The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out “admire me I am a violet! dote on me I am a primrose!”77

  Where the philosophes had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential Beauty.”78

  The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who was greatly influenced by the Romantic movement, was also in retreat from Newtonian religion. He too sought a presence in “the mind of man.” In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), he argued that the religious quest should not begin with an analysis of the cosmos but in the depths of the psyche.79 A religion of this kind would not be an alienating force but involved with what was “highest and dearest” to us.80 God was to be found in the “depths of human nature,” in “the ground of its actions and thought.”81 The essence of religion lay in the feeling of “absolute dependence” that was fundamental to human experience.82 This did not mean abject servility toward a distant, externalized God. Crucial aspects of our lives—our parentage, genetic inheritance, and the time and manner of our death—were entirely beyond our control. We experienced life, therefore, as “given,” something that we received. This “dependence” was not merely something that had been implanted by God; it was God, the source and “whence” of our being.83 Yet this theology was somewhat reductive: for Schleiermacher, the human being had become the center, origin, and goal of the religious quest. Instead of being the ultimate explanation of the universe, God was a necessary consequence of human nature, a device that enabled us to understand ourselves.

  The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770— 1831) remained fully committed to the Enlightenment ideal of objective knowledge but would have agreed with Blake that the externalized God must lose its lonely isolation and immerse itself in mundane reality. Human beings had thoughts and aspirations that exceeded their rational grasp, and they had traditionally expressed these in the mythos of religion. But it was now possible to reformulate these philosophically. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel argued that the ultimate reality, which he called Geist (“Spirit” or “Mind”), was not a being but “the inner being of the world, that which essentially is.”84 It was, therefore, being itself. Hegel developed a philosophical vision that recalled Jewish Kabbalah. It was a mistake to imagine that God was outside our world, an addition to our experience. Spirit was inextricably involved with the natural and human worlds and could achieve fulfillment only in finite reality. This, Hegel believed, was the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. Conversely, it was only when human beings denied the alienating idea of a separate, externalized God that they would discover the divinity inherent in their very nature, because the universal Spirit was most fully realized in the human mind.

  Hegel’s vision articulated the optimistic, forward-thrusting spirit of modernity. There could be no harking back to the past. Human beings were engaged in a dialectical process in which they ceaselessly cast aside ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. Every state of being brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash, are integrated, and create a new synthesis. Then the whole process begins again. The world was thus continuously re-creating itself. The structures of knowledge were not fixed but were simply stages in the unfolding of a final, absolute truth. Hegel’s dialectic expressed the modern compulsion to discard recent orthodoxy. Religion, he believed, was one of those phases that human beings would leave behind as they progressed toward their ultimate fulfillment. In what with hindsight we can see to be a sinister move, Hegel identified the alienating religion that we had to reject with Judaism. Apparently unaware of the similarity of his philosophy to the Kabbalah, he blamed the Jewish people for transforming the immanent Spirit into a tyrannical external God that had estranged men and women from their own nature. In a way that would become habitual in the modern critique of faith, he had presented a distorted picture of “religion” as a foil for his own ideas, selecting one strand of a complex tradition and arguing that it represented the whole.

  Even though Hegel stressed the relentlessly progressive movement of reality, he, like the Romantic poets, had actually recast older ideas in a modern form. As modernization proceeded, Western people were about to enter a world that was at once enthralling and disturbing. To keep pace with these fundamental changes, they had been forced to change their religion, their methods of education, and the social and political structures of their society. As they struggled to adapt to their radically altered world, they had abandoned traditional attitudes that seemed, however, to be embedded in the structure of humanity. As the Enlightenment proper drew to an end, some of these were beginning to resurface. Poets, philosophers, and theologians were urging people to recover a more receptive attitude to life. They were questioning the modern dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural and countering the distant Newtonian God with the image of an immanent Spirit. They had revived the idea of mystery. Condorcet, Hume, and Kant had suggested that unknowing was an inescapable part of our response to the world. The Age of Reason was not over, however. Only an elite group of intellectuals had been able to participate in the Enlightenment proper. But a religious movement was about to bring many of its basic assumptions into the mainstream so that they would become essential to the Western outlook.

  Atheism

  In 1790, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse descended on Boston from the rural outreaches of Massachusetts and launched a crusade against Deism, which had just attained the peak of its development in the United States. Hundreds of preachers joined this assault, and by the 1830s, Deism had been marginalized and a new version of Christianity had become central to the faith of America.1 Known as “Evangelicalism,” its objective was to convert the new nation to the “good news” of the Gospel. Evangelicals had no time for the remote God of the Deists; instead of relying on natural law, they wanted a return to biblical authority, to personal commitment to Jesus, and to a religion of the heart rather than the head. Faith did not require learned philosophers and scientific experts; it was a simple matter of felt conviction and virtuous living.

