herself a latter-day H. L. Mencken doing battle with the demons of dogmatism and political reaction that threaten our secular freedoms. She is here to skepticize us out of our silly fascination with angels, aliens, miracles, near-death experiences, junk science, creationism, a Gorgonzola moon, and (for Kaminer, a delusion of the same order) the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

Kaminer makes no effort to understand the reasons for the persistence of such beliefs in a rational, skeptical age. She knows only that she has a jaundiced liberal's saucy eye to cast on every subject, from school vouchers (they'll only religify education by putting more kids in the dreaded Catholic schools) to the impeachment of President Clinton, which she likens to Greek tragedy when she calls it "Clinton's misfortune (or his self-determined fate)." Kaminer presents the Lewinsky affair as a matter of the right to privacy trumping the right-wing preoccupation with sexual morality. The word "perjury" is absent from her analysis.

The point of bringing up Clinton is to address the second and more heartfelt part of the book's subtitle-the "perils of piety." According to Kaminer, the impeachment of the president, like the advent of public- school vouchers, showed just how dangerous it is to blur the line between church and state. Clinton's ordeal proves only one thing to Kaminer: When moralists control the government, we'll all be on trial for our sex lives. Beware of Republicans in power! Imagine what it will be like. Lying under oath will be a punishable offense, and Chinese spies will have to find a room at the Washington Hilton.

Much of what Kaminer purports to cover in this book-the weird and whirling world of self-help-she has already critiqued roundly in her previous book, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. Her real agenda here is to ridicule Catholicism and, to some extent, the political agenda of the Christian Right. Of course she never says outright that she's targeting papists and other superstitious dupes, preferring easy targets like New Age spirituality seminars and do- it-yourself therapy manuals, suicidal cults like Heaven's Gate, and saccharine television shows like Touched by an Angel-manifestations of irrationalism that no serious person of faith would defend. How hard is it to show that Deepak Chopra's elevator doesn't go to the top floor, or that The Celestine Prophecy lacks the compelling authority of a rational proof?

But for all the time she spends maligning half-baked pop gurus and other lightweight spiritual charlatans, comments like the following announce her real thesis: "The Reverend Sun Myung Moon is always fair game, but not the pope."