God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.

Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a skeptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.

Not every argument in the book takes this form, but most do. The first section focuses on the Big Bang theory, and its implication that the universe must have had a beginning, and will have an end; in which case, the authors think, the existence of a supernatural first cause is deductively implied. But the next section, focusing on “fine-tuning arguments”, puts us squarely in the territory of induction not deduction, and what philosophers like to call “inference to the best explanation” — treating the physical universe as if it were a murder scene, with you as Hercule Poirot, trying to work out whodunnit from the clues.

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Fine-tuning arguments are already familiar to many — not least from earlier popular science books like Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma — and Bolloré and Bonnassies make a reasonable job of introducing them to those not in the know. Put simply, the claim is that the universe is sensitively calibrated for life in a way that cannot be coincidental. It’s intelligent design. Physical laws and constants are balanced excruciatingly delicately. “For some of these numbers, a very slight deviation by even a distant decimal point would have yielded an unrecognizable Universe, and we would not be here to talk about it.”

Had the mass of a proton been slightly bigger than that of a neutron, there would be nothing in the universe but neutronium. Had the beryllium 8 in stars not formed chemical bonds at a very precise resonance, there wouldn’t have been enough carbon in the universe for the beginning of life. Had the electromagnetic force binding electrons to nuclei been only a few percentage points different, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Counterfactual after counterfactual underlines just how lucky we are to be alive — so lucky, in fact, that perhaps luck has nothing to do with it.

And it is not just in the realm of physics that Bolloré and Bonnassies find natural phenomena too improbable to be accidental. In biology, the complexity of a single cell organism and the stunning efficiency of the double helix are among the structures they think only an intelligent being could account for. But it’s when our co-authors get to the last third of their book, and take on the supposed improbability of historical events involving Jesus, the Jewish race, and miracles such as the one at Fatima, that the true extent of their detective skills comes to the fore: less Hercule Poirot and more Inspector Clouseau. This part of the book is so clumsily argued, it would cause the Pope himself to have doubts.

Consider their story about why the existence of the Old Testament counts as good historical evidence for God’s invisible hand. They argue that it offers readers proto-scientific truths, such as “mankind comes from matter”, and “the world was not created all at once but developed in stages”, that absolutely could not have been revealed to the Ancient Hebrews at the time without divine instruction. (Never mind that much earlier pre-Socratic Greeks like Anaximenes and Anaximander made statements like this too.) At this, you might reasonably protest that the Bible also gets quite a lot wrong, perhaps suggesting that occasional empirical accuracy is more due to luck than judgment. For instance, the Book of Genesis says that heaven and earth were created in six days, not 13.8 billion years. But a bit like loyal press officers working to cover the ramblings of an unreliable leader, Bolloré and Bonnassies retort that nobody back then had the concept of a billion (though couldn’t God have given it to them?); and anyway, the “precise” age of the Earth “is of no interest at all, from either a metaphysical or physical point of view”.

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Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?

By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.

Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?

Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God. This is explicit in God, the Science, the Evidence: at one point the authors write that “the human body is just an intelligent machine”. Only the soul, if it exists, is of a different nature.” Inside nature, we might one day understand everything; on the outside, there is no time, no space, no real hooks for our subjective minds to catch on. Every earthbound image we come up with is inadequate.

But materialist accounts don’t do much better in banishing cosmological mystery; for arguably, saying we came from absolutely nothing is the most mysterious stance of all. So puzzling is this proposal, attempts to explain the origins of the universe in terms of prior nothingness often inadvertently smuggle something in. A portion of space pulsating with energy is still something; a quantum field is still something. We can still always ask: yes, but what caused the existence of it? And there’s also the metaphysically irritating fact that, if you don’t want to countenance a birth and a death for the universe, you have to posit the existence of an actual infinity; no less bizarre for the average mind, acquainted only with finitude, than its religious alternative.

Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesizing transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.

I was curious to visit Louise because I had been reading Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, an absorbing new book by the anthropologist and New Yorker writer Manvir Singh. Singh — who has lived with and studied indigenous peoples from Indonesia to the Amazon — points out that shamanism is having a moment. In the 2021 UK census, 8,000 people said their religion was shamanism — more than Rastafarians or Zoroastrians. Celebrities from Madonna to Will Smith have testified to the transformative powers of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant used by Amazonian shamans, inspiring a busy trade in Western tourism to South American retreats. And, of course, you don’t need to leave your home to meet a shaman: Durek Verrett, who claims to be a reptile and whose clients include Gwyneth Paltrow, is just one of the more popular shamanic influencers online, with more than 400,000 Instagram followers.

Shamanism — the word comes from 17th-century accounts of hunter-gatherer religion in Siberia — may strike us as profoundly alien. Siberian Chukchi shamans claimed to turn into reindeer and travel through the underworld, and Durek Verrett offers to cleanse women’s vaginas of evil spirits. But in his book, Singh makes a striking claim: shamanism isn’t some primitive stage in the evolution of religion proper, or some kooky New Age parody of ancient superstitions. Instead, it’s about as natural to human beings as storytelling or dance — and it’s our institutional religions, with their bishops, churches and creeds, that are the peculiar innovations of a new age.

Singh’s argument is worth paying attention to, because if he’s right — if humans instinctively gravitate towards shamanism — then it means that the practices of the Chukchi don’t just tell us about our primordial past. They may also help us understand the spiritual yearnings that beset us today — and offer clues about where we are headed in the future. And if it’s true, as many claim, that secular Western societies are undergoing a “meaning crisis”, perhaps we’ll end up turning for answers not to traditional religions but to new forms of shamanism.

Singh’s argument starts from the fact that, when Europeans began exploring and colonizing the globe after the 15th century, everywhere they went they encountered peoples with remarkably similar religious practices. From the tundras of Siberia to the plains of North America to the islands of the Pacific, traditional societies recognized certain men or women as religious visionaries who used their special access to the supernatural to offer services like healing and prophecy. They explained what they were doing in different ways — Nepali shamans extracted ghosts from people’s bodies, whereas Eskimo shamans traveled to the moon and turned into bears — but beneath this diversity were some conspicuously similar characteristics.

Shamans everywhere advertise their connection to the unseen by entering altered states, whether through drugs, ecstatic dance, dreams or visions. They emphasize their difference from ordinary people by undergoing rituals of transformation, and by depriving themselves of food or sex. Although their work brings money and prestige, shamans are often society’s outsiders: some seem to be mentally ill, prone to weeping or psychosis; and some (like the bujasa of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) were what today we would call trans. Certain ideas — like “soul journeying” and metamorphosis into animals — occur among shamans again and again.

The fact that shamanism is virtually universal in traditional societies, despite their separation by millennia of historical development, calls for an explanation. It must be, argues Singh, that shamanism evolved again and again because it meets a fundamental human need — similar to how wings have evolved separately among insects, bats and birds to solve the challenge of how to navigate through the air.

The tragedy of human life is that we crave order in a wildly unpredictable universe. We want our crops to grow in a world of hail storms and drought. We want our loved ones to survive and stay healthy in a world of danger and disease. And when things go wrong, we find it virtually impossible to accept that they do so for no reason. We look out at the chaos of reality and see a universe saturated with agency. When bad things happen — the medieval Black Death, the Covid pandemic, the death of a child — we have a natural tendency to think unseen agents must be to blame. As a result, we are always susceptible to the claims of charismatic individuals who can convince us that they have special access to the world of invisible causes.

Singh’s account implies that, at the root of the human religious impulse — deeper even than a desire for community or existential purpose or moral guidance — is something far simpler: a craving for magic. We want good things to happen and bad things not to happen, and we want to believe that certain people have the power to make it so. This is the basis of shamanism, which means it was most likely the basis of religion everywhere for 95% of our species’ history, before agriculture triggered the development of civilizations and institutional religions. Not until the appearance of those newfangled faiths did the gods become obsessed with monitoring our behavior and beliefs. Most human religions have had nothing much to do with morality or doctrine.

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Today our post-Enlightenment religions go to great lengths to prove they are respectably rational. The spooky and miraculous have largely been banished from church. The pope pays obeisance to Darwin, apologists write books reconciling God and science, and talk of miraculous healing is for most part the preserve of embarrassing cranks. Priests pray that God will grant us wisdom and compassion, not that he will hold off plagues and tornadoes, stymie witches or curse our enemies.

But if Singh is right, it may be that the problem with mainstream Western religion is not that it is insufficiently rational but, rather, that it is nowhere near irrational enough. It’s now a commonplace that Westerners are dissatisfied with a coldly rationalistic worldview, and are increasingly seeking answers in a panoply of spiritual practices — or perhaps even rediscovering a belief in God. But reading Singh I began to wonder if the standard explanations for why this is happening — a loss of community, a breakdown in moral values, a search for transcendent meaning — ignore an even deeper cause.

Western societies like Britain didn’t rapidly become more secular after the Second World War because people began to reject Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs, or because we were busy reading On the Origin of Species. We stopped attending church because the modern state increasingly performed the functions of the ancient gods. First the Industrial Revolution and then the creation of welfare states helped us make staggering strides towards eliminating the role of chance in human affairs. Decades of postwar peace and economic growth meant we were living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives. And shrinking inequality and expanding welfare systems meant most of us no longer dreaded catastrophic reversals of economic fortune or social standing.

That era may now be coming to an abrupt halt. Climate change means the weather is again becoming a matter of existential concern. Covid destroyed our faith in the state’s ability to protect us from plague. The unthinkable prospect of great power war and nuclear apocalypse has again become thinkable. Flatlining economic growth may not look like a disaster in the grand scheme of human history, but when the very rich are capturing an ever-greater share of wealth, it translates to lower living standards for most and humiliating losses of status for many. Secularism advanced quickest in egalitarian Scandinavia, and slowest in the United States, where high inequality and patchy state support left people more exposed to the vagaries of fate. A more uncertain future may very well be a more religious one.

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But reading Singh and visiting Louise made me skeptical that we are about to see people flocking back to church pews — despite recent headlines trumpeting a revival of religiosity based on scanty data. According to Singh, institutional religions like Christianity never replaced the innate human attraction to shamanism, but merely captured and suppressed it. New religions, he argues, tend to be founded by shamans — Jesus, St Paul, Muhammad and Joseph Smith all gathered followers by hearing voices and performing miracles — and echoes of shamanism can be found in “charismatic” Christian churches. But shamans are unruly, and mainstream religions tend to maintain order and authority by stamping them out. Even so, the human fear of uncertainty means that shamans crop up again and again in the form of prophets, gurus and cult leaders.

This is particularly true in times of social upheaval. At the beginning of the 20th century, a social crisis was triggered in Polynesia when ships bearing American cargo confronted native peoples with previously unimaginable hordes of wealth. Indigenous societies were thrown into confusion, their settled worldviews overturned. Shamanic prophets emerged to lead “cargo cults”, promising a coming age of salvation when the heavenly ships would return. Rituals were invented to hasten their arrival, such as beating drums while marching up and down the shore.

Our own age of confusion has thrown up its own shamans with their own promises of salvation. Guru-influencers like Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand gain followers by promising healing based on their special insight into mysterious psychic realities. Like traditional shamans, they advertise their spiritual otherness via weird lifestyles based on self-deprivation (Brand abstains from animal products, drugs and alcohol; Peterson lives on steak). Like traditional shamans with their trance states, they weep and promise transcendence in ecstatic tirades of semi-comprehensible language. Only a little kookier than Brand and Peterson is Joe Dispenza, who tells his 1.36 million YouTube followers that he healed his broken back with positive thinking, and teaches techniques to use quantum physics to cure cancer and bring wealth.

Our new shamans may seem like the bizarre products of our strange new age of smartphones and algorithms, but in the long view of human history they make perfect sense. It’s the human condition to seek, in Peterson’s phrase, antidotes to chaos. A world of lavish wealth for a few and growing anxiety for many is one where charismatic individuals promising magical transformation will flourish. Now when I think of our current craze for Kundalini yoga and reiki, meditation and affirmation, ayahuasca and psilocybin, I consider those Polynesia islanders undergoing their own meaning crisis a century ago. Frightened by changes beyond our control, and stirred into ecstatic longing by wealth we can barely understand, we beat our drums and gaze out over the horizon, praying for the coming age of riches and renewal.

I thought about Levy’s punchy phrase when I read the headlines last week about a “dramatic growth” in churchgoing among young people in the US, mirroring the trend in the US. Twenty years ago, almost no one would have predicted such a revival. Religiosity in the West, and Christianity specifically, was in long-term decline; but more than that, irreligiosity appeared to be on an unstoppable path towards triumph.

Back in the 2000s, atheism felt exciting. It’s hard to credit now, but from 2005 to 2007, I spent many of my evenings in the pub thrashing out the flaws in agnosticism. No, no, someone would be saying as you arrived back from the bar clutching a round, it’s nonsense to reserve judgment on something when there’s no evidence for it. Someone else would quote Bertrand Russell, then the conversation would turn to the possibility of morality absent a deity: maybe atheists were more moral, because they weren’t just following old holy books? And then everyone could feel very pleased with themselves as they took a mouthful of their pint.

Unbelieving was a pleasant pace of rebellion for a young adult in England. We were defying our Church of England schooling, the compulsory “Our Fathers” in assembly, the nativity every Christmas. It was provocation without danger. The last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the UK had been in 1976. No one had been executed for heresy in this country for 300 years. The young apologetics fans who are rediscovering collective worship probably feel something of the same. There are many reasons someone can feel called to church, and one of them is surely the opportunity to make you elders feel slightly baffled and uncomfortable.

When it came to questions of belief, all the intellectual energy was with the “New Atheist” movement, which was determined to root faith itself out of public life. It felt like taking a stand against the atrocities of the time, which all seemed to have their roots in religion. The Catholic Church was embroiled in horrifying scandals of child abuse and cover-up, and the Anglicans had a few of their own. 9/11 had been a harrowing illustration of what “religious inspiration” in practice; the military response from the US and UK looked, to some, like a divinely motivated “crusade”. People who were unreasoning enough to believe in virgin births or paradise for martyrs were presumed to be capable of all kinds of unreasonable activity besides. Hence the title of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

But anyone who believed as fully as the New Atheists did that religion was a man-made phenomenon should have been able to foresee what happened next. New Atheism, it turned out, was not inherently immune to the unpleasant excesses of human behavior: by 2011, a number of New Atheists, particularly female ones, had started to notice that their movement was every bit as man-heavy in its leadership as the Catholic church. It wasn’t even immune from acting like exactly the thing it set itself in opposition to — a religion. And like all nascent religions, it would undergo a schism.

The rupture in New Atheism should have happened sooner, given its awkward coalition of anti-Islam hawks like Sam Harris (who set himself against “the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living”), and anti-war liberals who got twitchy when Tony Blair said he would be judged by God for his decision to commit the UK to war in Iraq. Somehow, though, that shoe never dropped. Instead, the split in New Atheism started in an elevator.

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In 2011, a New Atheist aligned blogger called Rebecca Watson (“Skepchick”) was propositioned in a lift at an atheist conference in Dublin. She posted about it, and received a comment from Richard Dawkins that began: “Dear Muslima…” The substance of his comment was that Watson’s experience was nothing in comparison to the suffering of Muslim women under theocratic regimes, and it implied that Watson should “grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.” Dawkins later apologized for invoking “rivalry in victimhood”,  but by then, the New Atheists had already taken sides.

On one side of the aisle, the old school, who believed that social justice concerns were a distraction from the important work of cultivating unbelief. On the other, the progressives, who thought of atheism as a vehicle for all the other issues they cared about. But it was a clash born of the original mission of the New Atheists, who had wanted more than freedom not to believe; they had wanted to destroy religion as an institution, because they saw its influence as toxic. If atheism was toxic too, the progressives reasoned, it surely didn’t deserve to exist. As the blogger Jen McCreigh wrote: “I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.”

McCreigh proposed the name “Atheism Plus” for the movement she wanted to instigate. As another blogger explained it, this would be a movement that “explicitly focuses, not just on atheism, but on the intersections between atheism and racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other social justice issues”. It was, in other words, an early instance of the omnicause. Very quickly, the issues of rationality and truth that had energized the early days of the New Atheists were left behind: facts might be important, but social justice mattered more.

Nowhere was this as obvious as in the way the former New Atheists dealt with trans issues. People who had once loved nothing more than dismantling the existence of the soul found themselves furiously defending the idea of “gender essences”. Rebecca Watson, the woman whose sexual harassment helped instigate the split in the first place, could recently be found “debunking” the Cass Review as “anti-science and anti-trans”. In 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew its 1996 Humanist of the Year award from Dawkins for his skeptical comments about trans identity.

This was a bizarre turn of events, but maybe an inevitable one. The attraction of New Atheism had always been, partly, the thrill of belonging to the elect. Before Gary Wolf came up with the name that stuck, Dawkins and others had attempted to popularize the label “brights” for unbelievers. In an article in The Guardian, Dawkins wondered: “what’s the opposite of a bright? What would you call a religious person?” And then he answered himself like this: “What would you suggest?” The implication was obvious. Religion was for the dim. Smart people were godless.

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The Atheist Plus people thought they were better than the New Atheist people, but the New Atheists thought they were better than everybody else. The abortive effort to make “brights” happen suggests that New Atheism was always more about asserting one’s own superiority than it was about popularizing reason: it was niche by design. In turn, the Atheist Plus people could prove their superiority to the New Atheists through their commitment to frankly improbable ideas. Declaring faith in gender identity was valuable in exactly the same way that believing in the literal truth of transubstantiation or the resurrection can be: an idea so unlikely that only special people could see its truth.

New Atheism was also, let us be honest, quite cringe. In many ways, it was exactly how you would imagine a religion of nerds to turn out. And, although there were many successful conferences and meet-ups built around it, it was fundamentally a very online movement. For an avowedly materialist philosophy, it offered very little in the way of real-world sustenance. I suspect that part of the resurgence of religion is down to simple skin hunger — the need of humans to be in physical contact with other humans.

It certainly hasn’t happened because religion has re-earned its moral authority. Despite the late Pope’s efforts, Catholicism still had plenty of sins to reckon with. The Anglican Communion has barely begun its own redemption — Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury over the church’s protection of the child abuser John Smyth came far too late and with far too little contrition. The lure of the pews comes from somewhere more elemental.

