Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility. Our conversations would free us from some of our more distorted fantasies about others’ lives, by revealing the extent to which, behind our well-defended façades, most of us are going a little out of our minds — and so have reason to stretch out a hand to our equally tortured neighbours.

  For new participants, the formality of the dinner-time liturgy would no doubt at first seem peculiar. Yet they would gradually appreciate the debt that authentic emotion owes to well-judged rules of conduct. After all, it is hardly natural to kneel down with a group of people on a stone floor, to gaze towards an altar and to intone together:

  ‘Lord,

  we pray for your people who believe in you.

  May they enjoy the gift of your love,

  share it with others,

  and spread it everywhere.

  We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord.

  Amen’

  — and yet the faithful who attend a Mass do not hold such structured commands against their religion; instead, they welcome them for generating a level of spiritual intensity that would be impossible to summon up in a more casual context.

  We benefit from having books that tell us how to behave at meals. Here, a Haggadah from Barcelona (c. 1350), an instruction manual for a precisely choreographed Passover meal, designed to convey a lesson in Jewish history while reanimating a sense of community. (illustration credit 2.11)

  Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, the bipolar with the balanced, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to gain status by accessing so-called elite circles.

  The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal will seem offensive to those with greater trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society’s ills. Yet these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step taken to humanize one another in our imaginations, in order that we would then more naturally engage with our communities and, unbidden, cede some of our impulses towards the egoism, racism, aggression, fear and guilt which lie at the root of so many of the issues with which traditional politics is concerned.

  A Passover meal: social mechanisms are at work here that are as useful and complex as those in a parliament or a law court. (illustration credit 2.12)

  Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have all made significant contributions to mainstream politics, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a hall with a hundred acquaintances and singing a hymn together or in ceremoniously washing a stranger’s feet or in sitting at a table with neighbours and partaking of lamb stew and conversation, the kinds of rituals which, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

  Dressed in traditional white, Israeli Jews walk down a traffic-free road in Jerusalem on their way to attend synagogue on the Day of Atonement. (illustration credit 2.13)

  ii. Apologies

  1.

  The effort of religions to inspire a sense of community does not stop at introducing us to one other. Religions have also been clever at solving some of what goes wrong inside groups once they are formed.

  It has been the particular insight of Judaism to focus on anger: how easy it is to feel it, how hard it is to express it and how frightening and awkward it is to appease it in others. We can see this especially clearly in the Jewish Day of Atonement, one of the most psychologically effective mechanisms ever devised for the resolution of social conflict.

  Falling on the tenth day of Tishrei, shortly after the beginning of the Jewish new year, the Day of Atonement (or Yom Kippur) is a solemn and critical event in the Hebrew calendar. Leviticus instructs that on this date, Jews must set aside their usual domestic and commercial activities and mentally review their actions over the preceding year, identifying all those whom they have hurt or behaved unjustly towards. Together in synagogue, they must repeat in prayer:

  ‘We have sinned, we have acted treacherously,

  we have robbed, we have spoken slander.

  We have acted perversely, we have acted wickedly,

  we have acted presumptuously, we have been violent,

  we have framed lies.’

  They must then seek out those whom they have frustrated, angered, discarded casually or otherwise betrayed and offer them their fullest contrition. This is God’s will, and a rare opportunity for blanket forgiveness. ‘All the people are in fault,’ says the evening prayer, and so ‘may all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst’.

  It was no one’s idea in particular to say sorry: Yom Kippur service, Budapest synagogue. (illustration credit 2.14)

  On this holy day, Jews are advised to contact their colleagues, sit down with their parents and children and send letters to acquaintances, lovers and ex-friends overseas, and to catalogue their relevant moments of sin. In turn, those to whom they apologize are urged to recognize the sincerity and effort which the offender has invested in asking for their forgiveness. Rather than let annoyance and bitterness towards their petitioner well up in them once more, they must be ready to draw a line under past incidents, aware that their own lives have surely also not been free of fault.

  God enjoys a privileged role in this cycle of apology: he is the only perfect being and therefore the only one to whom the need to apologize is alien. As for everyone else, imperfection is embedded in human nature and therefore so too must be the will to contrition. Asking others for forgiveness with courage and honesty signals an understanding of, and respect for, the difference between the human and the divine.

  The Day of Atonement has the immense advantage of making the idea of saying sorry look like it came from somewhere else, the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim. It is the day itself that is making us sit here and talk about the peculiar incident six months ago when you lied and I blustered and you accused me of insincerity and I made you cry, an incident that neither of us can quite forget but that we can’t quite mention either and which has been slowly corroding the trust and love we once had for each other. It is the day that has given us the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to stop talking of our usual business and to reopen a case we pretended to have put out of our minds. We are not satisfying ourselves, we are obeying the rules.

  2.

  The prescriptions of the Day of Atonement bring comfort to both parties to an injury. As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appalls our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we have given to the unkind remark or the forgotten birthday, when we should long ago have become serene and impervious to such needles. Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so. Our reserve may also have a financial edge. Those who caused us injury are liable to have authority over us — they own the business and decide on the contracts — and it is this imbalance of power that is keeping us quiet, yet not for that matter saving us from bitterness and suppressed rage.

  Alternatively, when we are the ones who have caused someone else pain and yet failed to offer apology, it was perhaps because acting badly made us feel intolerably guilty. We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry. We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness t
owards them, not because we aren’t bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.

