Elon Musk, in a recent conversation with Jordan Peterson, suggested that he was ‘probably a cultural Christian.’ Without being particularly religious, he claimed he was a ‘big believer in the principles of Christianity’, among which he named forgiveness. He also said that the Christian pronatalist presumption would probably ‘lead to a better society.’ Richard Dawkins, who is famous for being notoriously anti-religious, recently suggested that he does not wish for an end to Christian traditions in England because ‘I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’

In this article, I want to explain why I am a ‘cultural non-Christian.’ This does not necessarily mean that I am a non-Christian. It just means that, culturally, I am a non-Christian. Furthermore, though I can understand why somebody would see their embeddedness in a historic Christian culture as a fact, I understand much less why this cultural experience should be transformed into a political movement or an ideology.

The term ‘cultural Christian’ is shorthand for an attitude that rejects the supernatural claims of Christianity but still admits to being culturally determined by a historical context shaped by Christianity. Many people have embraced what Christian critics call ‘Christianity lite’, that is, Christian culture without miracles and divinity. Some people value moral ideas like humility or the sanctity of the individual, which they believe makes them ‘somewhat’ Christian in a cultural way. This leads to paradoxical labels. Slavoj Žižek has called his most recent book Christian Atheism, and French President Emmanuel Macron identifies himself as an ‘agnostic Catholic.’ Jordan Peterson adhered to a similar line when he said on television ‘I act as if God exists’ (emphasis added).

First, I wonder how deeply these people have actually examined their cultural contexts. In my own cultural environment, I find little that can really be identified as Christian. Instead, I notice that it is replete with almost anti-Christian elements. I might find a few secularized cultural components that were formerly Christian, but there is nothing powerful enough there to lead me to conclude that I am a cultural Christian. As a European or as a Westerner, I am culturally determined by secularism, the Enlightenment, the freedom to speak up against religion, and the overcoming of religion.

Cultural Christians tend to list qualities like respect for the individual, loyalty, or self-control as core Christian values that they still believe in. However, beyond the fact that such values can be found in practically any religion, these cultural principles have reached most of us in already highly secularized forms. Human rights and equality are secular ideas. Why should one insist on their Christian origins (a highly debatable proposition, anyway)? Many such principles could just as well be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and I could thus declare myself a cultural Greek. A kneejerk reaction might suggest that it is simply a difference in temporal distance that makes such an idea less feasible, but is the legacy of Greek philosophy really that much more distant than the Biblical origins of Christianity?

In my opinion, many non-practicing Christians are not as culturally influenced by Christianity as they think. They might imagine they are, and they may even want it to be true; but often, it is a highly secularized form of ‘Christian culture’ that they have experienced. The libidinal and subliminal reasons why these people attribute secular phenomena to Christianity might be interesting for their own sake, but they are irrelevant here.

We appreciate European culture, but to what extent is this culture actually Christian? Churches and their distinctive architecture can be used to illustrate a broader point here. When the Notre Dame of Paris burned in 2019, plenty of non-religious people were sincerely struck by this cultural loss and expressed a desire to have this monument quickly repaired. But this outpouring of emotion cannot simply be attributed to some kind of latent religiosity. It is more likely that the structure as a historical monument and a great example of Gothic architecture were what mattered to many, rather than its religious significance.

I appreciate much of the architecture that has been built by Christians, but I do not appreciate it as ‘Christian architecture.’ I appreciate it in the same secular way in which one might appreciate any architecture. The same goes for ideas and concepts that might once have been the preserve of Christian theologians but are no longer used in a Christian sense. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples is Christmas, which many celebrate without celebrating it as a Christian event. One could even go to Mass and enjoy it as a spectacle without it meaning that one is Christian in any way.

Theoretically, one could build a new Gothic cathedral and make it non-denominational, that is, build one that can be used by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike. Many who think of themselves as ‘cultural Christians’ might not be dissatisfied with such a monument in their city and might even view it as an example of foreign ideas being well integrated into their own culture. They are cultural Europeans rather than cultural Christians. In a similar vein, Dawkins mentioned that he enjoys listening to Christian hymns, and I believe that it is rather the music than the religious lyrics that he appreciates. He too is arguably a cultural European more so than a cultural Christian. How many people who enjoy Bach can actually relate to the lyrics of the St. Matthew Passion?

