The Remarkable Case of Pentecostalism
7
THE UNEXPECTED RESURGENCE OF RELIGION
BY 1970 MANY had come to the view that religion was on its way out. Some saw this as the glorious culmination of the process of secularization within Western culture; others as a sad and traumatic end to the history of faith in the West. What would a post-theist world look like? Many imagined one, and liked what they saw. Elimination of belief in God would lead to a more peaceful and stable world. That, at least, was the judgment of John Lennon (1940–80), whose song “Imagine” invited its audiences to envisage an ideal world, devoid of conflict precisely because it was devoid of religion: “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky.”
By eliminating religious, political, social, and economic differences, humanity would finally be able to achieve unity. The song was released on September 9, 1971, in the United States, and achieved an instant resonance with the zeitgeist, then dominated by the Vietnam conflict and the rise of the peace movement. Beliefs were firmly identified as the enemy of peace. Once religion had been eradicated, there would be only a “brotherhood of man” with nothing left “to kill or die for.” Sadly, Lennon was shot dead in New York on December 8, 1980, a victim of his own fame rather than of religious belief. But the vision remained persuasive.
But what if Nietzsche is right? What if the great revolt against God of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is not a matter of reason, but of taste? What if the appeal of atheism is culturally conditioned and historically located—in other words, its attractiveness is the outcome of a specific set of historical circumstances that have now ended, giving way to a quite different situation?
Everywhere there are signs that atheism is losing its appeal. To speak of the “twilight of atheism” is to evoke an association with Richard Wagner’s “twilight of the gods” or Nietzsche’s “twilight of the idols,” suggesting that its day of influence is passing, and its sun setting. The term “postatheist” is now widely used to designate the collapse of atheism as a worldview in Eastern Europe and the resurgence of religious belief throughout many of those areas that had once been considered officially atheist. Yet it is now clear postatheism is not limited to the East; it is becoming a recognizable presence within Western culture. Atheism, once seen as Western culture’s hot date with the future, is now seen as an embarrassing link with a largely discredited past.
One of the surest signs of this loss of confidence is a not particularly subtle attempt at redefinition within the atheist movement. Faced with numerical decline and a growing revolt against their dogmatism, some within the movement are suggesting that “atheism” should not designate those who positively reject belief in God; instead, they argue, it should refer to those who do not, at this moment, actually believe in any supernatural beings. So “the new atheism” now embraces those who are still thinking about God and those who regard the question of God as being beyond adjudication this side of heaven—in other words, those who prefer to call themselves agnostics.
It’s a smart public relations move. But it means that “atheism” has lost its cutting edge, dulled and grayed from overextension. The college graduate who has suspended judgment on God while she reflects on the issues cannot be designated an atheist for that reason; she might indeed be a potential atheist—but she might equally end up as an agnostic or a Christian. It’s a neat way of redefining atheism, extending its numerical embrace at a time of decline and demoralization. Yet it is clearly unacceptable to call a person an atheist because he doesn’t presently believe in God. This impoverishment of a once-proud concept will simply persuade atheism’s growing army of critics that it is on the retreat, and anxious to swell its ranks by any means possible.
But this is not atheism in the grand and dignified sense of the word—a bold and courageous word that I myself was once proud to own. Atheism is not about the suspension of judgment on the God question; it is a firm and principled commitment to the nonexistence of God, and the liberating impact of this belief. The very idea of God is declared to be outdated, enslaving, and a downright self-contradiction. The history of atheism is a mirror image of faith. For at its best and most authentic, atheism is a protest—a protest against the social and personal injustices often linked with religion and certain of its ideas in the past, which are held to be reactionary, oppressive, or even demonic. It is impossible not to respect atheism at these points. To abuse the term by applying it to those who are still thinking about things, or who believe that the matter cannot in fact be settled, represents a dilution of the concept born of demographic desperation.
A LOSS OF FAITH: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE
I used to be an atheist. Let me be clear what I mean by that. I am not using the watered-down definition of someone who does not (yet) believe in God, or is not particularly religious. By “atheist,” I mean precisely what the word has always been understood to mean—a principled and informed decision to reject belief in God. I write this book as a wounded yet still respectful lover of the great revolt against God. In the late 1960s, as a high school student in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I came to the view that religion was the source of all of humanity’s ills. It was the wisdom of the age, which I reflected faithfully, though perhaps a little too passively. Religion was, to my youthful eyes, an inherently violent presence within Western culture, whose elimination was only a matter of time. I had read A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and believed firmly, if a little prematurely, that it was utterly meaningless to talk about God. I came to regard Christianity and the natural sciences as mutually incompatible, on the basis of the incorrigible certainties about life widely entertained by teenagers. I tried, without much success, to found an Atheist Society at my school, the Methodist College in Belfast.
