Forty years ago Time Magazine ran one of its most famous covers
- a feature on the so-called 'death of God' theologians who, despairing of
ever reviving God, were attempting to rework Scripture for a Godless world.
If then even theologians were reading God his last rites, today even atheists
accept his miraculous resurrection. In this age of the worldwide jihad and
the march of the Creationists, only the blind or the mad could deny the return
of religion.
I don't think I'm blind, and I hope I am not mad, but I do want to suggest
that the return of religion is as illusory as was the death of God in the
first place. God is no more alive now than he was dead then. Rather the very
meaning of religion has changed. The embrace of religion today has little
to do with God, and still less to do with theology, but is bound up with very
secular notions of identity.
The argument for the return of religion is, ironically, bound very closely
to the argument for the death of God. In his book The Twilight of Atheism,
the theologian Alister McGrath links the revival of religion to what he calls
'The remarkable rise and subsequent fall of atheism'. The rise and fall of
atheism is, he suggests, framed by two pivotal events: the fall of the Bastille
in 1789 and that of the Berlin wall in 1989. In between the Bastille and the
Berlin Wall lay what McGrath calls the 'Golden age of atheism'.
This is a convenient fiction for both sides in the contemporary God Wars.
For atheists it demonstrates the possibility of a Godless world and the backwardness
of contemporary faith. For believers, it shows how miraculous, and necessary,
has been the return of religion. The trouble is, there was no such golden
age.
Atheism has never flourished as a significant social force, nor ever even
begun to displace faith in any real sense. Even scientists, until well into
the twentieth century, were more likely to be believers than non-believers.
What developed between the Bastille and the Berlin Wall was not atheism but
secularism. And to understand why the return of religion is not really the
return of religion, we have to understand the changing character of secularism.
Charles Taylor, in his new book A Secular Age, observes that there
are three meanings of secularism. The first is the separation of the public
and private spheres, of politics and religion. The second consists of the
falling off of religious belief and practice. And the third is a transformation
in the conditions of belief: the shift to secularity in this sense consists
of a move from a society in which belief in God was unchallenged and unproblematic
to one in which it is understood as just one option among many, and not necessarily
the most acceptable one. What I want to show is that in each of these senses,
Western societies have, over the past two decades, become less secular without
becoming more religious.
It was in the nineteenth century that the so-called Great Separation took
place - the uncoupling of politics and faith, and of the public and the private,
an uncoupling that came to define modernity. Political ideology rather than
religious dogma became the source of social conflict. War and revolution,
class and social justice, race and national identity - these, rather than
matters of faith, were the questions that divided Western societies over much
of the past two centuries.
The Great Separation is often seen as evidence of the death of God. It is
in fact both a lot more and a lot less than that. God did not die, but belief
in a wider sense began to decay.
Consider the three nineteenth century figures who between them embodied the
changing attitude to religion - Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche. Darwin provided
for the first time a Godless account of Creation that made atheism not just
conceivable but also plausible. But Darwinism expressed much more than this.
It also embodied a new relationship between science and religion. Traditionally
faith and reason had been seen not just as not incompatible but as inextricable.
The concept of God as creating a lawful universe had played an important role
in the development of science, one of the reasons that many of the pioneers
of the Scientific Revolution had been deeply devout men. But in the nineteenth
century science developed a new identity in opposition to religion, and no
theory expressed the conflict more than Darwinism.
If Darwin embodied the scientific assault on faith, Marx embodied the political
challenge. For Marx, religion was at one and the same time an expression of
alienation and a comfort in the face of such alienation, a protest against
oppression and the perpetuation of such oppression. For Marx, the real battle
was not against religion as such but against the social conditions that made
religion both possible and necessary. 'The struggle against religion', Marx
argued, 'is a struggle against the world of which religion is the spiritual
fragrance'.
Darwin and Marx both drew on the spirit of the Enlightenment. Darwin represented
one aspect of the Enlightenment challenge to faith - the importance of reason
over revelation. Marx represented another - the celebration of human agency.
But perhaps the biggest challenge to faith in the nineteenth century came
from a philosopher who was as dismissive of the philosophes as he
was of God - Nietzsche. No philosopher is more associated with the 'death
of God', having coined the very phrase. But if Nietzsche was the high priest
at God's funeral, he was also the chief celebrant at reason's wake. For the
late nineteenth century experienced not simply a crisis of faith, but also
what has been called 'the crisis of reason' - the erosion of Enlightenment
optimism, disenchantment with ideas of progress and disbelief in concepts
of truth.