Christianity’s comeback with Gen Z is a backlash to the rationalist certainty in which the millennials steeped themselves, and which proved to be so limited when “rationalism” came into conflict with questions of identity. I don’t go to church and would be a hypocrite if I did (I don’t believe in God), but I do know that standing in a nave for a wedding or a funeral, elbow to elbow with a stranger, joining my voice with theirs, feels more sacred than sitting in a conference room watching a PowerPoint about why God doesn’t exist ever could.

New Atheism promised freedom from dogma so people could forge what Harris called a “religion of reason”; but that promise proved as tautological as it sounded. The collapse of New Atheism into a mirror image of its avowed enemy shows how very difficult it is to do without a god, even when you don’t believe in one. Most people do want some of the answers, rather than to be left to flounder for them alone.

These so-called “cultural Christians” are appearing in droves: Douglas Murray, Tom Holland (not that one), Konstantin Kisin, Jordan Peterson (depending on what you mean by “Christian” and “cultural” and “and”); even Richard Dawkins — the archetypal modern atheist who has done more to confront organised religion than perhaps any other identifiable person in a generation — happily adopts this paradoxical moniker for himself.

Paradoxical because, of course, Christianity is more than just an affinity for evensong, disappointment with secular architecture, and suspicion of Islam. St Paul wrote in no uncertain terms to the Corinthians that “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”, and the vague, à la carte approach to the religion displayed by the “cultural Christian” which doesn’t seem to care about, much less affirm, the historicity of the extraordinary events of Easter Sunday is the kind of attitude that would see you condemned as heretical by the founders of the orthodox church.

Yet Christianity is experiencing a popular makeover, from an affirmative doctrine of truth-claims to a sort of protective garment to be worn as a practical measure against the equal and opposite destabilising forces of radical political religiosity and cynical nihilism which continue to claw away at the souls of those without a firm spiritual conviction.

This metamorphosis of the Christian religion in is many ways indebted to Tom Holland — not the actor, though perhaps an actor, in that he seems content to live as if Christianity were true — whose “Dominion” thesis has convinced a not insignificant number of intellectuals that the bulk of our celebrated Western ethics is ultimately the product of Christianity, an ideology which has so successfully embedded itself in our culture that we do not even notice it anymore.

This leads our cultural Christians, often those with a special interest in safeguarding Western civilisation, to cozy up to an ideology that they can’t quite adopt without qualification due to their rather inconvenient conviction that it isn’t true.

Enter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Re-enter, I should say, as this brave apostate from Islam won successful prominence as an atheist writer and speaker for many years since the early 2000s, before recently announcing that she had embraced Christianity. Indeed, she had originally been scheduled to participate in that famed discussion in Washington D.C. in 2007 which gave birth to the “four horsemen” of new atheism — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. So news of the “almost fifth’s” conversion was met with widespread surprise, joy, and speculation.

Perhaps the most widely read response came from Dawkins, in an open letter whose first sentence contained a rather less than charitable: “Seriously, Ayaan? You, a Christian? You are no more Christian than I am.”

Why? Because Hirsi Ali’s article, while passionate and detailed, suffered from the exclusion of anything resembling an argument for the existence of God, or for the theological supremacy of the Christian religion over others (or even over atheism). Instead, it is a political treatise: it begins with her experiences as a Muslim, touching on 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood, and antisemitism, before asking: “So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?”

She answers: “Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces,” which she identifies as Russian/Chinese authoritarianism, Islamism, and wokeism. All of which are distinctly political considerations and so hardly serve as a theological defence of Christianity. Then, referring to Tom Holland, she tells us that the “story of the West” is a civilisation built on the “Judeo-Christian tradition”. That is to say, She is ticking all the boxes of a merely cultural Christian.

Yet she later writes, as if anticipating this objection, “I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes.” It’s a promising interjection, which seems to ready us for an apolitical testimony that might justify her exclusion of the “cultural” in labelling her new Christian identity.

Here, Hirsi Ali begins to describe her personal struggles as an atheist. “I have…  found life without any spiritual solace unendurable,” she writes, claiming that the “God hole” left behind after her deconversion was not filled with reason and intelligent humanism, as atheists like Betrand Russell had predicted, but instead left painfully vacant.

“In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational,” she continues. “We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.” In explaining, then, her reasons for becoming Christian apart from her desire to defeat her political foes, she tells us that she was struggling with a nihilistic vacuum that was… insufficient for defeating her political foes. Once again, the motivation seems political.

Thus Richard Dawkins and his assessment, “you are no more a Christian than I am”. The funny thing is, Ayaan Hirsi Ali endorses this sentiment. Dawkins has, of late, been airing his misgivings about gender theorists and Islamists, and constantly reaffirms his admiration for Christian art, architecture and music. These political and aesthetic preferences inspired her to refer to Dawkins at one point as one of “the most Christian” people that she knows. Strangely, then, they could find initial agreement on one point: their being just as Christian as each other.

This uneasy equilibrium provided the mise en scène for an eagerly awaited conversation between the two, which took place in Brooklyn last month. Dawkins tells us at one point that he showed up fully prepared to explain to Hirsi Ali why she is not a Christian: “The idea,” he says, “that the Universe has lurking beneath it an intelligence a supernatural intelligence that invented the laws of physics it invented mathematics […] is a stupendous idea (if it’s true) and to me that simply dwarfs all talk of nobility and morality and comfort and that sort of thing.”

He was, therefore, taken quite unawares, as were many of us, when he asked (or rather told) her, “You don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, surely?” and she confidently replied, “I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And that is a matter of choice.” This, for Dawkins (as for me), changes the game. While throughout the event she had no hesitation in repeating her political grievances, in New York, she finally addressed the truth claims of Christianity, and appeared to confess a belief in them. “I came here prepared to persuade you, Ayaan, you’re not a Christian,” Dawkins told her, before correcting himself: “I think you are a Christian,” and — being Richard Dawkins — he added, “and I think Christianity is nonsense.”

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This extraordinary event began with Hirsi Ali recounting her conversion: “I lived for about a decade with intense depression and anxiety self-loathing. I hit rock bottom. I went to a place where I actually didn’t want to live anymore but wasn’t brave enough to take my own life.” Through prayer, she managed to escape that hole. “My zest for life is back,” she declared to a healthy applause, indicative of the one thing that everyone can agree on: it is wonderful to hear that Ayaan is happy again.

After finishing this personal narrative, she could only look at Dawkins and shrug slightly. The audience laughed, in anticipation of something of a shift in tone. I did think there was something comical about following such a moving story of escape from depression and anxiety with, “But do you really think Jesus was born of a virgin?” Dawkins’s decision to do so, however, can hardly be blamed: as touching as his former colleague’s story may be, if he is right that God’s existence is a scientific question, then we should remember that bringing personal narrative into the laboratory is as inappropriate an approach as bringing a microscope into a poetry seminar. It should be no more an insult to say that Hirsi Ali’s emotional struggles are irrelevant to the question of God’s existence than it would be to say to say that scientific observations are irrelevant to the study of Keats.

As Dawkins himself put it, responding to Hirsi Ali’s fear that an atheistic universe doesn’t offer us any way to connect with each other and the cosmos: “Suppose it were true that atheism doesn’t offer anything. So what? why should it offer anything?” Further applause.

“Faith offers you something, obviously. That’s very very very clear,” he says at one point. “But it doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t make the existence claims of Christianity true.” More clapping. Given that such a claim is hardly extraordinary or controversial, this reception seemed to be less in support of the point, and more of Dawkins’s willingness to make it plain.

Yet it is worth remembering that believing something for non-rational reasons is not unusual. Our beliefs are quite often formed by our surrounding environment, rather than some kind of perfect logic and analysis of abstract syllogisms. Most people know this. Hirsi Ali is happy to admit it. You may think it imperfect, but it is not unique to her.

This means that any surge in Christian interest we may notice among our public intellectuals is unlikely to be due to a renewed interest in Biblical scholarship or the figure of the crucified Nazarene. It is instead likely a product of their environment. Cultural Christianity, then, is in many ways a political movement disguised as a religious one, reacting not to arguments for God’s existence, but concerns about the practical shortcomings of atheism and alternative religions. The kind of Christianity adopted by Hirsi Ali goes further in asserting its truth, but not very much further in its justification.

Therefore, those celebrating some alleged resurgence of Christianity ought be cautious: it would certainly be a happy day for them if their favourite intellectuals began discovering a relationship with Jesus, but if they begin converting to Christianity principally as an ideological bulwark, we may witness the return not of a meek and mild community of believers, but of a more strong-armed, aggressive Christianity that has historically been a touch more controversial.

But Ayaan does seem genuinely transformed by her new faith: she looks happy, speaks humbly, and seems genuinely uninterested in point-scoring or winning any arguments. It troubles me not at all to admit that I found myself applauding her more than Richard Dawkins. It transpired in Brooklyn that her conversion, which at first appeared mostly political, was more a result of her personal battle with nihilism. This is hardly going to convince anybody else to become Christian, but such personal experience isn’t ever supposed to.

Atheists are often told that they are plagued with a “God-shaped hole”. Hirsi Ali appears to have developed for herself a hole-shaped God. But despite the probability of at least an element of motivated reasoning in this conversion, I’m genuinely happy for her. We should keep in mind, too, as her story evolves, that our ideas are the most unclear to us when they are new, and Ayaan is a new Christian. While we are all trying to work out what she really believes, she is probably trying to work out the same thing. She, however, has the unusual courage to do it out loud.

Earlier this week, he visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview about God, his love for WB Yeats, the heroism of JK Rowling, and how he changed his mind about vaccine hesitancy. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Richard Dawkins, welcome to UnHerd. You’re launching a podcast, “The Poetry of Reality”. Why?

Richard Dawkins: I’ve always felt that science is poetic, and deserves to be treated as a part of our culture. The magnificent fact that the universe has given rise to us, supremely complicated beings capable of even understanding where we came from, ought to be a topic of great literature. Science is the poetry of reality.

FS: Am I wrong to detect a softening in your later years? The choice of podcast name seems designed to give the impression that you’re a more romantic, less rigidly rational spirit than people realise?

RD: I think I’ve always been a romantic spirit and I think that’s what science inspires, or ought to inspire, as opposed to the cold, hard, dispassionate image that science can be mistaken as projecting.

FS: We’re talking at a time in which once-unassailable scientific ideas have become… complicated. Gender is an obvious one. Do you worry that the scientific institutions you cherish have become overly attuned to faddish politics, and that science risks compromising its reputation?

RD: Certainly, I have noticed that some of the leading scientific journals have capitulated to political pressure to become unscientific, and to betray what is an obvious scientific dichotomy between male and female. This seems to have been betrayed for political reasons by people in editorial positions in leading scientific journals who ought to know better.

FS: Another example might be Nature magazine, which has stated that part of its mission is to work to correct racial injustices — it seems to be a political agenda rather than a scientific one.

RD: There’s an analogue of original sin, that white people are expected to feel guilt for what their ancestors — or maybe just people of the same skin colour — did to other people of a different colour. It’s as though we are supposed to inherit the guilt of people of the past, just because we have the same colour skin as they did. And that is, I think, racism. It is actual racism to confer guilt upon people because of the colour of their skin.

FS: So would you prefer a completely colour-blind world, as far as institutions are concerned? This is controversial in the United States right now, with the Supreme Court reconsidering whether affirmative action has a place in education. For years, admissions criteria for university science departments have considered an applicant’s race. Where do you stand on that?

RD: If I were in favour of any sort of affirmative action, it might be in favour of those who have been disadvantaged in their own past, through poverty. And if they happen to be black, fair enough — but simply because they’re black? No, that’s the wrong sort of affirmative action. That is racism.

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FS: And if that resulted in fewer black people going to elite colleges, you’d be fine with that, on the grounds that places would be going to the most deserving candidates?

RD: Well, they would probably be the people most able to benefit from those places, yes. But there is also something to be said for bending over backwards to help people from a disadvantaged background who have a genuine ability that hasn’t had a chance to flourish — and if they were to get to Harvard, then they might be able to. And so I am in favour not of affirmative action but what I would call ‘intelligent looking’ for talent, which is what we try to do at Oxford. In my time, we did, anyway. We tried to recognise that somebody might be not so well groomed for an entrance exam or for an interview, but who showed signs of genuine talent.

FS: You’ve also been critical of New Zealand schools including indigenous origin stories in science classes. How do you think people of a scientific mindset should treat the irrational, or intuitions for which there is no clear proof? Is it not possible that poetic and symbolic ways of describing such things get us close to a different kind of truth? 

RD: My favourite poet is W.B. Yeats, a notorious mystic. Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever with his belief in fairies and things like that, but I resonate with his poetry. I think it’s wonderful. It’s hard for me to explain what I mean, but I suppose that’s the point. I’m not trying to be a scientist when I do that. I’m resonating as a human being. In the early poems — “The Wind Among the Reeds”, for example – I empathise with this lovelorn young man, struggling with his feelings of lost love. And I get that, but not as a scientist.

FS: But those feelings of being a lovelorn young man are true, are they not? They exist in the universe?

RD: They are true for this subject, what’s going on in his own mind, yes.

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don’t sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word “miracle” — it feels as though you’re moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there’s something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s something in my nervous system. That’s not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it’s not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

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FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

FS: We have to talk about the most recent scientific controversy of our age: Covid. It feels like we are now emerging from the Covid years, when our trust in science was enormously damaged. Millions of people now intuitively distrust what they are told by scientific authorities. Do you think Covid was a moment of scientific glory, or something more problematic?

RD: I think glory, with regards to the unprecedented speed that vaccines were developed. And that is a tribute to molecular biology. It was possible, almost instantly, to sequence the genome of the virus, and to transmit the genome directly to labs all over the world, who set to work developing vaccines with, as I said, unprecedented speed. That is magnificent. Whether humans mistrust or trust science, that’s their business.

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FS: But the vaccines were enormously over-promised in terms of their efficacy. They were originally sold to us as being 95% effective in preventing infection. That was then endlessly revised downwards and, in the end, we were told vaccination didn’t stop transmission, it only improved outcomes for vulnerable patients.

RD: The speed with which things were happening means that it’s very difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice. And normally, there’s much more time in order to examine all the evidence and give balanced, wise advice. When you’re required to give advice almost instantly, there inevitably are going to be mistakes.

FS: During the pandemic, you condemned people who were sceptical about the pandemic response. You tweeted that: “Some faith heads have a ritual of handling snakes, believing faith will protect them. When they’re bitten, they deserve it, they alone suffer. Vaccine refusal is different. Others are endangered. It’s as though their faith told them to release rattlesnakes in supermarkets.” This was April 6, 2021. Your vilification of people who were hesitant about taking the vaccine, in retrospect, seems too much, doesn’t it? Do you take that back?

RD: Well, I had become aware of the conventional wisdom about vaccination, which is that it’s a matter of altruism, because it’s not simply a matter of saying: “This is my private business, whether I’m vaccinated or not.” And in the case of the measles vaccine, for example, it really is a matter of altruism, because if you don’t get vaccinated, then then you are part of the problem if there’s a measles epidemic. And I thought that that would be the case with Covid. Now, it’s not entirely clear that that was right. And so, to that extent, I would take that back, yes.

FS: Do you also think that Covid showed how vulnerable scientists and institutions such as universities have become in this social media age — to peer pressure, to a fear of being cancelled and of being on the wrong side of mainstream thought?

RD: Yes. There are some heroic scientists who go off on their own and don’t need grants and just get on with their research — people like James Lovelock, who I’ve criticised on other grounds, but…

FS: Recently, universities have not been good at defending their own when they come under assault, on social media and elsewhere, for taking an unpopular position. The trends we saw with American universities during Covid, but there are lots of other examples. Professor Kathleen Stock springs to mind. Surely we can be constructively critical of universities for this?

RD: I think we can, and I think Kathleen Stock is a very good example of somebody who’s been appallingly treated. I think she’s a real hero. I think J.K. Rowling is a real hero. She’s not at a university, but she’s another one. Yes, I’ve been rather shocked at the way universities have not stood up to a rabble, a lynch mob, really, going after people like Kathleen Stock. But you can also sympathise with a university vice-chancellor with a baying mob of students after their blood. It’s difficult, but I think in that case they should hold the line.

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FS: Another concept you’ve defended recently is AI, and whether we might be leaving human nature behind altogether, either through some kind of AI future, or via extraterrestrial life. With your materialist hat on, explain how you think AI could supplant organic life?

RD: Well, the brain is a material object — and what it does is, although we don’t understand it fully yet, it must have a scientific explanation. And it must be the case that whatever the brain can do, in principle, could be done by an AI simulation. So, an artificial intelligence must be capable of doing what the human brain can do — and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be greatly superior to it.

It is conceivable that an artificial intelligence could greatly surpass what the human brain can do. And in many ways, that’s a very frightening prospect. People, many people, are very frightened of it. I haven’t decided whether I’m frightened of it or not. I think I could imagine it going both ways. But, as a materialist, I can’t deny that it’s possible.

FS: People might also be surprised by how much credence you give to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. How likely do you think it is that life exists on other planets?

RD: Very likely — especially when you think of the sheer number of opportunities in the universe for it to exist. It has arisen here and evolved to the point where it can understand its own existence. That was a ridiculously improbable event, but it happened. So why deny that it has happened anywhere else in the universe?

FS: So, on the balance of probabilities, we’re talking more than 50% likely, in your estimation, that there is life beyond our own planet?

RD: Yes. And I would make a distinction between life existing elsewhere, which is far more probable, than actual intelligent life, because one’s got to come from the other. We might well discover intelligent life through radio communication, but we will never be visited by it. Flying saucers, no — very unlikely. But visitation by radio communication, electromagnetic waves , that’s not totally unlikely. And I think that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a worthwhile enterprise that should be pursued and funded.

FS: You don’t think interstellar travel will become possible through some breakthrough in physics?

RD: Well, that’s very, very far off in the future, because of the huge distances involved. So far, we are waiting for interplanetary travel within the solar system. Light years is a very long distance for solid, physical objects to travel.

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

* “The Poetry of Reality” With Richard Dawkins is available to download now.

This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin did not, in his foundational work on evolution, focus on Homo sapiens. Only with the publication, 12 years later, of The Descent of Man did he explicitly address the question of “whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form”. Nevertheless, the implications of his theory, for humanity’s claim to a special status, had been evident enough from the start. Bishops might mock, and demand to know whether Darwin’s followers were descended from gorillas on the father’s side or the mother’s side, but humans ranked, in the final reckoning, as organisms just like any other. For them to imagine otherwise, to regard themselves as somehow superior to the rest of creation, was a conceit verging on the ludicrous.

