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Key insights from
Unbelievers: An Emotional History of
Doubt
By
Alec Ryrie
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What you’ll learn
Nietzsche famously wrote in
his work Thus Spoke
Zarathustra that, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have
killed him.” But if that is true, who are God’s murderers, really? Could we
point them out in a line-up? British historian Alec Ryrie argues that the
vast majority of historians and laypeople alike have brought in the wrong
suspects and called the wrong defendants to the stand, that God was on the
chopping block well before any Humes or Voltaires came on the scene. Ryrie
sees doubt beginning as an older, more visceral reaction to the Church.
Read
on for key insights from Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt.
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1. The
Enlightenment is commonly and mistakenly viewed as the turning point away
from Christian faith in the West.
In the West there remains a
lingering cultural Christian influence, but surveys find increasing
disbelief in the West, from the the religiously strident United States to
the more disenchanted Europe. Any stigma surrounding pronouncements of
disbelief in God or religion proper is gone or rapidly fading, especially
among young people. In parts of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, disbelief
is over 40 percent. A 2015 poll in Great Britain revealed that 70 percent
of those under 24 years old report no religious faith.
Nietzsche’s famous
pronouncement that “God is dead” is no longer seen as a scandal but fairly
obvious. The common narrative among Christians and atheists alike is that
scientists touting empiricism and philosophers pushing rationality are
responsible. These godless intellectuals turned scientific inquiry and
Enlightenment principles into weapons that aggressively clubbed down faith.
These histories of growing
unbelief usually mention thinkers like Spinoza, Hume, Rousseau, Kant,
Voltaire, and Thomas Paine and describe how they cast aspersions on
miracles or biblical authority or else created systems of thought and life
that did not depend on God to sustain or even create the universe. Other
philosophers found existence without religion to be the more compelling
option. And then there was Darwin who hunted the origin of the species and
did not find a creator at the front of it.
Depending on who tells the
story, these men are either heroes or villains, but both sides see the
Enlightenment as the hinge in the history of faith in the West. It is a
common, but unsatisfying account.
There are signs of atheism
reaching back further than the Enlightenment. The timeline is all wrong.
Just because earlier formulations of doubt were not philosophically robust
does not mean they were not powerful or persuasive.
We are routinely looking at
the wrong centuries to find God’s killers and bringing in the wrong
suspects for interrogation. We have to remember that currents guide
thinkers every bit as much as thinkers guide currents.
We think philosophers
attacked religion and the assault was successful, but what if there was
already plenty of disbelief in the cultural atmosphere and philosophers
simply put words to what many common people had already been thinking?
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2. Decisions to
come to faith or leave it are intuitive and emotional before they are
conscious and intellectual.
In the history of ideas,
faith and belief are often approached in a manner that is highly cerebral.
But if we consider our biggest decisions in life, we realize that they are
far more driven by intuition than pure, calculating reason. When we change
our minds, we cannot always clearly articulate the change. Often,
rationales come in only after the fact, as an overlay to reinforce a change
that has already taken place.
Blaise Pascal was right to
remark, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The
point is that belief and unbelief are both processes that operate most
powerfully at a level of inexpressible gut instincts. If this is true, then
the rumblings of discontent prior to formal declarations of atheism are
atheism’s true birthplace in Western Christianity.
Thus, the key question is
not what ideas germinated, but how did the cultural and religious soil
become so hospitable to seeds of doubt in the first place? This means that
we would do better looking not at atheism’s intellectual origins but at
atheism’s emotional history, which began much earlier.
We need not pull head and
heart apart to explore this history, but the history of ideas is often too
tidy, and fails to account for the messiness of human experience being
brought to bear on those ideas. Humans have never approached ideas from a
logical vacuum, free of cultural and personal experience.
As we will see,
Christianity’s biggest existential threats are not atheists “out there”
brandishing lethal arguments, intent on bringing down the Church. The
biggest opposition has come from Christians who end up opposing the
Christianity of their day. The impetus of these protests is primarily moral
(not intellectual). This is what is meant by an emotional history.
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3. Atheism can be
defined narrowly as disbelief in a deity, or broadly as a rejection of
established religious norms.
