by Tim Kreider
Nietzsche was a preacher’s kid. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Friedrich was five. Preacher’s kids have a reputation as troublemakers. Most of them just go wild in their teens and sleep around or get hooked on coke or total the family car, but Nietzsche, who started out as such a nice boy—a chair in philosophy at age twenty-four!—rebelled in a way that the most nihilistic punks and junkies can only envy: by single-handedly trashing a four-thousand-year-old religion. (Is it belaboring the Freudian obvious to point out that someone who’d lost a father in childhood grew up to herald the death of God?) I suspect that when he writes about the tragic irony of the Judeo-Christian virtue of Truth being that religion’s ultimate undoing, the entire intellectual tradition self-destructing of its own internal logic, he’s writing not just cultural history but autobiography.
I’ve noticed a qualitative difference between the atheism of people who weren’t brought up in a faith and those who underwent an adolescent disillusionment. My friend Lauren’s parents were atheists who never took her to church as a child, and her atheism has a placid, matter-of-fact quality that’s very different in affect from the passionate, strident atheism of those of us who abandoned their faith. A lot of the latter type tend to be bitter and evangelical in their unbelief: it’s like the difference between people who just don’t get why alcohol is supposed to be fun and people who had to go to rehab, and now treat wine like cyanide. Although Lauren doesn’t love the idea of dying any more than the next person, it doesn’t especially upset her to believe that life is meaningless or the universe indifferent. She thinks people like me, who were taught as children that a just and loving God is watching over the sparrows, feel bereft, cheated of something promised. Which is why we’re the ones who suffer these chronic cases of existential despair.
In a cardboard box of my own juvenilia that my mother gave me when she moved out of our old house, among the biblical dittos and construction-paper Christs in cotton-ball clouds, I found a sort of heraldic cardboard badge I’d brought home from the Lutheran nursery school I attended. It was suspended by two holes from a piece of yarn, as if meant to be hung from the wall, or maybe worn as a medallion. Its cryptic sigil was a blue shield bearing a weeping silver scallop shell,II with the motto inscribed in Elmer’s glue and glitter: “I AM GOD’S CHILD.” What are you supposed to do with such a thing? How can you throw that out? I hung it up over my desk, less in the spirit of putting up a crucifix than of framing an X-ray.
It’s not so easy to discard a childhood religion. Religion is tenacious, like recessive genes or herpes. It secretly weirds me out that even my Jewish friends who are atheists take for granted that they’ll have unnecessary surgery performed on their infants’ genitals. You’d think it would be easier to shake off Christianity than Judaism, since it’s a creed, not an ethnicity; in theory, if you stop believing it, you stop being one. It turns out to be more complicated. A girlfriend of mine, who’d been brought up working-class Catholic and was a Wiccan by the time I met her, confessed to me years later that she’d returned to the Church. To me it had always seemed as if she’d changed the content of her belief but not the form: Wicca, like Catholicism, was ritualistic, theatrical, full of props and ornament and incantations. Back when I dated her she owned a dagger, which she assured me was purely ceremonial. People who convert from brawler to jihadi, or from Klansman to abortion clinic bomber, haven’t really switched sides at all; they’re just assholes who’ve changed denominations.
It’s less easy for me to see the deeper continuities between my own religious upbringing and my adult intellectual life. I wasn’t fucked up by castrating guilt or S and M fantasies of divinely sanctioned torture in the afterlife, like the children of some Catholics or evangelicals, who later have to become Satanists or witches to exorcise their depraved faiths. But I know there are things like that old cardboard badge still hanging up in my own head that I no longer notice, or just haven’t had the heart to get rid of. I still cherish certain unexamined delusions of which the world is relentlessly divesting me: that speaking the truth matters; that there is, or ought to be, such a thing as justice; that my actions are observed and some ledger kept of my moral choices; that there are such things as forgiveness and redemption; and, perhaps most pernicious of all, that everything will turn out all right in the end. Regardless of their specific creeds, all religious beliefs presuppose, more invisibly, that there is some objective meaning in the world and a purpose to our lives. Even when a belief system collapses, its underlying presumptions remain, still shaping the space of what it’s possible to imagine, like an empty frame.