Darwin was not, of course, the first to have undermined the notion that humans might stand at the centre of the universe. In 1638, the young John Milton, in Florence, “visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought”. It was not the sun that revolved around the Earth, so Galileo had taught, but the Earth that revolved around the sun. Time came to prove his hypothesis right.

Today, we know that the sun is an undistinctive star in an undistinctive corner of an undistinctive galaxy in a universe so stupefyingly vast that it can hurt the brain even to try and comprehend its size. Set against the icy immensities of space, what is humanity, then, but the merest speck of a speck of dust? What scope is left us as a species to claim any dignity at all? “In science,” as the astronomer Seth Shostak has put it, “if you think you’re special, you probably aren’t.”

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as “humanist”.

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The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands, issued what its delegates presented as “the official defining statement of World Humanism”. The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed, “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others”. Religions — dismissed as “dogmatic” — were condemned for their ambition “to impose their world-view on all of humanity”. Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo-jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but “through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision”.

To accept the truth of all these various propositions — one might almost call them dogmas — requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values are where “a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision” is bound to lead — so much so that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be, but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the 18 subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the headquarters of Humanists International is in London. Its understanding of “universal” is, then, a somewhat culturally contingent one.

Humanists, unsurprisingly, tend to reject this characterisation. They prefer to see themselves as the heirs of traditions of intellectual enquiry that embrace the globe, and reach back millennia. In ancient India, in Confucian China, in classical Greece, writings have been identified by humanists that appear to prefigure the very things that they themselves believe. Yet the risk of this approach is not merely that it results in cherry-picking, but that it can obscure the very alien quality of those texts which are being cherry-picked.

Take, for instance, ancient Greece: a civilisation for which humanists have long had a particular fondness. Epicurus, for all that he featured in a list of famous atheists drawn up by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus, believed in gods. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is less Richard Dawkins than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.

But how common, in antiquity, are the fundamental tenets of humanism: that humans — no matter their sex, their place of origin, their class — are all of equal value; and that those who walk in darkness must be brought into light? Not common at all, I would say. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that their fusion was pretty much a one-off.

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing humanity with an inherent dignity. Quite the opposite. “I will make man, who shall inhabit the world, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.” So spoke Marduk, who according to the Babylonians created humanity out of a sticky compound of dust and blood to be the slaves of deities. Here was an understanding of man’s purpose, bleak and despairing, that it would have been very easy for the exiles brought to the banks of the Euphrates from sacked Jerusalem to accept: for it would certainly have corresponded to a sense of their puniness before the immensity of Babylon the Great.

But the exiles from Judah did not accept it. They clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being, per Genesis. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, were endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, had been created on the godh day.

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The corollary of this was, of course, very clear: that the cult of Marduk ranked as the merest superstition. So too did the pantheons worshipped by other peoples: the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: they were all of them, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “less than nothing”.

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions which served to define them; but in Europe there was only the odd community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Church. Just as humanists do today, it cast its values and ideals as universal — “catholic”. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones.

Even when, in the 16th century, Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers, and in their attempts to convert the inhabitants they found there.

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical re-alignment, our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as most of us in the West had assumed them to be. The need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are, and not to confuse them with “human nature” is, perhaps, more pressing than it has ever been. To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries — and in many cases millennia — has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.

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So it is, for instance, that the Amsterdam Declaration can airily dismiss the dogmas of religion, even as it simultaneously takes for granted the existence of “universal legal human rights”. Yet to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology.

When, in the 12th century, Christian scholars sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system, they naturally turned to the Bible for guidance. There, they read that all men and women were endowed with an inherent dignity. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how, that being so, were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in the Latin West.

The solution, arrived at by 1200, was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, iure naturali — “in accordance with natural law”. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. He was merely taking what was properly owed him.

Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers decreed, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered something novel: a legal obligation. That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, however, was a matching principal: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was — in a formulation increasingly deployed by lawyers in medieval Christendom — their ius: their “right”.

Yet this doctrine — despite its origins in Christian jurisprudence — was one that would come, in time, to slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owned nothing at all to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. They were instead eternal and universal. “The Declaration of Rights,” proclaimed anti-clerical French revolutionaries, “is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.” A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

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The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.

Yet this in turn veiled a further irony: for what was the contempt displayed by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution for Christianity if not a sign of Christianity’s influence? “The old has gone, the new has come!” So Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, had proclaimed. Change, in the opinion of the Romans, was by definition sinister. The phrase res novae — “new things” — served as a synonym for everything in society that was most menacing. Christianity, on the other hand, glorified revolution. Just as Isaiah had condemned the gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians as mere idols, fit to be toppled into the mire, so had Christians in the early Middle Ages equated progress with the banishment of superstition. Trees sacred to pagan gods were exultantly felled by missionaries, and churches planted where blood-stained altars had originally stood.

Humanists, when they celebrate the liberation from dogma and superstition that is to be gained, in their opinion, from “the application of the methods of science”, are bearing witness to the enduring hold on Western civilisation, not of Greek philosophy, but of Biblical prophecy. It was certainly no accident that many of Darwin’s most enthusiastic defenders should have borne the unmistakeable stamp of radical Protestantism. “Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist and biologist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as “Darwin’s bulldog”.

That it was his duty to bring light to the world was Huxley’s devoutest conviction. His sense of himself as a member of an elect had — as contemporaries were quick to note — a familiar quality: “He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.” Huxley’s conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics — a term coined by Huxley — have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. He is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.

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It is hardly surprising, of course, in a society that has increasingly abandoned the institutional practice of Christianity, yet still clings to its assumptions, its values, its myths, that we should shrink from staring the implications of our current predicament fully in the face. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

Such was the warning given almost a century and a half ago by Friedrich Nietzsche: the most radical, because the most unsparingly honest, of modern atheists. He gazed unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. Humanism, despised by Nietzsche as an ideology to which the English were peculiarly prone, was dismissed by him as palpable idiocy:

“When the English actually believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment.”

“For the English,” Nietzsche concluded witheringly, “morality is not yet a problem.”

It was not from reason that the doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith which humanists believed themselves — in their conceit — to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead — but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell. The myths of Christianity would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilisation. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. “In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,” he wrote, “before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.”

And yet Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. “After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.”

Half a century after Nietzsche wrote this, and almost two decades after the outbreak of the Great War, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed how Christian his movement was, had come increasingly to share in Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity. Its morality, its concern for the weak, the Führer viewed as cowardly and shameful. Christian teachings had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words — with which I opened — were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide.

He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism — “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” — finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

The above is an abridged version of the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture, “Humanism: A Christian Heresy”. 

Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.

Del Noce’s work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first — between 1917 and 1945 — and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.

Del Noce’s take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. “There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction,” he wrote. Marx’s view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process — man’s liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of man’s alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Society’s values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.

Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?

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This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, “Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxism’s] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect.” Marx’s vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.

Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that “the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see.” He argued that liberalism “sublimated,” or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called “the technological society.” Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both. Our society largely embraces Marx’s historical vision: advancing technologies are viewed as de facto proof that the question of God, and all transcendent values, are irrelevant. Yet this vision of history is also turned onto Marxism itself. Communism was tried and it was a failed experiment. The technological society does not have to enlist any religious or moral claims to reject Communism. It simply dismisses Communism as inefficient.

The Leninist path of Marxism also stumbles through our society in a misshapen form. Del Noce argued that Leninism unleashed a type of post-Christian gnosticism — which was an early Christian heresy that believed the world was evil and could only be saved by those with access to secret or esoteric knowledge. Lenin believed that the revolution wouldn’t just happen spontaneously — it had to be brought about by raising the consciousness of the proletariat. This required “professional revolutionaries”. Drawn from the people tasked with the job of modernising the Russian economy, these revolutionaries were an elect class that understands how the world “really” works. The British writer H.G. Wells understood the implications of this better than Lenin himself: in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy, inspired by his trips to the Soviet Union, Wells called for the West to embrace rule by its own elect class of “experts.”

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Everyone understands that a person is not wise by virtue of being an accountant, or a therapist, or an immunologist; we all understand that a person can have limited domain expertise, and be a complete fool outside of that area. Moreover, domain expertise is not the same as executive function: the act of governing a society is the act of choosing between competing goods, and this requires virtues like wisdom and prudence. And yet society has become enthralled by the “expert,” the idea of which works in the exact opposite way, suggesting that a person is equipped to make prudential choices between competing goods simply by virtue of possessing technical knowledge in some limited domain. Eventually this denigrates into absurdities, like the “disinformation expert” who is basically a “truth expert.”

Del Noce paints a landscape of a society that rejects all traditional values in the name of a supposedly neutral rationality, has a caste of revolutionary-cum-technocratic experts who function like gnostic priests, and engages in near-constant, system-approved “revolution.” This revolution was separate from Marxism, and was encapsulated in a sentence written by Friedrich Engels: “the thesis that reality is rational leads, according to Hegelian dialectics, to this other one: everything that exists deserves to die.” Del Noce wrote that “the revolutionary is the executioner of a death sentence that history has pronounced.” But since the radically bourgeois society rejects all transcendent values, its revolutionaries offer only negation. “The global rebellion becomes an absurd revolt against what exists” or what once existed. It becomes either a silly attempt to escape reality or a tool of the system it is revolting against. It should be obvious how this explains the woke, but it also shows how the anti-woke offer a mirror image.

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There are many, like James Lindsay and John McWhorter, who champion “Enlightenment values” in the face of the woke. They praise things like reason, rationality, and positivism in the face of a new religious fervor. The miracle of rationality fought off the forces of religious superstition, we are told, and we must be vigilant not to slide back into the shadows of irrationality. Del Noce might call this “the Enlightenment after Marxism.” It is a mythic narrative that its proponents fail to see as myth.

Carl Schmitt once wrote that American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks were engaged in a common struggle. That synthesis is now complete. Del Noce helps us see how this synthesis is at the root of today’s most pressing issues, and how those who want to fight the woke cannot retreat into the static categories of the 20th century. Decomposed Marxism limits our ability to see a new horizon, and the future seems impossibly hopeless because so few are willing to reassess past mistakes.

He eventually became a YouTube Bruh: that genre of male intellectual celebrity, like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, “destroying” idiots in bite-sized video clips. But the appeal of Hitchens, to me at least, wasn’t just polemical; he possessed a suavity that impressed me powerfully. He was just as likely to riff on Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence on twentieth-century British upper-class life as to publicly humiliate a religious crank.

I was 13 when I first discovered him. He had a similar appeal to me as James Bond: the willingness to engage in combat, the charm and sophistication of a worldly bruiser, even the booze. In a 2000 documentary called Hitch Hike, made by Channel 4 and tracking Hitchens’s book tour of his polemic against Bill Clinton, he said, “Jimmy Cameron was the reason I wanted to become a journalist”. He added that Cameron, who was a foreign correspondent, wrote a piece in 1966 outlining all the things he had accomplished as a journalist. Here is Hitchens ventriloquising Cameron: “I’ve sat with Ho Chi Minh, and I was deported from South Africa, and I was there listening to Nehru at midnight when India became a free country. I’ve also swum in all the five oceans and fucked on all five continents”. Hitchens himself made the world of the hack seem glamorous.

Or, perhaps, not the glamour of Bond or a foreign correspondent, but another form: the monied public intellectual. As Ian Parker puts it in his excellent 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens: “Hitchens has the life that a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be: he wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night.”

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On the topic of glamour, there was something also Francophile about him, and not just his fondness for exposing part of his chest in interviews and debates. He was an eighteenth-century style iconoclast, a public school Voltaire, who took down sacred cows: Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and God. This tendency toward confrontation was instilled by his education in Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the heretics of Communism. One must never stick rigidly to the party line. Individual responsibility and moral conscience were essential.

Nevertheless, there was also a coarseness beneath his oratorical sheen: when he tried, for instance, to divorce the civil rights movement from its religious influence, emphasising the secularism of A. Philip Randolph over the religious fervour of Martin Luther King. This was sophistry. Arguing, as he also did, that religion poisons everything, was intellectually juvenile and inconsistent with his deep appreciation of John Donne.

When he said, moreover, “there is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ”, this was a brilliant epigram. H.L. Mencken would be proud of its rhetorical force, but it’s also nonsense: IQ is one of the most stable findings in psychology and social science.

Related to this coarseness was his deep appreciation for vulgarity and obscenity. Substantial passages of his memoir Hitch-22 are dedicated to explaining the games he used to play with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Clive James and others: the boomer version of Dr Johnson’s Club. He called the gathering “the Bloomsbury kebab joint”. One of their games consisted of substituting the word “heart” for “dick” in well-known titles, or the word “love” for “fuck”, or “love” for “hysterical sex”. So they got, among many other confected titles, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Man Who Fucked Women”, and “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate”.

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He once said to an audience who were distracted by a heckler, “leave him alone … I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”. On the question of Mother Teresa’s virginity, he wrote: “Who can say what happened with the dashing boulevardiers of Skopje when Agnes Bojaxhiu was but a pouting and trusting lass? (The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position.)”.

This bawdiness was at times entertaining and at times embarrassing. But what we value in intellectuals is not often the particular arguments they make but their personality. As Edward Said wrote, in an essay about public intellectuals, “when I read Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat”.

The voice of Hitchens worked less well in print. As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. Martin’s father Kingsley was more brutal: he described Hitchens as “the one who can talk but can’t write”. This was in the Seventies, during Hitchens’s New Statesman days, when his prose was more functional and didactic. According to Amis fils, however, Hitchens’s writing improved after 1989. But there were still some odd tics in his style after this, such as his tendency towards using brackets for a needless digression on some point, and puncturing that digression with a showy italicised word or phrase. I can endlessly listen to him speak in interviews and discussion panels; but reading him can be a bumpy experience.

When Amis said Hitchens thought like a child, he was getting at something. Although Hitchens’s moral convictions seemed admirably clear, they also strayed into simple-mindedness: some of his criticism of the “anti-imperialist” Left and religious extremism is still valuable, but his zealous support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks even more disastrous now.

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Although Hitchens spent much of his career going after sacred cows, many of his fans now treat him in a hagiographical fashion. After the Spectator journalist Angus Colwell wrote a piece criticising Hitchens’s gung-ho support for the war in Afghanistan in August, many people described Colwell as possessing “sour grapes” and argued that Hitchens was “living rent-free” in his mind. These responses speak to the cultishness that surrounds some of Hitchens’s fan base; it is like someone is attacking their dad.

But if there is one thing worth taking from the writings and life of Christopher Hitchens, it is the importance of thinking critically and independently. Turning a blind eye to his faults out of a sense of sentimental loyalty seems profoundly un-Hitchian. It’s a shame that many of his supporters do this. But then again, as the title to Julien Benda’s book about intellectuals suggests, La Trahison des Clercs, public intellectuals are often like clerics. We should be able to admire Hitchens’s voice without taking it as holy writ.

First, I should declare an interest. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I believe that Professor Richard Dawkins’s tweets are some of the greatest cultural monuments of the 21^st Century. Combining a natural gift for surrealism with a blissful indifference to how people will react to him, they inspire both amusement and outrage — as strange and yet perfectly formed as diamonds falling from the Heavens.

“Saw a down-and-out in Seattle last night,” the great science writer told his followers once. “His sign said not ‘I need food’ or ‘I need a job’ but ‘I need a fat bitch’. What could this mean?” What indeed? The funniest aspect of this was the thought that a vagrant’s love of women on the curvier side had troubled an Oxford don all night.

“Good idea to beam erotic videos to theocracies?” Professor Dawkins asked on another occasion, “NOT violent, woman-hating porn but loving, gentle, woman-respecting eroticism.” It’s the “woman-respecting” that elevated this already mad proposal to the heights of genius, as if a male performer would be rattling off the names of women who had received Nobel Prizes mid-coitus.

Yet not everyone is a fan. The American Humanist Association has decided to withdraw its 1996 “Humanist of the Year” award to the ethologist. Dawkins, the AHA claim, “is no longer deserving of being honoured by the AHA”. His crime? A tweet which asked about the difference between “transracial” people like the infamous activist Rachel Dolezal and transgendered individuals.

Provocative? Of course. But did the tweet deserve such a pearl-clutching public disavowal? Not in the slightest. If anything, the most striking thing about the whole saga is the AHA’s own hysteria, which, somehow, is reminiscent of fundamentalist religion.

Dawkins, the AHA claim, implied that “the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent”. But this is wrong. Professor Dawkins asked if identifying as X means one can be said to be X — which is surely a valid question. Even if the answer to it is “no”, that does not imply that one’s identity is deceptive in the sense of being dishonest. But apparently one’s innate sense of gender is sacred, disqualifying scepticism. Again, there are echoes of religious absolutism.

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Even if one thinks Dawkins’s question was insensitive, one has to marvel at the scale of the AHA’s overreaction. Why, for example, should the possession of a Humanist of the Year award be contingent on one’s future behaviour? Have they forgotten what the word year means? If Michael Owen was footballer of the year in 2001, that was not made less true by his sub-par performance for Newcastle in 2009.

It is also interesting to consider who has not had their title revoked. Alice Walker won Humanist of the Year in 1997, a year after Dawkins, and has spent much of the time between then and now promoting David Icke and speculating about whether Jews plan to subjugate “the goyim”. I do not think Ms Walker should be subjected to this sort of handwringing denunciation either. But it is curious to see which questions prompt a hysterical backlash and which do not.

In the case of Dawkins, his abandonment certainly seems a fitting postscript to the new atheist project. In the noughties, believers found it obnoxious that he compared a religious education to child abuse — going so far as to suggest that “physical abuse of children by priests… may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.” Combined with stonking ignorance of the philosophical arguments that underpin religious belief — such as mistaking summaries of Aquinas’s Five Ways for the real thing — this made for an unwholesome stew of undeserved pomposity.

Back then, though, there was a lot of sunny optimism that books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens’s god is Not Great were heralding a rational, peaceful areligious time. The term “Brights” was invented to bring together a “community of reason”. Buses zipped around bearing the message, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Fewer people believe in God now but if there has been a decline in worry then it has been imperceptible. If someone were looking for a word to describe our age, I doubt their contenders would include “relaxed” or “carefree”.