The principal cause of my atheism was Marxism, a movement that I believed held the key to the future. The late 1960s were a time of immense optimism concerning the future. It was widely believed that a new world was waiting to be born, and that we would not have long to wait before a new era of justice, peace, and freedom would emerge, sweeping away the discredited old order. Religion was part of that order, and I confidently believed that it would not be around for much longer. Attending a very religious school did little to increase my enthusiasm for faith. The progressive books that I read—such as Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian—encouraged me to believe that mine would be the last generation to have to put up with this nonsense.
I had specialized in the natural sciences, hoping to go up to Oxford University to study chemistry after finishing high school. I was firmly of the view that the natural sciences offered perfectly adequate explanations for every aspect of reality. My views at this stage were very similar to those later expressed by Richard Dawkins. Religion was irrational superstition, which depended on blind faith on the part of very stupid people; science proved its theories for certain. It was an extremely simple worldview—probably deriving much of its appeal from precisely that simplicity—that I was able to maintain without undue difficulty. Until, that is, I began to study the history and philosophy of science in my final year at school, in preparation for going up to Oxford. Suddenly, things seemed rather more complicated and rather less straightforward than I realized.
Why did I then find atheism so attractive? I have no doubt that I, along with countless others, saw atheism as attractive for three interlocking reasons. First, it offered a break from the religious past. Northern Ireland had a long history of religious strife and violence; the elimination of religion would therefore lead to peace and prosperity within my troubled homeland. Like many, I longed for peace, and saw atheism as the solution to the world’s problems. If religion was to be abolished throughout the world, how many fewer wars there would be!
Let me stress this point: the appeal of atheism for me lay in its proposal to eradicate religion. If atheism had represented itself simply as commending the merits of a godless worldview, I would not have been attracted to it—and neither would many others. Its lure lay in its proposal to change the world rather than to create a little club of the godless in the midst of a religious world. As Karl Marx had pointed out many years earlier, philosophers had merely offered interpretations of the world; what was really needed was a transformation. The atheist vision was totalizing—a panoramic view of a society that had been liberated from its chief enemy and oppressor, whether that was defined as God or religion (I knew just enough at this stage to appreciate that not all religions believed in God).
Second, atheism seemed to make a certain degree of sense of things. If there was no God, then life was what we chose to make of it. It was, in some ways, a rather bleak philosophy of life—but if it was right, who cared? Having read Camus and Sartre, I had come to the view that there was a real integrity, not to mention a certain degree of bravery, in embracing such an austere philosophy, which contrasted rather pleasingly with what I regarded as the superstitious delusions of Christianity. To my slightly confused way of thinking, the bleaker an outlook, the greater the chance of its being right in the first place.
But third, atheism offered hope—the hope of a better future and the possibility of being involved in bringing this future about. It has often been suggested that Marxism offers a secular messianic outlook, and I certainly found it to be so. There had to be a better future for humanity—and to enter and embrace that future demanded breaking with the oppression and superstitions of long ago. Atheism offered humanity the possibility of transforming itself, starting all over again without the encumbrance of outmoded ideas inherited from a distant past.
It was only when I went up to Oxford in 1971 to study chemistry in detail that I began to realize how little I knew about the history and philosophy of the natural sciences, or the nature of Christian belief. Like my fellow countryman C. S. Lewis, I found myself experiencing “the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” To cut a long story short, I discovered that I had rejected what I did not really understand, and accepted what I increasingly came to realize was an imaginatively impoverished and emotionally deficient substitute. The trite antireligious slogans of writers such as Robert Ingersoll came increasingly to seem empty and uncomprehending as I began to discover a dimension to life that I had hitherto suppressed.
I do not for one moment imagine that I am typical of those who once embraced atheism and then lost their faith. With the passing of time since then, I have increasingly come to think that it is impossible to read the great works of the golden age of atheism without feeling a sense of distance, even dislocation. The conventional validations of atheism seemed to presuppose a social order that had long since vanished. Works of atheist propaganda seemed to relive long-forgotten battles; they paid disturbingly little attention to the more worrying aspects of the twentieth century, not least the highly ambivalent legacy of institutionalized atheism itself.
Writing this book has thus been an unsettling experience. It is like the Irishman who leaves his native land to settle in America, retaining fond memories of Ireland—memories made even fonder by a sense of dislocation, physical and cultural, from his homeland. As the years pass, those memories become increasingly romanticized, softened by the passage of time, tinged with nostalgia. On revisiting the homeland, some of its fondly remembered bright colors turn out to be rather drab, its idealized vast landscapes more cramped, and its cities more derelict than the memory allowed. The ideas that once excited and enthralled me seem, on being revisited, rather humdrum and mundane. The distorting effects of memory soon became clear to me; the rooms of the intellectual house I had once inhabited now appeared uncomfortably cramped, dingy, and stale. I had moved on, and, to my surprise, found less than I had expected in the revisiting to make me wish to move back.
