Evangelical Christians sometimes accuse me of being anti-Christian or anti-religion. I suppose they confuse atheism with anti-theism. But I am the first to admit that religion has benefits and probably played a significant role in our evolutionary history...
Introduction: The benefits of religion
Religion is one way to satisfy some basic, human needs. Religion wouldn't exist if it hadn't been useful. If faith means God, then religion can be separated from God (and the supernatural in general).
Philosopher Alain de Botton explored this idea in his book "Religion for atheists"…
What if religions are neither all true or all nonsense? The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain’s book Religion for Atheists, which argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false – and yet that religions still have some very important things to teach the secular world.
Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religions, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from them – because they’re packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, Alain (a non-believer himself) proposes that we should look to religions for insights into, among other concerns, how to:
• make our relationships last
• overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy
• escape the twenty-four hour media
• go travelling
• get more out of art, architecture and music
• and create new businesses designed to address our emotional needs.
For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing lots of peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last, in Religion for Atheists, Alain has fashioned a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.
The rest of this post is based on key points from the book...
2 Wisdom without Doctrine
Perhaps the most pointless argument in human history is whether or not a religion is true (which usually means based on Scripture handed down from heaven and supernaturally governed by prophets and celestial beings). The argument is easily resolved by recognising that no religions are true in any "God-given sense". Harsh critics of religion seem to derive pleasure laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, portraying them as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs.
But the real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where to take the argument once one decides that he evidently doesn't. Just because religions are man-made does not mean they are ridiculous. A common sense approach for atheists therefore is to realise that religions can be sporadically useful, interesting and consoling. Atheists should be curious as to the possibilities of importing the best religious ideas and practices into the secular realm, and interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring.
We can then recognise that we invented religions to serve two central, human needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. The non-existence of God does not negate the urgent issues which impelled us to invent Him. We should recognise the many aspects of faiths which remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. Once we cease to feel that we must either prostrate ourselves before them or denigrate them, we are free to discover religions as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.

In the course of ridding ourselves of unfeasible religious ideas, we have unnecessarily surrendered some of the most useful and attractive parts of the faiths. Religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for providing a justification for people to change the world. The medium of religion has managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture - a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential secular movements and individuals in history.
3. Community
One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. It’s often linked with the privatisation of religious belief - historians have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbours at around the same time as we ceased communally to honour our gods. But some of it is just sheer numbers – there are too many of us, and too many of our engagements are impersonal. We no longer need to rely on other people for help, we are frightened by what the media tell us about the violence and depravity of others, and we are encouraged to embark on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a lifelong, complete and sufficient communion. Many of us throw ourselves into our careers instead, and hope to get our needs met there.
The Church knows about loneliness, it creates community, it invites us to be happy without having to be successful, it deals with our fears and offers us the respect and security we crave through a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome. In AD 364 the Church banned agape feasts (they’d become excessive and rowdy) in favour of eating at home and then coming to a ritualised meal which we know as the Eucharist. It’s odd we have so few public venues which help us turn strangers into friends – we need to adapt the Mass into an all-comers Agape Restaurant, where people can meet one another through dining together.
It’s not just how to form community that religions are good at, it’s how to handle things when they go wrong. Judaism in particular is good at anger - an annual Day of Atonement on which people are supposed to seek forgiveness from all they may have hurt over the last year. And consider the other rituals religions offer to build and maintain community in the face of difficulty: funerals, Bar Mitzvahs, the medieval Feast of Fools, etc.
4. Kindness
We are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. Some people see this as counter to libertarian beliefs and risks paternalism. JS Mill said the only grounds for state interference in people’s lives is to prevent them harming others - not for their own good. Religions however have never held back. They are not afraid to offer guidance on how to live. They provide a particularly effective strategy to sustain goodness which is that of assuming there is always an audience. It helps us to be good if we know someone is watching (the principal is easily demonstrated with Father Christmas!)