Indeed, it was always destined to be a fad. There are only so many times you can debate the existence of God without getting bored, especially if you are not interested in the actual arguments involved. But to the extent that a “community of reason” ever existed it was also destined to fracture because it had no shared moral language. “I f**king love science” is not the stuff on which a substantive, inspiring worldview is built — and new atheists began to fight about foreign policy, sexual equality, trans issues and a variety of other subjects where “there’s probably no God” did not make it much easier to stop worrying about life.

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The first major schism in the atheist movement took place almost ten years ago, when Rebecca Watson, a prominent atheist blogger, was propositioned in a lift at the World Atheist Conference in Dublin. After she posted a video about her experience, highlighting how atheists should care about “social justice”, Dawkins poured petrol on to the flames by sarcastically comparing her plight with those of an oppressed Muslim woman.

Cultural Anglicans, like Dawkins, and hawkish Enlightenment liberals, like Sam Harris, who essentially admire Western culture except for its few religious holdouts, soon found themselves in heated conflict with radical progressives. The latter, such as PZ Myers, came to advocate something they called “Atheism Plus”, which held: “We are… Atheists plus we care about social justice; Atheists plus we support women’s rights; Atheists plus we protest racism; Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia; Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.”

In time, the “atheism” part grew less important compared to the other values. Advocates of “Atheism Plus” became more or less indistinguishable from other fiery advocates of cultural egalitarianism, just as in some cases right-leaning new atheists became indistinguishable from conservative Republicans. Each side, naturally, insisted that they were still representing truth and reason, though an elementary point is that a worldview demands more than that.

However, the bigger problem Dawkins faces is that our religious instincts are not reducible to the question of whether God exists. We hunger for community. We thirst for meaning. We celebrate idealised concepts and lash out when people question them. Even problems which are not explicitly religious — those of borders, and families, and resource allocation et cetera — cannot be solved by pure scientific reasoning. You can take God and the church out of the equation but people will imbue other concepts and communities with the hope of transcendence.

Well, people certainly found their tribes, and their hopes for transcendence, and many of them have none of the tolerant and curious spirit of the clerics and theologians who engaged Professor Dawkins in debate 15 years ago. Heresy must not stand. It demands public denunciation and disavowal — removal from the public space and from the bounds of civilised inquiry. The likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could sell millions of copies but the likes of Ryan Anderson and Abigail Shrier cannot have their books sold. Richard Dawkins cannot even hold onto an award that he won 25 years go.

In such a world, Professor, keep posting your tweets. Keep asking us why we do not treat spider webs with the astonishment that we would treat “lions…weaving antelope-catching nets ten lion-lengths wide.” Keep declaring that “Bin Laden has won” because of the confiscation of your little jars of honey. Keep asking unpopular questions. There is surreal comedy in being so blind to social convention. But there can be dogma-busting value in it as well.

Yet the choirs’, and congregations’, favourite describes himself only as “friend, fellow traveller, and agnostic supporter of the Christian faith”. He has problems with God as a controlling deity: “a bit like a Mafia don who is capable of doing good and charitable things, but also almost takes pleasure in doing malicious and harmful things”. Covid-19 might surely count as one of those mafioso stunts. Undaunted, the tireless and selfless Rutter has just written a new seasonal piece, Joseph’s Carol, in honour of the scientists who worked on the Oxford vaccine. It premiered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre last Friday.

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Christmas is the time for atheists, agnostics, heretics, waverers and those whose frail faith patchily comes and goes like the reception of Magic FM in the Chilterns (as Boris Johnson once put it) to drown their doubts and enjoy the glorious musical monuments to centuries of firm belief. Except that, often, they are no such thing. Rutter, the sympathetic “fellow traveller” with Christianity, stands on the shoulders of musical giants who shared his semi-detachment, yet laid down much of the Western soundtrack of religious observance.

“There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass,” said Ralph Vaughan Williams — a “cheerful agnostic” who spent half a century revitalising the music of the Church of England, after he edited the English Hymnal in 1906 and wrote, or adapted from folk-songs, some of its best tunes. (The melody for “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was collected from a Surrey farmhand.) Some atheists did write masses, though a groping, stumbling doubt marks many sceptical masterworks more than confident unbelief. Still, even a church-averse anti-clericalism has never held composers of sacred music back. Camille Saint-Saëns had “a repugnance for religious ceremonial”. But he wrote more than 50 ecclesiastical works — a rather lovely Christmas Oratorio among them.

In his splendidly sourced and argued book Dominion, Tom Holland has shown how Christian precepts and feelings shape today’s secularism. Ghosts of church doctrine and practice guide the superficially godless creeds of contemporary politics and culture. However, the musical canon of the past two centuries indicates that this traffic flows two ways. The modern Christian culture that many people like to revisit as tourists at Christmas itself owes much to non- or half-believers.

“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Pay attention to the post-Enlightenment musical record, and you might decide that there is (almost) no first-rate document of faith that is not at the same time a document of doubt.

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Verdi’s Requiem; Brahms’s German Requiem; Berlioz’s mighty trio of sacred humdingers (L’Enfance du Christ, the Te Deum, the Grande Messe des Morts); those five decades of Vaughan Williams from the Hymnal to Pilgrim’s Progress (about which the composer said “I wanted the idea to be universal and to apply to anybody who aims at the spiritual life”), Benjamin Britten’s lifelong service to church and choir; even Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, written by an artist drifting away from the Catholicism of his youth: questing doubt or overt scepticism often seems not a hindrance but a requirement for the post-Romantic sacred masterpiece.

Beethoven himself wrote his Missa Solemnis after a lifetime’s search for a personal God beyond creed and rite (he read and admired Hindu scriptures). Brahms’s Requiem gloriously defies divine transcendence in favour of human mourning and yearning. When Dvořák, who did keep his Catholic faith, visited his idol, he was aghast: “Such a man, such a fine soul — and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!”

Verdi thunderously, and poignantly, celebrates the life of novelist Alessandro Manzoni and rails against death in his Requiem. Its awe and terror came, though, from a spirit with little supernatural anchorage. His wife Giuseppina numbered him among those who while “observing every precept of the highest moral code, are happier believing in nothing”. It vexed her that “this brigand permits himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly very little of a believer, and that with an obstinacy and calm that make me want to beat him.”

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These testimonies come only from the past two centuries, when doubt and disbelief could find a voice in some Western societies without fearing the cell, rack and pyre — or, at best, social ostracism and professional death. Before that, compulsory piety often draws a veil over private heterodoxy. There’s no reason to doubt the Lutheran devotion that animates every note of Bach. But even that default Christmas blockbuster, Handel’s oratorio Messiah, attracted 18th-century suspicion for its weird choice of Biblical texts and sensational, operatic treatment of their words. One minister denounced it as “no better than a profanation of the name and truths of God”.

Some Christian apologists claim that the music may embody a faith so deep that it can even hide from the conscious mind of its creator. Others resort to the traditional standby of divine inspiration itself. It’s hard to argue with that. Or they may acknowledge that artists can reject dogma, priesthood, ritual and all the paraphernalia of church control while staying true to a spirituality free of walls and laws.

That makes most sense, perhaps. And there’s little evidence that the serial composition of sacred works leads their makers inexorably towards some institutional definition of the one true God. We do know that figures such as Vaughan Williams wrote sacred pieces with utter sincerity as if the scriptures they set were true. Their faith, if it exists, lies within the music, not behind or beyond it.

Nostalgia for the lost certainties of childhood may also drive sacred music from former believers. The church, wrote Berlioz, had given him seven years of youthful joy: “Although we have long since fallen out, I have always kept tender memories of it.” (More pointedly, he calls the Catholicism of his upbringing “this charming religion, so attractive since it gave up burning people”.) Listen to L’Enfance du Christ, with its “Shepherd’s Farewell” that might melt an infidel heart of Dawkins-grade quartz, and that nostalgia has an oceanic force. But if Berlioz had a god, it was William Shakespeare.

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In Britain, the career-long commitment of Vaughan Williams, Britten and Rutter to the renewal of church music did not lead to road-to-Damascus personal revelations. Britten, so his life-partner Peter Pears maintained, remained “an agnostic with a great love for Jesus Christ”.

Herbert Howells, composer of subtly gorgeous Anglican liturgical works (listen, for instance, to his three Christmas Carol-Anthems), lost rather than gained faith as time went by. “People assume he must have been deeply religious,” his wife Ursula reported, “and I have to tell them he wasn’t. He loved the tradition of the church, and the Bible as literature. But he was never more than an agnostic who veered toward belief.”

At this time of year, plenty of people “veer towards belief” for a while. They approach the sublime sentiments of festive showpieces “Hoping it might be so” — as Thomas Hardy’s Christmas Eve poem “The Oxen” puts it. It should comfort them to know that many of these works emerged not out of rock-solid faith but radical uncertainty. Their creators were not hypocrites, dissemblers, or wishy-washy faint-hearts; nor are they.

Earlier this year, John Rutter told a Vatican conference that composers, formal believers or not, may have a sense of faith “because music is a mystery, just as faith is a mystery”. Musicians, he said, “are at home with the transcendental”. Perhaps we should just enjoy the sacred music of the past with a measure of humility about its origins and meaning, then and now. So, not-quite-believers, listen to this year’s live-streamed Midnight Mass with a glad heart and a clear conscience. Honest doubt has built many great cathedrals of sound.

At the time, in Noughties London, I really believed that what I was doing was radical and creative: embracing fluidity, self-construction and impermanence, against the rigid constraints of a single-sex environment and the gender binary.

I blame some of this insufferability on queer theory, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate. From (among others) Judith Butler I learned that the identity categories of sex and sexuality are imposed on us by oppressive outside forces, while (confusingly) also being open to constant individual reinvention.

In this worldview ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ aren’t stable categories, and neither are ‘man’ and ‘woman’, except inasmuch as they’re imposed by un-hip Forces of Bad: the oppressive ‘cisheteropatriarchal status quo’. And the only way to stick two fingers up at this dread hegemon is to mess about with the categories. Hence feeling so pleased with myself, 15 years ago, for doing something as ground-breakingly subversive as calling myself a lesbian, moving in with a bunch of lesbians and then hooking up with a man.

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I share this not especially stellar episode not just as belated apology to my ex-housemates, but because since then queer theory has eaten culture. Everyone’s subverting identity categories now. The abbreviation ‘LGB’, which seemed more than expansive enough in the late nineties when I started university, has ballooned to ‘LGBTQQIAAP’ with activists still pushing for further inclusions. Facebook offers an ever-lengthening list of genders to put on your profile (71 at the last count). And the rainbow flag associated with the Pride marches has multiplied, with at least 24 different ones now available to wave, including a ‘Pup Pride’ one for people who like to roleplay as dogs.

Anyone boring enough to simply accept the identity assigned them by the ‘heteropatriarchy’ is marked with the (supposedly descriptive but really derogatory) epithet ‘cishet’. This is a mark of ignominy, as one Reddit user made clear, asking: “What is a ‘cishet’ and why is it bad?’. “I keep seeing the word cishet in the context of tumblr and my SJW type acquaintances,” the post explains, “usually with them saying that the cishets cause all of their problems and need to die.” One reply cuts to the chase: using cishet is “like derisively calling someone else a ‘normie’.”

In this ‘anti-normie-ism’ we hear echoes not just of the name, but also the ideas, contained in the Reformation-era Christian heresy of ‘antinomianism’. This doctrine held that salvation is available solely through faith and divine grace, and true believers are under no obligation to follow rules, laws or traditions. While antinomianism was rejected by mainstream Protestantism, it ended up having the last laugh: for today the heretics are those who resist the wholesale attack on rules, norms and traditions that characterises anti-normie-ism.

Far from being condemned as heresy, like antinomianism, anti-normie-ism is celebrated in the annual festival of Pride Month, during which millions join in a peculiarly modern ritual of simultaneously celebrating and subverting shared identity. Big brands fall over themselves to monetise the festival.

This moment, and movement, has been some time in the making. In 1793, having defeated the Ancien Régime, the victors in the French Revolution set out to sweep away all the irrational and traditionalist remnants of reactionary Catholicism in favour of a new, atheistic religion of rationality. To this end, they held a Festival of Reason in Notre Dame; where the altar had stood, a papier-mâché mountain was raised on which an actress dressed as Liberty bowed to the flame of Reason.

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In that moment, anti-normie-ism dispensed even with the polite antinomian fiction of having God on direct-dial as justification for binning the rules. The Catholic political theorist Adrian Vermeule characterises the subsequent history of our fight against normie-dom, and in favour of individual freedom and self-expression, as continuing the tradition of that 1793 Festival. The Festival of Reason is ongoing: the old must be smashed, traditions swept away, sacred items burned and the march of progress celebrated, a dynamic and relentless drive which “constantly, and at an ever-increasing tempo, disrupts deeply-cherished traditions among its subject populations”.

But over time, as once-edgy positions become mainstream, the Festival’s appetite turns cannibal. Having solidified into social norms, progressive victories become in turn targets for demolition. And this is the position in which many formerly progressive gay and lesbian people find themselves today.

The onward march of same-sex equality has been steady over the last half-century: gay sex was decriminalised in 1967, when the Conservative peer Lord Arran explained that his reason for sponsoring the Sexual Offences Act was his two life goals “to stop people buggering badgers, and to stop people badgering buggers”. The same-sex age of consent was 21 when I was a teenager in the Nineties, and is now equalised at 16 with the heterosexual one. Thanks to another Conservative, David Cameron, same-sex marriage today has the same civil standing as the heterosexual sort.

But the march of progress hasn’t stopped. The word queer, once a term of abuse, was first reclaimed by gay and lesbian people — and is now the territory of anyone, including heterosexuals, who don’t want to be shamed as cishet.

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The actor Nico Tortorella, for example, has been in what to me looks suspiciously like a heterosexual relationship for some 14 years, with the ‘lifestyle entrepreneur and LGBTQ activist’ Bethany Meyers. The couple even married in 2018. But Tortorella identifies as non-binary and prefers to be referred to as ‘they’ and ‘them’, while Meyers identifies as a lesbian. Thus despite having an (in the biological sense) entirely ordinary heterosexual relationship, Tortorella and Meyers are celebrated as a ‘queer couple’.

And their embrace of polyamory means that Tortorella and Meyer arguably are more anti-normie than of those stodgy gay people who prefer dull old monogamy. And Meyer’s re-interpretation of ‘lesbian’ is expansive enough to survive a 14-year relationship with a biological male, a fact that surely queers our understanding of sex and gender far more radically than those reactionary homos who insist on excluding people from their pool of potential partners on the grounds of anatomy.

Thus, by queering ‘queer’, the new heteroqueers have wrestled the baton of queerness from those lesbian and gay people who might once have been targeted for ‘queer-bashing’. And thanks to the ongoing Festival of Reason, the exclusively same-sex-attracted sexuality that launched the whole ‘queer rights’ enterprise has in turn come to seem conservative, if not outright bigoted.

My late great-aunt epitomised this kind of non-queer gayness. She was a staunch Tory and local councillor, wore trouser suits and kept her hair short, and lived her entire adult life with the same ‘friend’, in a relationship that was indistinguishable from any other petit-bourgeois marriage except that both of them were women. They went on cruises, finished each other’s sentences, were pillars of the local community — and didn’t have a ‘rainbow’ bone in their bodies.

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She died around the same time as I was misbehaving in houseshares, and I never discussed my own reflections on queer theory with her. I wish I had, as it would have given me much to think about. For my great-aunt was many things: a public servant, a citizen, a lesbian (though I don’t think she would have used that word) but one thing her devoted relationship absolutely wasn’t was ‘queer’.

And this in turn gives us a clue to the nature of ‘queerness’ as it’s celebrated today. “Love is love”, claims the Pride slogan, merrily sweeping aside millennia of philosophical and theological thought on the ways love may in fact differ from love. In his influential 1936 theological work Agape and Eros, for example, the Swedish bishop Anders Nygren unpicks the distinction between eros, the ego-centric, acquisitive and desire-based version of love first delineated in Plato’s Symposium, and agape, the Christian understanding of a love based in self-giving and a willingness to sacrifice self for others.

To complicate things further, the ancient Greeks had three words for love: eros, agape and philia, love for friends and family. Nygren argued that over time, even in Christian theology, agape became subordinate to eros — that is, to desire; while Nygren was criticised by other theologians for himself ignoring philia. But today, the juggernaut of Queer Theory, for all that it claims the mantle of ‘love’, ignores both philia and agape. Instead, ‘love’ in the queer theory sense is pure eros: desire.

And this is the bait-and-switch at the heart of queer theory. Decent, compassionate mainstream people hear ‘love’ and think of those same-sex couples they know whose lives embrace all three — the passionate eros, the sociable philia and selfless agape. Few in modern Britain would disagree that these can and do flourish just as well in same-sex as opposite-sex partnerships. Having won sympathy by gesturing at philia and agape, though, the juggernaut of queerness aggressively promotes only an eros increasingly impatient of any constraint.

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This means monogamists of all orientations go under the bus: for inasmuch as monogamy constrains desire, it’s by definition un-queer. We see this reflex, for example, in the brickbats flung at too-monogamous-to-be-queer Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg; or sneery terms like ‘homonormativity’. And all such jibes share the same loathing of any social structure that calls not for unchained desire but fellow-feeling (philia) or self-sacrifice (agape).

And in this way, the political campaign for gay acceptance has been colonised, cannibalised and ultimately displaced by a consumer marketing campaign for the limitless expansion of desire. It was 2004 when the Pride march in London stopped being classified as a political protest and became a ‘parade’; that change, questioned by many LGB people at the time, marks the decisive shift in balance of power from gay acceptance to anti-normie-ism. And this is a problem for gay normies.

For as Vermeule points out, the Festival’s inexorable appetite foments “unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash”. And indeed, evidence suggests that support for LGBTQ rights has peaked and is now falling again. The marketing campaign for unchained eros is today actively undermining public acceptance of same-sex relationships.

The campaign to de-stigmatise same-sex relationships was a huge gain for human dignity. I don’t want to see that reversed by the oncoming reaction against our now established religion of anti-normie-ism. The only beneficiaries of the takeover are brands selling rainbow leisurewear in Pride Month. But the front-line casualties, when the reaction begins in earnest, will be those gay normies who only ever wanted to be left in peace.

