Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

This article was originally published on the NSS’s website on 23 July 2024.

It’s easy to see how the idea of being saved by an act of ‘divine intervention’ might well appeal to a narcissist like Donald Trump. But his claim that he had ‘God on his side’ during the recent failed assassination attempt is more likely to be the sentiment of a grifter exploiting religion for political gain.

But sincere belief in the supernatural isn’t necessary for Trump and his cronies to dismantle America’s wall of separation between church and state. His nomination of conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his previous term of office paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade—a significant win for evangelicals. With a return to the White House looking distinctly possible, more laws to enforce the doctrines of his Christian support base could be on the cards.

The rise of Christian nationalism in the US is another indicator of a backsliding of secular liberal democratic values, the foundation upon which many successful modern societies are built.

Right across the world, wherever religion and political power are entwined, the chips are down for liberalism. Whether it’s Protestant evangelicalism in the US, Hindu nationalism in India, or Islamism in the Middle East, the closer clerics are to governance, the lower the likelihood that individual rights and freedoms can flourish.

Europe, too, is facing testing times.

American Christian Right organisations are pouring millions of dollars into the continent to fuel campaigns aimed at diminishing the rights of women and sexual minorities. Christian identity politics has become intertwined with nationalist ideologies, shaping the political landscape and contributing to the growth of far-right movements across the continent.

Meanwhile, mass migration and a failure to integrate sizeable Muslim populations have contributed to the undermining and challenging of fundamental liberal values like free speech, equality, and state neutrality.

One of secularism’s most important roles in protecting liberal values is in preserving freedom of expression—making sure that individuals are free to voice their ideas, beliefs, criticisms, and scorn of religious ideas without the threat of censorship or punishment.

Here in the UK, an incident at a Batley school starkly illustrated the erosion of this freedom. A teacher who used a cartoon of Muhammad to teach pupils about debates on free expression faced immediate and credible death threats and now must live under a new identity.

The writing has been on the wall ever since the Rushdie affair. But a spate of violent protests and murders across Europe since has sent the clear message to European citizens that, even if blasphemy laws have been abolished (and not all have been), they remain in place for Islam, and will be enforced by intimidation and violence.

Meanwhile, growing numbers of women and young girls on the continent are compelled to obey sexist religious modesty codes and thousands of children from minority backgrounds are attending illegal schools run by religious extremists.

Meaningful debates on these matters have become increasingly challenging due to the pervasive influence of ‘Islamophobia’, a term once noted by Christopher Hitchens as strategically employed to insinuate a ‘foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible message’. The language of Islamophobia has fostered a fear of being labelled ‘racist’ or bigoted, causing many liberals to refrain from criticising any manifestation of Islam, however worthy of disdain. This has created a void that is exploited by extremists on the far right.

Meanwhile, a crisis in confidence that secular liberalism can counter the ascendancy of radical Islam and ‘wokery’ has led some public intellectuals to be lured by the notion that Christianity is somehow indispensable in safeguarding the Western way of life. Daniel James Sharp and Matt Johnson have presented compelling critiques of this ‘New Theism’ and its defence of Christian privilege. But entrusting the preservation of liberal democracy to a belief one considers untrue yet expedient seems precarious at best.

All this is to say that the current climate for liberal values and human rights is challenging.

Amidst the ongoing threat posed by religious fundamentalism, a renewed embrace of the Enlightenment concept of separation of religion and state is sorely needed to safeguard individual rights and freedoms.

These are the issues we’ll be addressing at Secularism 2024, the National Secular Society’s upcoming conference on October 19th. A diverse range of expert speakers will shed light on some of the contemporary challenges faced by liberal societies and explore the role of secularism in protecting liberal values and social cohesion.

To be part of this important conversation about democracy, freedom of speech, individual rights, and the rule of law, join us at Secularism 2024. Tickets are on sale now.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together, by Megan Manson

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The perils of dropping a book, by Noel Yaxley

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer, by Daniel James Sharp

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

The post An upcoming secularist conference on the safeguarding of liberal values in a time of crisis appeared first on The Freethinker.

Donald Trump was nearly killed a couple of days ago, and the consequences of this failed assassination attempt will reverberate for a long time, and in ways that nobody can now predict. Have the photos of a bloodied but unbowed Trump defiantly raising his fist as he was ushered off-stage won him the presidential election? Quite possibly. Such iconic images appear only very rarely, and even the staunchest of Trump’s critics (of which I am one) cannot but admire the man’s vigour in this instance.

Plus, Joe Biden’s cognitive state is no longer the centre of attention, which might mean that the pressure among Democrats for him to stand down and allow a more able candidate to contest the election will dissipate. I was sceptical that Biden would step down anyway, but now I think it a certainty that he will face Trump in November. Both these things—the sympathy, outrage, and defiance and the retaining of Biden as the Democratic candidate—mean almost certain victory for Trump.

This would be a disaster. I need not enumerate all the reasons why—or not at length, anyway. That Trump is a fascistic, racist, criminal lunatic; that he is openly antagonistic to democracy and the peaceful transition of power; that he is contemptuous of the American Constitution; that he is the darling of the Christian theocrats; that a Trump win would likely mean defeat for Ukraine and NATO, and perhaps even the liberal democratic world as a whole—all these things are known to everybody. And still, I fear, he will triumph.

Worse, the Supreme Court recently granted him, and all other presidents, some immunity for actions taken in office—so whatever restraints there may once have been are now gone, and Trump, if he wins, will be able to act as ‘a king above the law’, in the words of dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Contrast this sorry state of affairs with the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776 that in America, ‘so far as we approve of monarchy…the law is King.’)

Concern over a Trump victory being one of the consequences of the assassination attempt might seem cold. It is not. Political violence in a liberal democracy is to be deplored, no matter the target, and I am glad that Trump is okay. Conspiracy theories from Trump opponents, and the glee evinced by some at the attempt (all the while regretting only that the would-be assassin missed), are foolish and disgusting. I also feel for the man who was killed saving his family and the two people injured by the shooter. The former, Corey Comperatore, was a hero, and I have no compunction about saying that.

But the view of many Trump supporters that the shooting happened as a direct result of the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy is misplaced, if not outright absurd. The only person responsible for the shooting is the shooter, not the words of others. It is possible—and necessary—to name and oppose anti-democratic politicians without calling for violence. Trump really is a threat to American democracy, and shooting him is not the answer. People like Trump are best beaten by arguments and ballots. If the Democrats and other opponents of Trump now shy away from telling the truth about him, they will do their country, and the world, a disservice.

Besides, Trump and other Republicans’ long history of promoting violence and using genuinely extreme rhetoric (which is still, I hasten to add, legitimate free speech) against Democrats shows this claim to be the shameless piece of hypocritical opportunism that it is. Contrast, for example, Trump’s vile public mockery of Nancy and Paul Pelosi after the latter’s skull was nearly caved in by a far-right fantasist in 2022 with Biden’s humane response to the Trump shooting (not to mention the decency of the Pelosis themselves). Accurately describing Trump and the threat he represents to America and the world is free speech, not inciting violence.

On the other hand, January 6 2021 was the climax of a months-long campaign conducted by Trump to cling to power and overturn the result of a free and fair election. The shoddy gunmanship of a lone attacker, whatever his motives, should not obscure the far more dangerous actions of Trump in 2020/21. A sitting president, using all the state, party, and personal resources at hand, attempted to destroy American democracy—and when this failed, he sat by for hours before calling his supporters, busy ravaging the Capitol, to heel. The attempted assassination of Trump was awful. Trump’s anti-democratic campaign and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol was awful. But one was much worse than the other: the two things are simply not comparable. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are the proponents and champions of political violence in America today.

This article is not an editorial, but it strikes me that the ideals of the Freethinker are more important than ever. Reason and argument, not political violence. Democracy, free speech, and secularism, not tyranny. As for those, like Tomi Lahren, who are praising ‘divine intervention’ for the delivery of Donald Trump and who were spouting conspiracy theories within minutes of the shooting, it can never be said enough: they really are irredeemably stupid—and, precisely for that reason, extremely dangerous. And they are the people who will cheer in November as Trump takes the White House. (I am no fan of Biden and the Democrats, either, by the way, but I recognise a genuine threat when I see one.)

I hope the people of the United States, the world’s first secular democratic republic, take these words of warning in the spirit of friendship with which they are offered. And I hope I am being overly pessimistic about Trump’s chances. Only time will tell, and perhaps there is still time for the American experiment to save itself.

The author republished this piece and added some additional reflections on new developments on his Substack on 1 August 2024. See here.

The post Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America appeared first on The Freethinker.

All this, to my mind, underscores the need for a much more robust secularism in the UK. Perhaps we ought to start with the Church of England? The CoE, after all, was the original—and, thus far, the single most successful—sectarian religious group dedicated to imposing on the rest of us. Without such privilege enshrined in our law and state, other groups will have a much weaker foundation for their own claims to special treatment. ~ Daniel James Sharp, Editor

In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Keir Starmer promised that his government will ‘unite our country’.

This must be a priority for our new PM. The 2024 election campaigning and its result keenly illustrated why.

Rishi Sunak’s call for a general election predictably sparked a flurry of wishlists for the next government from myriad groups. But this election’s lobbying frenzy was overcast by a worrying shadow of sectarianism.

A coalition of Hindu organisations released a ‘Hindu Manifesto’ which said linking Hinduism to issues of caste and misogyny in India could be considered ‘Hinduphobia’, and that Hinduphobia should be criminalised.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews published a ‘Jewish Manifesto’ calling for future MPs to allow religious freedom to trump other rights, by protecting the controversial practises of ritual circumcision on baby boys and ritual non-stun slaughter of animals.

And the ‘Sikh Manifesto’ 2020-2025 from the Sikh Network called for a ‘code of practice’ on the right of Sikhs to wear religious items such as swords and recognition of ‘anti-Sikh hate’ in a ‘similar fashion to Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’.

All three manifestos called for more support for state-funded, segregated faith schools for their respective communities, as did the Catholic Union. Interestingly, a newer Sikh Manifesto from the Sikh Network omitted this call—a step in the right direction.

All three manifestos also made some barbed references to sections of other religious communities. The Hindu Manifesto accused Islamist and Sikh extremists of ‘acts of violence’ against UK Hindus and suggested that the government is giving more support to Muslim and Jewish causes than Hindu ones. Conversely, the latest Sikh Manifesto says the government ‘needs to confront Hindu nationalist groups’ in the UK, while lamenting that Sikhs are under-represented in the Lords compared with Jews, Muslims, and Hindus. And the Jewish Manifesto expressed that ‘Islamist extremists’ are one of the ‘major threats to the immediate physical security of British Jews’.

These concerns are all valid. But their inclusion in each religious group’s ‘manifesto’ suggests that cracks between British religious communities are widening.

Meanwhile, a group of Muslim organisations launched ‘The Muslim Vote’, whose ‘high level pledges’ include adopting the contentious All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ ‘Islamophobia’ definition and ensuring school rules have exemptions to accommodate pupils wearing ‘religious symbols’ and attending Friday prayers.