I remember seeing, on a road trip with my friend Annie, a bumper sticker in a parking lot that read, in stark white-on-black letters: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT GOD. “What a terrible world that would be!” I said to Annie. “Think of it!—it would be a kind of . . . of nightmare world! Injustice would go unpunished—power would triumph over virtue—the innocent would suffer, while the greedy and cruel would live lives of luxury!” It got more blackly hilarious the more I thought about it. “Why, life would be without meaning! It would be a . . . a hell on earth!” I reeled around the parking lot and toppled against a car, I was laughing so hard. Annie got it, but it didn’t exactly slay her. (Annie wasn’t raised religiously, either.) Theodicy, the whole “Problem of Evil” that has stumped theologians and philosophers for millennia—somehow reconciling God’s benevolence and omnipotence with tsunamis, melanomas, and Nazis—becomes about as impenetrable as a maze on a kids’ menu once you’re willing to posit that maybe no one’s minding the store. Atheism is simply a more parsimonious theory. It’s just not what you’d call a consolation.
My atheism was most impassioned, as most things are, in my twenties. This was around the same time that I read everything Nietzsche wrote. (Nietzsche is like the Hardy Boys for brooding intellectual guys in their twenties, as Ayn Rand is the Nancy Drew of certain brainy, ambitious college girls.) I stayed away from church like a vampire. I can remember the first Easter I declined to join my family at Sunday morning services: I sat naked out on my porch after a shower, letting the sun dry me off, unbaptizing myself. Still, it never occurred to me to proselytize on behalf of my unbelief: Why spread the Bad News? I’d renounced religion, but I was still a practitioner of politeness, and it seemed tacky and mean to go around telling people there was no God, like exposing the Santa hoax to toddlers. When a friend invited me to go with her to an Atheists’ March on Washington, I imagined carrying a blank sign.
I did draw a few cartoons on the subject, like “Jesus vs. Jeezus” (the fierce-eyed desert prophet contrasted with a blow-dried American Christ bearing his traditional attributes, the flag and the gun) and “Science vs. Norse Mythology” (illustrating comparative theories of cosmogony and anthropogenesis). Christians, grown lazy and complacent, didn’t bother to complain, but the latter aroused the wrath of some followers of Asatru, which is what its adherents call the Norse religion today. They didn’t exactly issue a fatwa, but it still gave me pause, since the Vikings were historically not a peace-loving people and I do live right on the water.
You could argue that people lose faith in adolescence because their understanding of God is a childish understanding, literal and concrete, Freud’s big omnipotent Dad. (I’ve often wondered how closely people’s conceptions of God—as hardassed disciplinarian or forgiving confidant—or their ideal form of government—law-and-order authoritarianism versus safety-net nanny state—correspond to their own upbringings.) Fundamentalists are people who in adulthood still think as concretely as children: they can grasp symbols, not abstractions; flags and crosses, not ideologies or metaphysics. I’m afraid I’m a fundamentalist at heart; I’m just one who doesn’t believe. I envy religious people their sense of meaning and purpose in life, but utility isn’t enough of an argument. I’ve always loved the story Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Catholic, told about being at a New York literary event where Mary McCarthy remarked that the miracle of transubstantiation was a
serviceable symbol. O’Connor said, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” In some perverse way, I almost have less respect for people who say “I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person” and believe in a nebulous Something than I do for Southern Baptist dingbats who stand picketing outside abortion clinics. Which is not to say I would prefer to hang out with the latter; only that they actually appear to believe in something, and to act on their convictions. Catholics who are both anti-abortion and anti–death penalty are at least, unlike most liberals or conservatives, consistent. Religion should be transformative; it probably ought to make you a radical, a maniac. If I ever do take up religion again I certainly won’t be telling people I believe in Something; I’ll be out on the sidewalk with a sandwich board, yelling at people to repent and condemning them all to hell.