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.

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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.

So Spufford’s prose is hilarious and precise (but excruciating) as he acknowledges the worst caricatures of Christian belief: “Believers are the people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak”. It helps that he has spent some time as an atheist. Spufford knows all the flaws and failings of religion. Yet he still wants to offer, not “a defence of Christian ideas [but] a defence of Christian emotions — of their intelligibility, of their grown up dignity”.

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He moves the debate out of the zero-sum dingdong about the Big Bang and biblical archaeology and philosophical proofs — and into the realm of feelings. And not because feelings are just easier (the clue is in “intelligibility and grown-up dignity”) but because for almost all of us, that’s what drives not just our metaphysics, but most of our deepest decisions.

Spufford was not alone in pushing in this direction. Although he had been writing about it in academic circles since the late nineties, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also broke into the mainstream in 2012 with The Righteous Mind. Building on his earlier work “The emotional dog and its rational tail”, he updated the metaphor as an elephant and rider. Our emotional, intuitive judgements are the elephant, actually in charge, and our reasoning minds construct post-hoc rationalisations for why we wanted to go that way in the first place. Daniel Kahneman — a Nobel laureate psychologist and economist had made similar arguments in Thinking, Fast and Slow the previous year — and the work of Ian McGilchrist, among many others over the decade, all contributed to this growing sense that we are not as rational as we thought.

In seeking to shift the debate about religion into the realm of emotions, then, Spufford was not dodging the “real question”:

“If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether this crap I talk is true”.

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For the record, he does care, describing himself as a fairly orthodox believer who can recite the creeds. It’s not that he doesn’t think truth is important, but that arguments about whether God exists are self-defeating: “No, I can’t prove it. I don’t know if there’s a God (and neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins…it isn’t the kind of thing you can know. It isn’t a knowable item).”

Instead of getting stuck there, he agrees with the major move in social psychology and neuroscience this decade: “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I assent to the ideas”.

Crucially, he argues that this is true of everyone. It’s not only that religious people have faith because of their feelings — the opposite can be true:

“There are arguments to be made [against the existence of God]…but for a lot of people they function as a rationalisation after the event for a deep and emotional conviction that the universe is just not the kind of place in which such things can happen.”

The move is a good and persuasive one, but it’s the manner in which he writes about emotions that make the book so successful. There is no schmaltz; no earnest, dusty, churchy tone. Atheist philosopher John Gray called it, “a rare gem, a book that carries conviction by being honest all the way through”.

Whether describing sin — the crack in everything — as HPtFtU (the Human Propensity to Fuck things Up) or exploring the sense of divine mercy in Mozart’s Clarinet concerto, Spufford writes about the lived experience of faith more accurately and beautifully than anyone except Marilynne Robinson, Graham Greene and Dostoevsky (significantly all novelists).

People will still be reading this book once the new atheist polemics (and their religious responses) have been consigned to the recycling bin of history, because it is more powerful, more human, than any of them.

The only problem with this, as Alec Ryrie astutely observes in a new book on the rise of atheism, is that “death-by-philosophy … is a poor fit with the actual chronology of western secularisation”.

Atheism, he asserts, was alive and well before the Enlightenment. And considerable religious revivals — Methodism, Hasidism, the Russian Orthodox church — occurred after it, even as a reaction to it. In many ways, Unbelievers: An emotional history of doubt is a reflection on the cultural significance of experts, a challenge to those who, as historian Dominic Erdozain put it, “privilege the clean logic of ideas above the raw fuel of human experience among the forces of historical change”.

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What Ryrie’s account achieves is an explanation as to why atheism often remains so angry. That it is angry seems undeniable — from the vituperative nature of exchanges on social media, to the hardly concealed fury of its leading lights, Dawkins, Hitchens etc, there can be little doubt it is driven as much by passion and righteous indignation as by following the consequences of cold clear dispassionate rationality. “Reason is a slave to the passions” as David Hume rightly noted.

For Ryrie, a scholar of the Protestant Reformation, the passion in question has its roots in the protest against the abuses of the church of Rome, of well-padded priests feathering their own nests, of the bullying authority of the Papacy. For in seeking to establish an alternative source of religious authority, Protestants loaded a great deal more significance on the notion of faith, and its near cousin intellectual assent. It was under this category that the reformers would mock the Roman church and its practises as “superstitious” – making fun of Roman practises as mumbo-jumbo, transubstantiation, the veneration of bones and so forth.

According to Ryrie, reason became “a battering ram against the Papacy”. Doubt was mobilised by the Reformation as a means of dislodging Roman authority and of returning the believer to a more serious wrestling with the scriptures and their own personal convictions. In his way, doubt became a mechanism for the intensification of piety. “The aim was not to turn believers into unbelievers. It was to turn naive believers into sophisticated, self-aware believers”; that is, to shift the centre of religious authority from the church to the self. Scepticism began life not as a dispassionate estimation of the soundness of the arguments for the existence of God, it was the weaponisation of reason in the assault against over-weaning Roman power.

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Scepticism has grown intellectually respectable since its sectarian origins. But Ryrie’s contention that its power and effectiveness derive as much from its emotional impact as its rational argumentation makes considerable sense to me, not least because “one cannot be reasoned out of something one was never reasoned into”. None of which is to discount or discredit the rational case against God. But disproofs of God’s existence are about as effective in creating atheists as proofs are in creating believers. Such arguments are shadow boxing. The real battle is always emotional.

Which is why, for Christians, the book to read alongside that of Ryrie’s Unbelievers is that of Francis Spufford, published back in 2012. In many ways, Ryrie’s account of the origins of unbelief feels a lot like an academic prequel to Spufford’s much celebrated Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.  It helps that Spufford is a brilliant writer. But what makes Unapologeticwork so well is that it seeks to make sense of faith in its own terms, rightly refusing the unbeliever vs believer boo-hurrah that has sucked so much contemporary debate about religion into its boringly constricted channels.

Spufford explains Christianity by reminding us of the sort of work it is intended to do. The proper starting point is not the question of God’s existence, but what he calls “the HPtFtu” – or, “the human propensity to fuck things up”. The propensity extends to our relationships, our attempts to be good, even to our rationality. Emotionally, Christianity begins within the unfixable realities of human life, its tragedies and absurdities. Even its blood-soaked history, including that of the Reformation, is just yet another example of the HPtFtu.

Suggested reading

Why Polly Toynbee is wrong about God

By Freddie Sayers

Christianity grows out of the broken and unfixable. Its USP is to be found within and alongside the stuff that doesn’t work – indeed, that’s why someone so naturally sympathetic to Christianity as Dostoyevsky gives all the best arguments in The Brothers Karamazov to those most hostile to it. But this isn’t its failing as much as its point.

As Spufford claims: “Virtuous and idealistic atheists are at work all over the place, but it is observable that a surprisingly large number of believers are at work with the dying, the demented, the addicted, the institutionalised and the very impaired and afflicted, where the best that can be done is to love for the sake of it” and to “keep sorrow company”.

Christianity is a prolonged meditation on all the stuff in our lives that doesn’t work. It gains its emotional power by its connection with failure – moral, emotional, intellectual. I suppose that is why I read the New Atheist critique of Christianity as often obviously correct, and yet strangely irrelevant. What they take to be a kind of philosophical or quasi-scientific explanation of things is often much more like a cry for help. And to accuse a cry for help as being intellectually confused is a peculiar kind of response.

Yes, Christianity does have substantial things to say about human pain. But 99% of the work that it requires of us is to recognise our inability to fix ourselves, our incapacity. That’s what monks were doing in the desert. They were not punishing themselves for being sinful, or anything like that. They were living up close and personal to their own fragility, their own pain and failure. If you want to attack Christianity on its own terms, attack it here (as someone like Nietzsche does, for instance).

Now, of course, you may completely disagree with my characterisation of Christianity. Many will. But what Ryrie’s engaging book suggests is that the battle over God is really a battle about a certain sort of emotional literacy. For the Christian life is as much dependent on arguments about God’s existence as birds are dependent upon ornithology.

It was founded in 2013 by a couple of comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, and achieved much initial success with large congregations and an international programme of ‘church planting’. At a time when religious belief is declining — at least in the West — this movement was widely hailed as a way of organising goodness and wonder at a local level, bringing people together for support and edification. “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More”, was their mission statement.

A number of traditional religious believers were overtly hostile to the project when it was set up, thinking it ludicrous and inherently confused to ape religious practise whilst decrying religious belief. I was not one of those.

Yes, I thought it a little hubristic to assume that it should be a piece of cake to get people together for church-style assemblies, once the remnant of archaic belief had been exorcised. But the basic idea was so clearly well intentioned, it felt churlish to act all superior and sneer at this deep rooted desire to come together to celebrate the best in life. Two cheers for the Sunday Assembly, I thought. I might even pop along one day.

Suggested reading

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

So, no, I won’t rub my hands together and take pleasure at a report in The Atlantic which suggests that the movement is struggling – attendance is down; centres are closing. But I would like to offer some friendly advice, albeit from the perspective of a traditional Christian believer. After all, we have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time — my church has survived at the Elephant and Castle for 800 years — and we have picked up a thing or two along the way.

Several reasons have been suggested as to why the Sunday Assemblies have struggled. First, because many congregations were split between those who wanted to experience something of the charism of religious worship, just without the God bit, and those who wanted the Assembly to be a rallying point for a campaigning hostility to religious belief. I’m not sure that this is a fatal weakness – all churches need a big tent element, and will need to manage internal disagreements.

Second, though perhaps not unrelated, is that those who came together just didn’t have enough in common to sustain a shared experience. In traditional places of worship, religious belief — and in particular its traditions and Biblical narratives — serve as a common point of reference for an otherwise extremely diverse crowd. It is hard to see how something as nebulous as ‘celebrating life’ can function as a uniting force for what should be an otherwise unrelated crowd.

Suggested reading

Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly MacKenzie

This may be the reason that Sunday Assemblies do not feel very diverse in terms of class or ethnicity. In the absence of a shared point of religious reference, social sameness can easily become the focus for community instead of belief. And taking a look at the images used on their web sites, Sunday Assemblies do have the feel of a Boden catalogue convention, with smiley, well-to-do, middle-class people celebrating their own niceness.

And it is actually this niceness that takes us closer to the root of the trouble. It’s all very well celebrating the best of the world. But what about the worst. The real challenge for a God-less church is how it deals with the problem of evil. On one level, of course, they can do this just as easily as traditional churches. When something terrible occurs in the world, the Assemblies can of course analyse its causes, commit to making the world a better place, and take a collection to relieve the suffering of those affected.

But there’s another sort of evil: the darkness within. How do they address that? My acid test, then, for a godless church is this: how would they tackle the funeral of a paedophile? Or: what do they say at the eulogy for a racist?

In church we can say: “Lord, have mercy” and “Father, forgive”. But what is the atheistic equivalent? At the heart of the godless funeral – longer established than the Sunday Assemblies – there is commonly a celebration of the good qualities of the deceased: what they achieved, how much they were loved and admired and so on. But what if that person were an out-and-out rotter, someone about whom very little good could be said? What then?

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Here lies the problem at the heart of the godless movement. Belief is not really about being good and celebrating life and wonder. More importantly, it is about being saved. That is, it is a way of addressing some inherent brokenness about human beings, a brokenness that we are unable to fix by ourselves. The traditionally Christian way of describing all this is original sin – a term that has been overly associated with sex, but is better understood as a meditation on human failure and inadequacy.

The nearest thing a ‘secular’ organisation gets to this — and thus, I suspect, the most promising model for a semi-godless church — is Alcoholics Anonymous. In these meetings, no one is there to celebrate their niceness. Participants are broken and openly so. They have failed and messed up their lives.

People come from all walks of life and from all communities. What binds them together is their failure not their success. And the first thing they need to acknowledge is that they do not have the power to solve their problems by themselves (original sin). Some higher power is invoked to help them (be saved). Without this element — without some deeper acknowledgement of that sweaty panicky sense of failure that steals upon us in the dead of night — all churches, religious or non-religious, are undermined by lies and kitsch.

So my friendly advice to Sunday Assemblies goes something like this. Don’t worry too much about declining numbers. Don’t think of what you are doing as a form of showbiz or entertainment. The best churches, the ones that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, often have small congregations. And the worst, self-congratulatory churches often have big ones.

When numbers decline, a church is inevitably thrown back upon reflection of what they exist for – is it more than razzmatazz? Failure is often a much more intellectually energising experience than success. It forces you to ask what you really believe in, what you exist for. And there, I suppose, is the rub.

Other than as a glorified dating agency for lonely middle class metropolitans, no one really needs happy-clappy atheism. Because if you cannot accommodate failure – your own or that of your congregants – then you don’t have enough to exist for. And you deserve to perish.

The British Social Attitudes survey is the big annual state-of-the-nation report, and this year the headline finding was that for the first time ever, more than half of the country (52%) now sees themselves as totally unreligious. The Church of England has collapsed most spectacularly (only 1% of 18-24 year olds now identify as Anglican, compared to 33% of over-75s) and hard atheism is on the rise, with 26% of the population now saying with confidence that they don’t believe in God, up from 10% 20 years ago.[1. It is worth noting that Britain, and the West more widely, are going against the global trend. Overall, religion is on the rise, with both Christianity and Islam recording bumper increases in recent years.]

This wasn’t the area most newspapers focused on, though. They led with the juicier findings about gender identity and acceptance of gay relationships. The religion stuff was reported neutrally, matter-of-factly, as yet another confirmation of a trend we can’t do anything about. The decline of the Church now sits alongside Capitalism, Globalisation and Technology in the ‘too big to spend time fretting about’ category.

Further reading

Could homophobia be on the rise?

By Douglas Murray

There was one commentator, however, who did find something to say about the report. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee was delighted with the findings and devoted her column to calling for any remaining role for the Church of England in public decision-making to be finally extinguished. She neatly managed to bring her political views into line with the good forces of rational correctness. “This visceral Brexit war between old and young,” she concluded, “has often felt like a conflict between reason and unreason, between economic fact and emotional national identity. But the BSA report reassuringly finds that beneath the surface of our present turmoil, superstition and unreason are on the retreat.” There was something of the grand inquisitor in her tone, chasing out the last vestiges of the forbidden faiths.

Nor do the authors of the BSA report itself, distinguished social scientists, attempt to hide their conclusion that the collapse in religious belief is a positive development in favour of a more scientific world view. They write that “scientific rationalism and liberal individualism” are taking the space left by religion, and that science and technology offer “an alternative way of interpreting and understanding the world”. The chapter on trust in science and scientists (it’s high) directly follows the chapter on declining religious belief – structurally cementing the idea that the one has been succeeded by the other.

Yet when you look at the questions posed in the survey, they don’t seem to be the most important ones. They are focused on organised religion and its structural role in society – and as such are tilted towards the obvious.

“Looking around the world, religions bring more conflict than peace.” Do you agree? It would be hard for even the most ardent believer to make the case, in this context, that religion had brought more peace than conflict around the world. Or “Do you think that churches and religious organisations in this country have too much power or too little power?” Again, even die-hard Christians are not arguing for a theocracy, or that the Church should be granted new formal constitutional ‘powers’. I’m amazed that as many as 5% chose that option.

Further reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

If we wanted to be good social scientists, we would really be looking past the now-loaded word ‘religion’ to try to understand how these young, almost totally secular generations feel about the existential questions and their place in the universe. Is the picture painted by Polly Toynbee and the BSA authors, of a new generation confidently throwing off the last remaining shackles of religious superstition and marching cheerfully towards their rational futures, borne out by other evidence?

Three months ago, YouGov conducted a survey of 16-24 year olds for the children’s charity, Barnardo’s. In it the young respondents were asked whether they felt, in different ways, life was better or worse for them than it was for their parents’ generation. Overall, they were optimistic, understandably positive about what the modern world offers them in terms of physical health and life expectancy, education opportunities and overall prospects.

The survey didn’t mention the R word, but instead probed a number of aspects of life that religion traditionally had a role in. In this meaning-of-life department they weren’t so sanguine. Only 14% of British young people feel that they are better off than their parents in terms of “having a sense of purpose” (50% think they are worse off); only 13% feel they are better off than their parents in terms of “having a sense of belonging in your community” (59% think they are worse off); and only 11% feel they are better off than their parents in terms of “overall levels of happiness/good mental health” (69% think they are worse off).

Further reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Liza Philby

Now I’m not saying that the decline in religious faith causes these bleak numbers in any simple way, but it seems fair enough to bring them into the same conversation. The “scientific rationalism and liberal individualism” that the BSA report authors celebrate doesn’t seem to be doing such a great job of providing purpose, belonging or peace to young people.

In pure public policy terms, in terms of how we organise our society, it would be hard to think of a more fundamental change in all human history than the collapse of religion over the past 50-odd years. These recent generations are perhaps the first generations ever to be brought up without a meaning-of-life story, without respected elders outside the family to turn to for moral or existential matters, without common sacred rituals that situate them in their community. They are coming of age in a world without part of the architecture that has supported meaningful and fulfilled human lives for millennia. We now ask every young person, essentially, to devise their own moral and spiritual framework; no wonder they are anxious.

It doesn’t mean you want to turn the clock back if you acknowledge the absences left by religion; you don’t have to have faith yourself to recognise the wisdom and beauty of the traditions and the central role they played in our culture. This shouldn’t be an awkward topic that we leave to secular activists and evangelical Christians to battle out; finding ways to mitigate the absence of religion should be a public policy issue. The meaning of life is not a niche subject.

For the next 90 minutes Harris led the conversation on politics, science, ethics and God.  When the time came for audience questions the queues for the audience microphones stretched to the back of the hall.  The few questioners who did get a chance to ask something showed themselves to be part of a bunch of unusually cerebral people who were not only cool and diverse but clearly deeply engaged with their times.  It was the sort of crowd any politician would dream of being able to attract, while very few mainstream media figures would even be able to fill the bar of such a venue (people might come for the celebrity but they would not be detained by the thoughts).  Afterwards people mulled around, talking ideas, taking photos and finally getting those drinks in.  In some ways it was like a rock concert, but a rock concert of ideas.  For his followers, Harris is indeed a type of rock-star.

He first came to prominence in the post-9/11 years, firstly through his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book was an instant bestseller and was bracketed with a set of other ‘anti-God’ books that came out around the same time (not least Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great).  He became identified along with them as one of the ‘new atheists’ and along with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett they all became known as the ‘four horsemen’ of the anti-theist movement of the 2000s.