  3.

  All this the Day of Atonement will help to correct. A period in which human error is proclaimed as a general truth makes it easier to confess to specific infractions. It is more bearable to own up to our follies when the highest authority has told us that we are all childishly yet forgivably demented to begin with.

  So cathartic is the Day of Atonement, it seems a pity that there should be only one of them a year. A secular world could without fear of excess adopt its own version to mark the start of every quarter.

  iii. Our Hatred of Community

  1.

  It would be naive to suppose that the only reason we fail to create strong communities is because we are too shy to say hello to others. Some of our social alienation comes down to the many facets of our nature that have no interest whatsoever in communal values, sides that are bored or revolted by fidelity, self-sacrifice and empathy and which instead incline with abandon towards narcissism, jealousy, spite, promiscuity and wanton aggression.

  Religions know full well about these tendencies and recognize that if communities are to function, they must be dealt with, but by being artfully purged and exorcized rather than simply repressed. Religions therefore present us with an array of rituals, many of them oddly elaborate at first glance, whose function is to safely discharge what is vicious, destructive or nihilistic in our natures. These rituals don’t of course advertise their brief, for to do so would bring a degree of self-consciousness that might make participants flee from them in horror, but their longevity and popularity prove that something vital has been achieved through them.

  The best communal rituals effectively mediate between the needs of the individual and those of the group. Expressed freely, certain of our impulses would irreparably fracture our societies. Yet if they were simply repressed with equal force, they would end up challenging the sanity of individuals. The ritual hence conciliates self and others. It is a controlled and often aesthetically moving purgation. It demarcates a space in which our egocentric demands can be honoured and at the same time tamed, in order that the longer-term harmony and survival of the group can be negotiated and assured.

  2.

  We see some of this at work in the Jewish rituals attendant on the death of a beloved family member. Here the danger is that the mourner will be so overwhelmed with grief that he will cease to assume his responsibilities vis-à-vis the community. The group is therefore given instructions to allow the bereaved fulsome opportunity to express his sadness and yet it also applies a gentle and ever-increasing pressure to make sure that he eventually gets back to the business of living.

  In the seven days of shiva that follow the funeral, there is allowance for a period of cataclysmic confusion, then a more restrained thirty-day period (shloshim) in which one is absolved from many group responsibilities, followed by a whole twelve months (shneim asar chodesh) in which the memory of the deceased is commemorated in a mourner’s prayer during synagogue services. But at the end of the year, after the unveiling of the headstone (matzevah), further prayers, another service and a gathering at home, the claims of life and the community are definitively reasserted.

  3.

  Funerals aside, most religious communal rituals display outward cheer. They take place in halls with mountains of food, dancing, exchanges of gifts, toasts and an atmosphere of levity. But beneath the gaiety, there is often also a kernel of sadness in the people at the centre of the ritual, for they are likely to be surrendering a particular advantage for the sake of the community as a whole. The ritual is in truth a form of compensation, a transformational moment when depletion can be digested and sweetened.

  How can sadness be expressed without becoming all-consuming? The impulse might be to give up on life and the community altogether. The unveiling of a Jewish headstone a year after a father’s death. (illustration credit 2.15)

  It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realizing that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.

  The Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony is another ostensibly joyful ritual which endeavours to assuage inner tensions. Although apparently concerned with celebrating the moment when a Jewish boy enters adulthood, it is as much focused on trying to reconcile his parents to his evolving maturity. The parents are liable to be nursing complex regrets that the nurturing period which began with their son’s birth is drawing to a close and — especially in the case of the father — that they will soon have to grapple with their own decline and with a sense of envy and resentment at being equalled and superseded by a new generation. On the day of the ceremony, mother and father are heartily congratulated on the eloquence and accomplishment of their child even as they are also gently encouraged to begin to let him go.

  Religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania. They understand the difficulty we have in finding a way to tell our mother unaided that we are furious with her or our child that we envy him or our prospective spouse that the idea of marriage alarms as much as it delights us. They hence give us special days under the cover of which our pestiferous feelings can be processed. They give us lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.

  Would we ever need ritual festivities if there wasn’t also something to be sad about? A Bar Mitzvah ceremony, New York State. (illustration credit 2.16)

  In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites.

  4.

  Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festum fatuorum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen’, engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken’s Arse, the Gospel according to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married’ donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.

  To stay sane, we may need an occasional moment to deliver a sermon according to Luke’s Toenail. A nineteenth-century illustration of the medieval Feast of Fools. (illustration credit 2.17)

  But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a yea
r. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.’

  The moral we should draw is that if we want well-functioning communities, we cannot be naive about our nature. We must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. We should be allowed to talk gibberish, fasten woollen penises to our coats and set out into the night to party and copulate randomly and joyfully with strangers, and then return the next morning to our partners, who will themselves have been off doing something similar, both sides knowing that it was nothing personal, that it was the Feast of Fools that made them do it.

  5.

  We learn from religion not only about the charms of community. We learn also that a good community accepts just how much there is in us that doesn’t really want community — or at least can’t tolerate it in its ordered forms all the time. If we have our feasts of love, we must also have our feasts of fools.

  Yearly moment of release at the Agape Restaurant. (illustration credit 2.18)

  III

  Kindness

  i. Libertarianism and Paternalism