A similar ‘Muslim Vote’ campaign has been launched in Australia, ahead of the next federal election. The country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese has spoken out against it, saying: ‘I don’t think, and don’t want, Australia to go down the road of faith-based political parties because what that will do is undermine social cohesion.’

He’s right. But in the UK, too many candidates have instead rushed to embrace faith-based politics. Some have publicly endorsed the various faith manifestos and posted pictures of themselves clutching them on social media.

And sectarian politics had significant success in this election. Despite its overall victory, Labour lost four seats to independent candidates backed by The Muslim Vote in Leicester, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr, and Dewsbury and Batley. Other Labour MPs only just held on to their seats, including the new health secretary Wes Streeting, who retained his seat with just 528 more votes than the candidate backed by The Muslim Vote, Leanne Mohamad.

Sectarianism, particularly in connection to the Israel-Gaza conflict, also underpinned appalling campaigns of abuse and threats against candidates. Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Rushanara Ali were smeared as genocide supporters, Naz Shah was followed around and heckled by a man who called her a ‘dirty, dirty Zionist’, and Jess Phillips was heckled during her victory speech with cries of ‘free Palestine’. Phillips called it the ‘worst election’ she’d ever stood in, and that one Labour activist had her tyres slashed.

Starmer’s Labour government has inherited a country where most people have no religion, Christians are a minority for the first time in history, and other religions are growing in number and variety. But most of us don’t let religion divide us. During his campaign, Sunak called the UK ‘the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy’. It is true that, in general, we rub along pretty well with each other, but the lack of separation between religion and state creates unequal citizenship and so undermines this claim.

The election has revealed powerful forces which threaten to split our communities apart and pit them against each other. And many of our representatives seem all too happy to help them, for the sake of votes.

This approach will not heal divisions. It will instead entrench the notion that religious communities should compete with each other, rather than work for the mutual benefit of all UK citizens of all religions and beliefs.

How will Starmer face this challenge? So far, not all signs have been encouraging. Despite his personal atheistic beliefs, Starmer is in danger of falling into the same trap by appealing to faith-based interests. He told Premier Christianity magazine that his government will work ‘in partnership with churches and faith communities’, using a ‘network of parliamentary faith champions’.

Starmer needs to ensure that this ‘partnership’ doesn’t lead to a balkanization of public services or become a vehicle for proselytising and religious privilege.

Before the election, Starmer said his government would be ‘even more supportive of faith schools’ than the Conservatives. An early test for Labour will be whether they resist Catholic bishops’ demands to continue with the Tories’ dreadful plan to abolish the 50% cap on faith-based admissions at free schools, paving the way for a new wave of religiously, ethnically, and socio-economically segregated faith schools.

If Starmer wants to make sure his vision for a changed United Kingdom doesn’t turn it into a divided one, he and his party must consider carefully their approach to religion. Rather than giving more and more privileges to religious elites at the expense of equality, cohesion, and fairness, the government should work to ensure our society is a level playing field based on shared values, where individuals of all religions and beliefs have the opportunity to flourish.

Let’s hope the change Labour promised is in the right direction.

Related reading

What secularists want from the next UK Government, by Stephen Evans

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Faith schools: where do the political parties stand? by Stephen Evans

Circumcision: the human rights violation that no one wants to talk about, by Alejandro Sanchez

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

Cannibal Speaks Out, by Modus Tollens

Islamic identity politics is a threat to British democracy, by Khadija Khan

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularisation and Protestantism in the 2021 Northern Ireland Census, by Charlie Lynch

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer, by Emma Park

The post Keir Starmer must bring the UK’s diverse but divided people together appeared first on The Freethinker.

A judge citing the Bible and referring to God dozens of times in a court decision that limits reproductive health care. A nonbinary teenager dead after months of bullying in a state where public officials are advancing anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Public school boards agreeing to hire religious chaplains in place of mental health counsellors. A nationally televised prayer service sponsored by members of Congress, attended by the President of the United States, and held in the seat of American government. 

All these incidents happened recently and within the space of about a month in different locations across the United States. They may seem unrelated, but all serve as potent examples of how white Christian Nationalism is ascendant in the U.S.

White Christian Nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework rooted in the dangerous belief that America is—and must remain—a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants, and that our laws and policies must codify that privilege. Christian Nationalists deny the separation of church and state promised by the U.S. Constitution. They oppose equality for Black and Brown people, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and the nonreligious because their goal is to retain traditional power structures and turn back America’s steady progress toward her goal of equality. Through a well-funded shadow network of organizations, allied politicians and judges, and other political power brokers, Christian Nationalists are marshalling the power of the state to impose their beliefs on all Americans.

Take reproductive freedom. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a theology-infused opinion that human life begins at conception and therefore frozen embryos harvested for in vitro fertilization should have the same legal rights as living, breathing children. The court’s chief justice went a step further by writing a 22-page concurring opinion in which he cited the Bible five times and mentioned God or “the creator” nearly 50 times.

It was far from the first time that public officials have cited religion to justify the restriction of reproductive rights. In Missouri, legislators repeatedly voiced their religious beliefs when they passed the state’s current abortion ban; they even wrote religion into the law itself, proclaiming, ‘Almighty God is the author of life.’ My organization, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, along with the National Women’s Law Center, is in court on behalf of 14 clergy from seven different faith denominations challenging Missouri’s ban, which went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative bloc abolished the nationwide right to abortion in 2022. During the oral argument before the Supreme Court in that case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called out Mississippi lawmakers’ religious impetus for banning abortion: ‘How is your interest anything but a religious view?’

Christian Nationalism is also behind much of the vile persecution of LGBTQ+ people. Americans United and its allies have demanded the ouster of a religious extremist state politician who is pushing his anti-LGBTQ+, Christian Nationalist policies to the extreme. Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public instruction for Oklahoma, is on a crusade to infuse religion into the state’s public schools, from personally praying to a classroom of elementary school students to writing a suggested prayer for all of the state’s schools to supporting the creation of what would be the nation’s first religious public school (Americans United is also challenging that school in court).

Walters also advocates the teaching of a whitewashed version of American history and demonizes LGBTQ+ people. It was in this toxic atmosphere that a 16-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict died. Nex, who was of Native American heritage, died on 8 February after being beaten in their Oklahoma high school restroom by other students. This came after months of bullying. Nex’s death was ruled a suicide; state and federal officials continue to investigate the circumstances around their death. But what is clear is that Walters created the environment that drove this child—whom he was supposed to protect—to a place of hopelessness and despair. After Nex’s death, Walters doubled down on his anti-trans rhetoric: In a New York Times interview, he said: ‘There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.’

The attack on public schools and students that Walters is waging in Oklahoma is a microcosm of what we are seeing across the country. Christian Nationalists are on a crusade to impose their religious beliefs on public school students even as they continue to divert ever more public funding to private religious schools. Right now, Americans United is tracking more than 1,300 bills in states across the country that impact church-state separation; nearly half of them involve public education.

Following in the path of Texas, at least 14 state legislatures have proposed bills that would allow public schools to replace qualified counsellors with religious chaplains. Lawmakers in various states have also proposed bills that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, allow public school teachers to pray in front of and even with students, and allow for the teaching of the Bible or intelligent design creationism in public schools. At the same time, religious extremists are advancing schemes that force taxpayers to fund tuition at private, religious schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate; last year alone at least 17 states expanded or created new private school voucher programs.

There are so many other examples I could give of how Christian Nationalism is invading our lives and threatening our rights and freedoms. One vivid example was, while waving the Christian flag and ‘Jesus saves’ banners, Christian Nationalists drove the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, as election deniers sought to keep former president Donald Trump in power.

Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that about 30% of Americans are adherents to or sympathizers of Christian Nationalism; a majority of Republicans and a supermajority of white evangelical Protestants espouse these views. PRRI also found that Christian Nationalists are more likely to have racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and patriarchal views. And the survey not surprisingly found a correlation between Christian Nationalism and a penchant for personal and political violence and authoritarianism.

This is not the first time the U.S. has experienced a resurgence of Christian Nationalism. In the 1950s amid the Cold War, Christian Nationalists were behind Congress creating the National Prayer Breakfast, adding ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance that schoolchildren recite every morning, and establishing ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto. They were also behind the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and 1980s, as religious conservatives opposed to the desegregation of Christian universities coalesced into an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-feminism political movement.

America’s changing demographics and the fear this is engendering are spurring the current rise in white Christian Nationalism. In 2014, white Christians ceased being the majority in America. As their numbers have declined, the number of religiously unaffiliated people (the ‘nones’) has grown to about 26% of the population, according to PRRI. The U.S. has elected the first Black president and the first multiracial and female vice president. Same-sex couples now have the right to marry nationwide. There have been great strides in the movements for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ equality.

Now we are seeing the backlash: White Christian Nationalists are raging against the dying of their privilege. They were emboldened by Trump, who tapped into their insecurity and gave them unprecedented access to the White House and influence over federal policies. The Trump administration weaponized religious freedom as a license to discriminate in social services, health care, employment, education, and other aspects of American life.

During a 2018 state dinner at the White House with prominent evangelical Christians, Trump bragged: ‘The support you’ve given me has been incredible, but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back—just about everything I promised. And, as one of our great pastors just said, ‘Actually, you’ve given us much more, sir, than you’ve promised,’ and I think that’s true in many respects.’

Through a shadow network of organizations and political allies working to pack the courts, lobby politicians to rewrite laws, and empower book-banning, curriculum-scrubbing school boards, white Christian Nationalists are wielding outsized power. And they are taking a wrecking ball to the wall that separates church and state. They know church-state separation is the antidote to white Christian Nationalism. They know that this bedrock principle, an American original enshrined in our Constitution, protects freedom and equality for all of us. They know that it is foundational to our democracy. And they know that it is incompatible with their agenda of securing power and privilege for a select few.

The good news is that America has faced waves of white Christian Nationalism before and battled it back. That, combined with the reality that we have the power of the people and the American Constitution on our side, gives me hope for the future. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been around for 77 years and the organization is thriving. Every day, we are bringing together growing numbers of religious and nonreligious Americans to fight in the courts, in Congress, across state legislatures, and in the public square for freedom without favour and equality without exception. What could be more American than that?

Further reading

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Faith Watch, February 2024 and Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The post White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. appeared first on The Freethinker.

Vladimir Putin is one of the last defenders of Christian civilisation from an onslaught of wokeness taking over the West. The liberal democratic world is in danger of collapsing if it doesn’t return to its Judeo-Christian roots. The rise of secularism in the United States and Europe has created a spiritual and moral vacuum which is being crammed with conspiracism, political extremism, and identity politics.

These are a few of the ideas you’ll encounter if you spend some time listening to the New Theists. While the term ‘New Theism’ has been used before, the journalist Ed West provided a useful definition in a December 2023 article in The Spectator: ‘Their [the New Theists’] argument is not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ While the extent to which the New Theists regard religion as true varies from person to person, West’s definition captures the general thrust of the movement.