What we are really influenced by as Europeans and what really gives us an identity as Westerners is not religion but the liberty to act against obscurantism and religion. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a recent speech, suggested that Europeans should look to Christianity in order to reinstall meaning and purpose in a European society that has lost its moral compass. He does not seem to be aware that he suggests something that is deeply alien to a European culture that was born out of a revolution against religious authoritarianism. Unknowingly, by insisting on archaic Christian roots, Orbán, Peterson, and Musk push the West towards a worldview with which Christianity bears strong similarities: Islam.

Islamic societies continue to be much more strongly influenced by religion, and the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ is unnecessary because Islam is the only cultural reference point available: religion and culture almost entirely overlap, or are at least perceived to. Simultaneously and paradoxically, when the religious reference point is so strong that non-religious cultural aspects quasi-disappear, the idea of a ‘cultural Muslim’ becomes nonsensical and practically synonymous with the notion of a ‘cultural non-Muslim.’ A cultural Muslim is de facto a non-Muslim.

This is also the case for Christians, but for them, this paradox is less obvious. Westerners tend to have many more non-religious reference points, with the result that the concept of ‘cultural Christianity’ assumes a stronger connection to the religion than would exist if one identified more strongly with other cultural referents. Because one could choose another identity, the choice of Christianity holds more weight. Typically, when a Muslim says that they are only ‘culturally’ Muslim, the assumption is that they are in fact no longer Muslim. When a Christian says that they are ‘culturally’ Christian, the emphasis is that they are still somehow Christian. In Western societies, culture and religion can be more naturally perceived as two distinct things, and Musk et al plead not for a distinction but for a further confusion of cultural and religious aspects. It remains a strange choice. For example, Musk could simply talk about family policy boosting birth rates; why does he need Christianity to make his point?

I concede that the idea of being a ‘cultural Christian’, with which I personally cannot empathise, might be genuinely felt by some. However, there is no reason to turn this vague feeling into a movement or an ideology. This is precisely what Musk et al are doing. And when Dawkins values cultural Christianity as a ‘bulwark against Islam’ he is clearly missing the point. The only bulwark against Islam would be secularism.

I feel that you want to ask me now if I am a Christian or a non-Christian without the prefix ‘cultural.’ But this is not the topic of the article. Here I merely wanted to explain why, in cultural terms, I cannot be a Christian.

Related reading

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

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

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

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

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

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After three years, every print issue of the Freethinker published between 1881 and 2014 is now available to read, free of charge, in our digital archive. So it seems justified to do a little navel-gazing: our image of the week is the very first page of the very first issue of the Freethinker from 1 May 1881. You can read a stirring introduction to the archive from Bob Forder here and the archive itself can be found here. Enjoy!

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For the past three years, GW Foote & Co. Ltd have been working on a project to digitise the complete run of print versions of the Freethinker from 1881 to 2014. This project has now been completed and everyone can access this extraordinary back catalogue free of charge here.

In the first instalment of this series, I explained my own interest in freethought literature and my continuing career as a part-time bookseller for over 40 years. I have had the privilege of handling thousands of freethought books, pamphlets, journals, and other ephemera. However, the occasions when I have come across past issues of the Freethinker have been remarkably few. I have handled early bound volumes just twice and even later examples are rare, with dealers often demanding prices best described as speculative. I have asked myself why this is and guess that the attitude to newspapers is generally that you read them and then throw them away.

What is more, the printed Freethinker was always published in a relatively large format—the first copies were foolscap size (approximately 34 x 20 cm). This lasted for many years and made them difficult to store. The copies I have come across have almost always been bound volumes sold at the end of the calendar year. There were two types of these, one leather bound and one bound in sturdy green cloth. The former did not age well, with the leather cracking and the boards detaching, but the latter stood the test of time. I am delighted to say that one of the two sets I have handled still adorns my bookshelves and continues to provide me with hours of instruction, distraction, and entertainment.

If you agree that the Freethinker has been the dominant voice of British secularism and freethought for 143 years, and that secularism and freethought are central to a free and democratic society, then the Freethinker is precious, and it is troubling that up to now the archive has been so difficult to access. For most, it has meant an arduous physical visit to a copyright library. This is why the conclusion of the GW Foote & Co. digitisation project is cause for cheers and celebration.

As a tentative pointer to what readers might enjoy about the archive, I offer the following comments on the Freethinker’s history and an indication of what I have discovered over the years in my own printed collection.