Christianity, for example, creates an atmosphere in which people point out their flaws to one another and look for improvement in their behaviour. Fresco painters put up virtues and vices as models and warnings – e.g. the Scrovegni Chapel. We should have similar images on advertising hoardings advocating forgiveness instead of fast food! Atheists might pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but secular societies have their own commercial propaganda.
Christianity in particular recognises the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalise and mimic attitudes and behaviour of our peers. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work.
Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.
The paucity of paragons helps to explain why Catholicism sets before its believers some two and a half thousand of the greatest, most virtuous human beings who, they claim, have ever lived. These saints are each in their different ways exemplars of qualities we should hope to nurture in ourselves. The story of St Joseph, for instance, may illustrate to us how to cope calmly with the pressures of a young family and how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and complaining temper. There are moments when we may want to break down and sob in the company of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, whose gentle manner can grant us comfort without any need to find immediate solutions or even hope.
A mature secular society should think with similar care about its role models, but it has the advantage of using actual, historical figures whose actions are a matter of fact and cannot be labeled as fairy tales by sceptics. We need ‘patron saints’ who model courage, friendship, fidelity etc - how about Lincoln, Churchill, Paul Smith?
5. Education & the difference between Wisdom and Information,
Secular democracies believe fervently in education – but often this is about learning the facts of nature, literature and history. But there is not a great deal of effort going in to teaching emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it. Religions have used Scripture to do this; and since the 19th Century the hope has been that culture could replace Scripture in helping people find meaning, understand themselves, behave morally, forgive others and confront their own mortality. So we could turn to Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, Wagner and Turner instead.
Of course, novels, fables, parables and literature can impart and illustrate moral instruction; paintings make suggestions about happiness; literature can change our lives, philosophy can offer consolations. But while universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.
Christianity defines human beings to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death - and most of all in need of God.
What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.
We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities - history and anthropology, literature and philosophy - as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.
In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, un-empathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.
Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension - which we often refer to as the "soul". It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our "souls".
Wesley used to preach on being kind, staying obedient to parents, visiting the sick, caution against bigotry. He said ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore... I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is... to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ We must be careful not to construct an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul.
Then there’s the method - impassioned, emotional preaching makes a difference to the engagement and impact. Maybe Secular education would benefit from its lecturers being sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers!
Ideas need not just to be presented, but also repeated, in fact this is vital for learning. All mainstream religions include an element of repetitive learning of prayers and Scripture, and regular events in the religious calendar, and regular events during the day. On the other hand, secular society leaves us free, presenting us with a constant stream of new information - more than we can remember. It expects us to spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us, and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It’s the ‘news’ which occupies the position of authority in the secular sphere which the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Matins has become the breakfast bulletin, vespers the evening report. Its prestige is founded on the assumptions that our lives are poised on the verge of transformation due to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. Religious texts, by contrast, are few in number and thoroughly absorbed.
6. Tenderness
A man in a church, praying to Mary, going out feeling better. We long to be held and comforted; prayer does that. By contrast with religion, atheism is prone to seem coldly impatient with our neediness. The longing for comfort which lies at the heart of the Marian cult seems perilously regressive and at odds with the rational engagement with existence on which atheists pride themselves. Mary and her cohorts have been framed as symptoms of urges which adults ought quickly to outgrow.
Religion should not be attacked for blinding itself to its own motives, for being unwilling to acknowledge that it is, at base, nothing more than a glorified response to childhood longings which have been dressed up, recast in new forms and projected into the heavens. It is wrong to deny such needs exist. Atheists and theists have the same needs!
7. Pessimism
We should honour Pascal, and the long line of Christian pessimists to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state. Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on science, technology and commerce. Material improvements since the mid-eighteenth century have been so remarkable, have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth; power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic - and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content. It has been impossible to hold on to a balanced assessment of what life is likely to provide for us when have witnessed the cracking of the genetic code, the invention of the mobile phone, the opening of Western-style supermarkets in remote corners of China and the launch of the Hubble telescope.