The conservative public intellectual and self-help guru Jordan Peterson is the Richard Dawkins of New Theism. Peterson has spent many years defending religious narratives as integral to human understanding and flourishing, and he believes a recommitment to these narratives is indispensable for the survival of Western civilisation. He also believes that Western civilisation is a product of Judeo-Christian values and institutions—despite the long history of secular resistance to religious dogma and tyranny in the West.

In a recent conversation with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Peterson described religion as the ‘enterprise that specifies the highest aim, or the most foundational of aims’. If you ask Peterson to define words like ‘religion’, ‘god’, or ‘divine’, you’ll get labyrinthine, metaphor-laden monologues about hierarchies of values, the logos, consciousness across time, something called the ‘transcendental repository of reputation’, and so on to a boundless extent.

Meanwhile, Peterson won’t answer straightforward questions about his attitude toward the metaphysical claims of Christianity. During a 2018 debate, Susan Blackmore asked Peterson if he believed Jesus was divine: ‘Did he do miracles?’ He responded: ‘How about this? “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” That’s a miracle.’ The host didn’t allow Blackmore a natural follow-up, like: ‘Sure, but did he rise from the dead?’

Peterson isn’t the only New Theist who shies away from explicit affirmations of his theological beliefs—particularly beliefs which require faith in any supernatural phenomena. In November last year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay about her conversion to Christianity, in which the name ‘Jesus’ appears nowhere.

Hirsi Ali described her atheism as a reaction to the horrors of fundamentalist Islam—particularly the September 11 attacks, but also her vivid memories of religious stupidity and persecution, which she has bravely confronted all her life. She said her discovery of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am Not a Christian’ was a great relief which offered a ‘simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people.’ She discussed her contempt for the refusal among many Western ‘politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts’ to acknowledge the theological motivations of the perpetrators on September 11. She said she enjoyed spending time with ‘clever’ and ‘fun’ New Atheists like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

But Hirsi Ali now calls herself a Christian for purely instrumental reasons—she believes that ‘Western civilisation is under threat’ from the aggressive authoritarianism of China and Russia, radical Islam, and the ‘viral spread of woke ideology’. She laments the ineffectiveness of ‘modern, secular tools’ at countering these threats: ‘We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.’ She continues: ‘The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’

Hirsi Ali made three main points: Western civilisation is ‘built on the Judeo-Christian tradition’, the only way to defend liberal values is through a recommitment to this tradition, and atheism ‘failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?’ These are the central arguments made by many other New Theists.

Hirsi Ali spent many years as an atheist, so it’s surprising that she attributes the development of ‘freedom of conscience and speech’ in the West solely to Christianity. She says nothing about the secular humanism developed by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume. She doesn’t mention Thomas Paine’s great attack on Christianity, The Age of Reason. She skips over Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the document which laid the foundation for the First Amendment and erected what Jefferson described as the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ in the United States.

Many of the most important advancements for free speech and conscience in the West were made despite furious religious opposition. The Enlightenment was in part a response to centuries of religious bloodletting in Europe, which is why criticism of religious authority was such an integral part of its development. The reason Peterson celebrates Christ’s injunction to ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’ is that this line provides Biblical authority for the separation of church and state. But it still took centuries of moral and political progress—almost always in conflict with religious power—to institutionalise that separation.

According to Hirsi Ali, Peterson, and other New Theists (such as the historian Tom Holland), the liberal principles and institutions of the West—democracy, free expression, individual rights, and so on—are all ultimately attributable to Christianity. As Holland puts it, ‘We are goldfish swimming in Christian waters.’ Hirsi Ali says that Christianity is the ‘story of the West’. Peterson describes the Enlightenment as ‘irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But what does a recommitment to this tradition look like in practice? Beyond their selective history which leaves out the centuries of political and philosophical struggle against religious dominion, the New Theists don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions to what they view as a spiritual and political crisis in the West today.

Hirsi Ali recommends Christianity as a source of social solidarity, as it will fill the ‘void left by the retreat of the church’ with the ‘power of a unifying story’. She doesn’t explain how this will better equip the West to confront China or Russia, and she doesn’t seem to care that the ‘unifying story’ doesn’t apply to the 37 per cent of Americans (and much larger proportions in many European countries) who aren’t Christians.

Hirsi Ali believes religion has been replaced by a ‘jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma’, such as the ‘modern cult’ of wokeness. This is a common claim. West says that the ‘collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the conservative commentator Douglas Murray argues that Christianity has been replaced by a ‘new religion’ of strident identitarian activism.

There are several problems with this narrative. First, the process of secularisation has been going on for decades, while many movements the New Theists decry as ‘woke’ have emerged more recently. Second, Christianity has historically been compatible with a vast range of political and social movements. Many Nazis were Christians, as were many liberators of the concentration camps. Christianity has been used to justify slavery for millennia, but it was also invoked by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. (with crucial support from secularists like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph).

According to Hirsi Ali, ‘We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.’ But we don’t need Christianity to explain why resisting theocracy, imperialism, and totalitarianism matters. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. The West—even in its secularised and allegedly degenerate state—shocked Putin by rallying to Ukraine’s defence when his forces attempted to abolish its existence as an independent state. Ukraine’s desire to join the Western system of economic and political organisation was the trigger for the war, and solidarity with a fellow democracy under siege was sufficient to convince Ukraine’s Western allies that they had a responsibility to help.

Many politicians and intellectuals who present themselves as defenders of the Christian West don’t have an inspiring record on Ukraine. Viktor Orbán has cultivated an image of himself as the leader of a ‘Christian government’ which is defending traditional Christian values against sinister, godless globalists. He also wants to abandon Ukraine. He recently declared that Donald Trump ‘will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end’, and he regards Trump as the ‘man who can save the Western world.’

Trump wants to pull the United States out of NATO and he says the Russians should be able to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to American allies that haven’t made sufficient investments in their militaries. The overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants supported Trump, and this support has held despite his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. These American Christians aren’t just indifferent about the fate of Ukrainian democracy—they’re willing to put their own democracy in peril to bring their favourite demagogue back into the Oval Office. Is this what the defence of Western civilisation looks like?

Hirsi Ali’s fellow New Theist Jordan Peterson sneers at Western solidarity with Ukrainian democracy as ‘shallow moral posturing’ and a ‘banal form of dimwit flag-waving.’ Peterson has long been opposed to Western support for Ukraine, and he blames the invasion on ‘NATO and EU expansionism’ (a standard argument for Putin’s apologists like the ‘realist’ academic John Mearsheimer, whom Peterson has consulted with).

In an essay published several months after the invasion of Ukraine, Peterson argued that the conflict is a ‘civil war’ within the West. He believes liberal democracies like the United States have become increasingly degenerate and spiritually bankrupt, and he’s impressed with how Putin presents Russia as a ‘bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.’

Putin has increasingly cloaked his authoritarianism and imperialism in the garb of the Russian Orthodox Church, but instead of recognising the grotesque cynicism of this ploy, Peterson says he feels reassured by these professions of faith. He also suspects that Putin is on the right side of the global culture war: ‘Are we degenerate, in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes.’ Peterson believes Putin decided to ‘invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine’ to keep the ‘pathological West out of that country’, and his recommended course of action is total surrender.

Peterson is the most influential New Theist in the world, and he’s sympathetic to the cultural grievances of a brutal dictator who started the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. He believes the ‘pathological West’ should submit to the whims of that dictator and abandon his victims—people who are risking and losing their lives to uphold the values and institutions of the West every day. Hirsi Ali isn’t just wrong when she says that belief in Christianity is necessary to defend Western civilisation from its most dangerous foes—she fails to see how belief can actually be a severe impediment in that fight.

The New Theists aren’t the guardians of Western civilisation they purport to be. They use religion as a crutch and cudgel—they have a ‘god-shaped hole’ in their lives and assume that the only way to find any real meaning or purpose in life is to fill it with Christian dogma. Then they insist that this spiritual problem is universal—and tell us that they alone have the solution. That’s the thing about New Theism—it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s nothing new about it.

Further reading on New Atheism and New Theism

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

‘We are at a threshold right now’: interview with Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘What you have made will long endure.’ This is how Salman Rushdie signed off one of his last emails to his friend Martin Amis. Amis was dying from oesophageal cancer (the same cancer that killed his and Rushdie’s old comrade Christopher Hitchens) and Rushdie was still recovering from the savage attack against him in Chautauqua, New York when those words were written. Amis had previously written to Rushdie, of seeing him for the first time since the attack, that ‘I expected you to be altered, diminished in some way. Not a bit of it: you were and are intact and entire. And I thought with amazement, He’s EQUAL to it.’

Simple expressions of love and solidarity between two men all too well acquainted with the destroying angel: the perfect riposte to death, and to the bigotry and fanaticism of those, like Rushdie’s attacker, who worship it. This is just one of many life-affirming moments in Rushdie’s account of what Amis so appropriately calls ‘the atrocity’ of August 2022 and its aftermath, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Like the late Amis (who died last May), what Rushdie has made will long endure. His contributions to literature will endure for their power and beauty and truth, not because of the horrors inflicted upon their author. Still, and though he would prefer not to be defined by those horrors, his courage and his unswerving commitment to the defence of free expression in the face of them—this example, too, will long endure.

In August 2022, on the very day of the atrocity, I wrote a response, concluding with these words: ‘Pull through, Salman. Pull through.’ And pull through he did. He was equal to it, all right. The sheer strength of the man is nothing less than astounding: a 74-year-old asthmatic, who had endured through a COVID-19 infection, is stabbed and slashed over and over by a would-be assassin, and he pulls through, even though the doctors thought his survival a near-impossibility. No, he more than pulled through: he won. He has lost an eye and suffered horrifically, but his mind remains, and he has written a brave and beautiful book to ‘answer violence with art.’

‘I wasn’t well enough to take in clearly the scale of what was happening outside my hospital room, but I felt it,’ Rushdie writes of the thousands of outpourings of solidarity he received. ‘I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.’ It is heartening to know that the tsunami of love heartened Rushdie in his hospital bed; whether or not he knew of my own outpouring I do not know, but it is nice to think of it as a small undulation in the tsunami.

Knife is not just a personal narrative. It is also a reaffirmation of Rushdie’s commitment to the fight for ‘the idea of freedom—Thomas Paine’s idea, the Enlightenment idea, John Stuart Mill’s idea’ against its many enemies, whether left or right, progressive or reactionary. He also reaffirms his secularism and his atheism: ‘My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.’

But the genius of the book is that it is not a horror story, or not merely a horror story. It is, ultimately, a love story. Rushdie tells us how he met and fell in love with the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he married in 2021, and how Griffiths helped him through the horror: ‘The woman I loved and who loved me was by my side. We would win this battle. I would live.’

As against this, Rushdie’s attacker is not named at all. He is referred to only as ‘the A.’, ‘[m]y Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation . . .’ In one powerful chapter, Rushdie imagines a conversation between himself and the A., and the A. is revealed as the nameless loser he undoubtedly is. Later, Rushdie tells us what he would like to say to the A. in court, and he concludes that:

‘Your intrusion into my life was violent and damaging, but now my life has resumed, and it is a life filled with love… I don’t forgive you. I don’t not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me. And from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I’m glad I have my life, and not yours. And my life will go on.’