Atheism and disbelief are
no longer synonymous, philosophically speaking. But to track an emotional
history of doubt, it is helpful to recover the original meaning of the term
“atheist.” It comes from the Greek atheos.
Atheos literally translates “without god or gods,” but it
connotes a more cultural violation of the established religious norms. In
this sense, Socrates was an atheist, but so were early Christians. Their
renegade beliefs about Jesus as the King of Kings, deserving worship
instead of Caesar and the pantheon of the day, cut at the heart of
Greco-Roman religious sensibilities.
It is in this same, broader
sense that we can refer to unbelievers in Christendom as “atheists,” even
if they continue to believe in God. They are atheists in that they rejected
the religious systems that were part of Christendom’s atmosphere and taken
for granted as true.
The word “atheist” was only
widely used in the West after Ancient Greek was rediscovered during the
Renaissance. From there, the term gradually trickled into the mainstream of
various European languages.
The closest thing to early
medieval atheists in our own world would be flat-earthers. The two groups
have a lot in common. Both groups tend to be highly suspicious, independent
in thought, willing to go against the societal grain. Many are uneducated,
not integrated into society, and reject the wisdom of their age, whether it
came from priests or astronomers. Whatever the established authorities on
the matter might believe matters little, and both groups are convinced they
are being lied to. This critical distance from society makes it easier to
take shots at centuries or millennia of accumulated knowledge. Just as
flat-earthers reject scientific authority, the early medieval atheists
rejected established religious authority.
Flat-earthers generally
have views informed by passionate skepticism rather than a deep grasp of
the facts. Their beliefs are generally more jargon rather than refined or
well-reasoned proofs, but their beliefs are nonetheless powerful and cannot
be glibly brushed aside. Neither can early atheism, even if it only existed
in raw, ill-defined forms.
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4. Christian
thought and ancient Greco-Roman thought have a tangled history in the West,
with one critiquing the other or vice-versa.
Medieval Europe was
saturated in Christianity, but it also lauded ancient philosophers who were
leery or even critical of religion. The scholastics were attempting to
marry the two streams of thought (the Christian stream and Greco-Roman
stream), but Christianity was the measure against which ancient
philosophies were judged.
The early pioneers of a
movement that would later be called the Renaissance also revered the
ancient traditions, particularly the orators and rhetoricians. But unlike
the scholastics of the medieval era, who measured ancient pagan wisdom
according to a Christian framework, Renaissance thinkers began critiquing
Christianity using ancient pagan wisdom as the standard. Instead of seeing
Christianity and Greco-Roman thought as part of a proud inheritance to be
humbly received, they praised ancient rhetorical brilliance, and saw a
history of its corruption and disintegration over the centuries—which
coincided with the rise of Christianity.
The Renaissance movement
brought uncomfortable questions to the surface regarding the authority of
Scripture, its trustworthiness, and the reliability of the translations.
These were more quiet expressions of discomfort than a colossal clamor, but
those murmurs would grow in the subsequent centuries.
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5. Ancient
philosophers saw religion as a tool for manipulation and hated it;
Machiavelli saw religion as a tool for manipulation and loved it.
Lucretius (99 – 55 BC) was
a Roman poet and philosopher. As those pioneering the movement that would
be called the Renaissance began returning to ancient Roman texts,
Lucretius’ writings were among the most popular. His work On the Nature of Things
offered an Epicurean vision of life that the Church would have frowned
upon, but it had some of the most eloquent Latin poetry ever written. Just
like film critics appreciate good artwork even if the message clashes with
their personal view of life, so Renaissance thinkers loved the ancient
form, even if the content was not always commensurable with Christian
sensibilities. Even the Church’s heretic hunters would quote Lucretius’
witty sayings in their pamphlets designed to keep people on the straight
and narrow.
And Lucretius was the
beginning of the Renaissance return to ancient Rome. There were numerous
other ancient Roman voices that people were harkening to hear. Pliny the
Elder was another popular ancient to study, and Cicero was the crowned
jewel of antiquity according to many a Renaissance man.
One man from
Renaissance-era Italy who loved the ancients and took a much dimmer view
toward Christianity was Machiavelli. He had the bearing of a skeptic. As
one of his friends put it, Machiavelli “finds it difficult to believe the
things that should be believed.”