In revisiting atheism, I found some of those familiar and much-loved places I recalled from my youth: a passion for liberation, a principled demand for an end to oppression, for intellectual rigor in our thinking, and for courage in the face of the world’s evils and ambiguities. Yet I also became aware of the sheer humanity of the movement—its failures, both moral and intellectual, which jostled uneasily alongside its more publicized successes; its pathological sense of entitlement to sit at the head of the high table of religious discussion; and a disturbing ambivalence, even vulnerability, within the ideas and systems that I had once thought to be impregnable.
THE STALLED INTELLECTUAL CASE AGAINST GOD
It is increasingly recognized that philosophical argument about the existence of God has ground to a halt. The matter lies beyond rational proof, and is ultimately a matter of faith, in the sense of judgments made in the absence of sufficient evidence. As Thomas Huxley rightly pointed out, no such decision may be reached on the basis of the evidence available, forcing us to reach one of two conclusions: either no decision can be reached (a position that Huxley designated “agnosticism”), or a decision is reached on other grounds. As Blaise Pascal (1623–62) pointed out, “reasons of the heart” play a far greater role in shaping our attitudes to God than we realize.
The belief that there is no God is just as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God. If “faith” is defined as “belief lying beyond proof,” both Christianity and atheism are faiths. While this suggestion might seem astonishing to some atheists, it is not only philosophically correct but also illuminating in shedding light on the changed fortunes of atheism in recent years. The strength of atheistic feeling has been directly proportional to that of its religious antithesis: with the weakening of religious faith in many parts of the West, especially Western Europe, there has been a concomitant erosion in the attractiveness of its atheistic alternatives. In the Western European context at least, a swelling public indifference toward religion has led to the loss of the potency of both poles of religious culture, Christianity and atheism.
In recent years there has been a growing recognition of the ultimate circularity of the great atheist philosophies of recent centuries. The explanations of the origin of the idea of God put forward by Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud have one all-important feature in common: they presuppose atheism. It is the fundamental assumption that there is not—indeed, that there cannot be—a God that prompts them to offer explanations of why perfectly intelligent human beings should think that there is a God to believe in. As there is no God, the origins of this idea must lie in the malfunctioning of the mind, the subtle influence of the human unconscious, or the complex social forces that shape our beliefs and values, often without our being aware of them. Yet when all is said and done, these explanations of religious belief start out from atheist premises and duly arrive at atheist conclusions. They are, in their own way, coherent: they are not, however, compelling. They simply offer an atheist explanation of religious belief, in much the same way as Christianity offers a theistic explanation of the same phenomenon. They explain observation on the basis of a preconceived standpoint; they most emphatically do not establish that standpoint in the first place.
How can they? God is simply not an empirical hypothesis that can be checked out by the scientific method. As Stephen Jay Gould and others have insisted, the natural sciences are not capable of adjudicating, negatively or positively, on the God question. It lies beyond their legitimate scope. There is simply no logically watertight means of arguing from observation of the world to the existence or nonexistence of God. This has not stopped people from doing so, as a casual survey of writings on both sides of the question indicates. But it does mean that these “arguments” are suggestive and nothing more. The grand idea that atheism is the only option for a thinking person has long since passed away, being displaced by a growing awareness of the limitations placed on human knowledge and the need for humility in religious and antireligious advocacy.
There is an interesting and seldom noticed parallel between the arguments against the existence of God and the classic arguments for the existence of God set out by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. On close examination, Aquinas’s arguments have Christian assumptions—for example, that there is a God, and that this God has created the world. The arguments then proceed to demonstrate that these beliefs are consistent with the way the world actually is. For example, Aquinas asks where human values such as truth, goodness, and nobility come from. What causes them? He argues that there must be something which is in itself true, good, and noble, and that this brings into being our ideas of truth, goodness, and nobility. The origin of these ideas, Aquinas suggests, is God, who is their ultimate cause.
A similar line of argument is found in Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who reasons that, on the basis of a Christian understanding of creation, it is to be expected that humanity will long for the presence of God. If we have been created to relate to God, there is something intrinsic in human nature that will cause us to yearn for God. As Augustine himself put it in a prayer to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” The longing for God that Feuerbach regarded, on the basis of atheist premises, as a dysfunctional delusion, is seen by Augustine as the natural outcome of a humanity that mirrors the contours of the mind of God.
As has often been pointed out, such arguments as we find in Augustine and Aquinas are really addressed to Christian believers, intended to reassure them that their take on the world makes sense and is self-consistent. The existence of God is actually assumed; what is offered is a post hoc rationalization of that faith. In precisely the same way, the arguments of Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud really offer little more than a post hoc rationalization of atheism, showing that this position, once presupposed, can make sense of things. None of the three approaches, despite what their proponents claim, is any longer seen as a rigorously evidence-based, empirical approach that commands support on scientific grounds. Each sets out from, and duly returns to, atheist presuppositions. The journey may have been interesting, but it leads back to its starting point.
