God is not dead!
What will it mean, when God is dead? Australia is about to become an atheist nation. The census shows us that barely half the population identifies as Christian while nearly a third nominates no religion. The numbers of believers will be bolstered by immigration but the trend is unmistakable. The old beliefs are dying out.
Our trek to radical unbelief follows much of western Europe. The same trends are evident in the US. Though religious belief is stronger there, it has lost the elites and over time elite opinion leads public opinion.
The eclipse of Christianity will be like the eclipse of the sun. Darkness will be the result. Will it be a temporary darkness or a long night of the Western soul?
In abandoning God, we are about to embark on one of the most radical social experiments in Western history. It is nothing short of the reordering of human nature. Short of war, nothing is as consequential.
Human beings create themselves inside a culture. A culture without God will create different human beings. This is a much bigger shift than everything implied by the rise of digital technology, though this is involved in the revolution of the person we are now embarking on. When our culture has exiled God, there will be a radical change to the human personality and all our social institutions and relations.
For a time we will continue to live off the declining ethical and cultural capital of our heritage of 2000 years of Christianity and more than 3000 years of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But as British writer Arnold Lunn once remarked, we are living off the scent of an empty vase. As we cut ourselves off ever more comprehensively from the roots of our civilisation, our civilisation will be damaged.
The social and political consequences will be severe, with a crippling loss of civic purpose,
At this moment there is a perfect storm of social, historical, technological, educational and intellectual forces militating against belief in Christianity. A semi-official new religion, the new atheism, is slowly taking its place and acquiring the appurtenances of an established church.
Atheism is every bit as much a religious faith as any religion, but it is less rational and less human than Christianity. Its would-be self-appointed pope is Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion fame. His is an intolerant papacy, full of dogmatic pronouncements and ridicule and sneering for any who stray from the true doctrinal path. A slew of atheist bishops — the author and critic Christopher Hitchens, US philosopher Daniel Dennett, AC Grayling — perform the traditional tasks of bishops, reinforcing each other, reasserting doctrine.
Their attack on Christianity is not really an intellectual attack. It is an attack that mobilises celebrity status and received institutional approval; it is a cultural attack, one of abuse, intimidation and publicly sanctioned sneering. But while its content is feeble enough, it is only the post facto rationalisation of deeper, long running cultural dynamics.
Atheist and author of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins.
What are we losing here? Religious belief cannot be sustained on the basis that it is useful to society. People only subscribe to it if they think it’s true. This means not only a rational ascent, but an intuitive sense that religion is real, a sense that our innate hope and wonder are not meaningless, that our lives are not meaningless. In all the important decisions in life — who we will marry and the like — we use all the means of understanding at our disposal. Our intuition of God, and of hope, is admissible evidence, it is part of the reason we believe
But we should at least pause for a second to consider how much we are losing as a society by rejecting this Christian tradition. Virtually everything we like in our current society, and in our political culture, derives from Christianity, and before that from the tradition of the Old Testament.
The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, might have been written 2500 or more years ago. It begins with what was the most radical statement in favour of human rights to enter the ancient world. It was that God, one God, created human beings in his own image. That is the beginning of the story of human dignity in the Western tradition.
A case of course can be made for ancient Athens and other ancient civilisations. But in Athens human dignity applied only to men in the ruling elite. The franchise never went beyond 10 per cent of the people. Women, slaves and foreigners had no rights. And people were not conceived of as individuals but as members of families.
The unfolding revelation of the character of God, and the developing conception of the character of humanity, as the Old Testament progresses, is one of the central elements of cultural and indeed political development in Western civilisation.
But it was in the New Testament that the bases for human rights and human dignity were most explicitly developed.
The revolutionary ethical teachings of Jesus in the New Testament have remained well known, even in our time of self-induced cultural amnesia. Treat others as you would have them treat you. If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, do not strike back but offer him the left cheek.
Even the sense that the poor are favoured by God retains a faint hold on Western consciousness.
But some parts of the New Testament with more obvious long-term implications for political culture are forgotten.