In a previous article, I wrote of George Willam Foote’s (1850-1915) early life, his founding of the Freethinker in 1881, and his year-long imprisonment for blasphemy. An additional matter that deserves recognition is that Foote’s actions involved a large element of self-sacrifice. He was a cultivated, bookish man, a librarian with refined literary tastes who wrote beautifully. For him, the abrasive, satirical, and outrageous style of the new journal was initially alien. However, he was so incensed by the treatment of the President of the National Secular Society (NSS), Charles Bradlaugh, and the deprivation of Bradlaugh’s right to sit as an MP for Northampton, that he determined to take the fight to the ‘bigots’.

He was also influenced by the established tone of freethought publications, epitomised by George Jacob Holyoake’s (1817-1906) writings which were thoughtful, worthy, totally lacking in humour, and, for many, rather boring. Foote reasoned that humour was a devastating weapon when employed against pompous authority figures in the established church and against religion in general. He reasoned that nobody takes seriously an individual or idea that has been laughed at and he also noted the satirical power of cartoons, which he was to employ with great effect and which led to his conviction for blasphemy. Some things never change; cartoons have not lost their power to provoke in the modern world.

Foote’s years as editor were not only characterised by his pungent attacks on the religious and religion. After his accession to the NSS Presidency in 1890, the Freethinker emerged as the NSS’s ‘in-house’ journal, acting as a type of noticeboard providing details of lectures, meetings, and publications. I particularly enjoy Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s tightly written historical and biographical articles. Here was a man who grasped the significance of the intellectual and historical traditions of freethought. It is a great pity that his poor health and early death scuppered his plans to write a history of those traditions.

By the beginning of the First World War, Foote was ailing. Although he nominally remained editor, he had relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea for the sea air and occasionally commuted into London. Much of the actual editorial work and writing was being carried on by his sub-editor and loyal deputy, Chapman Cohen (1868-1954). Cohen formally took over the editor’s position and became President of the NSS when Foote died in 1915. He was known to a generation as CC, remaining editor until 1951. The Freethinker had had just two editors in its first 70 years. 

Like Foote, Cohen came to dominate the journal and make it his own, but there were differences in approach, substance, and style.  By the time of Cohen’s accession, the days when freethought was associated with radical political campaigns and working-class activism were long past. CC had little or no contact with politicians and always resisted political interventions in his many public meetings. His writings were characterised by a relatively sober critique of the illogicality, contradictions, and self-serving nature of religion and the religious. His arguments were rooted in philosophy, natural and social science, and literature. Foote’s biting satire was no more, and the cartoons long forgotten.

To my mind, Cohen’s greatest attribute was his ability to make the logical case for freethought in terms accessible to general readers. He never talked down, he just wrote logically and clearly in elegant, plain English that all could understand. Forty years ago, when I started book dealing, there were a few older customers who knew him. More than once I heard him described as ‘my greatest teacher’. To this, I would add that there was not a freethinking argument advanced by Bertrand Russell that CC had not made before. This is not to belittle Russell; rather, it is to recognise Cohen. For those who want to understand the case for atheism and the dangers of religion, just go to the Cohen years in the archive.

Before moving on, I must recognise CC’s sheer hard work. Each week through the 1920s and 30s he edited 12 or 16 foolscap pages, some of which he wrote. He corresponded with readers, provided the NSS with leadership, and spent his weekends speaking publicly. In the summer, that meant ‘outdoors’, in parks and public spaces. From September to April, he was ‘indoors’, travelling the country giving lectures (sometimes three in a single weekend). For example, during the 1919-1920 indoor season he spoke at no less than 34 venues on more than 50 occasions. This was a pattern and level of activity that he maintained throughout the interwar years.

One contributor whose writings will be enjoyed by those with an interest in freethought and radical history is Herbert Cutner (1881-1969), although he did not restrict himself to historical subjects. He began his contributions in 1920 and by 1959 had had his 1,000^th article published.

Since Cohen’s resignation the turnover of editors has been more rapid, at times too rapid, although an important exception was Barry Duke’s 24-year tenure beginning in 1998. One editor who had a particular impact on me was Bill McIlroy (1928-2013), who served three separate terms totalling more than 14 years. As well as commissioning some important historical essays, and networking with individuals such as politicians Tony Benn and Michael Foot and academics Edward Royle and David Berman, Bill had a talent for punchy, witty headlines. Here are some examples to whet the appetite. ‘Pious Indoctrinators Tighten Grip on Classroom Captives’ (July 1988); ‘Embryology Bill: “Pro-Life” Dirty Tricks Campaign Aborted’ (May 1990); ‘Patten Links Crime Rate with Decline in Fear of Fire and Brimstone’ (May 1992).