Yet while it is undeniable that the scientific and economic trajectories of mankind have been pointed firmly in an up direction for several centuries, we do not comprise mankind: none of us individuals can dwell exclusively amidst the ground-breaking developments in genetics or telecommunications that lend our age its distinctive and buoyant prejudices. We may derive some benefit from the availability of hot baths and computer chips, but our lives are no less subject to accident, frustrated ambition, heartbreak, jealousy, anxiety or death than were those of our medieval forebears. But at least our ancestors had the advantage of living in a religious era which never made the mistake of promising its population that happiness could ever make a permanent home for itself on this earth.
There is a risk that secular society will come to assume that paradise might be realised with just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.
It could therefore, be quite healthy for the non-religious to have their reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. We should cease to view the pessimism of religions as belonging to them alone, or as indelibly dependent on hopes for salvation. We should strive to adopt the acute perspective of those who believe in paradise, even as we live out our own lives abiding by the fundamental atheistic precept that this is the one world we will ever know.
A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise. Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say 'Thank you' a little more often.
Although people are generally polite to each other, the secular world may be missing a trick by not offering up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. Maybe that's because there is no one to say "Thank you" to. But giving thanks to a non-existence supernatural entity at leasts prompts us to appreciate our "blessings" for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, but which we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. We should carve out moments of gratitude in honour of sunsets or apricots!
8. Perspective
Religion is above all a symbol of what exceeds us and an education in the advantages of recognising our paltriness. Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Reminders of transcendence are helpful in providing perspective – maybe we should have public images of galaxies set up to remind us how small we are.
9. Art
Some atheists find it hard to give up the beauty and emotion of ecclesiastical art – and strive to find alternatives. Museums of art have become our new churches; like universities, they promise to fill the gaps left by the ebbing of faith; they give us meaning without superstition. Secular books can replace the gospels; and so museums may be able to take over the aesthetic responsibilities of churches.
Why should art matter? Museums display it in hushed galleries, but do not encourage us to ask any religious questions about it – even religious art is stripped of its theological content. We are encouraged to respond to art by becoming knowledgeable about it, not by reacting to it. We are supposed to understand it, not be transformed by it. Christianity has never left any doubt that art is there to remind us about what matters. Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’; ideas, particularly, which matter to the proper functioning of our souls.
The focus in Christian art on suffering helps us to bear it, to know we are not alone in it; art gives shape to pain, and thus attenuates the worst of our feelings of isolation. Perhaps art galleries should offer secular images as a modern equivalent of the 14 stations of the cross – a depressed girl, a disabled man. Art shows us that other people are just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. Christian art has a mission; to offer virtues and vices and remind us of what is important but easily forgotten. And the Church never left its artists to decide what art should be about - the religious authorities did that, and paid for the art to be produced. No one assumed that talent was compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. Titian was not expected to be a great philosopher.
How about a Tate Modern with galleries devoted to suffering, compassion, fear, love, self knowledge?
10. Architecture
Religious architecture mitigates our egoism by showing us our own insignificance. So could secular buildings. It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. We are never far from a machine that guarantees a mesmerising escape from reality. We need places where that’s not happening – with views, sounds, simplicity. We need modern temples to reflection, places where we can find the solitude we need to think about things, capture those rare insights upon which the successful course of our life depends, but which normally run across our distracted minds only occasionally and skittishly like shy deer.
Religions, both Roman and Christian, allow for sacred places with curative powers. We suffer from a lack of shrines. We travel, but our travelling sometimes lacks any therapeutic purpose.
11. Institutions
Secular intellectuals suffer from a suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic world view – but isolated they can’t disseminate their ideas effectively, and are doomed to achieve very little. We need to create secular entities that can meet the needs of the inner self with the skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.
