What are we to make of evangelical healing and prophecy? If these worked often enough, they would surely take over the world far more than they have done, offering a better explanation for disease, say, than any scientifically derived view. What are we to make of “speaking in tongues,” a biblical phrase that confers a would-be dignity on a phenomenon that, under any rational light, borders on mental illness? When, in February 2011, a reporter on live television in the United States suddenly broke into gibberish for a few moments, it attracted wide interest on other TV stations and on the Internet, and both ribald and sympathetic comment, but no one suggested for a moment that she had had a religious experience (and she didn’t say that herself). Discussion centered on which regions of her brain might have caused such an “epileptic-type” outburst.
What are we to make of health-and-wealth churches? What role does “transcendence” play in their ideology? Health and wealth directly address existential insecurity.
To the atheist mind, these developments—the violent intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, the willful ignorance of the creationists in certain regions of the United States, speaking in tongues by evangelicals, charismatic “healing,” the worship of motorcycles in India—suggest nothing less than a turning-back of the clock. The simple, obvious and rational sociological explanation for these events only underlines their crudity.
Alongside the sociological explanations for the religious revival, the psychological ones seem—to an extent—almost beside the point. In their book God Is Back, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge hold that there is “considerable evidence that, regardless of wealth, Christians are healthier and happier than their secular brethren.” David Hall, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, maintains that weekly church attendance can add two to three years to someone’s life. A 1997 study of seven thousand older people by the Duke University Medical Center found that religious observance “might” enhance immune systems and lower blood pressure. In 1992 there were just three medical schools in the United States that had programs examining the relationship between spirituality and health; by 2006 the number had increased to 141.17
Micklethwait and Wooldridge state: “One of the most striking results of the Pew Forum [Research Center]’s regular survey of happiness is that Americans who attend religious services once or more a week are happier (43 percent very happy) than those who attend monthly or less (31 percent) or seldom or never (26 percent). . . . The correlation between happiness and church attendance has been fairly steady since Pew started the survey in the 1970s; it is also more robust than the link between happiness and wealth.”18
Studies also show, they say, that religion can combat bad behavior as well as promote well-being. “Twenty years ago, Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, found that black youths who attended church were more likely to attend school and less likely to commit crimes or use drugs.” Since then, a host of further studies, including the 1991 report by the National Commission on Children, have concluded that religious participation is associated with lower rates of crime and drug use. James Q. Wilson (1931–2012), perhaps America’s pre-eminent criminologist, succinctly summarized “a mountain of [social-scientific] evidence”: “Religion, independent of social class, reduces deviance.” Finally, Jonathan Gruber, “a secular-minded economist” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has argued “on the basis of a mass of evidence” that churchgoing produces a boost in income.
Two observations are pertinent here. The first is that these examples are taken from the United States and, as is becoming clear, that country is exceptional in all sorts of ways and not at all typical of what is happening elsewhere. The second observation is, perhaps, more relevant to our subject. Even if some of these surveys showing the benefits of belief are true, what exactly is being argued here? That God rewards people who go to church regularly and often by making them happier, healthier and, to an extent, richer? But if so, and if God is omnipotent and beneficent, what about the 57 percent of regular churchgoers who are not happy? They go to church—so why has (an omnipotent and benevolent) God discriminated against them? By the same token, why are any non-churchgoers happy? Twenty-six percent say they are, yet seldom or never go to church. How do we know that these people weren’t happy or unhappy to begin with, irrespective of their churchgoing behavior? And in any case, these figures show that, even among the churchgoers, the unhappy outweigh the happy by a significant majority. What, we may ask, is God playing at?
Still more to the point, and revealingly, these are arguments for the psychological benefits of faith, not for theological ones. One could argue—theologians in the past have argued—that happiness is not the aim for religious people, certainly not for pious Christians, the crux of their belief system being that they can hope for salvation only in the next life. There is thus something in this whole exercise, of trying to prove the benefits of faith at every level, that smacks of . . . well, shaping the evidence to fit the conclusion that was wanted in the first place. Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind argues further that “human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness,” which is best obtained by religion, which is the “handmaiden of groupishness, tribalism and nationalism.” But he also adds that research shows that religious people are better neighbors and citizens not because they pray or read the scriptures or believe in hell (“These beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little”) but because they were “enmeshed” with others of similar religion. Here, too, religion is conceived of as a psychological phenomenon, not a theological one.