Another relatively recent contributor who should be mentioned is Jim Herrick (1943-2023), a stalwart of the freethought and secularist movement in general, editor of the Freethinker from 1977 to 1981, and contributor on a diverse range of subjects over many years. I have particularly enjoyed Jim’s theatre reviews and historical articles. An invaluable contribution is his centenary history of the journal, Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of the Freethinker, published in 1982.

So, the Freethinker lives on as a contemporary digital magazine rooted in its historical archive. Not everything published in its pages over the past 143 years has been impressive, although much of it is. But for me, it is a kind of intellectual treasure trove hidden away for too long and unavailable to even its most fervent supporters. There is nothing quite like it, with its alternative and critical take on religious belief, contemporary events, and social developments. It is also a testament to those who have gone before and who have on occasion sacrificed their own interests rather than surrender their intellectual freedom. The digital archive will be invaluable in keeping this intellectual tradition, once termed ‘the best of causes’, alive for a long time to come.

Editor: The Freethinker digital archive is a great achievement, the work of many hands. Though it, like the Freethinker today, is free to read, many resources were put into it and donations from readers are much appreciated. Anyone who donates over £500 will not only have our immense gratitude but will be publicly recognised, with their name proudly displayed in the archive itself (if they so desire). For technical reasons, please get in touch with us if you wish to donate £500 or more rather than using our usual donation form. Meanwhile, enjoy the archive.

The post Books from Bob’s Library #4: The ‘Freethinker’—over a century of issues now available as a digital archive appeared first on The Freethinker.

Islam’s hostility to human values ​​has long been the main reason why many of its followers have left it to become atheists. But, amid the far-right riots carried out in Britain earlier this month, it seems that some ex-Muslims have forgotten the motivation that drove them to become apostates in the first place. Do we oppose Islam out of sheer, mindless hatred, or do we hate it because it is hostile to humanity?

Some ex-Muslim atheists have shown their support for far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson and have encouraged anti-Muslim bigotry. In addition to that, they have promoted the violence perpetrated by the far right across the UK. This support is often based on the argument that the ‘demonstrations’ only target Muslims.

This position is based on misinformation. As we have seen, the riots went beyond targeting Muslims to include refugees and people of colour more generally, those who work in refugee support centres, and the police. But even if this position was accurate, it would still be bigoted and inhumane in itself.

‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which many if not most ex-Muslim atheists support as an alternative to Sharia law, begins thus: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ The word ‘dignity’ is placed before the word ‘rights’ for a logical reason: human dignity serves as the basis for human rights. The concept of dignity recognises that all human beings have a special value that is inherent in themselves—not acquired—and therefore deserving of respect, without exception, simply because they are human beings.  In other words, you cannot talk about human rights if these rights are limited to certain people and denied to others.

To support bigotry against Muslims is to strip Muslims of their human dignity, which means that Muslims will not enjoy the same rights as everyone else. And this is exactly what you support when you talk about the right of white English people to ‘security of person’ while supporting riots that are trying to take away the right of Muslims to the same. In supporting the far right, these ex-Muslims show themselves to be non-secular, non-humanist atheists.

The far right and Islamism: two sides of the same coin

The far right bases its hatred of others on a sense of superiority that has no scientific basis. They believe that being white and/or Christian makes them inherently better than everyone else. Isn’t this exactly the same justification Islamists use for persecuting ex-Muslims and others who don’t fit into their narrow view of the world? Islamists see themselves and their worldview as superior and unchallengeable, and this is the basis on which they persecute women, gays, atheists, non-Muslims, and secular Muslims. The far right does exactly the same: they target those who are not white and/or Christian because they believe that they alone are worthy of respect.

Far-right ideology is not a cure for Islamism. Rather, it feeds it. When a far-right extremist calls for bigotry against Muslims, he/she encourages Islamists to respond with their own bigotry—as we witnessed in Birmingham on the night of 5 August. Supporting the far right to oppose Islamism feeds an endless cycle of bigotry and terrorism. It is unfortunate that some of us ex-Muslims contribute to this cycle, which only strengthens the very people, whether Islamist or far-right, who seek to destroy us.

