plainly stretched too far – preachers who claimed that all sinners were atheists, or that disputing one specific Christian doctrine was tantamount to atheism, were playing polemical games rather than advancing serious definitions.[21] Even so, this broad sense of the word is more useful than the narrow modern one, for it takes us away from the abstractions of metaphysical definitions into the everyday reality of how religious cultures thrive, decay or dissolve.
My subject in this book, then, extends beyond ‘contemplative’ atheism into the penumbras of doubt and unbelief. As a point of metaphysics, whether or not you believe there is a deity is interesting. But in itself it has no more consequences than whether or not you believe there are other universes parallel to our own. As John Gray puts it, someone with ‘no use for the idea of God … [is] in truth an atheist’, whatever such a person claims to believe or disbelieve.[22] ‘Practical atheist’ remains a sensible term for those whose formal belief in God has no tangible effect on their lives – who observe no religious practices, adhere to no specifically religious ethics, and participate in no avowedly religious community. Our subject is not only those who abandon religious beliefs and change their lives as a result, but also those who abandon religious living and whose residual religious beliefs consequently wither.
In other words, I make no apology for using words – ‘atheist’, ‘sceptic’, ‘unbeliever’ – which describe what people are not. Our subject is a disappearance: the evaporation of a once very widespread religious culture. Those curmudgeonly terms are inadequate to describe what, if anything, has taken its place, but that will have to wait until we have a clearer idea of how the disappearance happened. The mystery we are addressing is how believers became unbelievers: and if the word unbelief sounds like it still has belief at its core, well, I think it does.
Before we embark for the Middle Ages, some readers may have suspicions about the book’s scope, and about its agenda.
The book’s scope is unashamedly Eurocentric and Christian-centric, with a couple of small but important supporting roles played by European Judaism. Within that frame, it focuses disproportionately on the Protestant world and in particular on England, which is almost the exclusive focus of a couple of crucial chapters. This partly reflects my own historical specialism, but is also because, for reasons that I hope will become clear, I think the Protestant and English material is distinctively important as well as rich.
If this all feels parochial, that is because the phenomenon we are considering –Western secularism – is a parochial one. It is an offshoot of European Christendom, and in particular (so I will argue) of the Protestant world. In global terms, it is a counter-current, even an aberration. The dominant religious story of the past two centuries is surely the spread of Christianity and of Islam around the globe, a race in which those two hares have so far outpaced the secular tortoise that it takes a considerable act of faith to believe it might one day catch up. It is true that Western secularism has spread across the planet along with various other Western cultural exports, but there are relatively few countries beyond the North Atlantic region where it has really put down roots: Uruguay, perhaps, or the ‘Anglosphere’ outposts of Australia and New Zealand. There are certainly many other modern countries, such as Turkey, India or China, where the ‘secular’ is a potent social or political force, but these ‘secularisms’ are not at all Western in flavour. And in most of the world, including many of those countries, ‘religion’ in its many forms is going from strength to strength. The once-widespread assumption that Euro-American secularisation represented the probable future of humanity as a whole now looks much more like an expression of cultural imperialism than a level-headed forecast. So I am in no sense claiming to write a history of a universal or global phenomenon, but of a specific and local one – important in its own context, to be sure, especially for those of us who live in its homelands, but one that neither foreshadows any kind of global destiny nor is inscribed indelibly into Western culture itself.
As to my agenda: I am a historian of religion, and am myself a believer (and, in the interests of full disclosure, a licensed lay minister in the Church of England). When such a person starts writing about unbelief, it is fair to suspect a hatchet job. I hope that is not what I have done.
Of course, no one can be objective on this subject. We were born into this world and we’re going to die here; we all have a stake in this and are forced to make our wager. My own position is that I am a believer with a soft spot for atheism. I abandoned my youthful atheism for reasons that seem to me sufficient and necessary, but I still respect it. Like many of the characters in my story, I find an honest atheism much more honourable and powerful than the religion of many of my fellow believers. I hope readers will find that I have treated unbelievers with due respect – if not always with kid gloves. This is one reason why, throughout the book, I write about what ‘you’ or ‘we’ might have experienced as a medieval or early modern believer or unbeliever, rather than using the easy, distancing impassivity of pronouns like ‘one’ or ‘they’. I think it is worth the imaginative effort of trying to put ourselves in their place.
In writing an emotional history of atheism, I am not arguing that atheism is irrational. I am arguing that human beings are irrational; or rather, that we are not calculating machines, and that our ‘choices’ about what we believe or disbelieve are made intuitively, with our whole selves, not with impersonal logic.[23]
Happily, since I am convinced that arguments as such have precious little bearing on either belief or unbelief, there is no danger of a book such as this converting anyone to or from anything. Nor, of course, is that its aim. My hope is instead that believers and atheists alike might understand better how unbelief has gone from feeling intuitively impossible to feeling, to many people, intuitively obvious; and how, during the long and fractious marriage between faith and doubt, both partners have shaped each other more than they might like to admit. ‘If you want to understand atheism and religion,’ says the steely atheist John Gray, ‘you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites.’[24] My purpose is merely to remind both parties how long their fates have been intertwined and how much they owe to one another, not least so they might be willing to talk and to listen to one another again.
So to atheist readers, my message is: please appreciate that unbelief is, like almost everything else human beings do, very often intuitive, non-rational and the product of historically specific circumstances. If that were not so, it would be fragile indeed. And to believers, my message is: please understand that atheism and doubt are serious. They have real emotional power and moral force, and they have flourished and are flourishing for very good reasons. The fact that those reasons are often deeply rooted in religion itself makes them all the more powerful, and means that the chasms separating us are narrower than we like to imagine.
It only remains to add that, in what follows, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; and that in quotations, spelling, punctuation and occasionally usage have been modernised for comprehensibility.
‘The bastard! He doesn’t exist!’
Samuel Beckett, Endgame
Impostors, Drunkards and Flat-Earthers
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, Germany, Italy and Jerusalem, was perhaps the most powerful ruler of the Middle Ages. According to Pope Gregory IX, he was also an unbeliever. In 1239 the pope accused Frederick of calling Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad ‘charlatans’ and ‘deceivers’ who had fooled the entire world, of scoffing at the notion ‘that a virgin could give birth