Consider Saint Paul, in his letter to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
It took a long time to abolish slavery. But Christianity brought with it the revolutionary doctrine that slaves were human beings, with human souls, with human dignity, with a personal relationship to an almighty God.
The New Testament even gave us the first monotheistic religious statement in favour of a secular political order: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.”
In his powerful and widely admired book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, the Oxford scholar Larry Siedentop argues that the very understanding of the human individual, with all that this implies for human rights and political order, comes from Christianity. He writes: “The defining characteristic of Christianity was its universalism. The fundamental relationship between the individual and his or her God provides the crucial test, in Christianity, of what really matters.
“It is, by definition, a test which applies to all equally. Hence the deep individualism of Christianity was simply the reverse side of its universalism.”
In the 19th century, seduced by the new discoveries of science and reacting against the exaggerated or misplaced claims of some Christians to explain the detail of the physical universe only through scriptural reference, there developed a great vogue among some intellectuals for scientism, the misplaced view that science could explain everything.
This animated a long-running hostility to religious belief, just as earlier reactions against obvious corruption among some Christian leaders had led to an exaggerated rediscovery of the allegedly humanistic virtues of ancient Greece and Rome. But as Siednetop amply demonstrates, ancient Greece and Rome did not embody liberalism or universalism.
Out of these two historical mistakes a consensus emerged that liberalism was a reaction against Christianity, produced by the Enlightenment rejecting Christianity. Siedentop demolishes this view and demonstrates how liberalism grew directly out of the precepts and practices of Christianity itself. His tracing of this history is fascinating and he represents the Middle Ages to us as a time of not darkness, but of scholarship and human development.
Monasteries, which were seen later as obscurantist, are in Siedentop’s telling an early expression of human freedom. People chose to be monks and therefore to have a life beyond that dictated by circumstances of birth and family.
Not only that but St Benedict, the greatest of the monastics, in the 7th century laid down a rule that was not harsh or especially ascetic, and which combined prayer, manual work, scholarship and service to the community, not least through welcoming visitors. The medieval rulers of Europe, the successors to Rome, were in many cases advised in the legal codes they introduced by bishops who had previously been monks. They imported into civil law the idea of some rights for human beings as individuals rather than as members of families.
Siedentop traces a long political and intellectual development of liberalism and secularism. At one point he asks: “Is it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian West?” His answer is no.
The scenes of Christ’s passion painted on the walls of medieval churches demonstrated that it was the immortal soul, not the immortal family, that was the primary reality of humanity, he argues.
This is not to whitewash the various crimes and periodic wickedness of countless Christians, including many Christian leaders, through history. Nothing is easier than to find bad deeds and sayings of individual Christians over 2000 years and then implausibly claim that this invalidates the whole of Christianity.
Dawkins and Hitchens do this endlessly. But their historical arguments are sometimes so tortured as to constitute a kind of pantomime parody of misrepresentation.
Dawkins graciously concedes that Joseph Stalin was an atheist and a mass murderer. But whereas Dawkins attributes any bad thing done by any Christian to their Christianity, and any good thing done by any Christian to a lingering humanism in contradiction of Christianity, his contrasting escape clause for the effects of atheist belief is absurd.
So while he acknowledges Stalin’s atheism he says it had no effect on Stalin’s actions. Yet Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union and a devoted adherent of Marxist communism, the most powerful atheist ideology of the 20th century.
Hitchens, though an infinitely better writer than Dawkins, is even more ridiculous. He claims the Khmer Rouge, which enacted genocide in Cambodia, “sought its authority in prehistoric temples and legends”.
Yet the Khmer Rouge was the communist movement of Cambodia and its leader, Pol Pot, was a dedicated communist all his life, and refined his Marxism, as did Ho Chi Minh and so many other Indochinese communist leaders, in Paris. Stalin and Pol Pot were the atheist religion in practice.
Barely half the Australian population identifies as Christian.