But Rushdie also tells us that he no longer really cares about getting to face his attacker; the A. truly has become irrelevant. And life and love go on: ‘After the angel of death, the angel of life.’

Like Rushdie’s latest novel Victory City, Knife is a humanist triumph. Referring to the former, I wrote that ‘Rushdie shows us the triumph of love, life and literature against philistinism, death and fanaticism.’ And so he continues to do. Knife, despite it all, has a happy ending. Rushdie and Griffiths return to the scene of the crime, more than a year later, and Rushdie realises his triumph:

‘Yes, we had reconstructed our happiness, even if imperfectly. Even on this blue-sky day, I knew it was not the cloudless thing we had known before. It was a wounded happiness, and there was, and perhaps always would be, a shadow in the corner of it. But it was a strong happiness nevertheless, and as we embraced, I knew it would be enough.’

In Knife, Salman Rushdie shows us that he has lost none of his power. The horror is subsumed and conquered by love. It is a work of genius, another testament, like his memoir Joseph Anton, to what Rushdie has called ‘the liberty instinct’: the indestructible human desire for freedom. In the end, Knife is Rushdie’s greatest victory.

Knife can be purchased here. Note that, when you use this link to purchase the book, we earn from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a compendium of relevant articles by Emma Park

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Rushdie’s victory appeared first on The Freethinker.

In December 2023, Ed West wrote for The Spectator about a phenomenon I have been interested in for quite a while: the rise of a new counter-Enlightenment that defends religion, and Christianity in particular, based on its social value rather than because it is true. West termed such defenders of faith(s?) the ‘New Theists’, a term that I like very much and which I shall probably use quite often from now on.  

The New Theists, says West, argue ‘not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ Whether West himself is a New Theist, I do not know, though his article seems very sympathetic to the New Theist argument. I am going to take issue with that argument soon enough, but first, who are the New Theists? 

I am tempted to date New Theism to the publication in 2019 of Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland’s argument is that almost all of Western culture is essentially Christian, even the parts seemingly antagonistic to Christianity. Holland wants to claim everything from gay rights to science to liberalism to the Enlightenment itself and even atheism as an outgrowth of Christianity.  

(Notice that, even as he tries to hide it behind a disinterested scholarly facade, Holland is a latter-day champion of Christianity—he is especially keen on claiming all the nice bits of Western civilisation for the faith. Christianity’s many historical crimes are explained away as not being really representative of its essence.) 

Dominion has been very influential since its publication, as perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s citation of it last November as a reason for her conversion to Christianity. But, as West rightly notes, this sort of argument has a long history. And in its current form, it precedes Tom Holland. As Adam Wakeling writes in the Freethinker: 

Perhaps no public figure has become more associated with this argument than Jordan Peterson. Peterson does not appear to believe in a literal supernatural being, but believes that the secular ethics of the modern west are based in Judeo-Christian values and it would be better if we acted as though the Christian God did exist.

So, since Peterson seems to have really started publicly obfuscating on religion in 2017, perhaps that is a better origin date for New Theism. Holland, Hirsi Ali, and Peterson are just a few of the more famous New Theists, though Hirsi Ali is unique in having formerly been a New Atheist. There are plenty of others. Some are actual believers, some are not, and many are just Petersonian wafflers. 

New Theism, of course, is named in opposition to New Atheism.¹ (I should say here that I pretty much consider myself an unreconstructed New Atheist.) West again: ‘Like New Atheism, [New Theism] largely involved unbelievers, and argued for the same western liberal tradition.’ I think New Theism is broader than West allows here—for example, Theo Hobson, another of its champions, is a theologian (and, incidentally, Hobson’s arguments for New Theism precede 2017). West’s third clause is also questionable, not least given Sam Harris’s interest in Eastern spirituality, but it is broadly true.  

Where West really misunderstands the relationship between New Theism and New Atheism is in New Theism’s much narrower focus: it is concerned only, or at least mainly, with religion as a social phenomenon. The New Atheists were concerned with both of the really big questions about religion: its truth and its utility. True, there were differences of emphasis. Richard Dawkins was much more interested in the God hypothesis, and Christopher Hitchens in the evils of religion. But they all dealt with both questions, while the New Theists are only really bothered about one of them. Hobson himself recently put it thus in a review of a book called Coming to Faith Through Dawkins²:  

This is the real flaw in New Atheism: it inherits a vague rational humanism that it has to pretend is natural, or common-sense. It’s an important task of Christian apologetics to point this out, to insist that the moral assumptions of our culture have Christian roots. But most Christian apologists fail to focus on this and get bogged down in tedious arguments about first causes, and try to make a rational case for God, and even the historical likelihood of the resurrection. Most of these contributors take this approach, some citing the apologetics of William Lane Craig and Alister McGrath (who is this book’s co-editor). 

To my mind, this is deeply unhelpful. It sinks to Dawkins’ level. A wise apologetics is minimalist. It calmly exposes the moral muddles of rational humanists, their weak grasp of the history of ideas. But it doesn’t overstate the role of intellectual argument in belief.

And this is telling. The God argument has been lost; all that is left is the argument from utility. The near certainty of God’s non-existence has been apparent since long before New Atheism³, but it now seems that the argument has been given up entirely. New Theism, then, is a rear-guard action, a desperate attempt to salvage religion even when its core has been gutted and even as the number of its adherents dwindles by the day. It is also an insult to the truly devout, for whom the truth of religion is very, even supremely, important. I have recently had the misfortune to have to endure The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger, and the happily deceased pontiff often made that point very clear.  

Now, with the faith in tatters, the New Theists are often not even, or are barely, theists (and isn’t there something strangely postmodern about that?⁴). And they now spend most of their time proclaiming that Christianity is fundamental to Western civilisation. In so doing, everything institutional Christianity ever opposed until it was beaten into submission—liberalism, secularism, gay rights, free speech, to name a few—are claimed for Christianity! This argument takes some chutzpah, I allow, but it is essentially the theology of the consolation prize—and a sign of continued decline rather than rejuvenation. 

An important exception to the above is Justin Brierley, a believing Christian apologist who tries to convince his readers of Christianity’s truth while also championing it in the fashion of Holland and the other New Theists.⁵ His latest book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again, is an explicitly New Theist text, and I am surprised West did not reference it.⁶ Of course, the popularity of any idea is no guarantee of whether it is correct or not, but I think Hobson and Brierley are simply the latest in a long line of people wrongly claiming that New Atheism is pretty much dead (see footnote 1 for a note on Jerry Coyne’s rebuttals of this oft-parroted critique, among other ones). The secularisation of the world, even in America, continues unabated, however much the New Theists wish otherwise. I do not think that New Theism will reverse this trend or have the public impact that New Atheism had in its heyday, but it is well capable of causing serious confusion (and perhaps worse⁷) nonetheless.⁸

There is little point in me going into great detail on the very many flaws of Hollandaise Christianity⁹, since many others have done so already—and, I think, have done so decisively. I will just recommend pieces by Nick Cohen, Peter Thonemann, and Gerard DeGroot in addition to the Wakeling piece mentioned above (and also Wakeling’s recent book Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world). The books of Charles Freeman—particularly The Closing of the Western Mind and The Awakening—are also fatal to Holland (I discussed this, among other things, in an interview with Freeman for the Freethinker). I also recommend looking through Richard Carrier’s website, for, even when not discussing Holland directly, he does refute many of Holland’s claims (e.g. on the supposed invention by Christianity of charity and the concept of dignity). I will allow myself one lengthy quote from Thonemann, though: 

Mr. Holland’s argument about the continuing legacy of Christian sensibilities involves selecting one particular winding strand of Christianity—the one that happens to terminate in our present-day value system—as the “real” one. Mr. Holland postulates a golden thread of Nice Christianity, directly linking Jesus’ teachings with the civil-rights movement, the end of apartheid, #MeToo and so forth. When large numbers of actual Christians between Paul and Pope Francis turn out to have subscribed to Nasty Christianity (butchering Albigensians, incinerating sodomites and suchlike), Mr. Holland blithely comments that “the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.” This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic. 

Perhaps Wakeling puts it most concisely: ‘According to Genesis, God created man in his image – yet the morality of the Bible is not humanist.’ (My emphasis.) Indeed—and it is very often anti-humanist, with its injunctions to slavery, rape, and genocide and its threats of eternal torture for nonbelievers.¹⁰

Secular liberalism has spent centuries defanging Christianity (one of civilisation’s most noble achievements, though the task is still incomplete). Christianity did not inspire secular humanism—and least of all did institutional Christianity, which, as Freeman notes, became an imperial and authoritarian structure in the fourth century. Once it became dominant in that period, it did not challenge slavery or wealth inequality or militarism, nor did it do any of the other nice things that it should have done if its essence was as Holland says. On Holland’s thesis, the millennium and more of Christian supremacy should have produced a paradise of liberalism and democracy long before the Enlightenment arose. The emergence of secular modernity has other roots, many of which predate Christianity by a long time and most of which were almost pulled up by Christianity before they had produced even the tiniest of shoots. 

To return to West’s apparently pro-New Theism article, a couple of small points of disagreement before we get on to the meatier stuff. West says that ‘Framed as opposition to religion in public affairs, [New Atheism] gathered much of its energy from fear of Islam following 9/11, although it was impolite to make that explicit.’  

Who said it was impolite? Given that the New Atheists frequently criticised Islam in their books, speeches, and debates, and that Hitchens deliberately inverted the Takbir in the title of God Is Not Great, and that some of New Atheism’s fiercest (and most unfair) critics were those who saw anti-Muslim bigotry in the work of the New Atheists, any implication that the New Atheists shied away from Islam is bogus (it is unclear whether West intends any such implication).¹¹ 

Second, West writes that ‘[r]ather than ushering in a golden age of enlightenment, the collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ Again, it is slightly unclear what West means in the full context. Does he mean that the New Atheists believed that destroying religion would ‘usher in a golden age of enlightenment’? If so, he is plain wrong. Hitchens, for example, wrote in God Is Not Great that “[r]eligious faith is…ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.’ No New Atheist claimed that the world would become an enlightened paradise after the demise of religion (which was unlikely or even impossible, anyway), or that religion was responsible for all the world’s ills.  

The point about the impossibility of fully throwing off religion is quite an important one, so I shall let Matt Johnson discuss it further. From his Quillette piece critiquing Konstantin Kisin’s argument against the New Atheists: 

The title of Kisin’s article is “The Atheism Delusion.” He now regards religion as “useful and inevitable.” The argument that religion is inevitable is one the New Atheists have always taken seriously: Hitchens described religion as “ineradicable”; [Daniel] Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell examined the ways in which religion evolves and survives over time; a central part of Harris’s career is channelling the religious impulse into secular forms of introspection and mindfulness; and Dawkins acknowledges that religion may reflect a deep psychological need among many people. Where the New Atheists part company with Kisin is over his argument that religion is useful—particularly in the third decade of the 21st Century.