The psychological evidence, however, is really overwhelmed by the much wider picture as described by Norris and Inglehart’s sociology. Their conclusion is worth giving in full:
“The critique [of secularization theory] relies too heavily on selected anomalies [and ignores some striking oddities]. And focuses too heavily on the United States (which happens to be a striking deviant case) rather than comparing systematic evidence across a broad range of rich and poor societies. . . . Philosophers and theologians have sought to probe into the meaning and purpose of life since the dawn of history; but for the great majority of the population, who lived at the margin of subsistence, the need for reassurance and a sense of certainty was the main function of religion.”19
Point one in the argument of this book, then, is that although for some people in the early twenty-first century “God is back!” the actual situation is rather more complex and considerably more fraught than that simple statement suggests. Contrary to what many religious people would like to believe is happening, that atheism is in retreat, that is not true either, at least in the developed world.
At the same time, for many people, Charles Taylor had a point when in his 2008 book A Secular Age he wrote that modernity involves in some sense a “subtraction story,” a loss or narrowing of experience, a “disenchantment” with the world that “leaves us with a universe that is dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart,’” that atheists lead impoverished lives that are somehow less “full” than the lives of believers, that atheists “yearn” for something more than can be provided by the self-sufficient power of reason, and that they are blind and deaf to the miraculous moments when “God breaks in,” in the works of Dante or Bach, or Chartres Cathedral, say.20
Many atheists would dismiss Taylor out of hand, but he is not entirely alone in this, either. Here is another raft of books published since the millennium: Luc Ferry, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life (2002); John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (2003); Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (2004); Richard Holloway, Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004); Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning and Social Life (2005); John F. Haught, Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (2006); Terry Eagleton, The Meani
ng of Life (2007); Owen J. Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007); Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (2010).
Now, at one stage such a phrase as “the meaning of life” could have been used only in an ironical or jokey way. Its serious use would have been seen as embarrassing. The 1983 Monty Python film The Meaning of Life had several answers, including “be kind to fish,” “wear more hats” and “avoid eating fat.” But “the meaning of life” is no longer an embarrassing subject, it would seem, in the twenty-first century.
Why should that be? Could it be that Taylor has at least part of a point, in that many of the ways of thought conceived over the past 130 years have proved not to have all the answers? Certainly, many ideologies and “isms” of the modern world have either collapsed or become dead ends: imperialism, nationalism, socialism, Marxism, communism, Stalinism, fascism, Maoism, materialism, behaviorism, apartheid. Most recently, with the “credit crunch” of 2008 and its turbulent wake, even capitalism has come under the spotlight.
“THE THINGS WE HAVE ARE DEVALUED BY THE THINGS WE WANT NEXT”
The impact of the credit crunch was much more than economic. Writing in the [London] Times, the author Jeanette Winterson argued that the “so-called civilized West, at its most materialistic, has failed to deliver the goods . . . we are in a terrible mess”; “the way out” is through art, she concluded. In a later article in the same newspaper, she wrote: “We have created a society without values, that believes in nothing.” Other aspects of the crisis were highlighted, again in the Times, which reported that a survey of Faithbook—a new multi-faith page on Facebook—showed that 71 percent of those surveyed thought that we are today in a “spiritual recession” and that that is more worrying than the material recession. (Another survey showed there had been a 27 percent increase in praying since the credit crunch began, yet more evidence of religious behavior having to do with existential insecurity.) In November 2008 it was reported that in Britain more people believed in aliens and ghosts than believed in God: of the three thousand surveyed (not a small sample), 58 percent believed in supernatural entities against 54 percent who believed in God.I The subscribers to Faithbook hold that “any faith is better than none.”
Despite some of the cathedrals of capitalism having gone under, or been rescued by nationalization or government bailouts, capitalism hasn’t yet, in 2014, collapsed. It certainly got a fright, and is still in intensive care, but its obituary hasn’t yet been published. More to the point, all this has provoked, and will continue to provoke, a change of attitude, or perspective: we now appear to be entering a more serious, more reflective time when, as a result of the financial collapse, people are seriously reassessing the values and ideas by which we live. Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, told the Financial Times that, having taught many students who went into the City or big law firms, he has observed a recent change. “I kept in touch with some of them. When they were young, the 24/7 life was stimulating. It became a burden later on when they had a family, but then they were trapped by wealth. I see a move away from that now: more interest in teaching and other forms of public service.”21
Several things are conflated here. Religious belief and unbelief are two of them. The failure of science to engage the enthusiasm of many is another. And the psychological dimension is yet another, in which the chief objects of attention have been happiness and loneliness, different sides of the same coin when it comes to fulfillment.