In terms of their impact and intrinsic interest, the arguments of these three atheist giants merit being placed alongside those of Aquinas. But none of these considerations—whether atheist or theist—are compelling, save for those prepared to accept their hidden presuppositions in advance of their more public conclusions. At a purely intellectual level, the arguments for both atheism and theism—whether based on reason or science—lead to a stalemate.
Perhaps the best way of appreciating this is to read the excellent recent dialogue between J.J.C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, published as Atheism and Theism, which demonstrates the possibility of a gracious and generous exploration of the issues while at the same time showing how purely rational arguments are incapable of resolving the issues. Knockdown and foolproof arguments simply are not available to us. It is for this reason that polemicists on both sides of the argument are so often reduced to rhetorical devices, bludgeoning their audiences into submission by crude verbal bullying rather than by careful evidence-based reasoning. The jury is out on this one: final adjudication on the God question lies beyond reason and experiment. Maybe T. H. Huxley was right: agnosticism is the only credible option here.
THE SUFFERING OF THE WORLD AND ATHEISM
Atheist writers often appeal to the presence of suffering in the world as a decisive refutation of the existence of God. How can there be a God, when there is so much suffering and pain in the world? Annie Besant’s influential book Why I Do Not Believe in God (1887) is typical of many atheist comments on this issue: “I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality, which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man’s redeeming power; in man’s remoulding energy; in man’s approaching triumph, through knowledge, love, and work.” We find here a contrast between a God who is indifferent to human pain and sorrow, and a caring, loving humanity, passionately committed to the well-being of all.
Besant is typical of the many who echo Ivan Karamazov’s inclination to hand God back his ticket. Who wants to believe in a God who is detached from the pain and sorrow of the world—who somehow evades the suffering of the world he is supposed to have created? For many, the trauma of Auschwitz can only mean the supreme triumph of atheism: who could believe in God in the face of such horrifying acts of violence and brutality?
It is only fair to point out that those who planned the Holocaust, and those who slammed shut the doors of the Auschwitz gas chambers, were human beings—precisely those whom Ludwig Feuerbach declared to be the new “gods” of the modern era, free from any divine prohibitions or sanctions, or any fear of future divine judgment. Annie Besant does not seem to have dreamed that the humanity she so venerated could do such shocking, immoral, and inhumane things. If any worldview is rendered incredible by the suffering and pain of the twentieth century, it is the petty dogma of the nineteenth century, which declared that humanity was divine. It requires an act of blind faith that ignores the moral wasteland of the twentieth century to agree with the shallow judgment of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909): “Glory to man in the highest! / For man is the master of things.” This “master of things” has much to answer for—more violence, bloodshed, and oppression than any naive Victorian optimist could ever have imagined.
Nearly two hundred years’ experience of the moral failings of this humanity-turned-divinity have been enough to convince most that it has been a failed experiment. While some continue to argue that Auschwitz disproves the existence of God, many more would argue that it demonstrates the depths to which humanity, unrestrained by any thought or fear of God, will sink. There are many today who affirm a belief in humanity in preference to a belief in God. Yet this humanity has been responsible for a series of moral, social, and political catastrophes, some inspired by a belief in God, others by a belief that God must be eliminated, by all means and at all costs. The common denominator here is humanity, not divinity.
For some, the existence of God is called into question by suffering; for others, however, the presence of God is a consolation and support in suffering. For these, the existence of a God who suffers alongside humanity is a lifeline, without which they would sink into despair. The idea of a God who suffers alongside his people is already present in the Christian Bible. It was, however, developed in particularly significant directions by writers such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45). For Bonhoeffer, “our God is a suffering God,” one who bears our sin, pain, and anguish. The deepest meaning of the cross of Christ is that there is no suffering on earth that is not also borne by God. The church, for Bonhoeffer, is the continuing presence of the suffering Christ in history, a body of persons called to share in the messianic suffering of God by being there for others, carrying their burdens and thus fulfilling the duty laid on them by Christ himself. It is through suffering that Christians learn to turn the final outcome of their actions over to God, who alone can perfect them in glory. And it is in dying that they find true freedom as they meet God face to face. A suffering God, according to Bonhoeffer, has not abandoned his people. Far from it; he stands by them as a fellow sufferer, and will bring them home to a place from which suffering and pain have been removed.
The twentieth century witnessed much ink being spilled over the question of what the existence of suffering has to say about the existence of God. The results have been inconclusive, not least because there has been a growing realization that the debate is going precisely nowhere. As philosopher William Alston has pointed out, any logical argument which attempts to show that evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God “is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides” to be completely bankrupt. So if human reason cannot finally settle the matter, then it will have to be sorted out in other ways. And so attention has shifted away from reason to the human imagination. Might this be the battleground on which atheism finally triumphs, given the signal failures of religion to captivate the imagination of Western culture in the recent past?