A friend told me once she’d have liked to be a fly on the wall for my theological conversations with Diana, but the truth is the subject just never came up much between us. Whenever we did discuss some aspect of belief or creed, it always turned out that we were more or less in agreement. We shared the same un-American Sermon on the Mount politics, though Diana actually went to community meetings and protests and got herself arrested, whereas my own activism took the form of complaining over drinks. When I asked her whether it wasn’t at least some part of her job to try to get people to behave more decently, she said, “Not really.” She asked me once whether I believed in an afterlife, and I admitted, reluctantly, that I didn’t. “I don’t think I do, either,” she said. I’d always associated faith with certitude and rules, but she seemed to feel that it had less to do with belief than doubt, and wasn’t about laws but freedom. Hers was what I would call a theology of uncertainty: she thought that God was in those moments where we feel most ethically squirmy and unsure of ourselves.
We kept threatening to have what we called the Jesus Conversation, but we never got around to it. I did sometimes wonder, looking at all the books on theology and church history stacked around her apartment: So, why Christianity, exactly? Did she really believe all this stuff—the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the whole Son of God thing? What about that weird incident with the fig tree? But relationships offer so many spontaneous opportunities for dumb arguments and conflicts that I think neither of us could see any reason to bring it up. And anyway, what people believe is a lot less important or interesting to me than who they are, and what they love. My friend Skelly and I argued about religion over beers for years, but the gulf between our beliefs seemed less divisive than his inexplicable allegiance to Busch.
I would’ve told you that the things I loved about Diana were irrelevant to her faith, although she probably would’ve said they were integral to it: her nonjudgmental understanding, her kindness, her high seriousness and deep joy. She saw some beavers the first time she visited my cabin and became obsessed with beavers for months thereafter—their lodges, their teeth, their instinctive hatred of the sound of running water. She would make a beaver face that I had to beg her not to make. There was a day when she had to stand by the side of a dirt road making small talk with a man named Pappy while I was bent over the back seat of my car attempting to wrestle a spare tire out of the back—wildly flailing around, giving up and going limp for a while, then wildly flailing again with renewed frenzy—“like a trapped bug,” as she later described it, red-faced and weeping with laughter. Sitting outside one summer night, watching a slow-approaching thunderstorm over the hills, she started crying, and when I asked her what was wrong, she explained that life was just sad because everyone dies.
* * *
The death of God may have been somewhat overhyped since Nietzsche first broke the story, like those “trends” that are only occurring among about six hundred hipsters in Bushwick. It’s a revolution that took place pretty much exclusively among the intelligentsia, who, now as ever, represent a negligible minority. There are no atheists in shitholes, and religion still thrives in the impoverished parts of the planet, which are, as ever, most of it. It may just be that atheists can finally come out of the closet, since this is also the first time in the last couple of millennia that atheism hasn’t carried fairly severe penalties, like being hung in cages on the spires of cathedrals. (And for atheists, remember, there’s no plus side to martyrdom.) Faith is a consensual, communal enterprise, and, as totalitarian states will tell you, any defection represents a threat. If only a few people believe in a religion, it’s a cult; if only one person believes it, it’s a delusion. Former children may remember how annoying it is when you’re pretending something and some wet blanket refuses to play along, ruining it for everyone.
But as far as we know, this is the first time that any significant percentage of the human race has been atheist or agnostic. It may be too soon to say how this experiment is going, but I think even atheists would have to admit it’s been something of a mixed bag. What people have chosen to worship in lieu of God is, literally, pretty dispiriting. MarxIII famously called religion the opiate of the masses, but these days opiates are the opiate of the masses. I would also include things like sportfucking, shopaholism, and a constant IV feed of entertainment under the heading of mass self-medication. I sometimes wonder whether the obsession with celebrity, exhibitionism, and exhaustive self-documentation on social media isn’t some sort of hysterical compensation for the absence of that omniscient Eye that used to watch and judge us. Even if your god is some capricious, abusive father—issuing arbitrary commands, demanding grotesque demonstrations of obedience, forever threatening to take off the Belt—it’s still better than being an orphan.