A survey published in Britain in 2008 showed that people across the country were “increasingly lonely,” and that the predicament had been accelerating in the previous decade. The increase in loneliness had started, the survey reported, in the late 1960s, when neighborhoods had been progressively weakened by increased rates of divorce, immigration, the need to move house for job-related reasons and the growth of transitory student populations (British universities have increased since 1963 from twenty-three to more than a hundred). Thomas Dumm’s Loneliness as a Way of Life (2008) characterizes America as the archetypal lonely society of the future, typified by a “possessive individualism” in which “personal choice” is a cloak rather than an opportunity.22
Happiness, touched on a few pages back, has received, perhaps inevitably, even more attention. Confining ourselves only to twenty-first-century sources, there has been a wave of books exploring happiness—how to achieve it, its links to the latest brain science, what gets in the way of it, how it varies around the world, why women are (in general) less happy than men.
One well-publicized finding is that although the developed Western nations have become better off in a financial and material sense, they are not any happier than they were decades ago. In fact, in The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy (2010), Michael Foley argues that modern life has made things worse, “deepening our cravings and at the same time heightening our delusions of importance as individuals. Not only are we rabid in our unsustainable demands for gourmet living, eternal youth, fame and a hundred varieties of sex, we have been encouraged—by a post-1970s ‘rights’ culture that has created a zero-tolerance sensitivity to any perceived inequality, slight or grievance—into believing that to want something is to deserve it.”23 Moreover, “the things we have are devalued by the things we want next”—another consequence of capitalism.
On the other hand, the latest World Values Survey, published in August 2008, found that over the past twenty-five years, in forty-five out of fifty-two countries where polling took place, happiness had risen. But the research also showed that economic growth boosts happiness noticeably only in countries with per capita GDP of less than $12,000. Happiness had fallen in India, China, Australia, Belarus, Hungary, Chile, Switzerland (Switzerland!) and Serbia. Happiness appeared more related to democratization, greater variety and opportunities in the workplace, access to travel and the opportunity to express oneself. Other research showed that individualistic nations, especially in the West, “were particularly susceptible to negative emotions,” whereas Asian or Latin American countries were less so “because they consider their individual feelings less important than the collective good.”24
Let us be honest. These are all fascinating findings, and many of them are salutary and worrying in equal measure. But they are also contradictory and paradoxical. In America it is the churchgoers who are happiest, but worldwide it is those who are existentially insecure (and therefore extremely unlikely to be happy) who most attend church; religion is associated in America with less criminality, but worldwide with more; in America attendance at church boosts income, but worldwide a rise in income fails to increase happiness and it is the poorest who most attend church. Peter Berger says we are as furiously religious as ever but the members of Faithbook think we are in a spiritual recession; Peter Berger says it is the absence of transcendence that people miss but the World Values Survey shows that it is instead the absence of bread, water, decent medication and jobs that people miss, and which leads them to religion.
Despite the contradictions in these findings, amid the atavistic, violent and absurdly incoherent nature of many recent religious manifestations, and although the sociological explanations for both religious and non-religious orientations seem—rationally and convincingly—to outweigh theological ones, it is clear that many religious souls refuse to accept such a state of affairs.
Charles Taylor and the other authors referred to above lead the way in arguing that atheists suffer impoverished lives. But the Norris-Inglehart survey indicates that once existential insecurity is relieved, faith disappears. This sociological transformation is still occurring—it is even beginning to occur in the United States. A Pew Research Center poll published in 2012 reveals that the number in the United States with no religious affiliation has risen from 16 percent in 2008 to 20 percent four years later. Church attendance has dropped from around 40 percent in 1965 to under 30 percent now.25
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One book cannot hope to have much of an impact when set against the absurd, tragic and horrific dimensions of recent religious history, but this one at least aims to offer something that hasn’t, to my knowledge, been done before. It aims to be an extensive survey of the work of those talented people—artists, novelists, dramatists, poets, scientists, psychologists, philosophers—who have embraced atheism, the death of God, and have sought other ways to live, who have discovered or fashioned other forms of meaning in the world, other ways to overcome the great “subtraction,” the dreadful impoverishment that so many appear to think is the inevitable consequence of losing the idea of supernatural transcendence.
I hope to show that such an eventuality is far from inevitable. In fact, when you look at our recent history you encounter quite a lot of surprises in the works of luminaries you thought you knew; you make some unusual (and revealing) juxtapositions; and you discover that the search for other ways to live has been one of the core components—part of the DNA, to use a modern metaphor—of modern culture. You also realize that, far from atheists leading less than full lives, neither God nor the Devil has all the best tunes.
One more point, but an important one. Is Nietzsche to blame for our current predicament? Why is it that his intervention has caught our attention above all others? And what does that tell us?
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 3