Brands promote consistency and create a shared visual vocabulary – both religions and commercial organisations do this. Auguste Comte recognised that secular society needs its own institutions, ones that cold take the place of religions by addressing human needs which fall outside the existing remits of politics, the family, culture and the workplace. He said good ideas would not be able to flourish if left inside books; they have to be supported by institutions. It never got off the ground – but maybe it should.
2 Wisdom without Doctrine
Perhaps the most pointless argument in human history is whether or not a religion is true (which usually means based on Scripture handed down from heaven and supernaturally governed by prophets and celestial beings). The argument is easily resolved by recognising that no religions are true in any "God-given sense". Harsh critics of religion seem to derive pleasure laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, portraying them as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs.
But the real issue is not whether God exists or not, but where to take the argument once one decides that he evidently doesn't. Just because religions are man-made does not mean they are ridiculous. A common sense approach for atheists therefore is to realise that religions can be sporadically useful, interesting and consoling. Atheists should be curious as to the possibilities of importing the best religious ideas and practices into the secular realm, and interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring.
We can then recognise that we invented religions to serve two central, human needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. The non-existence of God does not negate the urgent issues which impelled us to invent Him. We should recognise the many aspects of faiths which remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed. Once we cease to feel that we must either prostrate ourselves before them or denigrate them, we are free to discover religions as repositories of a myriad ingenious concepts with which we can try to assuage a few of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life.

In the course of ridding ourselves of unfeasible religious ideas, we have unnecessarily surrendered some of the most useful and attractive parts of the faiths. Religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for providing a justification for people to change the world. The medium of religion has managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture - a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential secular movements and individuals in history.
3. Community
One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. It’s often linked with the privatisation of religious belief - historians have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbours at around the same time as we ceased communally to honour our gods. But some of it is just sheer numbers – there are too many of us, and too many of our engagements are impersonal. We no longer need to rely on other people for help, we are frightened by what the media tell us about the violence and depravity of others, and we are encouraged to embark on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a lifelong, complete and sufficient communion. Many of us throw ourselves into our careers instead, and hope to get our needs met there.
The Church knows about loneliness, it creates community, it invites us to be happy without having to be successful, it deals with our fears and offers us the respect and security we crave through a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome. In AD 364 the Church banned agape feasts (they’d become excessive and rowdy) in favour of eating at home and then coming to a ritualised meal which we know as the Eucharist. It’s odd we have so few public venues which help us turn strangers into friends – we need to adapt the Mass into an all-comers Agape Restaurant, where people can meet one another through dining together.
It’s not just how to form community that religions are good at, it’s how to handle things when they go wrong. Judaism in particular is good at anger - an annual Day of Atonement on which people are supposed to seek forgiveness from all they may have hurt over the last year. And consider the other rituals religions offer to build and maintain community in the face of difficulty: funerals, Bar Mitzvahs, the medieval Feast of Fools, etc.
4. Kindness
We are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. Some people see this as counter to libertarian beliefs and risks paternalism. JS Mill said the only grounds for state interference in people’s lives is to prevent them harming others - not for their own good. Religions however have never held back. They are not afraid to offer guidance on how to live. They provide a particularly effective strategy to sustain goodness which is that of assuming there is always an audience. It helps us to be good if we know someone is watching (the principal is easily demonstrated with Father Christmas!)
Christianity, for example, creates an atmosphere in which people point out their flaws to one another and look for improvement in their behaviour. Fresco painters put up virtues and vices as models and warnings – e.g. the Scrovegni Chapel. We should have similar images on advertising hoardings advocating forgiveness instead of fast food! Atheists might pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but secular societies have their own commercial propaganda.
Christianity in particular recognises the extent to which our concepts of good and bad are shaped by the people we spend time with. It knows that we are dangerously permeable with regard to our social circle, all too apt to internalise and mimic attitudes and behaviour of our peers. Simultaneously, it accepts that the particular company we keep is largely a result of haphazard forces, a peculiar cast of characters drawn from our childhood, schooling, community and work.