I’d say most of my atheist friends and I are doing about as well as anyone else, limping gamely through the days with the frail defenses of kindness and laughter, books and music, late-night talks with friends and the occasional cocktail. And we seem to be at least as decent and generous-hearted as our religious peers. My friend Margot, a hard-line atheist, is one of the truest practicing Christians I know: she took a family of Laotian refugees into her home for years, flew their son back from Laos twice, and helped their oldest daughter get into an American college. Ad hoc and unglamorous though it all looks, it’s actually an experiment unprecedented in history: trying to get through a human existence without delusions of either God or eternity.
When you’re in the midst of a great intellectual revolution, it feels like a breakthrough, a revelation; it’s easy to forget that it’s another passing fashion. This last century could just be some historic aberration, a brief interim when Western civilization is temporarily adrift between myths. The story we’ve used to make sense of the world for the last twenty centuries doesn’t work anymore, and we haven’t come up with a new one yet. The tribal shepherd god of the Old Testament, who separated land from sea and day from night six thousand years ago, seems paltry and dwarfish in the light of an observable universe ninety-three billion light-years wide, strewn with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which contains hundreds of billions of stars and who knows how many unimaginable alien Christs and Nietzsches, Bachs and Gandhis, Newtons and Buddhas—and, no doubt, innumerable Napoleons and Khans jealously defending their dust speck empires. People seem ill-equipped to deal with the reality unveiled by the Hubble and Large Hadron Collider, with dark energy and quantum foam; it’s incomprehensible and counterintuitive, not just indifferent but utterly unrelated to human wants or fears.
Everybody smart seems to think we’re in for another bad century, for wars and earthquakes and upheavals that even the creepily prescient Nietzsche couldn’t have imagined: catastrophic storms and rising oceans, the depletion of the planet’s resources, mass migrations and savage wars of survival. (Of all the crimes with which the Abrahamic religions could fairly be charged—and the rap sheet is a long one—the most destructive may prove to have been their promise that the world was made for us.) Nietzsche’s earthquake metaphor had historical resonance: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed a hundred thousand people, triggered an intellectual re
ferendum on theodicy after the Church offered the same lame Deuteronomic explanation that Job’s sanctimonious asshole friends gave him when he was sitting on an ash-heap covered with boils: “You must’ve done something to deserve this.” Giving obsolete, irrelevant answers to urgent new questions is lethal to an institution. Christianity has been let’s say slow to respond to recent developments like the Enlightenment, the abolition of slavery and empire, and the expansion of our definitions of humanity. The Vatican formally acknowledged that Galileo had been technically correct in the matter of the heliocentric model of the solar system, after a lengthy inquiry by a committee, in 1992, the same year that radio astronomers confirmed the discovery of extrasolar planets.
Efforts to revive dead religions like Native American traditions, Druidism, and Asatru are, with all due reverence to the Æsir, moribund outside the cultural environments in which they were born. But it might be significant, a hint of things to come, that a lot of these retrofitted New Age religions share in common some variety of animism (which neuroscientists and philosophers of mind prefer to call panpsychism, so as not to sound woo-woo). The advantage of myths and religions that hold the world itself sacred are pretty evident in light of a recent UN report on the catastrophic implications of global warming: they enable us to see the world as alive, something of which we’re a small, organic part, instead of as a thing we own. The current pope has issued an encyclical that repudiates consumerism and exploitation in favor of a faith that sounds suspiciously mystical: “If we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.”
Or maybe there is no next myth. Maybe Western civilization is just out of ideas. A culture and an intellectual tradition that endured for millennia has disappeared as abruptly as dance cards and men’s hats. A couple of generations ago even uneducated people knew Nimrod and Babylon, the seven virgins and the Prodigal Son; today pretty much no one’s heard of any movie that was made before they were born. At least Eliot’s waste land was littered with shards of Sophocles, Chaucer, and Conrad; we’re a people without a culture, except for whatever we can salvage from the vast crapscape of pop songs, kids’ movies, sound bites, and memes that now constitute our noosphere, like the survivors of some disaster scavenging the shambles for food and medicine and finding only Wacky Packs and Band-Aids.