THE IMAGINATIVE FAILURE OF ATHEISM
The failure of the religious imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, as we have noted, a significant contributing factor to the erosion of faith. The human reason might persuade that something was true; it was, however, the human imagination that persuaded that it was real. As the nineteenth century proceeded, many concluded that Christianity—at any rate, in those Protestant forms that dominated Great Britain and North America—offered a rendering of reality that was less than compelling, a somewhat bleak and imaginatively impoverished account of things. In his remarkable work Christ and Apollo (1975), the Jesuit writer William Lynch pointed out that an appeal to the imagination was essential if Christian theology was to remain a viable option.
The Christian faith should never think of itself as a conceptual bundle of ideas which must beg imaginative support from literature and art. This faith is also a life of the imagination—historical, concrete, and ironic. There will, hopefully, never be an end to collaboration between theology and literature, but it must be a collaboration of (theological) imagination with (literary) imagination. Otherwise theology loses its nerve and does not have the strength to collaborate with anything.
In the twentieth century, following the Great War, something of a rebirth of the “baptized imagination” took place, with a growing number of Christian writers rediscovering the potency of an appeal to the imagination. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and Flannery O’Connor might be mentioned by way of illustration. A rebirth of the Christian imagination was under way.
Yet curiously, atheism seems to have lost its appeal to the imagination around the time Western Christianity was rediscovering it, however tentatively. Why? What went wrong? Why did a worldview that proved the imaginative victor over a weary Christianity in the nineteenth century come to lose its crucial superiority in this area? The simplest answer lies in the history of the twentieth century.
Atheism invited humanity to imagine a world without God. For many in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this was a morally compelling vision—a world in which humanity could think and do as it pleased, without having to look over its shoulder at some disapproving deity. In what seemed an intellectually and socially stifled situation, it was entirely understandable that many should dream of a world from which the tedium of social respectability had been eliminated, a world in which humanity was declared to be God and was hence free to do as it pleased. It was a pleasing vision, appealing to the imagination precisely because it was so obviously imaginary. In real life, Western culture continued to be dominated by belief in God, to the immense irritation of many, until the end of the Victorian era.
Yet the twentieth century brought about a radical transformation of things. It was no longer necessary to imagine a world without God. The Soviet Union represented precisely such an atheocracy. What humanity had previously been asked to imagine as presently unfulfilled had now come to pass. And the more people learned about the Soviet Union and its European dependencies, the less they liked what they saw. It was a world evacuated of God, to be sure—but the process of extraction appeared to have sucked that world dry of many of the vital stimuli for creativity and exhilaration. There were limits to the human imaginative capacity to laud the joys of Stalinism.
Yet there is a deeper failure here—a failure noted by Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, in his 2002 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, delivered at the Hay-on-Wye book festival. The archbishop points out that secularism, in common with modernity in general, “leaves us linguistically bereaved.” For Williams, the secular tendency to set limits to what may be known, spoken, and depicted truncates the human potential by failing to “allow room for the inaccessible in what we perceive.” The prohibition of even an attempt to engage with “agencies or presences beyond the tangible” seriously impoverishes humanity, which leads people to seek (illicitly, in the view of the atheist) a “spiritual” dimension to existence in the face of secularist protests that this cannot, or should not, be done. “Secularism fails to sustain the imaginative life and so can be said to fail; its failure may (does) produce a fascination with the ‘spiritual.’”
The fundamental question implied throughout Williams’s analysis will not go away. It is this: is there something about human nature that impels it to seek the spiritual? To press beyond the boundaries of the tangible? On an atheistic understanding of things, this is certainly not the case: there are no “spiritual” realities save those of our own making, arising from the exigencies of our social location and the secret dreams of our hearts. It may be a pleasing fiction to imagine that such longings actually correspond to something; nevertheless, such initially pleasant lines of thought might lead to a belief in the transcendent, and hence a reversion to the intellectual servility of a bygone age. But the thought will not go away.
On a Christian reading of things, such longings for God are only to be expected. They are part of the way things are. Even the most modest statement of a Christian doctrine of creation holds that God has created human beings in order to love, cherish, and fulfill them. We have been created to relate to God; if that relationship is absent, we experience a sense of longing. This sense of yearning for something of real significance is, for writers as diverse as Augustine of Hippo and C. S. Lewis, a disguised longing for none other than God. As Augustine put it, in a prayer to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” Another prayer to make the same point is attributed to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), one of the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages: “Lord, give me what you have made me want; I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired; perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.” For these writers, the deep human longing has its origins in God, and can only find its true fulfillment in God. God is the name of the one we have been looking for all our lives, without knowing it.
