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Book Review: Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith

of revealed moral precepts, which seems to preempt the moral necessity of freely judging or arriving at these precepts on our own; all ideas that enjoin moral living through penal enforcement, ideas like hell or the vengeance of God; the idea of reward, heaven; the idea of papal infallibility, which seems to invite passive assent instead of active personal assessment. For M., these things are actually demoralizing because they interrupt freedom. Any type of enforcement is coercive and therefore incompatible with morality. Here we might stop and mention the millions of people who do not have the time or the ability to come to moral conclusions on their own, people who rely on the existence of antecedent moral precepts as well as the decisions of other people who function as moral guides. By M.'s standards, would these people be amoral in their choices? M. anticipates this critique and offers two responses. First, he says that as long as peoples' right of assessment is respected, there is nothing demoralizing about their making moral choices based on the conclusion of other people. He could have and should have stopped there. But he goes on to develop a theory of "masters and apprentices." By this he means that at all levels of society there exist relationships between moral teachers and moral learners. When the learners retain the power of dissent, M. feels there is nothing coercive about this power. But surely this is too universal a claim, and there yet remains a risk of coercive domination over the "learner's" conscience. As to whether this book will be taken seriously by secular scholars, the bulk of it could be, but M. undermines this result by making a weak case that an "Eros-like" striving of humanity toward selfintegration, and a similar striving of creation in evolution, suggest "that the source of this striving universe is both moral and good" (106), a "cosmic moral agent" for whom "natural evolution is that agent's original letter of invitation" (148). Though M. disclaims this argument as an argument for God, it nonetheless retains that familiar flavor of desperate apologetics and would hardly be convincing to a secularist like, say, Michael Martin of Boston University, because, at the very least, it presumes a teleology that Martin would not accept as a given. M. is a critical supporter of Roman Catholicism. He delivers stinging criticisms of the papacy, of Vatican policies on morality, and of Vatican appointments of bishops world wide. This robust and candid work may resuscitate discussions of loyal dissent within the Church; though this was not one of M.'s expressed goals.