In his 1517 treatise that
condensed ancient pagan political wisdom, Machiavelli writes that religion
is an instrument of civil control, and thus piety and devotion should be
encouraged. Medieval Europeans would have agreed that piety and devotion
are laudable aspirations. Lucretius would have seen religion as an organ of
control and detested it. Differing both from the ancients and medieval
thought, Machiavelli saw religion’s manipulative potential and loved it. He
loved Roman emperors who leveraged the common belief in emperor divinity to
keep control over society.
This was a new twist on
unbelief, but here during the Renaissance, as in medieval times, doubt
tended to look like cynicism that saw faith as trickery rather than
philosophically untenable.
In Machiavelli’s most well
known treatise, The
Prince, talk of religion is conspicuous in that it does not get
a single mention. In other works, Machiavelli talks about popes and clerics
as political agents. Interestingly, he admired Moses but thought Jesus was
a fool. Of course, he knew better than to say so by name, but Jesus fell
into his category of “unarmed prophets” who inevitably met terrible ends
and were ineffectual.
Machiavelli was not
actively trying to bring Christianity to its knees. In fact, he encouraged
religion, even if only for its political utility. But there were limits to
Machiavelli’s political vision. Christianity is not a great religion for
building a strong state. There was too great an emphasis on mercy and love.
To put it bluntly, Christianity was not masculine enough for Machiavelli’s
liking.
This thread of atheism as
masculine philosophy and antidote to weakling religion has a long
intellectual history from certain Roman emperors to more recent thinkers
like Nietzsche—but the key word here is intellectual.
On the social and emotional histories of doubt and atheism, the impact has
been negligible. If anything, atheism has, in its own way, tried to bring a
more authentically compassionate ethic in reaction to what they saw as
lacking in the Church’s practices.
Machiavelli exposes a
thread of anger in the Christian world, rooted in the belief that people
were being hoodwinked. He gave voice to the perceived trickery and even
incorporated it as a tool in his political stratagems.
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6. Protestants are
falling on the sword of skepticism that Reformers used to cut ties with
Catholicism.
Even by the reluctant
admission of lawyer-theologian John Calvin, the Reformation was creating
conditions for greater unbelief. People were taking the Reformation’s
strong emphasis on gospel freedom and running with it in all sorts of
directions. The new doctrinal emphasis on freedom and faith alone was
creating relief for some and confusion for many more. The vitriol and
cynicism that Reformers had unleashed on the papacy were now being expended
on Protestant doctrines as well. More than mere confusion, though, the
Reformation was pulling people away from faith. How did this happen?
The Protestant Reformation
vehemently attacked superstition of any kind. In the early Protestant mind,
superstition was interchangeable with Catholic doctrine. Zeal without
knowledge or an inordinate emphasis on this or that practice was taken as
superstition.
But this suspicion of superstition
created a conundrum for Protestants. Since antiquity, the natural foil to
superstition is impiety—otherwise known as atheism, broadly defined as
rejection of popular religion. This created a tightrope walk for Christians
in the Reformation era, who would fall to superstition on one end and
impiety on the other. Whether someone was Catholic or Protestant was a
reliable indicator of which way someone would fall. Those opting for
Catholicism would take the older food of belief even if it were partially
rotten, whereas the Protestants would opt for extreme hunger rather than
partake. Protestants would chance some unbelief rather than fall back into
what they considered Rome’s trickery.
One Catholic observed that
“a Catholic may commonly become sooner Superstitious, than a Protestant;
And a Protestant sooner become an Atheist, than a Catholic.”
Another historian similarly
contended that, in an age that had begun rejecting superstition more than
ever, the devil saw an opportunity to lead people out of the prison of
superstition and straight into another: the prison of atheism.
Catholics have, not
unfairly, pointed out that disbelief was not just an unintended byproduct
of Protestantism, but a central defining feature. Protestants not only
argued against but ridiculed Catholic doctrines like transubstantiation,
relics, and papal authority. Catholics were not just wrong but childishly
credulous. Gullibility was a sin for Protestants. This is the perilous
tightrope that Protestants chose to walk: rejecting credulity while hanging
onto a faith that does not tip over the other way into total incredulity
toward religion altogether.