Nietzsche gave voice to the growing disaffection of the age with both faith
and reason. His brilliance at doing so would eventually turn him into a key
figure of the postmodern assault on the so-called Enlightenment project. It
would also, ironically, make him indispensable to contemporary theology. The
rise of postmodernity, Alister McGrath observes with relish, has robbed atheism
of its 'self-evident plausibility and appeal' and made more appealing religion's
'confession of modesty and despair'.
The death of God, then, did not happen in isolation, but was part of a growing
broader estrangement from classical notions of truth, reason and universal
human values, notions that were embodied in both traditional religion and
the Enlightenment critique of faith. This is why the Great Separation was
both a lot more and a lot less than the death of God. God did not really die,
but something more than God began to wither.
If the 19th century saw the death of God, the 20th century witnessed the Fall
of Man. As politics and religion were decoupled, and religious belief became
a private matter, so political theology based on God became replaced by political
philosophy centred on humanity. But secular political philosophy also required
faith, though of a different kind - faith that humans were capable of acting
rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. That faith, too, began
to be eaten away by the wider disenchantment with Enlightenment hopes and
aspirations. The history of the twentieth century - two world wars, the Depression
and Holocaust, Auschwitz and the Gulags, climate change and ethnic cleansing
- helped further gnaw away at Enlightenment hope.
The fall of the Berlin Wall came to symbolise not just rejection of the tyranny
of the Soviet Union but also disenchantment with the very idea of human-directed
transformation. Many had come to feel that every impression that humanity
made upon the world was for the worse. The attempt to master nature had led
to global warming and species depletion. The attempt to master society had
led to Auschwitz and the gulags. 'In a real sense', the late ecologist Murray
Bookchin noted, 'we seem to be afraid of ourselves - of our uniquely human
attributes. We seem to be suffering from a decline in human self-confidence
and in our ability to create ethically meaningful lives that enrich humanity
and the non-human world.'
This sentiment was underpinned by the transformation of politics itself. The
broad ideological divides that characterised politics in the previous two
hundred years have been all but erased. Politics has became less about competing
visions of the kinds of society people than a debate about how best to manage
the existing political system.
As the meaning of politics has become squeezed, so people have begun to view
themselves and their social affiliations in a different way. Social solidarity
has become increasingly defined not in political terms - as collective action
in pursuit of certain political ideals - but in terms of ethnicity or culture.
The politics or ideology, in other words, gave way to the politics of identity.
It is not faith, but identity, that has created the faultlines of contemporary
conflicts.
At the heart of the politics of identity is a belief that culture, rather
than class, was the defining feature of groups and the means by which one
group differentiated itself from another. Every group, whether Cuban peasants,
black Americans or women, had a specific culture, rooted in its particular
history and experiences. That culture gave shape to an individual's identity.
'There is a certain way of being human that is my way', wrote Charles Taylor
in his much discussed essay on The Politics of Recognition. 'I am
called upon to live my life in this way... Being true to myself means being
true to my own originality.' This sense of being 'true to myself' Taylor calls
'the ideal of "authenticity"'. For an individual identity to be
authentic, collective identity must be too. 'Just like individuals', Charles
Taylor has written, 'a Volk should be true to itself, that is, its own culture'.
That requires the group to be true to its own culture, to pursue faithfully
the traditions that mark out that culture as unique and to rebuff the inauthentic
advances of modernity and of other cultures.
The politics of identity developed in the 1960s through the growth of the
New Social Movements - third world liberation movements, civil rights organisations,
feminist groups, campaigns for gay rights, and so on. But over the past 40
years, it has moved from a response of marginalised groups to inequality and
injustice to being a key aspect of mainstream social policy. It now lies at
the heart of much multicultural policy. Summing up the argument, the social
philosopher Bhikhu Parekh argues that since 'The liberal is in theory committed
to equal respect for persons', and 'Since human beings are culturally embedded',
so 'respect for people entails respect for their cultures and ways of life'.
The demand that cultural differences be given public recognition and affirmation
is in reality a demand for the re-attachment of the public and the private.
And there is the irony: the undoing of the nineteenth century Great Separation
has been propelled not by pressure from resurgent religion but through secular
arguments about the nature of culture and the importance of cultural differences.
It is against this background that we now talk of the return of religion.
But religion itself has been transformed by these changes. As Marx has faded
from the picture, so Darwin's star and that of Nietzsche have shone ever brighter.
Evolutionary explanations of the human condition have gained credibility,
on the one hand, while postmodern cynicism, on the other, has seeped into
wider culture. Both sides in the contemporary God Wars have been shaped by
this.
A religion comprises both a set of beliefs, and a complex of social institutions,
traditions and cultures that bind people in a special relationship to a particular
conception of the sacred. What is striking about religion today is that religious
belief has been wrenched apart from religious institutions, traditions and
cultures.