The experience of longing, of yearning for the transcendent, will be interpreted by atheists along the lines suggested by Feuerbach, Marx, or Freud. It is the outcome of psychological or sociological forces, and cannot be assumed to correspond to anything real or transcendent beyond us. Yet the credibility of these great atheist systems themselves has been seriously eroded, to the point where some see them simply as arbitrary doctrines designed specifically to undermine religious belief. The same experience that some put down to purely social, economic, or psychological factors can easily be interpreted in a theistic manner—as a God-given means of prompting humanity to find and achieve its true destiny by finding its rest in God.
THE REBIRTH OF INTEREST IN THE SPIRITUAL
Faith in God will die out by natural means, or it should be eliminated through forcible suppression. That, in a nutshell, was the expectation of the golden age of atheism. It was the certainty of an age, a secure belief for which Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud had offered robust and compelling philosophical, sociological, and psychological defenses. Religion was expected to disappear from all but the more primitive sections of Western culture. Yet by 1980 it was clear that these great prophecies had failed. As William S. Bainbridge and Rodney Stark pointed out in their magisterial study of Western religion, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation, “The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology and psychology have unanimously expressed confidence that their children—or surely their grandchildren—would live to see the dawn of a new era in which, to paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown.”
But they have not been outgrown. If anything, the reverse is true. Perhaps Carl Jung was right when he argued that, in mythological archetypes, God’s death is always followed by his resurrection. The cultural perception of the death of God has given way to a renewed interest in spirituality, to the astonishment and intense irritation of those who hold such things to be superstitious nonsense. In postatheist Russia, there has been a remarkable rebirth of interest in religion, found both in the resurgence of traditional religions, especially Russian Orthodox Christianity, and in popular flirtation with various new religions—including a growing interest in angels as means of mediating between earth and heaven. As Robert Fulford remarked in a 2001 column in the National Post:
It is a melancholy truth that most of us are wrong most of the time about the way the world is going. We watch it, we hear about it, we experience it, and usually we don’t know what it means. Of all the smug and foolish delusions that were part of conventional wisdom when I was young in the middle of the 20th century, two stand out in memory. One was the idea that nationalism was a 19th-century concept, on its last legs. The other was that religion, as a force in worldly affairs, was slowly but inevitably fading away. At times I was stupid enough to believe both of these preposterous fallacies; but then, so was nearly everyone else.
The simple fact is that interest in religion has grown globally since the high-water mark of secularism in the 1970s, even in the heartlands of the West. A telling indicator of the resurgent popular interest in religion is the change in direction of the long-running television series Star Trek. Classic Trek episodes from the period 1966–69 were strongly influenced by the humanist philosophy of their creator, Gene Roddenberry. In a 1991 interview with Humanist magazine, Roddenberry dismissed religion as “nonsense—largely magical, superstitious things.” Early Star Trek episodes were saturated with an ideology of the excellence of science, the triumph of logic, and the inevitability of progress. Religion was one of the evils of the past—along with poverty, prejudice, and war—that progress would leave behind. Religious beliefs were to be expected among the primitive alien societies favored by a visit from the starship Enterprise. But the crew of the Enterprise, enlightened modern progressives thoroughly familiar with Freud’s advanced theories, themselves held no such beliefs. Religion was best left to the savages of the more backward parts of the galaxy, who had yet to discover the great eternal truths of psychoanalysis.
Roddenberry’s death in 1991 led to the breaking of this outdated rationalist stranglehold on the program. Suddenly, the series aligned itself with the new interest in spirituality in American culture of the 1990s, rather than the time warp of the 1960s. Science and progress were toppled from their throne. Where Dr. Spock relied upon logic, Commander Chakotay preferred to trust in spirit guides. While Star Trek deliberately avoided the question of what religious beliefs were true, the message was clear: spirituality was a good thing. As a legitimate part of a cultured person’s world, it was to be respected, not despised.
This new interest in things spiritual has swept through Western culture in the last decade. The burgeoning bookstore sections dealing with “Body, Mind, and Spirit” are a telling indicator of a shift in Western thought away from the world of the Enlightenment. This has not been welcomed by old-fashioned rationalists, who have seen their cherished deities of reason and logic dethroned, to be replaced with angels, spirits, forces—not to mention Jesus. Marxism—which was even declared to be a religion by several doubtless well-meaning theologians in the rather uncritical euphoria of the 1960s—has lost the appeal it once had for an alienated youth of yesteryear. Postmodern culture seems fed up with the rather boring platitudes of scientific progress and longs for something more interesting and exciting. Even those who try to get rid of religious beliefs often seem to end up by offering alternatives. The earlier episodes of Star Trek were obsessed with such fundamentally religious motifs as suffering, resurrection, and sacrifice, even if these were subtly restated in the cool and logical terms of modern science.
