Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section,
Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
“THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM
– The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World” by Alister McGrath
(first published 2004)
In
writing positively of Professor Neil Broom’s Life’s X Factor, I have probably just offended a certain number of
readers of this blog, who might be wary of, or even hostile to, religious
concepts being discussed seriously.
Oh
well.
I
might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
So
in this week’s “Something Old” I plough on into a polemic most definitely
written from a religious point of view.
Alister
McGrath is professor of historical theology at the University of Oxford, and
Principal of Wycliffe Hall. His viewpoint is therefore that of an informed
academic Protestant. Alistair McGrath is also a former atheist. He therefore
sometimes writes with the zeal of a convert.
In
The Twilight of Atheism, he argues
that true atheism, a complete rejection of the idea of God, far from being on
the rise in the Western world, is actually in decline. Certainly churches in
the West have been progressively emptying and in the few countries (such as New
Zealand) where a specific religious census is taken, there has been a rise in
the “No Religion” option. But this cannot be taken to mean a rise in real
atheism. More often, it is either simple indifferentism or a rejection of a
specific denominational label, leaving a large part of the population still
with religious assumptions, attitudes and inclinations, but without a framework
for them. And, despite the loud polemic of Dawkins, Hitchens et al, the number
who identify themselves as atheists is in decline.
As
McGrath argues it, real atheism is historically and culturally conditioned. It
is essentially a reaction against the abuses of religious belief or of church institutions.
It is at its most vigorous and authentic when it is oppositional. Corrupt or
overbearing church establishments provoke resentment and hard-core atheism.
Thus the pre-revolutionary Catholic Church of France gives rise to a Denis
Diderot; the “Established” nineteenth century Church of England throws up a Charles Bradlaugh; and the
pre-1917 Russian Orthodox Church turns out atheist Nihilists and Marxists. In
all three cases, there was a church establishment that was intolerant, had too
much power, and was identified with the state.
Conversely,
argues McGrath, when there is plurality and clear religious tolerance, atheism
loses purpose and withers away into marginalised crankiness. Few people are
interested when there is no intolerant religious establishment to kick against.
As he sees it, atheism is a product of modernism – the materialistic belief in
the scientific improvement of humanity – but has faded in the post-modern world
in which real diversity of viewpoints is respected.
Furthermore,
atheism has continued to remain on a narrow cerebral level and has failed to
capture many imaginations. Atheists may be able to show their reasons for
disliking religious belief, and may be able to score points in public debates
when giving such reasons. But this is essentially a negative thing. When it
comes to showing how atheism per se
gives meaning, purpose, direction and colour to life, there is apparently
little atheists can say.
On
the historical level, McGrath makes much of the facts that (a.) whenever
atheism has had the unfettered power churches once had, it has itself rapidly
become a persecuting establishment (e.g. the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao
etc.) ; and (b.) the fastest growing ideology in the present age is Pentecostal
Christianity, in Africa and Asia, because it really does speak for and through
the oppressed.
With
much personal soul-searching (as a Protestant), the author defines the main
ailment of the modern world as the separation of the spiritual and the
quotidian. For this he largely blames the Protestant Reformation and its (to
use the Oxford historian Eamon Duffy’s phrase) “stripping of the altars” and removal of religious rituals
and reminders from everyday life.
An
early Protestantism that fetishised the “word” of the Bible, and condemned or
smashed up religious art, religious processions and other lived-out elements of
a faith, was a Protestantism that paved the way for a purely cerebral
assessment of the world, for an absence of corporate belief and consciousness,
and hence for personalised secularism. It took the mainstream Protestant
churches a couple of hundred years to understand this, and then to begin to
creep back into the more celebratory and colourful forms of public worship that
they had abandoned in their initial break with Catholicism. To give the most
obvious example, the forms of worship of the Anglican Church were plain, bare,
non-sacramental and very “Protestant” from the late sixteenth century when the
Anglican Church was established, until the early nineteenth century, when the
Oxford Movement and then “Anglo-Catholics” began to re-make Anglican forms.
What some misinterpret as the “ancient” rituals of the present Anglican Church
(vestments, sacramentalism etc.) are, in the main, less than 200 years old and
very much imitated from Catholicism.
I
found much of McGrath’s argument sympathetic and well-researched. Certainly it
is true that lack of orthodox religious belief is not the same as atheism. More
often it indicates the uncommitted attitude that says “Ooh….ah….um… I dunno” or “I’ve
never thought about it really”. To become an atheist is to make a leap of
faith, which very few people do. (No, mes
enfants, atheism is no more based purely on “reason” than theology is.)
Much of McGrath’s historical commentary is also well-reasoned and –presented.
McGrath
is, however, writing a polemic and The
Twilight of Atheism sometimes has the crudity of a polemic.
As
you can see if you look them up on-line, initial reviews of this book tended to
divide along the lines of the reviewers’ personal beliefs and prejudices, so it
was inevitable that the likes of The
Freethinker would bollix it. Even so, I can agree with those who argue that
McGrath has not fully comprehended the beast that is post-modernism, and that he
is being altogether too optimistic in assuming that post-modernism will be
fertile ground for the resurgence of religious belief. Au contraire, post-modernism relativises and diminishes the
significance of everything, including religious belief. There is the additional
fact that the resurgence of militant Islam (hardly noted by McGrath) has
recently provided much ammunition for those who push the
“religion-causes-conflict” fallacy.
I
would also take issue with the whole chapter McGrath devotes to the bigotry of
the American atheist propagandist Madalyn O’Hair. Through the story of this
particular manipulative and mentally-unbalanced woman, the chapter does
more-or-less make the valid point (pace
the more naive assumptions of Diderot and others of the Enlightenment) that
atheism does not necessarily lead to an enhanced morality. Even so, it strikes
me as a very ad hominem form of
argument. If atheism is discredited by its neurotic American propagandist, then
how does Christianity stand with its money-making American tele-evangelists? If
you’re arguing against the crude polemics of a Christopher Hitchens, you
shouldn’t stoop to the dishonest tactics of a Hitchens.
Some
weeks ago, I looked at The War of the
Windsors [check it out on the index at right], a biased “history” with an
anti-British Monarchy theme. I noted that I, too, don’t have a great deal of
time for the British Monarchy, but this doesn’t mean that I endorse any old
rope written against it. The Twilight of
Atheism is not the same sort of book. It is written by a scholar, contains
genuinely scholarly observations and has a robust central thesis. Even so, in
its weaker spots I repeat my cry “Non
tali auxilio!”
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