With that out of the way, on to the meat. West writes that ‘The atomising effect of secularism has become extreme. While America’s poor filled their God-shaped hole with drugs and alcohol, its rich did so with politics.’ By the final clause, I think West means to refer to Critical Social Justice ideology, or ‘wokeism’, as his following reference to progressive intolerance implies. But these are just unevidenced assertions. There are plenty of other explanations for atomisation, drug and alcohol abuse, and the rise of wokeism, and why should one prefer secularisation over all others without any evidence?  

Indeed, poverty, genetics, mental health problems, and the social environment are among the many more convincing explanations for drug and alcohol abuse than some nebulous ‘secularism’. They are certainly more concrete. The causes of the US opioid epidemic, which West perhaps has in mind here, also lie largely in the many structural problems of the American healthcare system itself. Social atomisation and alienation also have many alternative explanations, though I grant that the shared community offered by churches has been and is very important for many people. But there are other sources of community that do not require belief in mumbo-jumbo or come with the negative effects of religion (which, to my mind, outweigh those ‘shared community’ positives)—although we must do better at providing them.  

Most fatal to West’s argument here is the fact that the social woes he lists are positively correlated with religiosity, while the opposite holds true for secularism, as the sociologist Phil Zuckerman has copiously shown. Or, as I have put it previously: 

Though we can’t re-run the tape to produce a definitive answer to the question of whether religion has overall been good or bad for humanity, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from the state of our existing societies. Put very broadly, and with the caveat that the causation/correlation relationships are complex, the data shows that more religious societies are poorer, less safe, and less happy while more secular societies are richer, happier, and more just. If religion is good for us, why should this be so? 

I would also argue more directly that nobody with even a shred of dignity or decency would wish to live in an extremely religious society. We have seen, and can see even now, what such societies look like, and it is not pretty. One need only look at the Muslim world or pre-Enlightenment Europe to see that where religion rules, tyranny and poverty are the norms. If you think religion is good for you, I invite you to consider living in a society where it reigns supreme; I think you will be rushing back to the decadent, post-Enlightenment, secular West very quickly. 

West, naturally, differs with all this, and might object that he goes into more detail in the very article I am criticising:  

[T]his period has also coincided with a proliferation of social science studies pointing to the benefits of religion – both belief and practice – on child welfare, social capital, individual happiness and most of all the suppression of anxiety, the cause of that modern-day “mental health epidemic”.

Fair enough, one might say: delusion does have its benefits. I can only repeat what I have already said: the negatives outweigh the positives, and these positives can all be gotten without the negatives. Religion might help with the problems West lists, but much better, I think, to provide adequate healthcare, housing, income, and the like.

The studies to which West points are also rather undermined by the data referenced above, which, among other things, suggest that as societies become more prosperous and more just, the need for religion, particularly to salve our social ills, evaporates. Perhaps religion has some benefits for the individual or the social group, but not so much as West seems to think. And is it not curious that religion is most popular among the destitute, the crisis-ridden, and the weary? It is almost as if the God delusion preys on desperation. 

In my previous article above, I also addressed the wokeism point: 

I know that the temptation to champion traditionalism and religion against the tide of Critical Social Justice (or, colloquially, and although it’s a term I’ve come to dislike, ‘wokeism’) is very strong. But consider: is championing another vile dogma really the solution? Of course it isn’t.¹² (Besides, wokeism is hardly the greatest threat in the world today; jihadist Islam and the grotesque alliance of Trumpism with Christian nationalism in the U.S., are, I would argue, much graver ones.) The solution is to keep fighting for free, secular societies based upon reason and universalism and human rights. This fight, and the societies produced by it, count among humanity’s greatest achievements.¹³ Much better to go forward in this enterprise, rather than embracing religion (or wokeism).

Matt Johnson, in the piece referenced earlier, has much more to say on the wokeism argument, including the following: 

The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with the new alternatives is too tidy and simplistic. For one thing, the process of secularization has been gaining momentum for decades, long before the “Great Awokening.” For another, unlike the Pew researchers who ask respondents how their religious views have evolved over time, the critics of progressive dogma don’t provide much evidence for their claims about the ways in which religion is supposed to have been supplanted by this new faith. Isn’t it possible that many religious people identify with elements of progressivism? Black Americans are disproportionately religious and far more likely than their fellow citizens to support the Black Lives Matter movement (81 percent versus a national average of 51 percent). However, they’re less progressive when it comes to issues such as gay rights—black Protestants are considerably less likely than their white counterparts to support gay marriage. Young even admits that wokeness has “made converts within the established Churches, particularly the Church of England.” 

… 

No matter how exhaustively the word “religion” is redefined, there’s plenty of evidence that secularization has taken place across the Western world. But there’s far less evidence for the opportunistic claim that this shift is responsible for the emergence of another socio-political movement. Those who say otherwise may have a “god-shaped hole” in their own lives, but they shouldn’t assume that everyone else suffers from the same affliction. More and more commentators are attempting to resuscitate religion under the guise of anti-woke politics, but they’re just exchanging one dogma for another.

On the argument that the West (though I would prefer to say ‘liberal democracy’) needs Christianity to combat the various threats it faces, much could and has been said. Michael Shermer has expertly done so already, along the way demolishing the other tenets of New Theism, so I shall simply recommend his piece and quote the central point: ‘Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is.’ 

Towards the end of his article, West says some quite astonishing things. First, he argues that ‘At the very least, the act of being involved in the community and ingesting a message of forgiveness would act as social Valium.’ I think I have said enough to make this at least a questionable assumption. When I shared West’s article with Matt Johnson, he responded to me with an understatedly tart observation: ‘Yes, because the essential message of forgiveness has always made Christians more tolerant throughout the ages.’  

A ‘social Valium’, though! The land of Europe is barely dry after centuries of Christian bloodlust. And remember the horror inflicted upon millions of people around the world when Christianity had real power in the West. Even today, Christianity remains one of the most dangerous forces in the world. Indeed, the fields of Europe even now are soaked through with the blood spilled by Christians in the name of faith. In the context of American fundamentalism’s support for the disgusting Ugandan ‘kill the gays’ bill, I wrote last year: 

We all know what American Christianity has done to America itself of late—helped to elect and shore up support for the most vulgar and dangerous man to ever hold the office of president, Donald Trump.¹⁴ Christian nationalists were heavily involved in the January 6 coup attempt. And don’t forget that a slew of anti-LGBTQ bills are being introduced across the US as I write these very words (at least American Christian fundamentalists practise what they preach to others). Looking a little further back, Christianity was the core of the creationist/Intelligent Design movement, which tried its very best to inculcate American children with superstitious rubbish. Going even deeper into history, we find pietist Protestants banning alcohol, sharia-style, and the Bible acting as the bulwark of the case for slavery. And so on and so forth. 

… 

In short, those of us who value secularism and humanism ought not to be complacent about Christianity. In its senescence, or senility if you prefer, it is as dangerous as ever. And American fundamentalists are among the most dangerous of all the followers of Christ. The disgusting bill that has just passed in Uganda is a chilling reminder of these facts. It should also harden the resolve of freethinkers worldwide, American ones in particular, to recognize—and relentlessly combat—the barbarism that Christianity is still very well capable of unleashing upon the world.

For the Freethinker, and with reference to the dangers posed by other religions, I recently wrote: 

[F]rom Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy [indeed, in March this year, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Putin’s assault a ‘holy war’]—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that “religion poisons everything”.

Finally, I can’t help but note again how lame New Theism is. From world domination and supreme authority over billions of human beings and their eternal souls to a Valium faith. What a mighty fall for mighty Christendom!  

West’s true sympathies are, I think, revealed by his conclusion: ‘But Christianity is not some meditation method or get-happy-quick guide. It is a deeply strange idea. Which makes its triumph over the West all the more unlikely – dare one say, miraculous.’ 

One might as well say the same about any hugely influential religion that has ever existed (here one might instance the ‘miraculously’ rapid spread of Islam¹⁵) but that would be to ignore the very worldly—and often very grubby—ways in which they gained power. As Charles Freeman notes in my Freethinker interview with him: 

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state.  … 

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

There is not much miraculous about cosying up to state authority to expand your influence, as I think West would agree.  

I have gone on long enough, certainly much longer than I anticipated at the outset (and I apologise for all the long quotes, but they were necessary). This is a subject I am likely to return to in future, and it is an important one. Critical as I have been, West’s piece is very good. It is certainly stimulating, and it provides a useful framing of the argument. It crystallised some things I have been thinking about a lot, albeit from a rather different perspective. So I am grateful that he wrote the piece, and even more grateful that he coined what I think is a very useful term for the very un-miraculous and probably over-hyped resurgence of Christianity.  

To finish off on a more positive note, a couple more quotes, including another of my own. In arguments about religion there is always latent the question of meaning. What meaning can there be in a godless universe? From my Freethinker interview with the New Atheist ‘horseman’ Daniel Dennett, where I asked him that very question: 

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.¹⁶

And from my own piece on religion, quoted earlier: 

One last thing remains. There is the question of meaning. Without religion, without the supernatural, how can humans even bear to get up in the morning? I think I have obliquely answered this already: secular societies are happier. But I’d like to add that this, to me, is an impoverished view of humanity. Without delusion, it essentially says, what’s the point? 

Well, there is art, and literature, and science, and philosophy; there are friends and family; there is sex, and parties, and music, and love. What more meaning can you possibly need? If you need the supernatural to find the transcendent, I pity you. 

In the end, I can make weaker and stronger versions of my argument. At its strongest, I can say that religion is not just harmless but harmful. At its weakest, I can say that religion is irrelevant. Either way, religion is not positively good for us. We have no need of it. Humanity is weak and foolish, yes, but it also contains what Saul Bellow in his great novel The Adventures of Augie March so beautifully called the “universal eligibility to be noble”. 

I submit, finally, then, that the highest, noblest path that humanity can pursue is one without religion. We must face the uncaring universe with our chins up. Abandoning religion is not a guarantee of utopia (indeed, utopia is unattainable anyway), but it is a good start. We are mere apes, yes—but apes capable of art and science and love. Supernaturalism, which is the core of religion, is a distraction from, even a negation of, this most important and inspiring of truths. 

So let’s reject the false, dangerous delusions of religion, and be worthy of humanity—that is, of ourselves.

In short: Christianity (and religion in general) is neither true nor particularly useful, and the New Theism is but a sputtering and desperate response to that fact. 

Update 9 February 2024: Charles Freeman writes to me to mention the splenetic David Bentley Hart as a forerunner of the New Theism and a critic of the New Atheism. Indeed he is both those things, though I did not have space to mention everyone who falls under those headings. I append this update only because Hart is a particularly obnoxious man, and his work is oft-trumpeted as a fatal knockdown of New Atheism. The ever-reliable Jerry Coyne once more makes nonsense of such claims.

Let me also add that, in his work, Freeman makes the very good points that Christianity’s Pauline disdain for philosophy and its extreme salvific exclusivism prevented it from being a vehicle for science and human rights almost from the very beginning.