Early Trek episodes reflected the sociological wisdom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which predicted with a confidence that now looks rather pathetic the demise of religion and emergence of a secular society. The problem was that most sociologists of the period were European, based in Germany or France, and made the fallacious (but to them, entirely natural) assumption that their local situations were determinative for the entire world. Religion was in decline in Western Europe; it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened everywhere. The fact that many of these sociologists were hostile to religious belief was conveniently overlooked by their supporters and inadequately understood by their foes. By the 1990s, confident predictions of the elimination of religion were a thing of the past. A new realism developed: religion is here to stay. One of the most important elements in this new evaluation of the situation is the growing attention paid by sociologists to Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing worldwide form of Christianity. In what follows, we shall explore why this development is of such importance to the observed waning appeal of atheism.
THE REMARKABLE CASE OF PENTECOSTALISM
As Christian writers such as John Henry Newman (1801–90) have consistently stressed, Christianity is a living organism, still in the process of evolving and developing. It has learned from its past failings and evolved away from those forms and structures that once attracted justifiable criticism. Without in any way ceasing to be Christian, it has learned to exist in more accountable and responsible forms. Thus the atheist criticism of the too cosy relationship between church and state in medieval and early modern Europe is regarded as having merit; yet this potentially compromising relationship is not of the essence of Christianity, but is a historical contingency arising from the evolution of medieval Europe. Christianity is not a historically fixed monochrome entity, but a diverse and dynamic faith that evolves in different manners at different points in history. That process of evolution is guided and stimulated by successes and failures, including—as Newman pointed out—valid criticism of the church from those outside its walls. The atheists who want to take potshots at Christianity end up shooting at a moving target. The rise of Pentecostalism illustrates this point particularly well, pointing to both the historically situated nature of atheist criticism of the church and the ability of Christianity to develop in new forms as it learns from the past.
In 1965 Harvard theologian Harvey Cox published The Secular City, a work arguing that Christianity would have to face up to a secularized culture that had no time for religion. Cox’s work is a useful weathervane, slavishly following the dominant cultural trends of the time, faithfully echoing what leading sociologists were predicting rather than critiquing them. Yet everyone now knows that they were completely wrong, including, it seems, Cox himself. In his most recent book, Fire from Heaven (1996), Cox turns his attention to the spirituality of Pentecostalism, which he argues holds the key to the religious life of the twenty-first century. It is no longer secularism that holds the future for Christianity, but Pentecostalism—“a spiritual hurricane that has already touched half a billion people, and an alternative vision of the human future whose impact may only be at its earliest stages today.” The book represents an about-face, a pointed and deliberate rejection of what seemed obviously true to its author—and to American academia—only thirty years earlier.
So what is this Pentecostalism, which has made such massive inroads globally since the Second World War, and has largely been ignored by sociologists until very recently? The origins of the movement are complex, but are usually traced back to the first day of the twentieth century—January 1, 1901. Charles Parham (1873–1929) had launched the Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, a few months earlier. One of his particular interests was the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, which is described in Acts 2:1–4. Most Christians had taken this to be something that happened in the early church, but was no longer part of the Christian experience. On New Year’s Day, 1901, one of Parham’s students experienced this phenomenon. A few days later, Parham experienced it for himself.
Parham began to teach about this apparent recovery of the gift of tongues. One of those who heard him speak was the African-American preacher William J. Seymour (1870–1922), who opened the Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles in April 1906. Over the next two years, a major revival broke out, characterized by the phenomenon of speaking in tongues. The term “Pentecostal” began to be applied to the movement, taking its name from the Day of Pentecost—the occasion, according to the New Testament, when the phenomenon was first experienced by the early Christian disciples.
The movement spread rapidly in America, appealing especially to the marginalized. Unusually, it seemed to appeal to and be embraced by both white and African-American Christian groupings. Although Pentecostalism can be thought of as traditionalist in its Christian theology, it differs radically from other Christian groupings in placing emphasis on speaking in tongues and in its highly experiential forms of worship, which involve prophesying, healings, and exorcisms. A direct, transforming, personal encounter with God is seen as a normal feature of the Christian life. The worshiping style and lack of intellectual sophistication of the movement led to its being ignored by mainline denominations and the academy—including theologians, church historians, and, above all, sociologists. Yet after the Second World War, a new phase of its expansion paved the way for massive growth in the second half of the twentieth century.
The incident that brought Pentecostalism to wider public attention in the United States took place in Van Nuys, California, in 1960. The rector of the local Episcopalian church, Dennis Bennett, told his astonished congregation that he had been filled with the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. Reaction varied from bewilderment to outrage; the local Episcopalian bishop promptly banned speaking in tongues from his churches. However, it soon became clear that others in the mainline denominations had shared Bennett’s experience. They came out of their closet and made it clear that they believed that they had experienced an authentic New Testament phenomenon, which would lead to the renewal of the churches.