For those who were paying attention it was obvious even from The End of Faith that Harris’s contributions did not simply consist of arguing around an absence.  The most controversial and brave parts of that book were not those aspects which reiterated in a newer and more sparkling form arguments against God which had existed before, but crucial arguments about what this meant for the moral universe the world now found itself in.  What should the attitude of non-believers be in an era of mass-terror being committed in the name of faith?  What accommodations could we (or should we) all come to agree upon?  In his writings throughout the rest of that decade – not least in his crystalline Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) Harris remained focussed on this question.  Not least because world events kept calling him back to the subject he had broken through in.  Throughout events like the Mohammed cartoon crisis (2005 – ?) Harris proved to be one of the few people who had a certain enough moral framework, a developed enough understanding of what was being attempted and enough residual outrage to make a stand against such violent incursions of the most extreme forms of faith back into the public square.

It led him to be pigeon-holed, certainly.  But by the turn of the decade it became clear that his strong anti-theism was not all there was to him (enough though that could have been).  In The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) and Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014) he did what very few among the ‘new atheists’ had ever bothered to do.  He attempted to build a positive case in the terrain which the new atheists had scorched.  Unlike many in his own schools of thought he recognised that opposition was not enough, but that it was necessary to build and to address questions, rather than merely to savage them and shoot them down.  What he engaged in was not what was elsewhere described as ‘Atheism 2.0’ but atheism as a starting point for all the important subjects which still followed.

Of course individual readers will have individual reactions to the level of success or persuasiveness of these ventures.  But the sincerity of them, as well as the depth – and, perhaps most crucially – width of his learning is something which any honest critic as well as fan will note.  His works draw not just on philosophy and history but on the very latest developments on science, in particular neuroscience.

Perhaps it is this cutting-edge that allows the ‘Waking Up’ podcast which Harris began in 2013 to reach tens of millions of listeners around the world.  In these podcasts – a medium in which Harris was a relative pioneer – he mulls at length (sometimes for several hours) on the most serious themes.

He occasionally veers wholly into politics.  But more commonly he delves into issues deep beneath the events of any day’s news.  Recent podcasts have addressed ‘Consciousness and the self’ (a conversation with the professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Anil K. Seth) and a conversation on ‘The science of meditation’.

These podcasts are an extraordinary phenomenon.  With more than a million followers on Twitter, Harris is obviously able to point people to the irregularly posted discussions.  But what is most extraordinary – as audiences like that in London in October evidenced – is their reach.  Not just because they are listened to by millions of people at a time.  But because in their reach they demonstrate the failure of a popular broadcast media intent on ‘gotcha’ moments and ‘X annihilates Y’ screen-grabs.

Harris shows an entirely different model of how to engage with your time and its challenges.  Even with people who he has invited on with whom he disagrees he shows himself to be unfailingly, outstandingly courteous.  Without any grandstanding he demonstrates continuously that thoughtful dialogue remains possible even between people who fundamentally disagree.  When he crossed swords with the actor Ben Affleck on the Bill Maher show in the USA four years ago Affleck came across as a grand-standing ignoramus with a misplaced, Hollywood-induced, sense of his own significance.  Even as he rolled his finger and ordered his fellow guest to hurry things along (as though Affleck were the director of all situations he graces with his presence) Harris dealt with him courteously, carefully and – as audience reaction showed – devastatingly.

It is the same in the conversations which he hosts.  It is impossible to come away feeling that Harris has done anything other than give his guest their best shot.  A recent appearance by Harris on Russell Brand’s podcast exemplified the idea.  Brand showed off his wares in his familiar fashion (duck, weave, play the joker, turn into a pseudo-philosopher, then whoopsey-daisey there I go again, I’m a comic really etc, ad nauseum).  All the time Harris takes even what Brand says as a serious proposition, countering him and correcting him, but always with a courtesy and an attention to facts so fastidious that it makes you wonder whether it mightn’t at some point even make some impact of Brand. In an age of intellectual dishonesty Harris’s way of communicating face-to-face as well as with his readers betrays a commitment to honesty as well as honest dialogue which is unusual.  Of course it might yet prove essential.

Harris is still only 50.  Many television bookers will not have read his works. Quite a number of opinion-page editors will only vaguely have registered him.  But he is one of the free minds who is changing our world.  And he’ll keep doing that whether the old media notice what he’s doing or not.

I summarise a little, but that’s the gist of it. Bulging with semi-digested food (we have our main Christmas meal on Christmas Eve) a declaration of post-dinner atheism has traditionally been the most effective way to stay firmly planted on the sofa. I am considering implementing an ‘atheists do the washing up’ policy this year. I reckon that might make a difference to the religious affiliation of the household. We will see.

But what about God’s existence? This is the time of year when surveys are commonly commissioned by newspapers to show that, as every year passes, fewer people believe in God – at least in Europe. These surveys have become as seasonal as Christmas itself, though what they say is rarely much of a surprise. God is dead, said Nietzsche over a century ago. For some, the problem is not God per se, so much as the church itself: the scandals, the hypocrisy, and (worst of all) that false/pious sanctimonious tone of voice. Others (most, I suspect) just don’t care one way or the other. For such as these, the question of God’s existence is something of a non-question. Like the politics of a distant country or the sex lives of beetles, the question is so distant it has no purchase on our lives.

So, for those of us who are believers, the rise of so-called new atheism around the end of the 20th century came almost as a welcome relief from all the shoulder-shrugging indifference of the ‘who cares?’ brigade. The new atheists cared enough to resurrect the question of God’s existence. It was almost as if God’s corpse needs to be temporarily re-animated, just so he can be killed off all over again, so as publically to demonstrate his death to each new generation.

Further reading

There's more to atheism than the dim-witted Dawkins brigade

By Giles Fraser

The problem with discussing the question of God’s existence is that it often turns into an argument about what we mean by existence rather than an argument about God per se. Consider, for instance, the surprisingly difficult question of the existence of numbers. Philosophers have been debating this since the Greeks. Is there an independent reality to the number seven – something over and above the objects that there may be seven of, like tables or cars? Or is mathematics simply a clever and complicated organising principle supplied by the human mind? Or something else entirely? No one is doubting that there are such things as numbers – the question is more like, in what way do they exist or what do we mean by their existence?

In other words, most philosophers don’t believe that the existence of numbers is an empirical question at all – it is not something that scientists can design experiments to establish. And the same may be true of God. For many theologians, God is not a thing. Thomas Aquinas says that if you made a list of all the things that exist in the universe – cups and saucers, human beings, planets, black holes etc – God wouldn’t be on that list. So there is no point looking for God in the same sort of way that one would look for physical objects. Aquinas explains this by saying that God cannot be both the creator of all things in heaven and earth and one of the things created.

Another shorthand way of saying this simply is that God doesn’t exist. Thingliness may not be a property of the divine. And a number of the more mystically inclined Christian theologians – Meister Ekhart in the 13th century for instance – come pretty close to saying this. Existence, as we understand it empirically, is the wrong sort of thing to ascribe to God.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Another way of approaching this same problem is to ask whether it would be possible for any sort of thing that we encountered actually to count as God. Imagine that a being presented itself that has all the apparently God-like properties – an all-powerful, all-knowing being with flowing robes and a long white beard could that thing ever be God?

Now it must be said that the way philosophers conceive of God and the way that the Bible conceives of God are often sharply contrasting. Omniscience and omnipotence, for example, are words that philosophers like to use to describe God; but they are not words used in the Hebrew scriptures. And why would such a mighty being be in any way worthy of worship? Wouldn’t the worship of this sort of thing be little more than the worship of power, supplication to the biggest force on the block? And if God really had all this executive power and refused to use it to save Jews from the gas chambers or refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, wouldn’t s/he just be a callous bastard undeserving of any sort of praise, let alone worship?

So I almost want to say – to be deliberately paradoxical – that the one thing that would stop me from believing would be if God actually existed. And this is the problem with the new atheists’ approach to God. They confuse believing in God with believing that God exists. It is perfectly possible to believe that God exists without actually believing in God.

The point here is that God cannot be simply a big powerful thing hidden somewhere in the universe. If that is what we are arguing about, then the atheists are right and the believers wrong. But this is not what Christians mean when they talk about God. Take Christmas. The story here is that to imagine a God who is indeed worthy of worship is not to imagine a being of power and prestige but quite the opposite: it is to imagine a powerless child in a shitty shed. Only a God that could share fully in the human condition, only one that could experience suffering and death, only one that could give up all his God-like super-powers, could ever be counted properly as God.

Christmas is a sort of practical atheism. Forget about that big God in the heavens, that God is dead. From now on, to imagine God is not to imagine a set of abstract properties all maxed up to 100%. At Christmas, all of God is small and helpless. “He emptied himself” as the book of Philippians described it. A bit like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, giving up his power. Powerlessness is God’s only excuse. Only justification. Only chance of redemption.

The philosopher Mary Warnock, in her Confessions podcast talk with me, described God as love. She meant this as a sort of definition. That love is the essence of God’s being, the manner of God’s existence. And she is exactly right. For many of us, when we are arguing about the existence of God we don’t care about a thing called God, we care about a belief that all things are orientated towards love and the loving celebration of all existence. And the way many of us experience this is though the astonishing beauty of the Christmas story.

Religion is not physics. And those who confuse the two, be they religious fundamentalists or the so-called new atheists, will always miss the point. Religion is the poetry of cosmic love. Which is why my kids’ “God doesn’t exist” is, in my book, not a good enough reason for staying on the sofa. You will come with me, I will say, and listen again to the message of the angels: “Peace on earth, good will to all.”

In retrospect it seems kind of ridiculous that we thought we’d settle an argument as old as humanity in a three-hour flame-war on the Guardian Unlimited Talkboards. But we tried. Oh, how we tried. It was the glorious summer of New Atheism and, waving our flaming swords and our copies of The God Delusion, the Skeptics (with a K) would do daily battle with our hated foes, the Creationists. Or, if they were busy that day, the Homeopaths. In a way it was a great and positive thing, because everyone on both sides always thought they’d won.

Further reading

So you think you're open-minded...

By Tom Chivers

One of the things we would regularly do, which looking back was extraordinarily smug and patronising, was to categorise our opponents’ logical errors. “Begging the question!” we would tell people when they argued that we should believe in God because the Bible said so, and should believe the Bible because it was the word of God. “Straw man!” we would yell at people who said that evolutionists thought humans arose through random chance.

And “argumentum ad hominem!”, we would say, when someone attacked the person making the argument, rather than the argument itself.

It turns out, though, that smugly pointing out people’s logical errors for the better part of the mid-2000s didn’t stop them making them. I say this because the ad hominem argument seems (in my admittedly subjective experience) more common than ever. We seem to spend an awful lot of time looking to show that the person making an argument is bad, rather than trying to show that the argument itself is.

Further reading

'Unconscious bias training’ doesn't work

By Peter Franklin

Would a new, centrist, anti-Brexit party be any good? No need to think about the electoral maths: we can simply point out that Tony Blair supports it, so it’s bad. Does a piece about biological differences between men and women make any good points? No need to read it: we can simply point out that it’s in Quillette, so it’s bad.

There’s a term that I dislike but which is widely used in these situations, “cancelled”: when a person, thing, concept or organisation has done a sufficient number of bad things or expressed a sufficient number of bad opinions, that person, thing, concept or organisation is cancelled. It seems to be a relatively new use of the word, going back to the early 2000s or so. But the concept is ancient: Greg Jenner, the historian, likens it to “damnatio memoriae”, a punishment the Roman senate passed on traitors to the state, calling for the memory of that person to be expunged. The person is to be deprived of attention, given no more airtime.

When someone has been cancelled, it doesn’t matter whether the arguments they make are worth listening to. You can ignore their arguments because they are bad. That is, essentially, the argumentum ad hominem taken to its logical extreme.

I should admit that this isn’t always a bad idea. For all that we used to accuse people of the “logical fallacy” of argumentum ad hominem (or its inverse, the argument from authority), it isn’t a fallacy. Knowing who is making an argument does indeed give you information about the argument they are making; not perfect information, but some.

Further reading

How the Left locked itself in the echo chamber

By Peter Hurst

If I were to hear two people make arguments about the impact of climate change, and one of them was an professor of atmospheric physics who had worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and published many widely cited papers in well-respected journals, and the other was a English Literature graduate who wrote angry columns about climate change being a scam and had received money from the Koch brothers, then – knowing nothing about the arguments themselves – it would be entirely reasonable for me to put more weight on the first person’s claims. Their credentials make it more likely that they know what they are talking about.

But it only really matters when you don’t know or can’t follow the arguments. If the English Lit graduate had provided a detailed, plausible argument, with references, and the atmospheric physicist had made poorly argued and unlikely claims with no sources, then it doesn’t matter that she has a PhD and he doesn’t – if I am able to follow the arguments in their technical detail myself, then I should believe the former, not the latter. Otherwise, I really am failing, committing the sin of ad hominem.

And that has repercussions. Everyone has been cancelled by someone. I was declared cancelled once by some guy I didn’t know on Twitter (I probably deserved it). There are so many people, so many groups, such a whirling, swirling morass of opinions on social media, that it doesn’t take much to get cancelled. The New York Times notes that Bill Gates, who has a strong case for being declared the greatest philanthropist in human history, has been declared cancelled, as has the impeccably right-on and polite Chris Evans (the superhero actor, not the Radio 2 guy or the editor of the Telegraph).

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By Peter Franklin

If you’re looking for a reason to discount someone’s arguments (and we all are, all the time), then you can find it. And there’ll always be someone, somewhere, who thinks you shouldn’t pay attention to someone else, and it only takes a few dozen people making a lot of noise on Twitter to make it look as though there’s a huge groundswell of opinion.

I don’t know if it really is more common, these days. But it feels as though it is. We are all constantly hunting for reasons to disbelieve our opponents. People concerned about immigration changing their communities are racists, so we don’t have to listen to them. People who think Trump ought to be impeached for fraud are Democrats, so they’re just being partisan. But where we can, we ought to be arguing against the arguments themselves. Assume that the person making them is doing so in good faith, and try to counter them, rather than dismissing them on your assessment of the author’s motives and interests.

There are a couple of reasons why people might disagree with that, and they’re good ones. One, judging an argument by the arguer can save a lot of time. If I had to carefully read every Breitbart article before deciding on its merits, I’d spend a lot of my life reading a load of angry half-baked nativist crap which I’d end up ignoring anyway. There does come a threshold when someone really is cancelled.

And two, ‘judge arguments on merit’ can be a code for ‘the white guys like me who write everything now can carry on doing so, and there’s no need to try to represent underprivileged groups because we should judge the arguments on merit, not who makes them’.

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These are fair points. On the first, I suppose I’d argue that there’s a big difference between, say, Steven Pinker and Steve Bannon: Steven Pinker is a brilliant and wise academic with impeccable liberal credentials; Steve Bannon is a borderline fascist. I can understand people demanding that the Economist or the New Yorker not provide Bannon with a platform. But I’ve seen people trying to discount arguments because Steven Pinker is associated with them, and that feels like we’re setting our ‘cancellation’ threshold too low.

On the second, I’d say we ought to still judge the arguments on merit – ‘Britain is a relatively non-racist society compared to most of Europe’ is either a true statement or a false one, regardless of whether a white person or a black person says it – but that female, minority ethnic and LGBT representation in the media is important in its own right.

We never did win the war against the Creationists, probably partly because we were unbearable smug young tossers who pointed out logical fallacies on internet message boards. But we did have a point, I think. Arguing against arguments, not people, is still the correct thing to do.

It’s all too common for people of faith to treat those without as inferior. The best of them will champion interfaith dialogue, bringing the world’s religious believers together in common cause. But the atheists are another tribe, somewhere underneath, not invited to the interfaith party. We don’t even get a slot on Thought for the Day.

Here at UnHerd, Giles Fraser recently wrote a lengthy vicar-splaining article explaining how atheists think. He had the brass neck to dismiss atheism – and its billion adherents – as “an illiberal creed that does little to advance the cause of human flourishing”. If he’d said the same about Judaism, Islam, or even Zoroastrianism, there would have been outrage. But it seems we atheists don’t mind being insulted.

Radio 4’s Sunday programme recently described us as “people with no beliefs” – suggesting they’ve never met an atheist, let alone had a conversation with one.

As a confirmed, even devout, atheist I have more beliefs than you can shake a stick at. Central to them is my belief that there is no God. And it’s that central, overwhelming conviction that human existence is without intrinsic purpose or meaning that motivates my life. I believe the idea of ‘No God’ is as powerful as the idea of ‘God’.

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With No God, it is clear that this is all we have. There is no after, or before. We have not earned it at its best any more than we deserve it at its worst. We exist, and we live out every day our lives on what the astrologist Carl Sagan called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.[1. Carl Sagan, October 13, 1994, speech at Cornell University]

Like him, I see the fragility of our lives and the extraordinary circumstance of our even existing in the vast nothingness of space, as a reminder of “our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”.

With No God, there is no meaning to attach to suffering, just a sharp imperative to stop it wherever and whenever possible. There is no palliative assurance that it is part of God’s plan for millions to die in pain and poverty, just an obligation to act before they do. There is no hope of an afterlife to bring peace to the kind or punishment to the cruel, just the urgency of justice in the here and now. And there is no surrendering to a higher power to resolve my faults or failings, only my own agency, and my own responsibility.

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When there is only the human, it is only the human that can change our lives.

One of the greatest articulations of a moment of apostasy was written by the Victorian poet Arthur Clough. Easter Day, Naples, 1849 chronicles an overwhelming, catastrophic loss of faith, as it suddenly dawned on Clough that “Christ is not risen”. Bereft of his God, Clough enjoins us to “eat, drink and die, for we are souls bereaved”.

Like Fraser, he sees life with no God as an essentially narcissistic experience, medicating the loss of meaning with the hedonism of gluttony. But the poem then gives advice to the readers it constructs. To the women: “Go to your homes, your living children tend / Your earthly spouses love.” To the fishermen: “Mend the old nets ye left to roam / Tie the split oar, patch the torn sail”.