This is as good a place as any for a further update. After I had written the bulk of this piece, I rediscovered a good passage from Bertrand Russell’s classic Why I am not a Christian that puts the point much better than I ever could:

You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organised in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

1. I am more or less sidestepping the question of whether there is even such a thing as New Atheism. Many so-called New Atheists disavow the term altogether and see nothing particularly new in it (Jerry Coyne is a good exemplar here) or don’t regard it as a coherent movement in any meaningful way. I have some sympathy with these objections, but I think that it is a useful term nonetheless. Similar objections could be lodged against the use of ‘New Theism’, of course. But both terms describe real phenomena, regardless of whether there is anything new about them and however formal or informal they are as ‘movements’. 
   
   Incidentally, if you search ‘atheism’ or ‘New Atheism’ on Coyne’s website, he has done a remarkably thorough job over the years of defending New Atheism from its many critics, who never tire of pronouncing it dead or leading to ‘wokeism’ or being bigoted or whatever else. Critics dismantled by Coyne are as various as (but are far from limited to) John Gray, Freddie DeBoer, Rupert Sheldrake, Sebastian Milbank, Massimo Pigliucci, Tim Stanley, and Julian Baggini.  ︎
2. By the way, this book’s trumpeting of former Dawkinsian atheists finding faith should be seen in the context of how many people lost (and never recovered) their faith thanks to Dawkins. I think if you tallied these numbers up, it would not even be close. ︎
3. I have no space for that argument here, but many of the people I reference in this essay deal with it. I would also recommend Victor J. Stenger’s book The New Atheism (Stenger, incidentally, embraced the ‘New Atheist’ label and in his book on the subject enumerated what he saw as its key propositions). I shall just say here that ancient atheists in Greece and India came to this conclusion long before Christianity even existed and that there is not much to add to David Hume and Bertrand Russell and the rest. I think Richard Dawkins’ Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit (elaborated in The God Delusion and elsewhere) is unassailable unless you engage in theological hand-waving. Richard Carrier has made a similar ‘argument from specified complexity against supernaturalism’.
   
   This might be the moment to mention that I am familiar with a lot of what Jerry Coyne, in a deliciously condescending manner, terms ‘sophisticated theology’. It is, unsurprisingly, unimpressive stuff, full of hokum and special pleading and mere assertion (and Coyne mercilessly rips a great deal of it apart in his Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible). ︎
4. And perhaps this is what really marks New Theism out as ‘new’. In that sense, it is perhaps more appropriately labelled than New Atheism. ︎
5. Richard Carrier has laid waste at some length to Brierley’s apologetics, as propounded in Brierley’s 2017 book Unbelievable. ︎
6. Note added 23 April 2024: I have just come across a good review of Brierley’s book in the New Humanist which has led me to reframe things slightly. Brierley and other genuine believers seem to be riding the wave of the barely-theistic New Theism, hoping that the popularity of obscurantist gurus like Peterson will give them an opening to win souls. This is unlikely ever to happen, as the New Humanist reviewer explains. As I say in note 8 below, I can see the religion debate becoming prominent again, partly because of the New Theists but also because of the resurgence of religious fanaticism—the continuing depredations of the Islamists, the Christian and Hindu nationalists, Tucker Carlson’s resurrection of creationism, etc. A moment for a new New Atheism, perhaps? ︎
7. Vide the unfortunately named National Conservatism movement.
   ︎
8. On the other hand, I can envision a return to prominence of the religion question in public debate. It is certainly an important question given that religious fanaticism is undergoing a resurgence across the world. Perhaps we’re in for another New Atheist-type moment in the discourse. I still doubt it will be as prominent now as it was then, though, and I certainly don’t think that it will have much effect on secularisation. ︎
9. Would using le Christianisme hollandaise be too pretentious? And yes, I know ‘hollandaise’ means ‘Dutch’ (or ‘Hollandic’) in French. I just like the sound of it, though given that the word ‘Hollandaise’ was applied by the French to the sauce during the Franco-Dutch war of 1672-78—that is, between Catholic absolutist France and a relatively (and I mean relatively) tolerant Dutch Republic, perhaps I could conjure some more substantial meaning into my little joke. In any case, only a teeny bit of fun at Tom Holland’s expense is intended. ︎
10. I would also recommend Mister Deity’s less scholarly but funny and scathing video series debunking Dominion. In the last part, he makes a good point: if Holland’s work ends up winning more converts for secular humanist ideals, perhaps that’s no bad thing. Also, there have been several more recent pieces in the Freethinker tackling New Theism, including one by Jack Stacey, which also deals with Richard Dawkins and the ‘cultural Christian’ hysteria (on which more below). You can look forward to another anti-New Theism article by Matt Johnson soon. ︎
11. And that provokes a thought: New Theism is largely about Christianity, not religion in general—another big difference with New Atheism. Both West and I, you will have noticed, switch between ‘religion’ and ‘Christianity’, when it is mostly Christianity under discussion. I, at least, also have religion tout court in mind, while West, I think, does not.
    
    New Theism is, to a large extent, a merely political movement (a conservative one, of course). It is also largely an exercise in apologetics containing assertions of Christian supremacy. All this makes it much less intellectually sophisticated than New Atheism (and, yes, I say that with a deliberate and disdainful nod to the critics of New Atheism who think it crude and philosophically naïve).
    
    I wonder if, in a few centuries when Islam has been tamed, we shall see similar arguments from its votaries and champions? Indeed, some Muslim apologists already claim that much of modern science is contained in the Qu’ran. Fatuously claiming pre-eminence in achievements that religion had little to do with is nothing new for its defenders.
    
    Incidentally, Richard Dawkins has recently spoken of his preference for Christianity over Islam. This is nothing new; he has called himself a ‘cultural Christian’ many times before (and his cultural affinity with Christianity is apparent in The God Delusion). But I do worry that in championing Christianity in this way, he misses the many ways in which the followers of Jesus Christ still pose a terrible threat to liberty and democracy around the world today. In fairness, I should say that he was specifically talking about the contemporary and very woolly British variant of Christianity. Nevertheless, it is worth restating that the solution to religious tyranny is the Enlightenment; it is not to be found in preferring an apparently softer religion over a more openly tyrannical one. That way only disappointment lies, and the noose will find its way back to your neck regardless. I think Dawkins would agree with all this, but I wish he would make it clearer. Still, and especially when he flirts with being a ‘Political Christian’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali-style, I do shake my head. I also agree with Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, who wrote in this magazine that Dawkins’s recent comments verge, if not quite on the chauvinistic, then on the anti-secular.
    
    Indeed, it did not take very long for the New Theists to pounce on Dawkins’s recent pronouncements. It should be said, though, that they have misunderstood him: he did not say that the West’s liberal values owe anything to Christianity; he merely said that he preferred Christianity today to Islam today and that he has an affinity for Christian, particularly Anglican, culture (music, cathedrals, and the like). He explicitly denied the New Theists’ central claim last year in his open letter to Hirsi Ali. ︎
12. Here there was a footnote in the original piece: ‘On April 29 of this year [2022], Angel Eduardo wrote a very good piece for the Center for Inquiry blog on this very topic: ‘No, We Don’t Need to Go Back to Church’. In it, he puts the point very well: “Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.”’ ︎
13. I might now emphasise here that Christianity had little to do with the formation of these concepts or the success of the Western world, which is better explained by other factors, as discussed in more depth by many of the articles referenced in this piece. ︎
14. And they remain faithful to Trump, who is now more or less openly declaring that he will seek to destroy American democracy and rule as a dictator if he regains power in November. ︎
15. Christian apologists used to argue that Christianity arose at just the right time to become absorbed and spread by the Roman Empire. Some of them probably still do.
    
    But one could make the same argument about Islam today: if the claims that it is the fastest-growing religion are even remotely true, perhaps Allah ensured that people from Muslim countries would be among the greatest beneficiaries of the age of mass migration. Perhaps he even made sure that there was such an age to begin with! All so Islam could spread across the world, even into decadent secular lands.
    
    Yes, that really is about the level at which religious apologetics operates. ︎
16. Incidentally, Dennett accepts the point about the ‘shared community’ value of religion even more strongly than I do, as you can read in that interview. ︎

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Introduction

Frank Turner is an English singer and songwriter whose music I have loved for years. His songs are wild and varied, sometimes sad and sometimes happy but always somehow life-affirming. He is a patron of Humanists UK and his secular and humanistic style, while rarely explicit, shines through all his music (at least to my ears). His tenth studio album, ‘Undefeated’, is out on 3 May, and in February I interviewed him about it.

Topics covered include Frank’s artistry; humanism and atheism; history and cancel culture; the greatness of Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift; raucous middle age; the perils of social media; and defiance.

The Freethinker has not interviewed many creative artists lately. As someone who believes that godlessness and art are entwined, in that art is one of the things that makes life in a purposeless universe worth living, I could not resist the opportunity to talk to Frank. As such, this interview might feel a little different—not least because there is a lot more casual swearing than usual. So, be warned. Frank is a rebellious singer with a punk background, after all. Indeed, his individualism, discussed below, is an example of freethinking in an artistic context.

I have also tried to keep the informal verbal flow of the conversation intact in the edited transcript. Selected audio excerpts are included alongside the transcript.

You can pre-order ‘Undefeated’ here.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: ‘Undefeated’ marks your return to independent music and it was recorded in your home studio. Why did you make that choice and what effect do you think it has had on your music?

Frank Turner: It’s a funny thing, the whole independent label business, because I’m not sure how much anybody else really cares about it. But it’s important to me. I have always been with Xtra Mile Recordings. For five records, starting in 2012, I was licensed to Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company. It was an experiment, and I expected it to last for maybe one album. I imagined I’d be dropped instantaneously!  

I am quite proud that I finished my deal rather than getting dropped. At the end of the deal, they were keen to continue, and I was not. I don’t have any ill things to say about the past, but it felt like the right moment to return to the warm embrace of the independent world on the label side of things, and I feel very good about it.  

It’s not that I was ever really creatively constrained per se in the licensing years. But there were moments when I had to expend some firepower, if you like, on maintaining my creative independence, and that is no longer the case. I’m the wild, drunk captain of my own ship now, and very nice that is too.  

So I have now produced a record, which was awesome. That is not to say that I think I should have produced all my albums—that’s not true at all. Another part of it is that one of my lockdown projects was to learn how to produce music in order to produce other bands, and I’ve been doing that with the likes of The Meffs, Pet Needs, and Grace Petrie, among others. And I thought, ‘Wait, hold on, I could do this for myself.’ And I had demoed my last few records in more and more depth before the recording. So even for my previous album ‘FTHC’, it was a process of replacing my demo tracks with better quality, better-played performances. And I thought, I can supervise that. My band are amazing, they can be part of that. And on we go.  

I don’t want to use the word ‘comfortable’ because that sounds kind of flaccid, somehow. But I feel confident in where I’m sitting creatively at the moment, and that feels good, and I feel like I’m putting my best foot forward.

On your blog, you wrote that you ‘still have something to share with the world’ in ‘Undefeated’. So, what exactly is it that you want to share?

It’s important to say that it’s entirely legitimate for certain sections of the world to say that they don’t give a fuck about what I want to share, and that’s all good.  

