Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

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  In my memory, doubts about the existence of a deity begin, at age seven, with a visit to a hospital to see a friend who had been stricken with polio and confined to an iron lung—a spectre that haunted both parents and children in the era before polio vaccine. I asked my mother why God would let that happen to a little boy, and she replied, with a sigh that conveyed her own lack of conviction on the subject, “I don’t know. I suppose God must have a plan we don’t understand.” The answer did not satisfy me, and only seven years later—an eternity to a child, but a short time in a life—I would conclude that there could not possibly be an all-powerful, all-loving God. I never talked about my beliefs with anyone and had no idea that others before me had reached the same conclusion about the nonexistence of a guiding divine hand. If anything influenced me, it was a growing consciousness of the pervasiveness of pain and evil. I had read Anne Frank’s diary in sixth grade, in 1956, and I could not agree with her belief that “people are really good at heart.” (I underlined the phrase in the paperback that still sits on my desk and was the first book I ever bought.) But, then, I knew at age eleven what Anne did not know when she wrote those words—that, while I was safely growing inside my mother in early 1945, she and her people (my people, too, but I didn’t know that) were being murdered on the continent of Europe.

  When I was fourteen and understood what atheism meant, I was as little disturbed by the idea that there was no deity to ensure righteousness and justice as I had been by the much earlier realization that there was no Santa Claus. In both instances, I remember a sense of pride at having entered into a more grown-up world (although I certainly understood that the same grown-ups who had been willing to admit, “Yes, Susan, there is no Santa Claus,” would not have been delighted to agree with me that there was no God). Nevertheless, I could not possibly describe this stage of my intellectual and emotional development as a conversion. My nonreligious views were part of a logical progression; as a teenager, I felt relieved that my thinking was no longer constricted by an explanation of creation, salvation, and the meaning of evil and suffering that simply did not make sense to me. As an adult, I came to regard “losing” my faith as an experience that had much in common with the end of a bad love affair: first came a certain sense of regret for the loss of a familiar presence, then relief at liberation from a relationship that had required me to behave in a fashion at odds with my deepest instincts about what constitutes a good and honorable life. Sincere religious faith is both a relationship and a love affair. That is one of the many reasons atheism is not a religion.

  Another reason is the undeniable intellectual relationship between atheism and science. The most specious and most frequently cited argument against atheism is that it is “just another religion,” because science is its divinity. The argument is rooted in a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method, which can only reach provisional, always challengeable conclusions based on available evidence. There is no scientific counterpart to the old Baltimore Catechism’s assertion (one of the many statements my father had to memorize before his baptism) that “God always was, always will be, and always remains the same.” If there is one premise every student of science must accept, it is that any conclusion, however old and cherished, is subject to being modified or overturned by new data unobtainable in earlier eras of scientific and technological capability. To the extent that atheism is grounded in science, the atheist must always be open to being proved wrong.

  Nor is atheism a religion on an institutional or communal level—and religion lives, perhaps most vibrantly, on those levels, too. The noninstitutional nature of atheism—whether in its physical or spiritual dimensions—is responsible for one of its greatest disadvantages in what Americans call the religious marketplace. No secular organization fulfills the human need for community in a way that a local church does. Churches, synagogues, and mosques are physical entities, there to perform good works, such as sheltering the homeless, as well as to proselytize and pass around the collection plate. A number of prominent atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins, have set up online portals for secular charitable giving, but that is no substitute for on-the-ground institutions that make a visible and perceptible difference in people’s lives.

  If some people convert to a religion because of the emotional support and financial help they have received from a religious institution, that is certainly understandable. In late antiquity, when wealthy Christians began to join the Catholic Church in large numbers, helping other Christians financially was a requirement for membership—and needy pagans could certainly see that conversion might bring earthly benefits as well as heavenly rewards. Today it doesn’t work that way with mainstream religions: Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish charities in the United States serve people without regard to their faith. Many aggressive proselytizing churches, however, including some right-wing evangelical and Mormon communities, reserve the lion’s share of charity for their believers. Or they link charity—and not always in subtle form—to conversion strategies. An evangelical adoption service created an international furor, for example, by trying to sneak presumably orphaned Haitian children across the Dominican border, to be delivered to American evangelical Christian families for adoption, after a hurricane in 2011.