These are not, in fact, the pursuits of narcissistic hedonists. Caring for family; feeding the village: these are noble pursuits in the service of our community. They are the only way to satisfy our human desire for purpose, in the absence of a God. Whereas those motivated by faith can find meaning in prayer, or perpetual contemplation of the divine, we atheists have no such channels open, and must find purpose in our actions.

Fraser is wrong. Atheists contribute in their millions, every day, to “human flourishing”. And unlike those with religious motivations, they do so without a hope of eternal reward. Of course, there are plenty of selfish and cruel atheists, just as there are those who use religion for immoral purposes. But even those whose religion motivates them to do great works of charity, are not better than the atheists who do good. It is surely more impressive to help others in a world with No God, than it is to help others in a world with God on hand to give out the reward of eternal life.

Faith tells us there is something beyond the here and now that matters, and matters more. It is perhaps the most successful technique humans have developed for tolerating the horrors of human existence, which atheism leaves intolerable. No wonder religion seems to be good for our mental health: it alleviates the guilt if God is in charge. That’s why religion can, and has been used, to make the case against progress, the case for accepting horror instead of challenging it.

For billions of people, faith adds meaning to their lives. But the assumption that there is no meaning in atheism needs to end. Pew Research Trust has shown that, even in the deeply religious US, atheists are the most likely to feel “a deep sense of wonder about the world”. We’re the ones most overwhelmed by our transcendent luck in being here: no one put us here to serve their purpose. With No God, there is no-one to blame, and no one to hide how close we are, in every moment, to oblivion.

With No God this fragile little world of ours is all we have. Let those with faith live in faith, but don’t ever tell me atheism is a moral vacuum. As Clough said, religion means “setting affection on things above”. Atheism, by contrast, is a way to set affection on the things below, the things around us every day, the human rather than the ineffable. There is no next world: just this one. So let’s stop screwing it up.

But the internet has a short memory, and can downplay the significance of people who were making their case before we fully entered the digital age. Contemporary atheists (like contemporary believers) are often woefully ignorant of the arguments and thinkers who came before them. And though there are many such significant sceptics and dissenters who are worthy of attention, I wanted to focus on two people in particular, whose thinking made a significant impression on me.   They are the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the philosopher and ex–priest, Don Cupitt. The influence of both men continues to make an impression today, even though many are unaware of it.

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From the age of 14, Richard Holloway (born 1933) attended a school run by a religious order, which trained young men for the priesthood. From there, he went to spend a lifetime in the ministry, in Africa and America, but largely in Britain. In Scotland, he was promoted Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1992 – positions from which he resigned in 2000. This last step was unavoidable. By Holloway’s own admission towards the end of his career he found himself holding exactly the stances that he had attempted to fight against as a young man.

Holloway’s early works and preaching were expressions of religious orthodoxy which gained him institutional respect. As he later explained it:

In the late 1960s, I emerged from a period of radical doubt about the whole Christian doctrinal system, and I fell into a very common trap: I reacted against my own uncertainties by attacking doubt and uncertainty in others. A closet sceptic, I condemned in others what I was too afraid to look at in myself.

As he also said of his first book:

It was an attack on the kind of theology I myself now write. All along, I can now see, I was my own enemy, the opponent of the other self within, the person who doubted that theological propositions actually represented metaphysical realities, actually described the situation in the heavenly realm. My anxieties about all of this caused me to engage in a classic projective identification and condemn in others what I secretly believed in my own heart. It is one of the deepest ironies of my life that I ended up in my sixties the kind of bishop that I attacked when I was a priest in my thirties.” [1.  Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves, Canongate, 2001, pp.177-8. Also, Richard Holloway  Leaving Alexandria: a memoir of faith and doubt, Canongate, 2012, p.335]

This took some decades to work itself out. Throughout the Eighties, as he made his way up the church hierarchy, Holloway held onto belief. Though by the 1990s this began to slip. In Dancing on the Edge: Faith in a Post-Christian Age (1997), Holloway aimed to rethink Christianity for those who increasingly felt on the margins of it. Two years later he had written perhaps his most important book, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics. What was it that had made a theologically conservative Bishop turn against the dogma and truth-claims of his own religion?

One thing, which comes up repeatedly in his later books, was the church’s stance on moral issues and in particular the church’s attitude towards women and gays. The 1998 Lambeth Conference, in particular, was a watershed for Holloway. It was there – at the once-a-decade meeting of all Anglican bishops from around the world – that Holloway found something which turned him not just off, but away. The 1998 Conference was riven by a particularly bitter and public row over the church’s attitude towards homosexuality.

At the previous Lambeth Conference, the then Archbishop of Canterbury had managed to contain the division which existed over the matter of women’s ordination. But at the 1998 conference the divide between the liberal and literal wings of the church split wide open and in particularly rancorous terms. The divide between the Anglican church in the developed world and, in particular, that of the African churches, climaxed in one Bishop trying to exorcise the ‘demons’ out of a prominent gay Christian.

Holloway said that “in reaffirming Christianity’s traditional rejection of same-sex relationships” the conference “evinced a degree of hatred of homosexuals that many observers found frightening”. But it was not the personal unpleasantness alone that troubled him. It was the theology that lay behind it. He wrote at the time, “The saddest aspect of a very depressing event was the way speaker after speaker quoted the Bible as though it was the final word on a complex subject, so that no further thinking needed to be done.” [2.  Richard Holloway, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics, Canongate, 1999, pp.79-80]

Holloway did not merely object to specific moral judgements being made by his fellow bishops. He objected to their reliance on the Bible as the ultimate source for moral truth. In the book he wrote immediately after Lambeth – indeed, he later said, “provoked” by Lambeth – he made a clear call for keeping God out of ethics. In this he took scripture out of the equation and argued a case for dealing with some of the very modern complexities of ethics by what he described as a system of ‘ethical jazz’.

It was a book that was lavishly received outside of the church. But inside it ended his career. In his 2012 memoir Holloway recorded the ‘fatwa’ issued by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, on the then still Bishop of Edinburgh’s turf and presence, in September 1999. The Archbishop proclaimed a form of ‘anathema’ on the book. The Archbishop of South-East Asia proclaimed the book to be heretical and Scotland, by extension, a heretical province. Local clergy demanded his resignation, but it was not until the following year, in his own time, that he announced he was leaving his position.[3.  Leaving Alexandria: a memoir of faith and doubt, pp. 326-335]

Unconstrained any longer by the strictures or reprimands of the church authorities, this move gave Holloway the opportunity to move further away from the church’s precepts as well as precincts. The following year he published Doubts and Loves, a book which revealed a personal as well as professional move. In it he described a type of person who cannot believe in “a set of claims about ancient miracles” but who is “haunted by some of the values of Christianity and would like to be associated with it in a way that did not violate their moral and intellectual integrity”.

This, Holloway explained, was now his own position. He wrote:

I have asked myself repeatedly in recent years whether I can still call myself a Christian, holding the faith in the way I now do. The answer to my question may be No and this book may conclusively demonstrate my departure from the faith I have given my life to. On the other hand, and this is what I hope, it may offer a lifeline to people who, like me, want to remain members of the Christian community, but only if they can bring their minds, formed by the science and philosophy of the day, along with them. [4.  Doubts and Loves, pp.53–4]

In 2004, in Looking in the Distance he talked of Christianity as a historical force and described its intention at “balancing” the world “without entirely understanding what it was doing”. He was frank about what Christianity and the church had tried to do, but also what it had failed to do, including the things religion could not know. He described the universe as “mystery enough to be going on with, without hanging on to ancient hypotheses that now create more problems for us than they solve”. [5.  Richard Holloway, Looking in the Distance, Canongate, 2004, pp. 30–1]

In his next book, Between the Monster and the Saint (2008), he described religion as “certainly a work of the human imagination”. But again he stressed that this did not mean he wanted it thrown out. “You do not have to believe in the truth of the doctrine to acknowledge that, like a great work of art, the Christian story captures the reality of our experience. Indeed, it could be argued that it was developed over the centuries precisely to account for the human condition.” And, he says:

Like everything else we have invented, religion has been put to evil uses, to such an extent that certain secular thinkers identify it as the root of all evil. Without softening the valid elements of that accusation, the paradox of religion is that its myths and metaphors also provide us with some of the deepest insights into our own condition. Used modestly and understood properly, religion still has much to offer a humanity that is trying to save itself from itself. [6.  Richard Holloway, Between the Monster and the Saint, Canongate, 2008, p.xvi and xix]

Over the course of less than two decades, Holloway moved from doubts over the uses to which religion can be put to a complete rejection of its divine origins. That path is one that many others have made and many more doubtless fear making. But what makes Holloway different is not merely that he made this journey whilst himself being a member of the clergy or that he wrote about it whilst doing so. What is different and significant about Holloway is that while he became disenchanted with traditional religion and while he became surer of its man-made nature he nevertheless saw that there remained something in religion, and the Christian story in particular, that deserved and needed to be saved.

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In his 2012 memoir, Leaving Alexandria, he described with frankness not only the fundamentalism that had pushed him away from the church, but those few hopes he had still had left for it. His religion is now, he says, “pared away to almost nothing” [7.  Leaving Alexandria: a memoir of faith and doubt, p.188], and he asks what he is left believing. ‘Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake. Lies are just lies, but mistakes can be corrected and lessons can be learned from them. “The mistake'” he says,”‘was to think religion was more than human.” [7.  Leaving Alexandria: a memoir of faith and doubt, p.343]

Though he concludes that religion was a work of the human imagination he reiterates that that itself is not nothing. If it could be appreciated as other works of the human imagination are appreciated – so long as people did not fall over again into thinking it was more than that – if it could be appreciated like Shakespeare, and Proust, Elgar, Tolstoy, Gaugin or Nietzsche (to use Holloway’s list) and seen to have no more authority than them, then the uses of religion might still be for the good. [8.  ibid., p.345]

Don Cupitt: The atheist priest

Like Holloway, Don Cupitt spent the early part of his career attempting to uphold the orthodoxy of the church into which he was ordained in 1960. In the mid–1960s, he became the Dean of Emanuel College Cambridge, where he remains a Life Fellow. From this berth, Cupitt began writing books in the 1970s which became more and more unorthodox. In particular he applied a critical, philosophical and historical analysis to the Christian tradition, putting himself further and further from the mainstream of the church.

His participation in a 1977 symposium book The Myth of God Incarnate and a set of television projects including Open to Question (1973) and Who was Jesus? (1977) made him made him one of the most nationally famous members of the clergy. In 1980, he published his most important work up to that date, Taking Leave of God. The book argued (among much else) that a belief in the existence of God was no longer a necessary pre-requisite for Christian belief. This gained him the popular press title of the ‘atheist priest’ and ‘the most radical theologian in the world” It also led to a book–length reply by the distinguished theologian Keith Ward, Holding Fast to God: a reply to Don Cupitt.

Taking Leave of God wrecked Cupitt’s career in the church, but for the following 30 years and more he has continued to write, broadcast and lecture with the support of his college and the imprint of SCM Press. In 1984, he presented a hugely influential, intensely learned and deeply argued series for British television with an accompanying book. The Sea of Faith was so provocative and timely that it became a movement, with Sea of Faith branches opening not just across the UK but around the world.

Cupitt’s starting point was the poem that hangs over much Christian thinking of the last century and a half. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ written in a crucial decade for Christianity, the 1860s, included the famous lines:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night–wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

From its opening, Cupitt explained that Christianity had experienced this slow withdrawing roar – the slow but inevitable process of secularisation. Science and Biblical criticism had repeatedly broken against the faith and the churches could not hold it back. The story of the church’s decline in England may be local, he points out, but the impact and the trend are universal.

In The Sea of Faith, Cupitt laid out the process through which England in particular had lost its faith. It consisted of a profound and brilliant tour across the thinkers, scientists and philosophers of recent centuries. He shows how the thought of the writers who lost their faith in the 1840s filtered down through the culture, but he does not over–exaggerate their impact.

For instance, he stresses that while “The bulk of the English middle class did not lose their religion until somewhere between Darwin and Bloomsbury,” he says, “the workers began to lose their faith much earlier. For some generations they continued to respect Jesus and religion; but they felt the Church was not for them.” [9.  Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith, SCM, 1984, p.25]

Cupitt’s analysis of the decline of belief is deeply nuanced. The sea of faith, in Arnold’s metaphor, “flows as well as ebbs; but the tide that returns is not quite the same as the tide that went out”. [10.  ibid., p.18] But by the end of his scan across disciplines and centuries, Cupitt is clear in his arrival at the fact that God is man-made, though “only in the non-startling sense that everything is”.

Certainly a tone more familiar to recent entries into the god debate emerges at the very end, but what Cupitt presents is not straightforward atheism and is certainly not nihilism. “When we have fully accepted these ideas and have freed ourselves from nostalgia for a cosmic Father Christmas,” he says, “then our faith can at last become fully human, existential, voluntary, pure, and free from superstition.” He is arguing for a faith, and a religion, but not as we have previously known it.

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He was right to see that this revolution in thinking and the new point of view would be ‘traumatic’, adding “so far as I know, only a few people are yet prepared for it. The majority of people reject it as being incomprehensibly thin and barren after the richer fare they have been accustomed to.” He talked of the importance of rejecting illusions. But, he concluded:

The historic task of religion, of embodying our values, witnessing to them, conserving them, setting them forth in symbols and securing their realisation in human life, remains unchanged. It will be performed all the better after the painted veil of illusion, that has hitherto hidden its workings, has finally dropped away. [11. ibid. pp.271-3]

If Taking Leave of God had not finished Cupitt’s career, then The Sea of Faith did. The fact that Cupitt remained in a position in the church bewildered and angered some more than it would have done had he been out of it altogether. But he stayed inside, in part to have the argument from the inside. Nevertheless, in the decades after the height of his controversial fame, Cupitt stepped very far away indeed. In After All (1994) he began to leave traditional Christianity completely. By 1995, he was beginning to invent an original and personal system of his own creation.

In Solar Ethics (1995) Cupitt, by his own admission, sought to create a non-religious metaphor by which people could live their lives and not fear their deaths. Fifteen years later he used The Fountain [2010] as the image of his ‘secular theology’. The idea in both was to focus on an image: “The world is like a fire or a fountain, an outpouring, self–renewing, utterly contingent and outsideless flux of energies–read–as–signs.”

From up close, of course, life looks hectic and feverish, but from a distance all that is forgotten and the movement, and the symbol it is unified in can be seen not just as serene, but as unifying and life-giving. “We should burn, burn away and burn out,” he says. [12.  Don Cupitt, Solar Ethics, SCM, 1995, p.18]

In Cupitt’s later writings he acknowledges that ‘Tradition’ has failed but recognises that we need something in the place of the parts of it that worked. “We need a moral philosophy better fitted to our sociology and our culture’ he wrote in Solar Ethics. [13.  ibid., p.8] As a philosophy, more than a theology, this vision is not just ‘post-Christian’, ‘post-secular’ and ‘post-philosophy’. It is ‘post–’ everything. In Solar Ethics Cupitt writes:

There are no guarantees. There is no objectively-provided Reality, Goodness, Truth or Beauty any longer, at all. There’s nothing out there. To that extent, nihilism has come and is henceforth our permanent human condition. That is so: it truly is so. [13.  ibid., p.46]

All this may sound as though Cupitt has ended up with a view so far away from where he started out as to be entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Christianity and its place in our lives. But that would be to miss an important remaining part of his thinking.

Though in his most recent work he has tried not to use references to ‘God’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christianity’ at all, he acknowledges movingly the manner in which we nevertheless remain imbued with it. His 2008 book The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity makes clear why. In that work Cupitt describes how the post-modern West has become the epitome of ‘secularized Christianity.’

He claims that after the Enlightenment, large numbers of people thought it possible to leave the Church and have no further connection to the Christian religion. But they are wrong he says, because ‘we remain what Christianity has made us, and in many respects the postmodern West is more Christian than ever.’ [14.  Don Cupitt, The Meaning of the West: An Apologia for Secular Christianity, SCM, 2008, p.36] The values we live by, the belief in – indeed institutionalising of – such ideals as charity, fairness, poverty-relief and the emancipation of women, these things have come to us, argues Cupitt, directly from Christianity.

What we should be trying to save, Cupitt stresses, is not the institution of the church but instead the spirituality and ethics of Christianity. [15.  ibid., esp. pp. vii-viii, x and 10] This, for Cupitt, is the true Christianity, the state that Christianity was always meant to find itself in. And it doesn’t matter whether we want it to be or not – it is what we are. “Nobody in the West can be wholly non-Christian,” he says, in a central passage. “You may call yourself non-Christian, but the dreams you dream are still Christian dreams, and you continue to be part of the history of Christianity. That’s your fate. You may consider yourself secular, but the modern Western secular world is itself a Christian creation.” [15.  ibid., p.67]

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Far more than Holloway, Cupitt has now been for three decades so completely persona-non-grata with the church that his survival within a church-related institution was something of a miracle. The established church dislikes what he says very much and has retaliated over recent decades in the most effective way possible – by completely ignoring him. His publications, from SCM press, have gone increasingly un-noticed. Some may say that they have become too esoteric, too technical or too detached from the subjects which first brought Cupitt attention. Some may even find them to be too far down the road of a kind of modern nihilism.

Nihilism may of course be one reaction to the work of Cupitt. And an increasing sense of religious doubt may be one of the hallmarks of those who over the course of years imbibed the theology and writings of both Cupitt and Holloway. For people who are religious, both men left their congregation a long time ago. But it is striking that for the non-religious, neither man currently has quite the standing or level of appreciation that they deserve. Perhaps one reason is because of the assuredness that has become a hallmark of debate on religion – both from the religious and the non-religious alike.

But, then, as Holloway once said in an interview, people are wrong to believe that the opposite of faith is doubt.  The opposite of faith, as he said, is certainty.

Already, this seems a little unfair on the atheist. The believer affirms a particular form of God. The atheist denies it. Then another believer affirms a quite different version of God, which the atheist has to set about denying all over again. It feels like a rather exhausting version of whack-a-mole.

In his brilliant inaugural lecture as Professor of Theology at Cambridge, cheekily titled “How to be an Atheist”, Denys Turner complains about forms of denial that are just too confident that they know what they are denying:

The problem is presented to us equally by those theists who know all too well what they are affirming when they say ‘God exists’ and by those atheists – the mirror-image of the first – who know all too well what they are denying when they say ‘God does not exist’. For both the affirmer and the denier are complicit in a sort of cosy and mutually reassuring idolatrous domesticity: in short, they keep each other in a job.

