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Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West?

Matt Johnson — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 06:01:00 +0000

Jordan Peterson, ‘the Richard dawkins of new theism’, making an address to delegates at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, 2023.

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.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI IN A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH JORDAN PETERSON, OS GUINNESS, AND OTHERS AT ARC FORUM 2023.

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).

Many politicians and intellectuals who present themselves as defenders of the Christian West don’t have an inspiring record on Ukraine.

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.

The New Theists…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.

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.

Against the ‘New Theism’

Daniel James Sharp — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 06:09:00 +0000

Note: this is a very slightly revised version of a piece originally written for my personal Substack and published on 7 February of this year.

Fiolent, Crimea, Black Sea. Cape Fiolent is home to St. George Orthodox Monastery. image credit: © Vyacheslav Argenberg. image under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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.

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. ︎
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. ︎
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). ︎
And perhaps this is what really marks New Theism out as ‘new’. In that sense, it is perhaps more appropriately labelled than New Atheism. ︎
Richard Carrier has laid waste at some length to Brierley’s apologetics, as propounded in Brierley’s 2017 book Unbelievable. ︎
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? ︎
Vide the unfortunately named National Conservatism movement.
︎
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. ︎
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. ︎
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. ︎
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. ︎
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.”’ ︎
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. ︎
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. ︎
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. ︎
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. ︎

The post Against the ‘New Theism’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity

Jack Stacey — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 06:19:00 +0000

The ‘Four Horsemen of the non-apocalypse’. Image credit: direktor, based on works by d avid shankbone, ensceptico, mathias schindler, and unknown. image used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The ‘New Atheist’ position has been misunderstood and misrepresented since the term was coined. There seems to be something about its capacity for independent thought which makes it a perennial source of confusion.

Eighteen years after publishing The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins recently managed to surprise both conservative figures and Muslim activists by saying that he is a ‘cultural Christian’ and would choose that faith over Islam if forced.

Seeing as though he has said as much for decades—even getting a similar response to it in 2018 when comparing church bells favourably to the muezzin’s call to prayer—one wonders where these people (from Jordan Peterson to Mehdi Hasan) have been all this time.

The natural suspicion is that they were not really listening to begin with, even when they were in conversation with Dawkins, as both Peterson and Hasan have been. In any case, they have undoubtedly since been working up their respective theocratic arguments ahead of what they see as the battle for Western hearts and minds.

As such, it is not that they cannot conceive that a famed atheist might prefer the religion of his upbringing if compelled, but that this does not sufficiently convince those they hope to convince (including themselves) that he was all along a lost Christian, shortsighted iconoclast, or closeted ‘Islamophobe’—to be recruited, ignored or despised accordingly.

That the defenders of Christianity and Islam are so closely aligned here should come as little surprise. The thing about the religiously motivated is that they are often confounded by freethinkers.

Here one is put in mind of the joke relayed by Dawkins’s late colleague Christopher Hitchens: a man is stopped at a checkpoint in Belfast and asked whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. He answers that he is an atheist. Response: ‘Protestant atheist or Catholic atheist?’

For his part, Hitchens refused to be the butt of such a joke, preferring the more forthright, negative term ‘anti-theist’. And yet, even he was unapologetic in his gratitude for some of his Christian inheritance, from the King James Version of the Bible to the works of G. K. Chesterton. Actually, he was even willing to assent to a sort of ‘Protestant atheism’ in his love for the KJV and his respect for the Protestant tradition of resistance to Catholic authority. The point is that none of this necessitated a belief in, or even respect for, the divine.

(Likewise, his assertion that ‘the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form’ did not make him a bigot or an ‘Islamophobe’, since Islam is an ideology, not a race, to be judged on its merits.)

Still, he and Dawkins, along with the two other ‘Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse’, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, spent much time debating the extent to which Christianity could be credited for Western achievements. Hitchens, for instance, asserted that John Donne could not have written his poetry without piety, while the others have variously pointed out the inherent problem of exclusively acclaiming the only game in town for the works it commissioned. In other words, we will never know what Michelangelo would have produced in a secular society.

It is therefore tedious that despite such nuanced conversations (along with countless books, public debates, reiterations, and restatements), educated people should come away thinking that atheism (new or otherwise) is just another blind dogma, or the want of one.

Worse is the increasingly popular view that the only way to fill the ‘God-shaped hole’ or to combat the encroachment of Islam(ism) and ‘wokeism’ on public life is through a return to Christianity.

Of these re-conversions, the most surprising and instructive was that of the famed New Atheist and critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The reasons she cites for her newfound faith in Jesus are that she missed the spiritual solace she found in religion and that uniting under the West’s Judeo-Christian tradition is the only viable bulwark against the West’s totalitarian enemies—China, Russia, Islamism, and wokeism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a panel discussion with Jordan Peterson, Os Guinness and others at ARC Forum 2023.