Among the few hundred people we regularly encounter, not very many are likely to be the sorts of exceptional individuals who exhaust our imagination with their good qualities, who strengthen our soul and whose voices we want consciously to adopt to bolster our best impulses.
The paucity of paragons helps to explain why Catholicism sets before its believers some two and a half thousand of the greatest, most virtuous human beings who, they claim, have ever lived. These saints are each in their different ways exemplars of qualities we should hope to nurture in ourselves. The story of St Joseph, for instance, may illustrate to us how to cope calmly with the pressures of a young family and how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and complaining temper. There are moments when we may want to break down and sob in the company of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, whose gentle manner can grant us comfort without any need to find immediate solutions or even hope.
A mature secular society should think with similar care about its role models, but it has the advantage of using actual, historical figures whose actions are a matter of fact and cannot be labeled as fairy tales by sceptics. We need ‘patron saints’ who model courage, friendship, fidelity etc - how about Lincoln, Churchill, Paul Smith?
5. Education & the difference between Wisdom and Information,
Secular democracies believe fervently in education – but often this is about learning the facts of nature, literature and history. But there is not a great deal of effort going in to teaching emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it. Religions have used Scripture to do this; and since the 19th Century the hope has been that culture could replace Scripture in helping people find meaning, understand themselves, behave morally, forgive others and confront their own mortality. So we could turn to Marcus Aurelius, Boccaccio, Wagner and Turner instead.
Of course, novels, fables, parables and literature can impart and illustrate moral instruction; paintings make suggestions about happiness; literature can change our lives, philosophy can offer consolations. But while universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.
Christianity defines human beings to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death - and most of all in need of God.
What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.
We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities - history and anthropology, literature and philosophy - as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.
In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, un-empathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.
Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension - which we often refer to as the "soul". It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our "souls".
Wesley used to preach on being kind, staying obedient to parents, visiting the sick, caution against bigotry. He said ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore... I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is... to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’ We must be careful not to construct an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul.
Then there’s the method - impassioned, emotional preaching makes a difference to the engagement and impact. Maybe Secular education would benefit from its lecturers being sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers!
Ideas need not just to be presented, but also repeated, in fact this is vital for learning. All mainstream religions include an element of repetitive learning of prayers and Scripture, and regular events in the religious calendar, and regular events during the day. On the other hand, secular society leaves us free, presenting us with a constant stream of new information - more than we can remember. It expects us to spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us, and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. It’s the ‘news’ which occupies the position of authority in the secular sphere which the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Matins has become the breakfast bulletin, vespers the evening report. Its prestige is founded on the assumptions that our lives are poised on the verge of transformation due to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. Religious texts, by contrast, are few in number and thoroughly absorbed.
6. Tenderness
A man in a church, praying to Mary, going out feeling better. We long to be held and comforted; prayer does that. By contrast with religion, atheism is prone to seem coldly impatient with our neediness. The longing for comfort which lies at the heart of the Marian cult seems perilously regressive and at odds with the rational engagement with existence on which atheists pride themselves. Mary and her cohorts have been framed as symptoms of urges which adults ought quickly to outgrow.
Religion should not be attacked for blinding itself to its own motives, for being unwilling to acknowledge that it is, at base, nothing more than a glorified response to childhood longings which have been dressed up, recast in new forms and projected into the heavens. It is wrong to deny such needs exist. Atheists and theists have the same needs!
7. Pessimism
We should honour Pascal, and the long line of Christian pessimists to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state. Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on science, technology and commerce. Material improvements since the mid-eighteenth century have been so remarkable, have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth; power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic - and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content. It has been impossible to hold on to a balanced assessment of what life is likely to provide for us when have witnessed the cracking of the genetic code, the invention of the mobile phone, the opening of Western-style supermarkets in remote corners of China and the launch of the Hubble telescope.