A better approach: secular alliance against extremism

The cure for reactionary Islamism is not through an alliance with the reactionary far right built on a shared fanatical bigotry against ‘Muslims’, but through an alliance between secular atheists and secular Muslims. This would be a useful and humane alliance built on the values ​​advocated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: dignity, freedom, and rejection of extremism.

As ex-Muslim atheists seeking to build more humane societies, we must work to build bridges of understanding and coexistence between all religious and ethnic groups. We must unequivocally reject any form of fanaticism and violence, whether it comes from Islamists, far-right extremists, or anyone else. Taking a stand against far-right extremism and being a voice for justice and equality reflects our principle of rejecting extremism. Those who stood with the rioters showed that their problem is not with extremism as such but with Muslim extremism only.

For a better world free from hatred

Given that a large proportion of us ex-Muslims are refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, it is shameful that some of us are complicit in the attempted destruction of the democracies in which persecuted people like us seek refuge. Promoting far-right ideology threatens refugees like us. Moreover, far-right ideas are categorically opposed to the fundamental democratic ideals ​​of freedom, equality, and justice—the very values ​​that we as ex-Muslims felt the lack of in our countries of origin, leading us to flee by air or sea to places which stood up for those values. In other words, allying ourselves with extremists, some of whom call for the return of a ‘white and Christian’ England, undermines our own rights and interests as atheists in the UK.

The post The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

From Chapter 1: Daisies Tell About Jesus

I remember the smell of the songbook paper, and pushing my little fingers through the tiny communion cup holders on the backs of the burnt orange itchy fabric-covered pews.

I remember selling ‘Bible Times’ pita bread by the pulpit on the church stage during my first church play and whispering the words to ‘Away in a Manger’ into a big colourful mic there one Christmas. I remember folding my hands every night on my knees by my bed and saying sorry for my sins, and the hardcover Bible story collection with the colourful illustrations we kept in the hall linen closet.

I remember how much I loved Jesus.

To me Jesus was a version of my dad. Maybe it’s the same for most Christian girls with kind and present fathers. God was a little scary, but I tried to dismiss that thought fast because he could read my mind.

At first my indoctrination was mostly harmless: Bedtime prayers, brown beard painting of Jesus surrounded by the kiddos, Children’s Church.

I don’t remember the first time I heard the Pastor shout about the love and wrath of God in one breath.

Understanding and accepting God’s anger was as critical as accepting his love. We were shameful and sinful people destined for an afterlife of torture. I was told that my belief and dedication to my relationship with Jesus saved me from this eternal damnation, and in turn, my mission was to urge others to have that faith too.

Being a Christian was normal for me, but not everyone believed in Jesus. That’s why Christians had to spread the Good News. You didn’t want anyone else to end up in the fiery pits of Hell either.

Some Christians might hand out Bibles or witness to their neighbors, but I wanted to go big or go to Hell I guess, because by eight I was preaching to my classmates on the playground and saying I was going to be a missionary in foreign countries.

I imagined myself in these African jungle scenarios, makeshift kitchens with big leaves on the floor, those little kids with bellies bloated from hunger pulling at my skirt while I cooked soup and talked about Jesus. Yes, really.

This to me would be a soul-saving sacrifice as well as the ultimate adventure.

I was born in 1983 into an average White evangelical family that made up a quarter of the country in the nineties, a Protestant family in a small rural community where we mixed with Catholics but had little exposure to religions outside of Christianity.

Protestants are the biggest Christian bloc in the U.S. They split with the Roman Catholic Church and follow the principles of the Reformation, led by German monk and university professor Martin Luther (1483–1546).

The Reformation held that one’s eternal soul could be saved only by personal faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God, rather than via prayers to saints and confessions to priests. 

Consider terms like ‘born again’ (John 3:3) and narratives involving the prayer of salvation (Romans 10:9).

Some Protestants even came to rough it in colonial America, rather than feel like they were under the thumb of the Catholic Church. I’d gotten the notion that the nation was founded on my religion from the way that narrative had been spun for me.

I wasn’t just a mainstream Protestant but a fundamentalist and an evangelical.

A fundamentalist will insist that every word of the Bible is without error, while a mainline Protestant will concede that historical documents are susceptible to fallibility. Fundamentalists interpret scripture literally, complete with its outdated dogmas and Israelite ideology.

Evangelists busy themselves with the relentless recruitment of souls practised by salvation-based brands of Christian faith. Evangelize means ‘convert’.