  The absence of a tangible structure is the main reason atheist proselytizing bears no resemblance to the fantasies of right-wing preachers, who see a vast, efficient secular conspiracy to “reverse convert” the faithful. Even when atheists do proselytize, writing books and making speeches that hurt the feelings of believers is about as personal as it gets: no member of the American Atheists or the American Humanist Association is likely to come knocking at the door and ask you to check out the newest pamphlet debunking the existence of a deity. Atheism has no hierarchies or enforcement mechanisms, no popes or bishops or imams, no fatwas or excommunication protocols. The concept of heresy does not exist within atheism. The same can be said of secularism, which is a way of acting in the world on the atheist’s conviction that human reason, not divine grace, is our best hope of improving life on earth. No figure in the history of secularism has expressed this conviction more eloquently than Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–99), known as the “Great Agnostic” and the most famous orator in the United States throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. “Secularism teaches us to be good here and now,” Ingersoll declared. “I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just….Secularism has no ‘castles in Spain.’ It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day….” Like many of his Enlightenment predecessors, Ingersoll regarded the relentless pursuit of converts by proselytizing religions—and the failure of such faiths to stamp out competing truth claims even with the tools of coercive state power—as evidence of the failure of orthodox religion to stand the test of reason.

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  Religious conversion is an irresistible subject for a secularist or an atheist precisely because so much human energy, throughout recorded history, has been expended on persuading or forcing large numbers of people to replace belief in one supernatural mystery with another. Yet there is an undeniable intellectual laxity inherent in any secularist contention that Christian theocracies would have spent their money on the restoration of ancient Roman plumbing and roads had they not wasted their treasure on the Crusades and the Inquisition. This is an argument unmoored from reality (not unlike arguments over the truth of supernatural beliefs), in part because there is no evidence to suggest that the effort expended on taking the lives and property of those who ungratefully refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah or the hegemony of one form of Christianity would have otherwise been directed toward the improvement of education, sanitation, and transportation.

  In the Catholic education of my youth, the role of individual converts in the history of the church’s triumph was always emphasized and idealiz
ed. The conversion of one person, if he or she (usually he) was powerful enough, could and did foreshadow the conversion of millions when monotheistic faith claimed political primacy for its truth. As James Carroll argues in Constantine’s Sword (2001), “After the death and Resurrection of Jesus, the conversion of Constantine may have been the most implication-laden event in Western history….Imagine how the history we trace in this book would have unfolded had the young emperor been converted to Judaism instead. It is a nearly unthinkable turn in the story, imagined in retrospect, but in prospect such a conversion would have been no more unlikely than what happened, and to entertain the idea is to wonder how Judaism, instead of Catholicism, would have fared as the locus of political and religious dominance.” According to legend (which we were taught as historical fact in parochial school), the young Constantine became a Christian, and overcame his rivals to become undisputed emperor of Rome, after he saw a flaming cross in the night sky over the Tiber River in 312, before the decisive battle with a rival at the Milvian Bridge. The era when Judaism was still a religion that attracted converts (even without proselytizing) was already ending during the period when Constantine gave state preference to Christianity, and this chapter in Jewish history has faded from the collective Western historical memory. Yet Carroll’s speculation is not idle in view of the religious pluralism that still prevailed at the beginning of the fourth century. What if Constantine had seen an illuminated menorah—or a Jovian thunderbolt—instead of a cross over the Tiber? For that matter, one might extend the retrospective speculation even further, to the angry Jew on the road to Damascus, and wonder what would have happened had he awakened from his fall off the horse and heard a different message after the inquiry, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” The voice would still belong to Yeshua, but this Yeshua would claim not to be the Messiah—an assertion considered blasphemous by Saul—but one in a long line of Jewish prophets. In his blindness after the fall, Saul might then hear the voice saying, “I am part of you, and you are part of me. The God of Abraham is our God, and a living God—ours to carry forward through time. I have come not to destroy the Law but to add to its wisdom and glory.” Would Saul have written very different letters to the Romans, Corinthians, et al., had he heard the voice of Yeshua the Jew instead of the voice of the Messiah sent to save the world? Had Saul been the proselytizer for a different kind of Judaism rather than for Christianity, Constantine (and many others) might never have seen the Galilean prophet as a divinity.

  Although it is impossible to know how the alternate story of a non-Christian Europe would have unfolded, we do know that, until the Enlightenment, Europe was dominated by the conviction that one religion, Christianity, was in possession of absolute truth. The problem, after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, was that Europeans no longer agreed about precisely which branch of Christianity was entitled to the monopoly on truth.*5 The Reformation multiplied the number of sects making absolute truth claims within Christianity, but it did not alter basic assumptions about the rights of governments to demand adherence to the religious truth of the ruler and of the majority as a legal condition of full participation in civil society. It took not only the philosophical Enlightenment but the founding of the United States of America, with a Constitution infused with the conviction that the only proper function of government in relation to religion was to protect freedom of conscience for all, to attack the roots of theocratic dominion. In the new land, the practice of a particular religion would no longer be a matter of life and death. The belief that governments, as a matter of divine right, could legitimately enforce conversion and stamp out religious heresy under pain of death was also on its way out in Europe, but Europe—consider the Jacobin violence after the French Revolution—did not then have the political and legal institutions to encourage religious pluralism peacefully. Without a real government as an example, the religious toleration of the early Enlightenment and the philosophy of the High Enlightenment in England and continental Europe would have taken even longer than it did to create real religious liberty for real people. The great paradox is that the new American nation, with its formal separation of church and state, would produce a more religious population, for a longer period, than European nations whose people had suffered under the yoke of theocratic power.