In ‘Undefeated’ there is a lot of stuff about nostalgia. There was a moment in time when it was going to be a concept record about an argument between me and my 15-year-old self. It didn’t quite stay that high concept, which is probably for the best. But there is a fair amount of that kind of thing running through the creative DNA of the record. And there are songs about impostor syndrome, life in the creative arts, London Tube stations. So, lots of different things!  

I try to be quite strict on checking myself on whether I am repeating myself, or whether I am making a record just because that’s what I do. That seems robotic to me. And it seems creatively indefensible somehow. People can argue as to how successfully I’ve checked myself on this. But personally, I feel that I have new things to say, and people can listen to the songs and judge for themselves.

You are very keen on having a distinctive creative voice in your music. One of the pre-released songs from ‘Undefeated’, ‘No Thank You For The Music’, is very much about having an individual voice and having things to say as opposed to bowing to musical conformity. Where does that spirit come from?

I had the fortune or misfortune (to be decided at a later date) of being obsessed with punk and rock music when I was growing up. There is a sense of independence and defiance and rejection that comes with a lot of that music—everything from The Clash to the Sex Pistols and Black Flag through to all the modern stuff like Bob Vylan.  

I would also say that in terms of making a life out of being a writer and being a performer and all the rest of it, I don’t really see the point unless I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m not trying to complain about my lot in life. There is a fair amount of costs in my cost-benefit analysis of what I do, but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. That is why I still do this. It’s fantastic. I’m very privileged. I’m not complaining. But if I was not free to have my own voice and to be my own writer and my own artist, then I’m not sure what the point of doing any of this would be for me. I’ve never been doing this because I want to be famous or because I want to be rich—fucking lol [as in ‘laugh out loud’, pronounced ‘lawl’]. The sense of being under my own steam is very much the point.  

‘No Thank You For The Music’ is a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the gatekeepers of this world, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve always thought the idea of ‘cool’ in the creative arts was dumb. Fuck off! What does that even mean? And how lame would you have to be to care? More than a few times in my career, people have attempted to throw the insult at me that what I do is not ‘relevant’. I just think, what kind of a fucking loser cares about whether art is, quote-unquote, relevant. I don’t listen to music and I don’t engage with other types of art while looking over my shoulders to check whether other people agree with my opinion. Don’t be such a fucking coward. 

There are people who make it their business to try and gatekeep what is and isn’t ‘cool’ or ‘in’ or ‘hip’ or ‘permissible’. I just think that that is laughable. Those people should be laughed at. I think that they should be hounded from polite society with jeers. Just fuck off and leave everybody alone. I hope that that comes through in the way that I present my music, but it’s also about how I listen to music and how I engage with music as well. And I hope that younger people have the courage to ignore those types of people.

I love the line ‘Bees shouldn’t waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit’.

I must admit, and in public for the first time [this interview was conducted on 8 February 2024], that that is actually a line from a friend’s grandmother. When I heard that, I thought, ‘I am putting that in a fucking song, goddamn.’ Credit where it’s due!

You are a patron of Humanists UK and, though your music is not explicitly godless (with some exceptions, like 2011’s ‘Glory Hallelujah’), it is very secular and humanistic. It’s about the love of life and humanity in the here and now. Is that conscious on your part?

It’s a reflection of how I see the world. My maternal grandfather was a priest, and he was a very smart and a very wise man, and I loved and respected him very much. In a way that the historian Tom Holland would endorse, I’m obviously culturally Christian—that is, in the way that Western culture broadly is post-Christian at the very least, up to and including modern progressivism. So that informs the way I see the world. But I don’t believe in the supernatural. I think that nature is super enough, thank you very much! But I’m wary of getting too deep into the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens type of angry, finger-pointing atheism. That just seems a little needless to me a lot of the time.  

‘Glory Hallelujah’ was intended as a sort of atheist hymn. But at the same time, I never really wanted that to be my central cause in engaging with the world. But we play it from time to time and people enjoy it.  

Occasionally I get people who write me letters telling me that I’m going to hell. We got protested in Norfolk, Virginia, many years ago by some evangelical Christians who said that I was Satan. As somebody who grew up listening to Slayer and Iron Maiden and the like, I thought that was fucking awesome. It made my day. An absolute career highlight.

I think that ‘humanism’ is a useful word, though in many ways it is quite a nebulous word. The idea of attempting to engage with the world in a morally and ethically coherent way that is not reliant on theism, broadly writ, is something that interests me, and something that I support. But again, I’m at pains not to batter people over the head with this stuff.  

There’s a clergyman in the US who writes appreciatively about me and my music, and I think that’s great. I think it’s lovely. A little bit more pluralism and ecumenism in the world at large would be a good thing. I’m very comfortable hanging out with people who I don’t 100% agree with. And I think more people should get behind that.

And that clergyman isn’t the only one. There is a Catholic guy, a friar I think, who writes me private correspondence. He sends me long philosophical discourses which, when I have the free time to engage in philosophical debates, I will get into. There’s a lot of mutual respect in the room, I like to think. I find it very flattering that somebody wants to engage with anything that I put together in that kind of depth. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, dude, you’ve thought about this a lot!’

I absolutely agree about engaging with people who disagree with you. As it happens, we’ve published a few articles quite critical of Holland’s views on Christianity recently.  

The first thing to say is that I’m an abject fanboy for The Rest Is History, the podcast Holland and Dominic Sandbrook host. I think it’s phenomenal. I’ve been to see them live. I want to be their friend! They’re very good, and their approach to history is refreshingly dogma-free. History is something I care about a lot.  

I remember that there was a wonderful moment when I saw them live. Sandbrook commented that the business of being a historian is not a judgemental business. We shouldn’t judge the behaviour of people in the past and weigh them in a balance and try to find ways of feeling superior to them.  

That’s a misapprehension of what the study of history is supposed to be, in my opinion, and indeed in Sandbrook’s opinion, and it was quite comforting to hear somebody say that and see him get a standing ovation for it. That gave me a little bit of hope because the flipside is a kind of airbrushing, Maoist approach to history (and I know that’s a loaded description). That approach is bad news, both for our own historical record and culture and for the people who engage in that way with the world. I don’t think it’s very healthy.  

Another pre-released song from ‘Undefeated’ is ‘Do One’, which is another ‘fuck you’ type of song, isn’t it?

I’m glad you put it that way because I think it is a ‘fuck you’ song. ‘Do One’ is the first song in the album, and the first line sets the tone: ‘Some people are just gonna hate you’. There’s a wonderful quote that I read a few years ago, which was very psychologically useful to me, which came from, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt. She essentially said that it takes two people to be humiliated. Ultimately, to be hounded, cancelled, chained, or whatever word we want to use, you have to agree to play the game on some level. And there’s something really liberating about being able to say ‘fuck off, I’m not playing.’

In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty unimportant, but I’ve had people come at me on various issues over the years. There have been times when it was fucking horrible, and deleterious to my mental health, and there have been times when it has felt really unfair and done in total bad faith.  

There have been times when I have felt that people were picking up on an ill-phrased thing that I said. I do think it’s important to take that on board sometimes, but more often than not it’s a bad-faith form of argument.  

It’s been something I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with and being affected by. And, as I say, it’s been catastrophic for my mental health at various times. But there’s something liberating about just saying, ‘don’t care, not playing, will not engage’. In practical terms, I don’t reply on social media and I don’t read the comments.  

There were days when I would be losing my fucking mind because of a couple of tweets from someone. And my wife would just be like, ‘What are you doing? Stop caring about this one person.’ That’s the other thing about the human mind. You can scroll past a hundred people telling you you’re great, but one person calls you a bastard and three days of my life goes down the toilet thinking about it.  

So the point of ‘Do One’ is essentially that I’m not playing that game anymore. And it took me more time than I would like to admit to figure that out, as the song says. I don’t want to be one of those people who just feeds off the hatred. With a certain kind of mindset, the people coming at you just become flies bouncing off a windscreen. You sleep better once you reach that point.

I think I have learned how to pick my battles a bit. There are days when one wants to engage with the good-faith arguments. In my line of work, it’s easy for people to confuse bad faith cancel culture and legitimate criticism, and I try to steer the right way through that. I’m certainly not above being criticised in terms of my ethics and actions and music.

I’m actually really interested in good music criticism. There have been times in my life when I’ve read a critique of an album of mine and I think, ‘Yeah, that’s a fair point’. There’s value in that. Historically, you can look at some of Bob Dylan’s output as being part of a conversation with Greil Marcus. There are fewer and fewer music journalists who write music criticism at that level these days, which is a sadness, I think.  

I’m not trying to sit here and say that I’m fucking perfect or anything like that, but hopefully, I can tune out the haters to a degree as well. In many ways, ‘Undefeated’ is saying, ‘I’m ten albums in, motherfucker.’ After that amount of time successfully touring and successfully releasing records, my music can’t be meritless. It’s landing with someone, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.

So you feel that you have earned your place, to put it another way?

Hopefully, yes. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

You said of your previous album ‘FTHC’ that it was an attempt to be more rawly personal. Can the same be said of ‘Undefeated’?

I would say so, but in a slightly different way. I’m still at the point of figuring out the vocabulary to describe exactly what I mean by that. I’ve been using the word ‘defiant’ quite a lot. But ‘FTHC’ is quite an angry record, in retrospect. There’s a fair amount of bitterness in it. There are a lot of tracks about childhood and stuff that are not happy-go-lucky songs. In ‘Undefeated’, there is definitely a fair number of middle fingers being shown, but there’s a smile on the face at the same time. It’s a more fun place to be.

That’s not true of the whole album, though. There’s a track towards the end called ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ which is one of the rawest pieces of writing that I’ve ever done in my life. I’m both excited and nervous for that song to be released because I think that it’s…’unforgiving’ might be the word. Hopefully, the record is not monotonal, not monochromatic.

It’s an age-old question, and it applies to writers not only of music but of essays and memoirs and even novels, but how do you find the right balance? How much do you reveal? Can you ever fully reveal everything?

It depends on what type of art you are trying to make. I don’t think the Scissors Sisters spend very much time thinking about making confessional music, but they make great art. My taste of music leans towards the confessional, towards the raw and the brutally honest. Arab Strap is one of my favourite bands. I remember hearing their album ‘Philophobia’ for the first time, and just staring and thinking, ‘Is this motherfucker for real? Is he really saying this stuff out loud? Like, we can hear you, man!’ So I’ve always been interested in that sort of art.  

There are constraints on it, of course, one of which is consideration for others. It’s perfectly legitimate for me to be as raw as I want about myself. How legitimate it is for me to be raw about somebody else in the public forum is a more complicated question. In 2013 I put out a break-up record that had 13 songs about one person, and she was not appreciative of that. And I think that that is a legitimate response.  

