I can still remember the relief I felt on first reading Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. It was published in 2012, a year that was perhaps the high-water mark of ‘New Atheism’, and proved to be an inflection point in the way religion was written about in public. My copy (or I should say copies, as I have bought, read and given away more than I can recall) is heavily underlined and splattered with marginalia.
Prompted, at least in part, by 9/11, New Atheism rumbled through the ‘noughties’. It was noisiest towards the end of that decade, thanks the self-described ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, God is not Great by Hitchens and Breaking the Spell by Dennett were all published in a cluster around 2007.
In 2009, British citizens were treated to the spectacle of the ‘Atheist Bus’ — a double decker advert declaring ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’ — created by the comedian Ariane Sherine with the support of, again, Dawkins.
The themes of the Four Horsemen’s treatises are now widely known: religion is dangerous and deeply irrational; only science, and the light of reason, can save humanity from the plague of superstition and violence it whips up.
Most religious responses took the bait. Some were shrill and ill-informed. The best, like The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath, did a good job of exploding the facile underpinnings of most of the arguments, but didn’t succeed in changing the terms of the debate. Unapologetic did. The first chapter was serialised run in full by the Guardian, for one thing.
For another, Spufford is a real writer, a writer’s writer. Picked as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997, he is unusual in publishing both critically acclaimed, commercially successful novels and books of non-fiction, as well as collections of essays. He is also a professor, teaching creative and life writing at Goldsmiths College. The book directly prior to Unapologetic was Red Plenty, about life in the USSR. This segue into religion came as a bit of a surprise, not least, apparently, to his agent.
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