From Chapter 4: The Evangelical Agenda

Regardless of any neurological factors fortifying my faith, once I grew old enough to reason, doubt, the most dangerous of all sins, crept in. Doubt could land you in Hell before you even opened your mouth or lifted a finger to sin against God or another person.

To a Pentecostal, nothing is to be respected and valued more than unwavering faith. Certainly not education or intelligence or even critical thinking.

You were supposed to ‘trust in God with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding’ (Proverbs 3:5).

Knowledge was dangerous. Look what happened when the first humans dared seek it.

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.

Musician Frank Zappa

I struggled painfully with my faith in youth, but I didn’t let my doubt show, other than scribbling it over and over in my journals.

God, please take away my doubt; please open my eyes! I doubted three times today Jesus; please forgive me! I’m so sorry for doubting!!!

Without faith, Hebrews 11:6 assured me, it was impossible to please God.

Faith was my biggest struggle, the incredible challenge of my life. My lack of it was my gravest, deepest, most mortal sin.

I sought to solidify my salvation with the solidarity of other believers, tried to redeem and revive my soul by striking sin from my life. But I needed a louder voice in my mind, clarifying I wasn’t making it all up. As time went on I needed a more intense, more pronounced reprieve from guilt and a more ecstatic euphoria to wash over me in prayer and worship.

Now a new kind of joy and a whole ecosystem of knowledge has grown from the seed of doubt that was planted in my heart where I could never quite get that mustard seed to grow.

I have ceased to scream at myself in my mind, desperately trying to silence the voice of reason. I have silenced instead the voice of God.

From Chapter 7: Books Besides Bibles

For as far back as I can remember, I have loved books: reading them, writing them, collecting them, quoting them, smelling their sweet paper, smearing their ink with my tears.

I carried books to the playground at recess in elementary [school] and I took my textbooks home to devour poetry, history, and social studies in high school.

From a young age I could appreciate a well-crafted sentence, and I rarely grew bored of a story or a subject if the content was written well.

A vast wealth of literature had been off limits while I wasted countless hours perusing an old religious book instead!

There was time to make up for.

There was no Google to do research about religion when I was living that lie. Aside from, of course, books about other religions maybe, and academic papers perhaps, there wasn’t a lot of accessible literature published that challenged mainstream evangelical ideology. Prominent atheist figures weren’t podcasting yet.

When I began my quest for truth I spent endless hours in books besides Bibles, astonished and appalled at the sheer volume of information about the world I’d been so willing to remain oblivious to.

I kept my mind open, giving the theology I’d been fed and its apologists ample time to refute the new information I was swimming in. Their once compelling, convincing voices couldn’t hold up to the facts and perspectives presented by these historians and biologists.

Definitely one of the greatest perks of breaking free from an oppressive and controlling religion is that no information is off limits.

No books are banned.

Suddenly no fiction was off limits either: Dante, Nabokov, vampires, horror, trashy romance reads with women bursting out of corsets on the covers.

I could read academic material that had been forbidden, finally reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and exploring evolutionary science at last at age 23.

Suddenly I could eagerly accept scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality.

I was late to that table, much as humankind had been, attributing everything to the supernatural before scientific knowledge offered real answers—like we attributed sickness or healing to a god but now origins of ailments are evident because germ theory exists now.

I was born long after science filled in the gaps where gods stood in as placeholders, but like millions of other believers I’d been coerced to cling to them when they should have been discarded.

Like Douglas Adams said, ‘God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones.’ Embracing intellectual honesty at last was exciting!

From Chapter 10: Mind Rape

My child never shed a tear about Hell. She never shut herself in a closet and begged not to be hurt. She never had to feel shame for her own desires or unworthy of love because she had doubts about things that just didn’t make sense. She never had to reconcile in her mind the atrocities committed by someone she was supposed to love even more than she loved me.

At bedtime I tucked her in and told her to have dreams about candy castles and puppies and she never heard the words ‘brimstone’ or ‘gnashing of teeth’.

I love the moments when I speak of my Pentecostal past and she doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

‘Wait, what’s a pew, Mom?’

My heart soars in those moments. She will never be a sinner seeking sanctification. I feel she’s a more rounded individual than I am, more emotionally stable.

I had a lot of anger and anxiety to work through, character traits developed after a youth of servitude under an imaginary authoritarian entity.

I taught my daughter early, about multiple religions. When she was five and six we talked about what animals we would like to come back as, if the reincarnation religions were right.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are “valid,” let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins

Watching my daughter choose for herself, selecting biocentrism as her philosophy long before either of us had a name for it, and rejecting all religion, provided a boost of comfort and confidence that was very healing for me.