Where are we now in the West? As our liberalism loses touch with its Christian roots it is becoming ever more confused, intolerant and incapable of delivering a good political culture.
Liberalism in the 19th century and much of the 20th century was passionate, vigorous, optimistic and infused with Christianity. Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, the father of the British welfare state — and in a sense of every Western welfare state — frequently spoke of the “spiritual dimension” of socialism.
The Christian churches are often identified with social conservatism. They were also hugely influential in 2000 years of history in providing relief to the poor and the sick. And in the 19th century, faithful to the New Testament honouring of the poor, they were instrumental in the development of liberalism for the rights of the working class and impoverished people.
Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, at the end of the 19th century, called for legal protections for trade unions and for working people to receive a fair wage. The Methodists, founded earlier by John Wesley, were at the forefront of campaigns for decent wages and to abolish slavery. All of these reformers and countless others saw their reforms as embodying their Christian faith.
This is not to say that Christianity mandates any one narrow approach to politics. John Howard has been known to comment that The Parable of the Talents is the pro-small-business parable of the New Testament.
But liberalism today is unravelling. The loss of faith in God has been accompanied in the West by the collapse of faith in institutions, and indeed in humanity itself. Is it entirely a coincidence that the decline of religious belief is accompanied by a decline in belief in democracy, as evident in Australia in successive Lowy polls? Indeed the least religious cohort is also the cohort with the least faith in democracy.
In his definitive study, Coming Apart, Charles Murray charts the growth of the white underclass in America. The last force that holds a disintegrating community together is the churches, he reports. When they collapse, the community collapses too.
JD Vance, in his brilliant Hillbilly Elegy, covers similar ground. In his childhood, his mother’s addiction to drugs and alcohol nearly destroyed him. From time to time he would live with a churchgoing relative, and the order and regularity and affection of these sojourns were a big part of what saved him.
To cite one study among thousands, the US National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper titled Is Religion Good for You? Here is one of the headline results: “Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 per cent, decreases welfare participation by 16 per cent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 per cent and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 per cent.” There are endless similar statistics.
In Australia the Catholic Church in particular has been savagely and often justly criticised for the unspeakably evil crime of child sex abuse, which occurred in many of its institutions. Tragically, this kind of abuse was widespread across religious and non-religious institutions and testifies to the terrible temptation provided by the total power of one human being over another.
Nonetheless, this terrible historical crime has been seized on by enemies of the Christian churches to try to chase the churches from the public square altogether.
So what does the Catholic Church actually spend its time doing in Australia? It is in fact the second biggest provider of social welfare services after the commonwealth government. It provides social services to more than 450,000 people all over Australia.
In every Catholic parish I have ever attended there has been a St Vincent de Paul Society to help the poor. It is the largest volunteer welfare network in the country, with 40,000 members.
I have visited dying friends in what used to be called Catholic hospices and are today called palliative care services. The Catholic Church runs 42 of these, a huge number. In the ones that I have visited there have typically been nuns providing special care to the people with the least family resources around them. In the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, when society was terrified of the victims, it was typically nuns who lifted the drink to the lips of the dying and mopped their brows.
All of the Christian churches in Australia do similar work. A good deal of it now receives government funds. But there is still an enormous volunteer effort that involves people who believe the love of Christ inspires and obliges them to love their neighbours.
On refugee policy I think that the bipartisan approach of strong borders has been justified and effective and reduced harm overall, but I am in a sense happy that the churches haven’t quite reached this position, because their overwhelming first instinct is simply to care for the refugees.
Of course people can be good and charitable without religious motivation. But even Dawkins admits that without God there is no ultimate way to define good and evil.
This leads, as surely as night follows day (though Dawkins denies it), ultimately to the perverse worship of power for its own sake.
This disability is evident in the unravelling of contemporary liberalism. It is driven insane by contradictory impulses it can no longer control or balance. One is an antisocial self-absorption. The metaphysical development of identity across the centuries has ended in a dry gulch. Slaves became souls under the influence of Christianity.