By the late 1960s it was evident that some form of renewal based on charismatic gifts (such as speaking in tongues) was gaining a hold within Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian circles. Perhaps most important of all, a growing charismatic movement began to develop within the Roman Catholic church. Using “Pentecostal” to describe this became problematic, as this term was used to refer to a family of churches—such as the Assemblies of God—which placed particular emphasis on speaking in tongues. Accordingly, the term “charismatic” was used to refer to movements within the mainline churches based upon the ideas and experiences of the Pentecostalist movement.
The Pentecostalist movement—which we shall here take to include charismatic groups within mainline churches—has changed considerably since the Second World War. The most obvious change is a massive surge in growth. It is now estimated that there are 500 million Pentecostalists in the world, with a very wide geographical distribution. Although the movement may be argued to have its origins primarily within African-American culture, it has taken root in South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Why has this form of Christianity become so popular? Two factors are generally agreed to explain the growing global appeal of Pentecostalism. First, Pentecostalism stresses a direct, immediate experience of God and avoids the rather dry and cerebral forms of Christianity, which many find unattractive and unintelligible. It is thus significant that Pentecostalism has made significant inroads in working-class areas of the developing world that have been resistant to traditional forms of Protestantism, especially in traditionally Roman Catholic Latin America.
Second, the movement uses a language and form of communication that enables it to bridge cultural gaps effectively. Sociologist David Martin argues that the most important feature of Latin American Pentecostalism is its “indigenous character,” pointing to the movement’s remarkable ability to adjust itself and become “incarnate” in any culture, particularly in Africa and Asia.
In terms of the number of its adherents, Pentecostalism is already the most significant Christian alternative to Roman Catholicism. It has sidelined those Protestant groupings that once saw themselves as mainline. Nobody likes to be shunted off to the sidings like this, and there has been lots of grumpy sniping at Pentecostals from anxious Protestant intellectuals as a result. Yet the more perceptive of their number have realized that a massive transformation in global Christianity is taking place, and have urged their fellows to take the movement seriously. Harvey Cox’s Fire from Heaven blazes a trail that many will need to explore. One of the reasons that Pentecostalism has succeeded is that mainline Protestantism has failed to meet the needs and aspirations of the marginalized and disadvantaged. The development of the charismatic movement within the Roman Catholic church in Brazil and other Latin American nations has radically changed the appeal of Christianity to the region. And the movement is spreading.
The wider relevance of Pentecostalism to the fortunes of atheism is not difficult to discern. Christianity is perfectly capable of reinventing itself (although Christians are careful to speak of this process in terms of renewing or reclaiming lost or neglected themes of apostolic Christianity). This new variant of Christianity is experientially grounded and socially activist, having no complex ecclesiastical hierarchy worth speaking of, thus bypassing many of the traditional grounds of criticism of Christianity. Atheist critiques originally aimed at the Christianity of French Roman Catholicism of the early eighteenth century prove ineffective against this new variant of faith. As Denys Turner pointed out in his witty inaugural lecture as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University (October 2001), atheism has rather come to rely upon Christian traditionalism as a means of preserving its own identity:
It is indeed extraordinary how theologically conservative some atheists are, and one might even speculate that atheists of this species have an interest in resisting such renewals of Christian faith and practice as might require the renewal of their rejection of it. I suppose it must be upsetting for atheists when the target of their rejection moves; for insofar as a moving Christian target does upset the atheist, it reveals, depressingly, the parasitical character of the rejection. So a static atheism can have no wish for a moving theism.
In part, atheism gained its appeal in the past through the failures of the churches, rather than on account of its own intrinsic merits. The appeal of atheism to many socially alienated individuals lay in their sense of disconnection and alienation from the churches, which often seemed to be located at a sociological address a million miles away from them. The churches spoke a language they could not understand, addressing realities they did not experience. Pentecostalism changed all that, engaging directly with the cultural, social, and experiential world of the masses. In many ways, Pentecostalism has become the new Marxism of the third world, displacing its secular rival for the affections and loyalty of the dispossessed. This is supremely the case in Latin America, which has seen Marxism, either as a philosophy in itself or as a significant secularizing influence within the Roman Catholic church, slip into headlong retreat in the face of massive Pentecostal expansion. But where, in some deplorable cases, Marxism made use of firing squads and force in securing its power base, Pentecostalism seems to put its trust in the power of God to change people’s lives.
Pentecostalism is of importance to our story in another respect. For its sense of the immediacy of God’s presence through the Holy Spirit is of potentially immense importance in repairing the felt loss of the presence of the divine in everyday life in the West. The rise of atheism mirrored the parallel erosion of any expectation of an encounter with divine reality in personal experience or group worship. Controversially, many historians suggest that the cause of this wearing away of the sacred within the secular was the Protestant Reformation—the movement that brought about massive change and reform within the Western European church in the sixteenth century. So can the Protestant Reformation be seen as somehow—however indirectly and unintentionally—having contributed to the rise of atheism? In what follows, we shall give thought to this provocative possibility.