Society tends to assume religion is either benign or good for people. It’s a Sunday morning cultural tradition most Christians don’t think too hard about so they don’t have to reconcile their cognitive dissonance.

But while my peers were in Catechism reciting rosaries I was being brainwashed with brimstone by the Assembly of God.

Certain brands of fundamentalist faith that pound the original sin/eternal damnation ideology boast the gravest grievance against religious indoctrination.

A parent or preacher doesn’t even necessarily have to pound Hell into a child’s mind repeatedly to get the intended reaction. One horrifying threat involving a lake of fire can have a profound effect on a developing mind.

Richard Dawkins:

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

I am persuaded that “child abuse” is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like eternal hell.

It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.

I wish I could explain to all those kids in Sunday School that the sensational, scary stories they’re being taught are not real.

There’s no scary God up there, intent on punishing sinners.

No eternal suffering awaits anyone for anything they say or do.

And no, their ‘sins’ did not contribute to the suffering of a nice, loving man.

Related reading

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

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

The post Silencing the voice of God: the journey of an evangelical apostate appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

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

Has coming out affected you politically?

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

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

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

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

And what does the caucus do?

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

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

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

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

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

What is Project 2025?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you give another example of their plans?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related reading

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

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

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

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

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

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

The seventeenth century did not get off to a great start in Europe. Religious conflict still simmered, and in 1618, the continent became embroiled in the bloodiest and most destructive war it would suffer before the two World Wars. The Netherlands was fighting for its independence. In Britain, the dispute between King and Parliament led to wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1640s and 1650s. Scientific progress faced massive barriers. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the reverse, as Aristotle and generations of his followers had maintained. Across the continent, people remained poor, ignorant, oppressed, and victims of seemingly continuous violence.

Yet, by the end of the century, the religious wars were over, Europe had modern astronomy and physics, the Dutch had created the corporation and the stock exchange, England had established parliamentary government, and books calling for freedom of religion were openly being published and distributed. ‘In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was largely medieval,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy.

This shift in mindset, from the medieval to the modern, is the subject of Paul Strathern’s Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason From Descartes to Peter the Great. Strathern covers the major figures and events of the era, painting a sweeping picture of the century and the monumental changes it brought to intellectual and cultural life in Europe. Dark Brilliance has remarkable breadth, touching on every field of knowledge from calculus to cooking. It includes the microscope and telescope, probability and statistics, gravity and motion, the Golden Age in the Netherlands and the Glorious Revolution in Britain. We meet—as we expect—figures such as Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. But Strathern pays far more attention to culture and the arts than most other writers on the Enlightenment. He also breaks down the contrast between reason and unreason running through the seventeenth century; this is the ‘Dark’ of the book’s title.

The Culture of Enlightenment

As he promises in the subtitle, Strathern begins Dark Brilliance with René Descartes, as he is developing his new philosophy in a bucolic winter scene in a Bavarian village. From Descartes, he makes an unexpected jump to the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio would not normally feature in a book on the Age of Reason. He lived in Italy, which had been the unquestioned centre of Europe during the Renaissance but was falling into the shadows of the Netherlands and France in the seventeenth century. For all their wealth and splendour, Rome and Florence never became centres of the Enlightenment in the way that Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or London did. Not only that, Caravaggio died before the Age of Reason really began.

Still, Strathern argues that Caravaggio’s painting was a leap forward from the past, just like the works of the Enlightenment thinkers. His painting showed more depth, photorealism, and understanding of scientific topics such as anatomy and optics than the Italian Renaissance masters who preceded him. And they, in turn, painted far more lifelike scenes than medieval European artists. Like the Renaissance artists, Caravaggio drew on classical as well as Biblical inspiration, although he painted with more drama and energy. Strathern highlights, in particular, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, where he painted a scene from the Bible, a conventional subject, but presented it in a way that was unconventionally violent, visceral, and shocking. Compare the painting with medieval European art, which was often without passion; even people suffering violent deaths can look only bored or vaguely annoyed.

This focus on culture is an original approach, but one which makes sense. Culture reflects society, and we can see the ideas of the Enlightenment reflected in the art of the Baroque artists. But it has limitations, and centres of culture and art were not always centres of learning, science, philosophy, or law. There was no Florentine Newton or Milanese Spinoza.