It’s important to note that there is some artistry involved in the confessional style. I could sing out my diary, but I’m not sure anyone would give a fuck. The creative trick, the magic trick at the heart of it all in some ways, is to take the personal and make it feel universal, or at least that’s how it is in my corner of writing. Art is about empathy to a large extent, and I’ve spent most of my time as a writer trying to find a way of expressing my feelings that is useful, or that is interpretable, by other people who live different lives. I want it to be raw, and I want it to be honest, but I also want it to be accessible. And that’s a neat trick, and it’s not an easy one. If it was, we’d all be writing better songs. Finding that balance is tough. In a way, that’s the centre of my working life, looking for that balance.

At the risk of seeming entirely obsessed with songwriting, there’s a wonderful Leonard Cohen line—well, first we just need to establish the fact that Cohen was the greatest songwriter of the 20^th century.  

I’m so glad you said that—I completely agree! I say it all the time.

I like Dylan, but Cohen is an infinitely superior songwriter, in my opinion, and now people can shout at me. But the line is, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in’.  That’s one of the most profound couplets that I’m aware of in human writing. And it says something about the creative act as well. Finding that moment of damage can also be a moment of revelation.  

Salman Rushdie once said of the first three lines of Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ that, ‘Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.’ That’s some compliment.

It’s interesting to compare songwriting with other kinds of writing. Songwriting is a more bite-sized medium to work in. I’m sort of terrified by the concept of a novel. The idea of trying to sustain a creative idea over that amount of linguistic output gives me the fear, I’ll be honest with you. But, as that quote sort of outlines, the flipside is that there is a concision to good songwriting. That’s the thing I enjoy sometimes, and I think that’s what sets songwriting apart from poetry. In a song, you’ve got eight lines before you’re back in the chorus, so whatever you’ve got to say needs to be said now. I suppose you could add another 25 stanzas, but then you end up being Genesis, and nobody really wants that. And Cohen is the master of that kind of concision. I actually have a ‘Bird on the Wire’ tattoo in reference to that song. And that line, ‘like a drunk in a midnight choir’, is the most perfectly concise image. And God rest his soul. 

When you mentioned the break-up album, I thought, ‘Was that your Taylor Swift phase?’ And that makes me wonder if, looking back, you see distinct phases in your career?  

Yes, there are definitely phases in my career. If you look at the career arc of many artists—like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Costello, Nick Cave, people like that—there often tends to be a slightly odd middle-aged phase. Whether Dylan being a Christian or, indeed, Cohen producing great songs with Phil Spector in the late 1980s, but with terrible production, or Neil Young being sued for not sounding like Neil Young. There are these creative lull moments for many artists. Actually, one of the reasons I’m terminally obsessed with Nick Cave is that I think that he’s somebody who sidestepped that, and I’m curious how he did so.  

Of course, it’s pretentious of me to compare myself to all the people I’ve just listed, but cut me a break. I feel like I’m in a moment where I’m trying to be raucously middle-aged. I’m 42. That’s definitely middle-aged. The world is full of variously named generations constantly trying to pretend that middle age and old age start later because they’re getting close to it. Fuck off, man, 42 is middle-aged! I’d like to be raucous and ill-mannered in my middle age rather than soft and flabby and reticent. 

Grow old disgracefully.

Exactly.

Incidentally, it’s worth throwing in that Taylor Swift is clearly an excellent songwriter, musician, and performer, and I think that the general disdain within which a certain type of person in the music industry (and it’s usually a guy) holds Taylor Swift is so obviously sexist at this point. Just stop it now. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the MAGA conspiracy nuts here.) She’s the artist of her generation. That’s the fucking end of that conversation. She’s arguably bigger than Michael Jackson, now. And, like Michael Jackson was the artist of the eighties, and there is no one to compare, so too with Taylor Swift. I think she’s a great songwriter, and I just had to get that off my chest.

She completely screwed my album chart plans, because she’s putting out a record two weeks before mine is released. And do you know what? I’ll let it slide.

‘Undefeated’ is about middle age, as you mentioned. So, what’s it like being middle-aged? To what extent are you the same Frank Turner you were 20 years ago?

Aside from some very basic fundamentals, not much. And that’s how I want it to be. It’s a well-worn quote, but Muhammad Ali said something like, ‘a man who is the same at 40 as he was at 20 has wasted 20 years of his life.’ I don’t want to be the same person. There’s a curious sense of proprietorship that a certain type of music fan has that they want you to stay how you were when they discovered you, and I sympathize because I can see myself having that feeling about some musicians that I like, but also: fuck off, you’re boring! Life is about change, and I want to change and develop as an artist. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Again, this is not an original thought, but my experience of getting older is that there is a quid pro quo. Everything hurts more and hangovers last longer, and I spend more time worrying about sleeping than I used to—all this sort of shit—but I’m more confident in who I am and what I think about the world. That feels hard-won to me to a degree, and I’m grateful for it. And that feels like a direction of travel as well. I’m not sure that that’s a process that has reached its apotheosis for me just yet, and that’s fun. I like that idea. I like the idea of being in my 70s and really not giving a fuck. Good for me!

That reminds me of Rushdie again, who is one of my favourite writers—

I strongly agree, by the way. I think he’s absolutely sensational. I’ve just finished [Rushdie’s memoir] Joseph Anton and it was amazing.  

Actually, I think it’s in ‘Joseph Anton’ that he says this: something along the lines of his 40s being a man’s prime.  

That may be more true in the world of novels and fiction writers than it is in the world of musicians. But here’s hoping we can buck that trend.

Further reading on freethinking and secularism in art and music:

Porcus Sapiens, by Emma Park and Paul Fitzgerald

Reading list against nuclear war, by Emma Park

Can art be independent of politics? by Ella Nixon

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

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Every couple of years, whenever he declares that he is a ‘cultural Christian’, Richard Dawkins provides a ‘gotcha!’ moment to a whole host of ideologues. That he has expressed this sentiment for at least a couple of decades should suffice in putting to bed the self-congratulatory notion that his latest LBC reiteration is a triumph of Christianity over nonbelief or the death knell for ‘New Atheism’. These claims have been made more frequently recently, owing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent conversion from atheism to Christianity. In fact, her conversion prompted an open letter by the evolutionary biologist questioning her embrace of Christian beliefs.

Another reason why Dawkins’s LBC interview received backlash was that he set contemporary British Christian culture against Islam, declared his dislike of Ramadan celebrations in Britain, described Britain as a (culturally) ‘Christian country’, and noted that Islam is ‘hostile’ to, for example, gay rights and women’s rights. But again, there is nothing new about Dawkins’s singling out of Islam as being especially problematic today—even many Muslim thinkers concede this. Like Christopher Hitchens before him, he believes that Christianity was just as dangerous as Islam historically (he states as much in his open letter to Hirsi Ali).¹ Even so, Dawkins does not limit the simultaneous embracing of a cultural affiliation with a religion and staunch atheism to Christianity, even extending it to Islam in The God Delusion.

The idea that atheism and religious identity can coexist in an individual is hardly groundbreaking. In Sanatana Dharma, or Hinduism, the nirishvaravadi (one who rejects the notion of a divine supreme being) and the nastika (those who reject the divinity of Hindu scripture) not only have the freedom to self-identify as a Hindu, but also have the Vedic, or scriptural, permission to do so. Both Jainism and Buddhism stem from the nastika tradition of Hinduism, rejecting the notion of a creator—albeit still preaching the divine and the supernatural, thus underlining the fluidity of the Indic belief systems. However, while the combination of irreligion with religious culture is natural in syncretic polytheism, pantheism, and non-theism, it is more difficult to envisage in Abrahamic monotheism.

While Jews run the gamut from the ultra-Orthodox to the atheist, all of whom unapologetically lay claim to a Jewish identity, Christianity and Islam are the last bastions of monotheistic rigidity. It is no coincidence that these two became the two largest religions in the world, given the aggressive evangelicalism and the notion of one, absolutist, divine truth common to both. These strategies have since been coopted by political dogmas that establish themselves as quasi-religions, which in recent years can be seen in the rise of Critical Social Justice ideology or ‘wokeism’. The Christian uproar against Dawkins identifying with Christianity owing to his rejection of the Biblical doctrine is no different to the woke repudiation of Dawkins as left-leaning or progressive owing to his blaspheming against gender ideology, for which he has been duly excommunicated by the American Humanist Association. But, of course, these affronts carry a whole different meaning in Muslim countries and communities.

Not only is Islam unparalleled in how it explicitly names other religions as enemies, and in how it reiterates the negation of all other faiths and gods in its daily prayers, but most critically it today remains the only religion that codifies death and violence for thought crimes in numerous states. And yet, despite facing sharia-codified violence, many thinkers for centuries have managed to merge a communal Muslim identity with a rejection of Islamic faith, from Persian alchemists to Turkic physicians to Arab philosophers to Urdu poets in the Indian subcontinent. Granted that self-preservation has been a significant motivation for such thinkers, many also associated with religious culture owing to their desire for uplift and community. This invariably hinges on fighting theological dogma, for it is convenient for the fundamentalists to reject even indigenous voices that self-identify as being outside of the fold as echoers of alien ideas, an allegation customarily launched against the critical thought propounded by many prominent ex-Muslims in recent years.

Furthermore, those who establish theological belief as the definitive feature of religious identity ignore that only a fraction of humankind chooses their faith when they convert from one to another; for the rest, religious identity is just a coincidence of birth, not much different to nationality or ethnicity. Also, if belief were to be used as the determiner, its logical extrapolation would be to presume that all members of the community are adherents of all religious tenets, making all Christians homophobes and all Muslims violently misogynistic. The very reason many have championed a rethinking of the term ‘Islamophobia’ is that it conflates Islam and Muslims, a distinction that many, including Dawkins in his latest LBC interview, maintain is critical so as to protect the expression of critiques against the harmful ideas Muslims and ex-Muslims alike are born into.

Another much-regurgitated critique of Dawkins’s latest interview, which arguably he has walked into himself, is that by identifying as a cultural Christian, the atheist scholar wants to ‘reap the fruits’ of Christianity without believing in the tree that produced them. When Dawkins calls Britain a ‘Christian country’—regardless of the cultural or communal asterisks—to reject Islamic displays, he inadvertently echoes Christian nationalists and their relegation of Muslims, and members of other religious communities, as lesser members of British society, even if not in the eyes of law. Any secular state, which Dawkins has spent a lifetime advocating for, should neither be Christian, nor Muslim, nor affiliated with any other religion, which is perhaps best achieved by limiting all religious displays to their designated spheres.

This is the crucial difference between people formulating religio-cultural identities and states doing so. State secularism has been, and remains, more critical to human progress than any variation of theism or atheism, and it is the sole guarantor of coexistence for all belief systems and cultures, especially when implemented without any preference for the majority or minority. And it is in secular realms that all orthodox and heterodox identities, including nonbelieving members of monotheistic communities, can find their own spaces to express themselves.

1. Hitchens argued that all religions were evil, but not always in the same way or to the same extent at different times; he once said that if he had lived in the 1930s he would view the Catholic Church as the most evil religious force. He was well aware, too, of the many contemporary threats posed by Christian fanatics, and believed that ‘over space and time…[the threat of different religions] tremendously evens out… [And that all religions are] equally rotten, false, dishonest, corrupt, humourless, and dangerous, in the last analysis.’ ︎

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