Here is part of the problem for the atheist. For much theology, the affirmation of God’s existence is not like the affirmation of unicorns or Santa Claus because God is not any sort of object in the world. So if, for example, you decided to embark upon some mad project of counting all the objects that exist in the universe as Thomas Aquinas suggests, you would never come across a thing called God that would go on that list.

To this extent, the atheists are clearly correct: there is no thing called God. But they are correct only in a trivial sense, because only the most Sunday school-ish mind thinks God to be the sort of thing that could exist in such a way.

Gray, himself an atheist, understands that atheism is a far richer subject that the sort of trivial denial that the so-called New Atheists specialise in. Gray says he even seriously considered writing his book without any reference to people such as Dawkins and Sam Harris, such was his estimation of their non contribution to atheistic thought. A “media phenomenon” and “a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion” he calls it.

But Gray does venture into their territory, not least because he wants to scotch the assumption that their sort of atheism is linked with the establishment of a more progressive politics. There is no good reason that atheism leads to liberalism, greater equality or a personal freedom. Indeed, historically speaking, most campaigning atheists have been profoundly illiberal in their approach – from Auguste Comte’s atheistic religion of humanity to the various versions of Communism to Nietzsche and Ayn Rand’s philosophically batty objectivism, atheism is mostly an illiberal creed that does little to advance the cause of human flourishing.

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Gray is at his strongest when he seeks to expose the ways in which supposedly atheistic philosophies are often shot through with religious assumptions. He called secular humanism, for instance, a “sacred relic”, not least because it often tends to be constructed around the notion of progress, which he sees as a secularised version of Christian eschatology, with history always pointing to the sunny uplands of some grand metaphysical conclusion.

Gray rightly shrugs at all this philosophical upspeak. Calm down, he councils, like some avuncular Geordie Eeyore, we are not on the verge of something new, we are not about to reinvent what it is to be human, we are not at some special point in history. The moral challenges of today are pretty much the same as they have been for centuries. There is no short cut out of constituent issues of being human.

The idea of exploding moral or existential short cuts is where Gray’s work is most important. As he rightly insists, the idea that science or technology can somehow deliver us from the sort of questions that have driven some of us to God – questions about mortality, for instance – is every bit as superstitious as any religious belief. For many, technology and science function in today’s society very much the same way as magic once did – they both represent the fantasy that there can be some quick fix to the challenges of being human.

The idea, for example, that we (our essence) might one day be uploaded into an app so we might live forever carries with it a “parody” of what it is to be human. Likewise, the way technology appears in the argument over climate change, for example, as some future saviour for our consumptive greed and expectation of endless growth, is a classic deus ex machina that would make even the most credulous believer blush. “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means,” Gray concludes, “Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism.”

Of the other forms of atheism, Gray also mentions what he calls the ‘God haters’. Now this is an interesting category because it includes those to whom the question of God’s existence is beside the point – they reject God if he exists or if he doesn’t.

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I once had a rather boozy lunch with the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson (whose Who’s Who entry cites both “drinking” and “atheism” among his interests) and I remember him saying that even if God walked though the restaurant door and introduced himself, he would still be an atheist. And I completely get that. Like Ivan Karamazov in the Brother’s Karamazov, Rowson’s atheism is deeper than mere denial. It is moral rejection. And finding out that God actually exists wouldn’t make him believe in God one bit.

This makes an important point. Believing that God exists and believing in God are entirely different things. In this regard Rowson is a more sophisticated non-believer than the New Atheists who still think atheism is all about establishing whether a thing called God is on Aquinas’ inventory of things that exist in the universe.

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The most interesting aspect of Gray’s book is his insistence that “if you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites” – and this strikes me as absolutely right. Gray’s own sympathies lie closer to those of  Joseph Conrad, who had no use for the idea of God, but nonetheless wrote often of his characters as sailors dependent upon the vast, beautiful indifference of the oceans. This dependence has religion-like qualities – a sense of something much bigger than oneself, a sense that the waters provided the ship with its living and purpose, the need for shipmates to establish patterns of human solidarity in the face of the dangerous circumstances.

But this sailor atheism also contained a recognition that the ocean is wholly indifferent, without higher meaning or purpose. Gray’s atheism thus retains its sense of mystery – not mystery as in stuff that is yet to be found out, but mystery as in the intrinsic unknowability of the place in which human beings find ourselves.

Over the last few decades, atheism has got rather dull. The New Atheist debate was highly successful in an evangelical kind of way – and lots of people (in the west) have been converted to it. But atheism stopped being rich or interesting. And that is a pity because, as Gray demonstrated, there is so much more to atheism than the dim witted Dawkins brigade. I did my PhD on Nietzsche, have been intellectually shaped by several important atheists, notably Freud, and even my religious heroes have atheistic tendencies.

If I have one criticism of Gray’s book it is that he could have done more with the religious side of atheism – the whole iconoclastic tradition that deliberately smashes any settled representation of God as being a product of the human imagination. Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing etc.

There is a rich interaction to be had between belief and unbelief that the New Atheist debate has driven out with its juvenile ‘Boo Hurrah’ approach. My hope is that Gray’s book might spark a renewal in the creative interchange between believers and non believers. As his final words put it: “The difference between the two may be less than you think.”

On a bleak Sunday evening last October I headed to Hammersmith Apollo in London to see a show.  Queues of hundreds of people – mostly young – curled all the way in front of the building and around the block, destroying any chance of a pre-show drink in the bar.  Yet that night the Apollo was not hosting a comedian or pop band.  It was hosting an event with Sam Harris, the West Coast neuroscientist and author.  He was joined in conversation by his fellow author and scientific atheist Richard Dawkins and the internet talk-show host Matt Dillahunty.  But it was clear that it was Sam Harris that the crowd had come to see and his social media network that filled the 5,000 seater venue to capacity.

For the next 90 minutes Harris led the conversation on politics, science, ethics and God.  When the time came for audience questions the queues for the audience microphones stretched to the back of the hall.  The few questioners who did get a chance to ask something showed themselves to be part of a bunch of unusually cerebral people who were not only cool and diverse but clearly deeply engaged with their times.  It was the sort of crowd any politician would dream of being able to attract, while very few mainstream media figures would even be able to fill the bar of such a venue (people might come for the celebrity but they would not be detained by the thoughts).  Afterwards people mulled around, talking ideas, taking photos and finally getting those drinks in.  In some ways it was like a rock concert, but a rock concert of ideas.  For his followers, Harris is indeed a type of rock-star.

He first came to prominence in the post-9/11 years, firstly through his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. The book was an instant bestseller and was bracketed with a set of other ‘anti-God’ books that came out around the same time (not least Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great).  He became identified along with them as one of the ‘new atheists’ and along with the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett they all became known as the ‘four horsemen’ of the anti-theist movement of the 2000s.

For those who were paying attention it was obvious even from The End of Faith that Harris’s contributions did not simply consist of arguing around an absence.  The most controversial and brave parts of that book were not those aspects which reiterated in a newer and more sparkling form arguments against God which had existed before, but crucial arguments about what this meant for the moral universe the world now found itself in.  What should the attitude of non-believers be in an era of mass-terror being committed in the name of faith?  What accommodations could we (or should we) all come to agree upon?  In his writings throughout the rest of that decade – not least in his crystalline Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) Harris remained focussed on this question.  Not least because world events kept calling him back to the subject he had broken through in.  Throughout events like the Mohammed cartoon crisis (2005 – ?) Harris proved to be one of the few people who had a certain enough moral framework, a developed enough understanding of what was being attempted and enough residual outrage to make a stand against such violent incursions of the most extreme forms of faith back into the public square.

It led him to be pigeon-holed, certainly.  But by the turn of the decade it became clear that his strong anti-theism was not all there was to him (enough though that could have been).  In The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values (2010) and Waking Up: A guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014) he did what very few among the ‘new atheists’ had ever bothered to do.  He attempted to build a positive case in the terrain which the new atheists had scorched.  Unlike many in his own schools of thought he recognised that opposition was not enough, but that it was necessary to build and to address questions, rather than merely to savage them and shoot them down.  What he engaged in was not what was elsewhere described as ‘Atheism 2.0’ but atheism as a starting point for all the important subjects which still followed.

Of course individual readers will have individual reactions to the level of success or persuasiveness of these ventures.  But the sincerity of them, as well as the depth – and, perhaps most crucially – width of his learning is something which any honest critic as well as fan will note.  His works draw not just on philosophy and history but on the very latest developments on science, in particular neuroscience.

Perhaps it is this cutting-edge that allows the ‘Waking Up’ podcast which Harris began in 2013 to reach tens of millions of listeners around the world.  In these podcasts – a medium in which Harris was a relative pioneer – he mulls at length (sometimes for several hours) on the most serious themes.

He occasionally veers wholly into politics.  But more commonly he delves into issues deep beneath the events of any day’s news.  Recent podcasts have addressed ‘Consciousness and the self’ (a conversation with the professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience, Anil K. Seth) and a conversation on ‘The science of meditation’.

These podcasts are an extraordinary phenomenon.  With more than a million followers on Twitter, Harris is obviously able to point people to the irregularly posted discussions.  But what is most extraordinary – as audiences like that in London in October evidenced – is their reach.  Not just because they are listened to by millions of people at a time.  But because in their reach they demonstrate the failure of a popular broadcast media intent on ‘gotcha’ moments and ‘X annihilates Y’ screen-grabs.

Harris shows an entirely different model of how to engage with your time and its challenges.  Even with people who he has invited on with whom he disagrees he shows himself to be unfailingly, outstandingly courteous.  Without any grandstanding he demonstrates continuously that thoughtful dialogue remains possible even between people who fundamentally disagree.  When he crossed swords with the actor Ben Affleck on the Bill Maher show in the USA four years ago Affleck came across as a grand-standing ignoramus with a misplaced, Hollywood-induced, sense of his own significance.  Even as he rolled his finger and ordered his fellow guest to hurry things along (as though Affleck were the director of all situations he graces with his presence) Harris dealt with him courteously, carefully and – as audience reaction showed – devastatingly.

It is the same in the conversations which he hosts.  It is impossible to come away feeling that Harris has done anything other than give his guest their best shot.  A recent appearance by Harris on Russell Brand’s podcast exemplified the idea.  Brand showed off his wares in his familiar fashion (duck, weave, play the joker, turn into a pseudo-philosopher, then whoopsey-daisey there I go again, I’m a comic really etc, ad nauseum).  All the time Harris takes even what Brand says as a serious proposition, countering him and correcting him, but always with a courtesy and an attention to facts so fastidious that it makes you wonder whether it mightn’t at some point even make some impact of Brand. In an age of intellectual dishonesty Harris’s way of communicating face-to-face as well as with his readers betrays a commitment to honesty as well as honest dialogue which is unusual.  Of course it might yet prove essential.

Harris is still only 50.  Many television bookers will not have read his works. Quite a number of opinion-page editors will only vaguely have registered him.  But he is one of the free minds who is changing our world.  And he’ll keep doing that whether the old media notice what he’s doing or not.

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A decade on, and despite the continuing decline of religious adherence, the campaign, together with the broader ‘New Atheist’ movement, can be seen as a failure. This is how Ben Sixsmith, a self-described agnostic, concludes a thought-provoking essay for Quillette:

“‘There’s probably no god,’ proclaimed the famous slogan on the side of the ‘Atheist Bus’ in 2008, ‘Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ No one stopped worrying, and, thus, here we are. The religious instinct perseveres. How it will be actualised is to be contested.”

The core of his argument is that, even in the midst of unbelief, religion (and, in particular, Christianity) remains culturally relevant – and not just in a weak sense:

“Europe and America, of course, have Christian heritage and there is no excuse for intelligent citizens to lack some knowledge of and appreciation for the faith. To reject it as a whole means rejecting Inferno, Paradise Lost and Four Quartets. To dismiss its power is to dismiss the power of Mass in B minor, Requiem and The Creation. To deny its influence on our social norms is to deny the influence of faith on family structures, common law, industry and social justice.

“One could value our religious heritage while maintaining that religion is no longer relevant. Christianity might have inspired Dante and Donne but now artists have secular sources of inspiration. There are nonbelievers, though, who turn to the Bible for advice and inspiration and are ‘cultural Christians’ in a deeper sense.”

These deep cultural Christians can be found within the (secular) intellectual resistance to the “deconstructive frenzy” of the post-modernist left. An increasingly influential figure, in this regard, is the Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson:

“Influenced by Carl Jung, he argues that whether or not great stories reflect actual events they reflect the archetypal narratives of human beings and their societies…

“The story of Noah’s Ark, for example, reflects the need to order one’s life so as to withstand chaos. The story of Abraham reflects the need to abjure comfort for the sake of achievement. One could teach these lessons without reference to ancient texts, of course, yet abstracting them from stories weakens the emotional punch and divides our collective consciousness.”

This is also why secular sources of inspiration provide such an inadequate substitute for religion.

At any one time, popular culture will produce stories, images, words and music that provide common reference points across a population. Some of these might even fall into the category of inspirational and perhaps archetypal. But the trouble is that they very rarely endure.

Consider, for instance, the Matrix films (1999 and 2003), which were saturated with quasi-religious themes. The messianic hero of the franchise, ‘Neo’, was played by Keanu Reeves – an iconic role for one of the most famous actors of his generation. The other week, I was shocked to discover that the younger members of the UnHerd office had no idea who he was – and had never seen the Matrix.

As well as making me feel positively ancient, this also made me realise just how ephemeral most of our cultural references are – and therefore how useless they are in shaping the “collective consciousness” of a nation or civilisation. For that we need the mythical, the legendary and, above all, the religious.

This, of course, requires a basic level of religious literacy – but does it also require actual belief? Ben Sixsmith believes that this is an important question:

“Religion exists insofar as it is functional; insofar, in other words, as it promotes human well-being. It can do this, of course, but without the grandeur of God, and the promise of Heaven, it is less compelling and less exceptional; part of the structure of societies and not their energising force.”

Another, less self-centred, way of putting the question is this: is the Christian story contained within our culture? Or is our culture contained within the Christian story?

As Katie Harrison noted in her column earlier this week, the survey showed that more adults in Britain now identify as being of ‘no religion’ than identify as being part of any religion.  At 53%, people of ‘no religion’ now outnumber followers of all the other religions combined.  Fall-off in membership in the Church of England appears to have been especially steep with the figures showing that just 15% of adults in Britain now regard themselves as Anglicans (a steep fall from 2000 when half the population claimed to be followers of the national, established church).  Among young people the figures are even starker. In the 18-24 age bracket a mere 3% of people said that they were Anglicans, as opposed to 40% among those aged 75 or over.

The optimistic case that a believer might put on this is that young people will grow up to something like the religious affiliation of those older people. Perhaps declinists are at risk of making the same mistake that Joseph Stalin famously made in thinking that the old women in Russia’s churches would die out in time.  The mistake being that the old women are always replaced by other old women: there is a constant supply.  Yet the fall-off is now so stark, that absent a considerable religious revival in Britain, the trajectory would appear to be irreversible. It would require a considerable form of evangelism to turn that 3% into anything like a majority through the rest of those 18-24 year old’s lives[1.  Polling by ComRes for UnHerd – published last week – found that 61% of 18 to 24 year-olds wanted less Christianity in British life whilst, in stark contrast, 74% of over 65s wanted more.].

Of course for some people all of this is a subject of celebration. For others a source of great pain. But the one thing which both responses must agree on is the magnitude of the effect that such changes will have.

The principal effect is the way in which it changes the population’s view of what it is, what it is doing here and what its purposes in life might be.  Those who are positive about the change acknowledge all this with an accentuation of what they see as the throwing off of religious ‘shackles’.  Those more inclined to mourn such change note (among other things) the great break with the language of the past, including the unbridgeable gap in understanding of the literature, art and music of what had been the Western inheritance.

But what is equally important, and what both sides might be able to agree upon is that changes such as these alter the way in which we look out as well as in.  That majority of young people who have no interest in religion present a fascinating case-study. For though they may be free to understand themselves better than ever, they may find it harder than any of their ancestors to understand the world.  To be religious, or even just to be brought up within religion is at the very least to imbibe a degree of religious literacy.  Youth is the best chance that religious literacy – like all other kinds – has of getting to us, or we to it.

Everybody has their own examples of the story I am about to tell.  Some will have many of them. But one of the most striking conversations I have had over the last year was with a very brilliant film-maker now in middle age. He knew that I had written about terrorist groups a lot and chose to question me in a spirit of genuine inquiry.  “What do ISIS actually want?” he asked.  Somewhat startled that he didn’t know, I politely told him that they appeared to want was to invite the world to Islam, engage in a great battle that would herald the end-times and from there achieve paradise.

My conversation partner looked at me as though I was some variety of maniac and then replied, “Well that’s impossible”.  I conceded that it was remarkable but not that it was implausible. And I restated their aims again.  After which I was told, “That may be what they say but what do they really want?” I tried again in various forms before we eventually agreed that we appeared to be talking different languages. Some of us have had this experience many times by now.

If I had told the undoubtedly intelligent person with whom I was conversing that ISIS were going to continue to do what they were doing until such a time as coalition forces moved out of Afghanistan then we would have understood each other and the group in question. Had I said that ISIS’s main pre-occupation was to campaign for greater environmental awareness in the Arabian peninsula, or a fairer taxation-scheme across the region then this would also have been easy enough for us to discuss and analyse. Their aims were utterly alien to him, however, not just in their outlandishness and undesirability but in their foundations and that even taking them at their word was impossible for him.

Why should anyone wish to die?  What kind of cause would regard death as an end in itself?  These and many other questions could be answered or understood at any time in history by almost any variety of believer. To the modern secular mindset, however, the world of religious faith appears so impossible to appreciate that it cannot even be taken especially seriously. The religiously untutored mindset looks out at the world and wonders why that world does not come from the same point of view as it does, often concluding that it probably does, but just doesn’t know it yet.

This mistake – this category error – may yet prove to be one of the most striking consequences of the era of non-faith. We may believe our direction of travel to be the inevitable one but what if it is not?  Indeed what if this withdrawing roar is the prelude to a far greater returning roar?  The religious mind – however reluctant – can consider this, anticipate it and even prevent it.  It is only the untutored, inevitable secularist who considers any such talk impossible. At least for now.

FURTHER READING