Faith, as Charles Taylor observes, has become disembedded from its historical
culture, and reconstituted instead as part of the culture of 'expressive individualism',
forms of spirituality grounded in the primacy of individual experience and
rooted in the social values of what Tom Wolfe called the 'me generation'.
In this sense contemporary forms of faith - whether radical Islam or charismatic
Christianity - signify not a return to traditional religion but a dramatic
break with it.
Religion has, ironically, become secularised, driven less by a search for
piety and holiness than for identity and belongingness. Faith has transformed
itself into the religious wing of identity politics. Contemporary radical
Islam, Nilufer Gole observes, is a 'religious experience of a new kind; it
is not directly handed over by community, religious or state institutions'.
Rather, it presents 'an affirmative reconstruction of identity'.
Consider, for instance, the changing face of Islamic religious texts. For
centuries such works were written by religious scholars, and carried titles
such as The explanations of secrets and The pearls of knowledge.
Contemporary texts are without precedent in Islamic history, penned as they
are by laypeople and addressing issues such as What does it mean to be
Muslim? and How to experience Islam - questions the answers
to which would have seemed self-evident in the past. Today, though, the answers
are far from clear because Islam, like all religions, is being reinvented
and redefined to meet secular, not religious, needs.
Islam 'today is constructed, reinterpreted and carried into public life',
Nilufer Gole writes, 'not through religious institutions, but through political
agency and cultural movements'. This is true not just of Islam, but of all
contemporary faiths. The 'new religions' - whether Islamic fundamentalism
or Pentecostal Christianity - have more in common with each other than they
do with more conventional forms of faith. They also have much in common with
cotemporary secular movements such as anti-globalisation and environmentalism.
And such secular movements, in turn, are often closer in outlook to the new
faiths than they are to traditional progressive ideologies.
As broader political, cultural and national identities have eroded, and as
traditional social networks, institutions of authority and moral codes have
weakened, so the resultant atomisation of society has created both an intensely
individual relationship to the world and a yearning for the restoration of
strong identities and moral lines. The new forms of faith address both these
needs. They are strongest in those communities that have most felt the dislocatory
effects of the erosion of politics - migrants to Europe, African Americans,
and conservative white Americans who feel that the dominant liberal culture
leaves them voiceless.
The religious form most often regarded as a throwback to traditional faith
- fundamentalism - signals, in fact, a tearing up of the past. It expresses
a kind of anti-modern nihilism that is, paradoxically, a peculiarly modern
sensibility and is often also expressed through contemporary secular ideologies,
such as environmentalism or anti-globalisation.
Fundamentalists put up two fingers to liberal democratic values. But they
are also hostile to traditional religious cultures. It is precisely the detachment
of fundamentalism from traditional religious institutions and cultures that
forces its adherents into a literal reading of the Holy book and to a strict
observance of supposedly authentic religious norms. Without cultural or institutional
embeddedness, fundamentalists look to the very word of the revealed text for
anchorage and to rigid social, cultural and moral forms - such as, for instance,
the veil - to mark themselves out as distinct and provide a collective identity.
Contemporary fundamentalism is very much a child of modern plural societies
and the celebration 'difference' and 'authenticity'. 'The illusion held by
Islamic radicals', the French sociologist Olivier Roy writes, 'is that they
represent tradition when in fact they express a negative form of westernisation'.
Non-Islamic observers hold exactly the same illusion.
Not only is contemporary fundamentalism a child of modern pluralism, it is
also a child of modern scientific culture. A literal reading of the text only
becomes both possible and necessary in a culture that has accepted scientific
notions of evidence. The Book must tell the truth in a scientific, not allegorical
or literary, fashion. Intelligent Design is a means of describing the Bible
as providing not just revealed but also empirical truth. The Indian writer
Meera Nanda has shown how Hinduvta, the philosophy of the modern Hindu fundamentalism
movement, marries a postmodern sensibility to a seeming acceptance of a scientific
concept of empirical truth to show that traditional Hinduism already contains
the seeds of a 'a humane, ecological and non-reductionist science'.
What we are witnessing in all is not the return of religion in any traditional
sense but the rise of what Olivier Roy calls religiosity - a sensibility
to be found not just in new forms of faith, but also in new forms of secular
politics. As Roy says of studying radical Islam, what we need is a transverse
understanding, exploring it not in terms of specific Islamic history but in
comparison to other forms of contemporary faith, of New Age philosophies,
of other identity movements and of contemporary forms of political radicalisation.
What it suggests is that we should stop asking what it is about religion that
makes people believe or behave in certain ways. And start asking: what is
it about contemporary society that leads people, the faithful and the secular,
to believe or behave in certain ways?