Religion and Public Intellectuals

Religion provides a topic of discourse in which some of the most famous of today’s public intellectuals readily interact. On one side this includes famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and from another direction come religious thinkers and leaders such as C S Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr as past examples and more recently Abdolkarim Soroush, Francis Collins Pope Benedict XVI, Hans Küng and Tariq Ramadan.
Russell McCutcheon has highlighted the under explored potential of scholars of religion to act as public intellectuals. He states that their role should be limited to that of a critic. In addition to this, J. O’Connor argues that the role should be broader than this; enabling the public to knowledgeably participate in the debates of scholars and stimulating the public’s own self critical reflection.
O'Conner argues that religious enthusiasts should be confronted by public intellectuals to consider the functions that religion can have, for instance, to be an illusion, opiate or patriarchal force - referring to the theories of religion held by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and broadly speaking, Feminism. On the other hand she also asserts that intellectuals should challenge contemporary despisers of religions to recognise religion as a force for positive social change by empowering believers with hope and survival when they are met with suffering, as well as a tool that provides further perspectives and insights on today’s pressing questions and dissects culture. McCutcheon reacts to this saying that schools of religion have done this to themselves.. Eileen Barker is an example, who, as a sociologist of religion, has founded an impartial charity called INFORM (Information Network Focus on Religious Movements) that provides factual information on religious movements for public use.
There is a debate of epistemological legitimacy to do with what the appropriate relationship should be between religion and public intellectual life. McCutcheon argues that it is necessary for scholars of the religion to "admit" that they are unable to know how or what reality is and that critical intelligence should reject the role of providing normative guidance; a position that disallows the possibility of objective truth claims.

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