Yet while it is undeniable that the scientific and economic trajectories of mankind have been pointed firmly in an up direction for several centuries, we do not comprise mankind: none of us individuals can dwell exclusively amidst the ground-breaking developments in genetics or telecommunications that lend our age its distinctive and buoyant prejudices. We may derive some benefit from the availability of hot baths and computer chips, but our lives are no less subject to accident, frustrated ambition, heartbreak, jealousy, anxiety or death than were those of our medieval forebears. But at least our ancestors had the advantage of living in a religious era which never made the mistake of promising its population that happiness could ever make a permanent home for itself on this earth.
There is a risk that secular society will come to assume that paradise might be realised with just a few more years of financial growth and medical research. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.
It could therefore, be quite healthy for the non-religious to have their reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. We should cease to view the pessimism of religions as belonging to them alone, or as indelibly dependent on hopes for salvation. We should strive to adopt the acute perspective of those who believe in paradise, even as we live out our own lives abiding by the fundamental atheistic precept that this is the one world we will ever know.
A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise. Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say 'Thank you' a little more often.
Although people are generally polite to each other, the secular world may be missing a trick by not offering up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. Maybe that's because there is no one to say "Thank you" to. But giving thanks to a non-existence supernatural entity at leasts prompts us to appreciate our "blessings" for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, but which we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. We should carve out moments of gratitude in honour of sunsets or apricots!
8. Perspective
Religion is above all a symbol of what exceeds us and an education in the advantages of recognising our paltriness. Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Reminders of transcendence are helpful in providing perspective – maybe we should have public images of galaxies set up to remind us how small we are.
9. Art
Some atheists find it hard to give up the beauty and emotion of ecclesiastical art – and strive to find alternatives. Museums of art have become our new churches; like universities, they promise to fill the gaps left by the ebbing of faith; they give us meaning without superstition. Secular books can replace the gospels; and so museums may be able to take over the aesthetic responsibilities of churches.
Why should art matter? Museums display it in hushed galleries, but do not encourage us to ask any religious questions about it – even religious art is stripped of its theological content. We are encouraged to respond to art by becoming knowledgeable about it, not by reacting to it. We are supposed to understand it, not be transformed by it. Christianity has never left any doubt that art is there to remind us about what matters. Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’; ideas, particularly, which matter to the proper functioning of our souls.
The focus in Christian art on suffering helps us to bear it, to know we are not alone in it; art gives shape to pain, and thus attenuates the worst of our feelings of isolation. Perhaps art galleries should offer secular images as a modern equivalent of the 14 stations of the cross – a depressed girl, a disabled man. Art shows us that other people are just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. Christian art has a mission; to offer virtues and vices and remind us of what is important but easily forgotten. And the Church never left its artists to decide what art should be about - the religious authorities did that, and paid for the art to be produced. No one assumed that talent was compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. Titian was not expected to be a great philosopher.
How about a Tate Modern with galleries devoted to suffering, compassion, fear, love, self knowledge?
10. Architecture
Religious architecture mitigates our egoism by showing us our own insignificance. So could secular buildings. It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. We are never far from a machine that guarantees a mesmerising escape from reality. We need places where that’s not happening – with views, sounds, simplicity. We need modern temples to reflection, places where we can find the solitude we need to think about things, capture those rare insights upon which the successful course of our life depends, but which normally run across our distracted minds only occasionally and skittishly like shy deer.
Religions, both Roman and Christian, allow for sacred places with curative powers. We suffer from a lack of shrines. We travel, but our travelling sometimes lacks any therapeutic purpose.
11. Institutions
Secular intellectuals suffer from a suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic world view – but isolated they can’t disseminate their ideas effectively, and are doomed to achieve very little. We need to create secular entities that can meet the needs of the inner self with the skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.
Brands promote consistency and create a shared visual vocabulary – both religions and commercial organisations do this. Auguste Comte recognised that secular society needs its own institutions, ones that cold take the place of religions by addressing human needs which fall outside the existing remits of politics, the family, culture and the workplace. He said good ideas would not be able to flourish if left inside books; they have to be supported by institutions. It never got off the ground – but maybe it should.
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