The splendour of the court of Louis XIV made France the cultural centre of Europe—even today fields like cooking and fashion are speckled with French words and phrases—but the French Enlightenment only really took off after the Sun King’s death. Strathern could have perhaps explored this further.  

Reason and Unreason

The other theme of Dark Brilliance is, as the title itself illustrates, the paradoxes of the Enlightenment. To Strathern, the seventeenth century was the Age of Reason and Unreason. As he points out in the introduction, the achievements of the Enlightenment ‘took place against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale,’ from frenzied persecutions of supposed witches to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The developers of the telescope and the microscope were achieving steadily higher levels of magnification and bringing more and more of the hidden universe into view even as Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the tens of thousands. In the first chapter of Dark Brilliance, René Descartes invents his new philosophy while in the winter quarters of the Bavarian army during the Thirty Years War. The metastatic growth of the slave trade provides another example of how the irrational and inhumane could easily grow alongside the ideals of the Enlightenment. ‘…[I]n the Age of Reason, it was slavery that produced the capital which led to the progress of western European civilization, laying the foundations upon which its empires were built,’ Strathern writes. ‘At the same time, it also prompted a few rare spirits such as Montaigne to recognize the contagious barbarity of all who took part in it—to say nothing of the absurdity of its claims regarding racial superiority’. Man’s expanding knowledge did not seem to lessen his brutality—at least not yet.

The greatest paradox of the Enlightenment was, arguably, the French Revolution itself, which led to mass killing, the establishment of a dictatorship, and a new ‘rational’ religion in the name of Enlightenment values and freeing the people of France from the oppression of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and a corrupt and reactionary Church. As he finishes his account at the start of the eighteenth century, Strathern doesn’t cover the French Revolution, although the theme of paradox runs through the book.

Conclusions

Why should we care about the Enlightenment? Because we live in a world shaped by it, and while we enjoy its benefits, we should also be aware (and beware) of its lessons. At the start of Dark Brilliance, Strathern asks if human progress will end up destroying the civilisation it helped to create. We face a range of threats, including climate change, enabled by the scientific progress and material wealth which has made our lives so much better. At the end of the book, he has not yet answered his own question, although he concludes that ‘paradoxically, the answer would appear to be progress itself’. Admittedly, it’s hard to see what other conclusion anyone could reach. There are calls today from the far left and far right of the political spectrum to dismantle the modern economy and modern society and revert to some pre-modern ideal. But this ideal is, in all cases, as mythical as it is real.

Strathern chooses to tell his overall story as a collection of colourful little biographies. This is an accessible approach and makes the book engaging for a general audience. Anyone who reads Dark Brilliance will reach the end with a much better understanding of not just the Enlightenment but life in seventeenth-century Europe in general. As someone who has read and written much about the subject, Strathern’s account of the development of Baroque painting was still entirely new to me.

I was left feeling that some of the threads remained loose, particularly on the impact of the Enlightenment and the paradox of reason coexisting with unreason. But as a panorama of seventeenth-century Europe, Dark Brilliance is both an impressive and very readable book.

Related reading

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

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

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

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post The Enlightenment paradox: review of ‘Dark Brilliance’ by Paul Strathern appeared first on The Freethinker.

As editor of the Freethinker, I would like to invite you along to Conway Hall’s Freethought History Festival, which is being held from Friday 30th August to Sunday 1st September.

On Saturday 31st August, I will be on a panel discussing the Freethinker alongside my predecessor as editor Emma Park and Professor David Nash. Other speakers will include Freethinker contributors Bob Forder, Eoin Carter, Maddy Goodall, Frances Lynch, Clare Stainthorp, and our resident radical cartoonist Paul Fitzgerald. Graham Smith, head of the campaigning group Republic, will launch the festival on 30 August, while 1 September is a free family fun day. Bob Forder will also be conducting his Books, Bones, and Blasphemy walking tour on the Sunday.

The festival is sponsored by the Freethinker, and it would be lovely to meet some of you there. You can find out more and get tickets here. Use the code FREETHINK!25 for a 25% discount.

Related reading

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith, by Daniel James Sharp

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

Daniel James Sharp’s Freethinker articles

Emma Park’s Freethinker articles

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

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

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

Freethinker cartoons and articles by Paul Fitzgerald

Megan Manson’s Freethinker articles

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

The post Invitation to the Freethought History Festival at Conway Hall, 31 August – 1 September appeared first on The Freethinker.