  In the post-Enlightenment world, fear for one’s life, liberty, and property would recede as a motive for conversion and be replaced by a wide variety of other pragmatic considerations. Depending on the social circumstances and the prevailing religious prejudices of each country, these pragmatic reasons included admission to professions barred to members of minority religions by law or by custom (the former in much of Europe, the latter in the United States); social and professional advancement by affiliating with the most prestigious religious group within a society; the shedding of telltale immigrant origins; and, as always, religious intermarriage. None of these motives, it should be emphasized, ruled out the desire to, in some spiritual sense, be “born again.”

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  The models of conversion in the Western world are also models of the universal human desire for emotional experience that retains its intensity over time, and that emotional need explains the relative lack of attention to pragmatic factors in iconic stories of conversions. To understand the power of emotion in conversion experiences, one need only read Paul’s epistles or Augustine. More recently, there was a huge audience for the outpourings of nineteenth-century English clerical intellectuals, such as Cardinals John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning, who found the meaning of life in crossing the rivulet (one could hardly call it a gulf) between a state religion that rejected papal infallibility and a former state religion that accepted the inerrancy of Rome. In the twentieth century, the conversions from atheism of the English writers G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis (the former to Catholicism, the latter to Anglicanism) also had an iconic quality—especially since both men were famous writers. The highly intellectual and intellectualized conversion stories of English cultural figures in the twentieth century have exerted a disproportionate influence on American ideas (especially in the educated upper-middle class) about changes of religious faith. The outsize interest in the spiritual journeys of English dons is due partly to a residual Anglophilia that provides the huge American audience for television shows like Downton Abbey (and for productions of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Chesterton’s Father Brown mystery series), and partly to the fit between these unusual writers and the American stereotype of the convert solely as an individual touched by divine grace rather than as a product of his time and social circumstances.

  To argue that there is a critical, often overlooked social component to most conversions is not to downplay the emotional component—whether one believes that absolute truth is both discoverable and essential to the decent and examined life, or whether one rejects the very idea of a truth that always was, always will be, and always remains the same. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Who among us, however skeptical, is immune to the pull of these words? Paul’s ability to frame such fundamental longing in understandable and beautiful metaphors (with a strong assist, in English, from the translators of the King James Bible) is one reason Christianity would probably not have unfolded as it did without him. What could be more immense, not only for the theologian but for the lover, the thinker, the scientist in her laboratory, than the promise of knowing perfectly and fully even as we are known?

  This aspiration, at once self-obliterating and self-aggrandizing, lies at the heart of what believers are wont to call the “true” conversion experience: it accounts for the pull of conversion stories, as told by masters and mistresses of language, not only for those who dwell in the mansion of faith but for those who have chosen to live in the realm of reason and naturalism. Converts who have recorded their spiritual transitions tend to be interesting and powerf
ul personalities, whether one views them from a religious perspective, as instruments and beneficiaries of divine grace; from a psychological perspective, as case studies in the extremes human beings will go to in their search for a meaning that transcends their finite lives; or from a purely secular social perspective, as actors in dramas animated by personal-seeming forces that are, in reality, inseparable from larger historical trends.

  It is difficult to apply any rational analysis to spiritual conversion precisely because the people who write so movingly about their changes of faith—a tiny slice of converts throughout Western history—are obviously sincere in their belief that they have, at last, found absolute, unchallengeable truth. From a secular standpoint, the monotheist who adopts another monotheistic religion is the most baffling convert of all, given that each of the three great monotheistic religions has, at one point or another, insisted that there is no meaningful life, in time or eternity, outside its boundaries. I recall the astonishment of a Jewish friend—a woman of great intellectual sophistication whose education had omitted Christian theology—when I explained the doctrine of the Trinity to her for the first time: “You mean Catholics don’t believe that Jesus is just the son of God but God Himself!” Well, yes—and it is a rather peculiar idea when you look at it from the standpoint of someone who believes in the truth of one God, the father of all, without the participation of any other deities or quasi-deities, including a son and a holy spirit. This pill could not be swallowed even by many attracted to Christianity during the period of late antiquity and was responsible for movements suppressed by the church canon but irrepressible in their tendency to pop up in new forms, in very different social and intellectual climates, throughout the next two millennia.