  On the frontiers, nearly 40 percent of Americans felt slighted by the aristocratic republican government, which did not share their hardships but taxed them as heavily as the British and bought land for investment without any intention of leaving the comforts of the eastern seaboard. Frontiersmen and frontierswomen were ready to listen to a new kind of preacher who stirred up a wave of revivals known as the Second Great Awakening (1800–35). This Awakening was more politically radical than the first. The ideals of its prophets seemed very different from those of the founding fathers. They were not educated men, and their rough, populist Christianity seemed light-years away from the Deism of Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. Yet they too belonged to the modern world and were able to convey the ideals of the republic to the people in a way that their political leaders could not.

  With his wild, flowing hair, Lorenzo Dow looked like a latter-day John the Baptist; he still saw a storm as a direct act of God, and yet he would often begin a sermon with a quotation from Jefferson or Paine and constantly urged his congregations to cast superstition aside and think for themselves. When Barton Warren Stone left the Presbyterians to found a more democratic church, he called his secession a “declaration of independence.” James O’Kelly who had fought in the Revolution and been thoroughly politicized, left mainstream Christianity to found his
own church of “Republican Methodists.” These men have been called “folk geniuses.”2 They were able to translate modern ideals such as freedom of speech, democracy, and equality into an idiom that the less privileged could understand and make their own. Drawing on the radical strain in the gospels, they insisted that the first should be last and the last first, that God favored the poor and unlettered. Jesus and his disciples had not had a college education, so people should not be in thrall to a learned clergy; they had the common sense to figure out the plain meaning of the scriptures for themselves.3 These prophets mobilized the population in nationwide mass movements, making creative use of popular music and the new communications media. Instead of imposing modernity from above, as the founding fathers had intended, they created a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Smith, O’Kelly, and others amalgamated later to form the Disciples of Christ, which by 1860 had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States with some two hundred thousand members.4

  Rooted in eighteenth-century Pietism, Evangelical Christianity led many Americans away from the cool ethos of the Age of Reason to the kind of populist democracy, anti-intellectualism, and rugged individualism that still characterizes American culture. Preachers held torchlight processions and mass rallies, and the new genre of the gospel song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept and shouted for joy. Like some of the fundamentalist movements today, these congregations gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited a means of making their voices heard by the establishment.

  But the Evangelical movement was not confined to the frontiers. Christians in the developing cities of the Northeast had also become disillusioned with the Deist establishment, whose revolution had signally failed to inaugurate a better world. Many of the denominations were anxious to create a “space” that was separate from the federal government. They had been deeply perturbed by the fearful stories of the French Revolution, which seemed to epitomize the dangers of untrammeled rationality, and were appalled that Thomas Paine, who had supported their own war for liberty, had published The Age of Reason (1794) when the Terror was at its height. If their democratic society was to avoid the dangers of mob rule, the people must become more Godly. “If you wish to be free indeed, you must be virtuous, temperate, well-instructed,” insisted Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), a leading Evangelical pastor of Cincinnati.5 America was the new Israel, insisted Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; its expanding frontier was a sign of the coming Kingdom, so to be worthy of their calling, Americans must become more religious.6 Deism was now regarded as a satanic foe, responsible for the inevitable failures of the infant nation: giving to nature the honor due to Jesus Christ, Deism would promote atheism and materialism.7

  Yet despite their apparently visceral recoil from the Enlightenment, Evangelicals were eager to embrace its natural theology. They remained deeply dependent upon Scottish Common Sense philosophy and Paley’s argument from design and saw Newton’s God as essential to Christianity. The natural laws that scientists had discovered in the universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care and provided the faith of Jesus Christ with unshakable, scientific certainty. At the same time as he called for a religion of the heart, Lyman Beecher also insisted that Evangelical Christianity was “eminently a rational system.”8 And by this he meant the rationality of science.9 In the same spirit, James McCosh (1811–94), president of Princeton, argued that theology was a “science” that, “from an investigation of the works of nature, would rise to a discovery of the character and will of God.” Any theologian, he declared, must proceed

  in the same way as he does in every other branch of investigation. He sets out in search of facts; he arranges and coordinates them, and rising from the phenomena which present themselves to their cause, he discovers, by the ordinary laws of evidence, a cause of all subordinate causes.10

  God functioned in exactly the same way as any natural phenomenon; in the modern world, there was only one path to truth, so theology must conform to the scientific method.

  During the 1840s, Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), a pivotal figure in American religion, brought the rough, democratic Christianity of the frontiers to the urban middle classes.11 Finney used the wilder techniques of the older prophets but addressed professionals and businessmen, urging them to experience Christ directly without the mediation of the establishment, to think for themselves, and to rebel against academic theologians. Christianity was a strictly rational faith; its God was the Creator and Governor of Nature who worked through the laws of physics. Every natural event revealed God’s providence. Even the emotions engendered by the revivals were not directly inspired by God (as Jonathan Edwards had supposed); instead these pious passions showed that God worked through the skill of the preacher, who knew how to use natural psychological means to elicit these responses.