But the soul — the embodiment of our deepest sense of integrity and destiny — gave way to the self as the therapeutic age replaced the age of belief.
Now, in our postmodern times, even self has been supplanted by brand. Soul to self to brand is a steep decline in what it means to be a human being.
Liberalism remains in furious rebellion against Christianity, long after Christianity’s power to constrain it in any way has disappeared. A certain moral panic at the existential emptiness of atheism impels liberalism to a new authoritarianism. Everyone must genuflect to the same secular pieties.
There is a regression too as liberalism works its way away from the universalism of Christianity to create a new series of tribal identities. Nothing is more powerful in Western politics now, and in the long run more destructive, than identity politics.
This sells itself as a means to empower and to help disadvantaged minorities. But everyone wants a slice of identity politics.
Part of the Donald Trump phenomenon is a reaction by some American whites who feel marginalised by their exclusion from minority identity politics. They want an identity politics too.
This abandonment of the universalism of citizenship, which was the civic expression of the universalism of humanity as understood in Christianity, is a dreadful wrong turn for Western civilisation.
It has been rightly said that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. An intolerant atheism is just one variant of a wild miscellany of ideologies and esoteric cults gaining ground in the West. Witchcraft is undergoing a big revival. Old-fashioned communist banners have been seen in many recent demonstrations in London. The murderous violence in Charlottesville was accompanied by Nazi swastikas.
The lack of purpose and the lack of any ultimate standards that comes with the exile of God from our culture leads to savage polarisations and sudden outbursts of hysterical sentiments.
This is an inevitable consequence of the new conception of human nature that will follow the turn away from God.
Without God, human beings are no longer unique, universal and special in nature — they are just one more chancy outcrop of the planet and its biosphere. And when Christianity is more completely eradicated from our consciousness it will dawn on the culture that without God there is no final human accountability. Life is just what you can get away with, and no ultimate price to pay.
We seem now to be moving into a new, extremely perplexing historical phase.
The sheer pace of change everywhere, not least the extreme disorientation of every person holding in their smartphone computing power undreamed of even a decade ago, is fracturing and disorienting. We have moved from what sociologists have called the “solid modernity” of the first half of the 20th century to “liquid modernity”, where there is nothing to keep hold of, no certainties, just a continuous whirl of change that is exhausting and confusing, and yet ultimately dreary.
And we have decided to banish and harm the very things that might help us make sense of this time. For the first time in non-communist Western societies, except for brief moments in European history when revolutions have displaced monarchies, the state apparatus itself will to some extent be mobilised to suppress and prevent Christianity.
The process has already begun, but you can see coming down the road a vast caravan of legal harassment and actions, under the aegis of human rights and anti-discrimination bodies, to constrain churches and Christian institutions from teaching and practising their faith.
It is no longer a question of the law enforcing Christian moral standards on nonbelievers. Although society does need behavioural norms, there is very little case for using the state apparatus to enforce norms that do not have broad consensus and which the churches cannot in any event get their own followers to adhere to.
But society is about to move from that consideration and swing wildly to an alternative extreme of making the conventional practice and teaching of traditional Christianity legally problematic.
The Christian churches have been slow to understand and respond to all this. But a serious dialogue is under way. American writer Rod Dreher argues that many mainline Christian churches are in danger of descending into what he calls moralistic therapeutic deism, a bland version of the prevailing zeitgeist with the merest thin treacle of lowest-common-denominator deist beliefs over the top.
In his bold and high-selling new book The Benedict Option, Dreher suggests the churches have to rethink their social roles. Politics offers them nothing, the culture is everything. Their main political battle, he argues, should be to secure their own freedoms.
He thinks they need to re-conceive of themselves as minorities. This would give them some advantages. They need, too, to reconsider the seriousness of their purposes, so that even if they no longer represent a consensus, they can at least continue to offer an alternative.
This is not the end of days. But it is the end of that long period when the West has known Christianity, even if it has often honoured the faith in the breach.
Our culture, our people, not to mention our poor and our sick, will miss Christianity more than they can possibly know.