In their own way,
Protestants were carrying on the theme of Church as trickster that had been
around since medieval times. Protestants were turning reason into a weapon
against superstition, but as more and more people failed to maintain the
balancing act and slipped from less credulous to incredulous, that same
weapon was brandished against not just Catholic superstition but against
Christianity of any stripe. To the Catholic, this stony suspicion was a far
more troubling trend than credulity because Protestants were losing their
capacity for faith at all.
Ultimately, it was not a
question of doctrine or faith being debated. It was a race to find the
others' view unbelievable, and one’s own view as credible. Just as
Protestants would make fun of Catholic belief in transubstantiation,
Catholics would ridicule the Protestants’ strict adherence to the word of
God as inspired. Each side viewed the other side as so blind and gullible
as to be incapable of embracing the more beautiful spiritual vision of the
more credible side.
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7. The core
emotions driving the history of religious doubt have been anger and
anxiety.
The roots of doubt were
emotional well before they were intellectual. Doubt appeared first as
anger, and then anxiety. An angry suspicious view of Church leaders as
tricksters abusing authority gave way to a defiance that reached a fever
pitch in the Protestant Reformation. Reformers wielded skepticism as a
weapon to club down Catholic gullibility, but their technique using doubt
to disarm Catholic superstition became increasingly generalized to religious
superstition. The Catholics wanted to keep faith simple and trusting,
whereas Protestants wanted a faith that was tested through reflection and
experience. Doubt became faith’s refining fire, but some were burned in the
process.
The Reformation era opened
up options of faith in Europe where there had formerly only been
Catholicism, but it was a decision that some people did not want to be
presented with in the first place. If we consider the word heretic comes from the
Greek word meaning “able to choose,” the idea of options was deeply
unsettling to some. Sometimes the ongoing reflective process of working
through doubts strengthened faith, but it left many other people in a state
of quiet exhaustion, and still others in a state of disillusionment. As the
tool of skepticism became more and more widely resorted to, religion itself
was doubted, often from within the Church’s ranks.
The rise of doubt about
one’s salvation, the Church’s or Bible’s authority, and immortality led to
a mounting anxiety. Seventeenth-century Puritans in some ways epitomize
this anxiety. Protestantism ushered in new forms of doubt and with it, deep
anxiety: A vacillating kind of skepticism that never alights on anything
for fear of being wrong or choosing wrong. Radicals, spiritualists,
Quakers, Anabaptists, and Seekers in England and Holland often deflected
questions of doctrinal stances until they could be more certain, or they
would look for the core of faith and shirk what they considered overly
established and outmoded doctrines. Some were waiting for another prophet
to come out of the wilderness in the power of the Spirit to show people a
way forward. One spiritualist even believed that all spiritual rites (from
baptism to the Lord’s Supper) should be postponed until such a figure
comes, since the Church had been corrupt since the death of the first
apostles.
Atheism was a more
acceptable phenomenon for the Church when it was seen as something beyond
the Church’s walls—all the better for believers when atheists were corrupt
and sexually immoral, their lives in shambles, because it reinforced the
narrative of a clear-cut demarcation between the faithful and faithless,
and the consequences of living outside Christian faith.
The Church and its devotees
were comfortable with that kind of atheism, but when atheists left the
expected role of bad guy, the narrative was thrown into upheaval. This was
the case when atheists claimed the moral high ground over believers and
respected Jesus but rejected what they considered corruption among clerics
and believers.
Some of the famous
Enlightenment figures that most Christian historians and theologians vilify
as atheists bent on ruining Christianity actually seemed more keen on
purifying or salvaging it. Listen at what Thomas Paine has to say in The Age of Reason. It
is a piece that is often considered a strike at faith, but he writes the
treatise, “…lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of
government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, humanity and of
the theology that is true.”
By exploring natural law
and universal moral frameworks, some Enlightenment figures were attempting
to find a new, surer foundation than questionable church authority to
ground a system closer to a more genuine Christianity.
The threads of anger and
anxiety tie together a history of unbelief in Western Christianity that
goes back further than most people realize. Considering the emotional
history of doubt can help those who still hold to faith take a more humble
view of the Church’s role in the rise of doubt and a more charitable view
of unbelievers from the past and the present.
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