The first reason demonstrates the regressive draw religion holds for those brought up in it. The capacity for lapsed believers to attempt to find ‘meaning’ in the faith of their youth, especially as thoughts of mortality begin to assert themselves, is as predictable as the age-old political shuffle to the right. But Hirsi Ali has ‘returned’ to a different faith entirely, which further suggests that any meaning has more to do with the medium than the message, and thus cannot be meaningful in any true sense. It is simply a kind of nostalgia for the little rituals, sights, smells, and consolations of religion. In short, the feeling a ‘cultural Christian’ like her friend Richard Dawkins would share.

The second reason demonstrates how quickly religion becomes the answer to everything for the born again (again). As Hirsi Ali goes on to say:

‘The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.’

The argument here, then, is that to resist totalising belief systems like Islam and Chinese autocracy, we must take our lead from them and then reinstate another. It is also worth noting the suggested (if obvious) starting point: those ‘foundational texts’, which is to say the ‘fundamentals’—this being a few letters away from the approach which once had Hirsi Ali ‘cursing Jews’ from inside a burqa.

The temptation is to believe that no such thing could happen here, of course, while forgetting that the potency and unpredictability of doctrinaire wish-thinking is the very root of the problem in the first place.

Indeed, much of the concern about Wokeness comes from how much it resembles a religion, with its fanaticism and irrational articles of faith. How, then, can we argue credibly that trans women are not literally women while, for instance, maintaining that bread and wine can literally transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of an immortal Bronze Age preacher born of a virgin?

But not much less will do, according to the ‘New Theists’. Otherwise, we are just like Dawkins, who has either failed to see the light or is recalcitrant, and therefore cannot join the united ranks of Christian soldiers marching to the Culture Wars.

These are wars they will lose, of course. For there remains no proper foundation from which to make the required leaps of faith en masse. Their only real plan, it seems, is to cynically entrust themselves to a God they barely know. This, in the face of enemies whose every moment is accounted for by a set of absolutist tenets, is asking to be dragged down to their level and beaten with experience.

And yet this is a plan on which many have now embarked, inspired in part by Tom Holland’s history of the faith, Dominion. But I would submit that the New Theists’ fervour owes more to the tendency of history to repeat itself. For what are these but vague agitations for another crusade in response to an expansionist caliphate, or other? If God be for us, who can be against us? is a rhetorical question with a different answer every time it is asked.

Only through rational secularism have we ever come close to breaking this cycle. This is reflected in our language—from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. This is not to say that secularisation has been without far-reaching implications. The same advancements which negated the need for religion as a way to explain the world have also undone respect for tradition and inherited wisdom while atomising society.

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has been the most astute observer of this phenomenon. Especially by chronicling the post-postmodern malaise of the individual, he has managed to predict the machinations of the competing orders of Islamism and Globalism. In doing so, he has become the sage of our time, more so than Holland, which is why his apparent proposal of Christianity as an antidote has been so readily assumed.

Scepticism and intellectual rigour…are the very qualities which, now and in the coming age of Artificial Intelligence, are far more valuable against our enemies than matching their ignorance—and arrogance.

What seems to have been overlooked by those who herald Houellebecq as a Catholic thinker, however, is that even he has found it impossible to complete the conversion. In an interview with a specialist in his work, Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, he said: ‘Conversion acts as a revelation. In fact, every time I go to mass I believe; sincerely and totally, I have a revelation every time. But as soon as I leave, it collapses.’

In which case, what hope is there for the rest of us? After all, nothing less than a full-throated avowal will suffice if Christianity is to be the cure for our ills. There is no way to force belief, so all that remains is to reject the notion or deceive ourselves and those around us, which is only a disguised form of cultural Christianity anyway. And even if we were all to be smitten in some mass Damascene moment, what of its unintended consequences for scepticism and intellectual rigour? These are the very qualities which, now and in the coming age of Artificial Intelligence, are far more valuable against our enemies than matching their ignorance—and arrogance.

The problem is that such looming spectres are exactly what make past certainties seductive. As Oswald Spengler predicted, existential threats inspire a search for existential responses. This new Christian revival, then, has as much to do with a yearning for transcendence of, and salvation from, what we are menaced by as it has to do with fighting back. The urge is not to be sneered at, but likewise it should not go unchallenged when it comes at the expense of our critical faculties, especially in these critical times.

Cultural Christianity is therefore an argument for getting our priorities straight. It is an argument for recognising that religion is in fact the product of culture, not the other way around—an assumption that even the religious make for every other faith but their own.

Then we might see that just as the beauty of the ancient world can be appreciated and preserved without adoration for Zeus, Jupiter, or Osiris, so too can we extract significance from Christian holidays, art, and architecture without insulting the rational human impulses which may not have inspired them, but which surely created them.

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

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 New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity appeared first on The Freethinker.

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

Daniel James Sharp — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 05:51:00 +0000

Credit: ben morse

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.

‘undefeated’ is released 3 may

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.

credit: Shannon Shumaker

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

The post ‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman

Daniel James Sharp — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 05:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

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. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

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.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.