  The Evangelicals brought natural theology, hitherto a minority pursuit, into the mainstream. Even though they continued to insist on the transcendence of God, they believed paradoxically that he could be known through science as a matter of common sense. Wary of learned experts, they wanted a plain-speaking religion with no abstruse theological flights of fancy. They read the scriptures with an unprecedented literalism, because this seemed more rational than the older allegorical exegesis. Like scientific discourse, religious language should be univocal, clear, and transparent. The Evangelicals also brought the Enlightenment concept of “belief” as intellectual conviction to the center of Protestant religiosity and perpetuated the Enlightenment separation of the natural from the supernatural. Finally, in an attempt to ground their faith in something tangible, they followed the philosophes in making the practice of morality central to religion. They wanted a rationalized God who shared their own moral standards and behaved like a good Evangelical.12 In the past, moral and compassionate behavior had introduced people to transcendence; now people were declaring that God was “good” in exactly the same way as a human being. Interestingly, he shared their enthusiasm for the virtues that ensured success in the marketplace: thrift, sobriety, self-discipline, diligence, and temperance. This God was clearly in danger of becoming an idol.

  Yet again American religion was proving to be a modernizing force but this time it supported the capitalist ethos while at the same time articulating a healthy criticism of the system. During the 1820s, Evangelicals threw themselves into moral crusades to hasten the coming of the Kingdom, campaigning against slavery, urban poverty, exploitation, and liquor, and fighting for penal reform, the education of the poor, and the emancipation of women. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being, egalitarianism, and the ideal of inalienable human rights. These Christian reform groups were among the first to channel the efficiency, energy, and bureaucratic skills of capitalism into nonprofit enterprises, teaching people to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined goal.13 There was a widespread conviction that the technological improvements in transport, machinery, public health, gaslight, and communications that were giving Americans such control over their environment would also lead to moral improvement.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, largely, perhaps, because of the Evangelical initiative, Americans were more religious than ever before. In 1780, there were only about 2,500 congregations in the United States; by 1820, there were 11,000, and by 1860 a phenomenal 52,000—an almost twenty-one-fold increase. In comparison, the population of the United States rose from about 4 million in 1780 to 10 million in 1820 and 31 million in 1860—a less than eightfold increase.14 In America, Protestantism empowered the people against the establishment, and this tendency still continues, so that today it is difficult to find a popular movement in the United States that is not associated with religion in some way. By the 1850s, Christianity in America had taken what it wanted from the Enlightenment and, confident in a certainty derived from science, seemed perfectly attuned to the modern world.

 
By contrast, a new type of atheism was emerging in Europe that was different from the “scientism” of Diderot and d’Holbach.15 Americans were wary of intellectualism and, appalled by the French Revolution, had used Christianity to promote social reform. But Germans were inspired by the French Revolution, which had translated the intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment into a program for justice and equity. The social and political situation in Germany ruled out revolutionary activity, and after the experience of France, it seemed better to try to change the way people thought than resort to violence and terror, so during the 1830s, an anti-establishment intellectual cadre had emerged in the universities.

  Many of these revolutionary intellectuals were theologically literate. In Germany, theology was an advanced and progressive discipline: two out of every five graduates had a theological degree and knew that they were in the vanguard of religious change. At the end of the eighteenth century, German scholars such as Johann Eichhorn (1752-1827), Johann Vater (1771-1826), and Wilhelm DeWette (17801849) had pioneered a new method of reading the Bible, applying to scripture the modern historical-critical methodology used to study classical texts. As a result, they had discovered that the Pentateuch had not been authored by Moses but was composed of at least four different sources, and were beginning to look at revelation and religious truth in an entirely different way. Other young men became disciples of Schleiermacher and Hegel and were eager to accelerate the dialectical progress that Hegel had described by abolishing reactionary ideologies and institutions. They were particularly incensed by the social privileges of the clergy and regarded the Lutheran Church as a bastion of conservatism.

  The new European atheism was a product of this hunger for radical social and political change. As part of the corrupt old regime, the churches had to go, together with the God who had supported the system.16 As modernization intensified, rapid industrialization and population growth during the 1840s led to severe social deprivation. Food riots were brutally suppressed. It was in this climate that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), pupil of Schleiermacher and Hegel, published The Essence of Christianity (1841), which was avidly read, not simply as a theological statement but as a revolutionary tract. Feuerbach had taken Hegel’s call for a God and religion of this world to its logical conclusion.17 If the idea of a remote, external God was so alienating, why not get rid of him altogether? God, Feuerbach argued, was simply an oppressive human construct. People had projected their own human qualities onto an imaginary being that was merely a reflection of themselves. So “man’s belief in God is nothing other than his belief in himself. … In his God he reveres and loves nothing other than his own being.”18 Hegel had been right. God was not external to humanity; the goodness, power, and love that were attributed to him were human qualities and should be revered for their own sake.19 The idea of God had deprived Christians of self-confidence,20 encouraging them to think that “in the face of God, the world and man are nothing.”21 The people must realize that they were the only “gods” that existed and understand that any authority rooted in the idea of God was nothing more than an expression of blatant self-interest.