The Atheist Challenge and the Future of Protestantism
8
DISCONNECTION FROM THE SACRED: PROTESTANTISM AND ATHEISM
THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION of the sixteenth century is a landmark in the history of Western thought, religious and secular. The rise of Protestantism changed the shape of Western European culture and had a decisive effect on the subsequent transformation of global culture. Protestant émigrés from Europe settling in North America, especially during the first half of the seventeenth century, established their faith in that region, seeing themselves as a chosen people entering a new promised land. During the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries from North America and the United Kingdom undertook an unprecedented level of evangelistic work in Asia, Australasia, and Africa, with the result that Protestant forms of Christianity became established far beyond their original homeland of Western Europe.
To suggest a link between Protestantism and atheism might, at first sight, seem improbable, perhaps even bizarre. How could a movement so dedicated to the propagation of the Christian faith conceivably be said to have encouraged the rise of atheism? In making this suggestion, I am drawing together a number of scholarly studies of the origins and development of Protestantism, which indicate that there is a significant link between the movement and the emergence of atheism. Given the importance of this suggestion, however uncomfortable it may be for Protestants (among whom I unabashedly number myself), it is essential to explore its foundations, and, if it is found to be cogent, ask what its consequences might be.
Sociologists have often drawn attention to the radical changes in Western culture that are implicated in the rise of Protestantism. Protestantism was the preferred religion of the new middle classes, often enterprising tradesmen and artisans who felt that they were hindered in their economic and social advancement by the old social order of the Middle Ages. The traditionalist ethos of that period gave precedence to patrician families. There was little possibility of self-made people bettering their position through talent or achievements. By the end of the Middle Ages, a social revolution was under way in the cities of Western Europe. Power was shifting, sometimes slowly but always irreversibly, from the old patrician families to the mercantile middle classes.
It has often been noted that Protestantism had a special appeal to city populations, and especially the new urban middle classes. The new religion was seen as strongly supportive of the emerging individualism of the period. Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone is an example of this tendency to move away from a corporate understanding of society. Salvation was no longer determined by membership in the church, but by one’s individual relationship with God. No longer was salvation dependent upon social position; it was a matter of the individual’s relating correctly to God. The institution of the church, including its sacramental system and its priesthood, was no longer to be seen as essential to the individual’s securing admission to heaven (although Protestant reformers such as Calvin stressed the importance of the church as a means of supporting believers in their spiritual development).
Protestantism may thus be seen as a religion with a particular concern for the middle classes. The history of the Reformation certainly supports this suggestion, indicating that those most hostile to Protestantism were generally drawn from the traditional upper classes and those most supportive from the middle classes. Even some apparent exceptions to this pattern fall smoothly into place on closer examination. For example, Calvinism had a strong appeal to the middle classes in France in the 1560s, but was also regarded favorably by some aristocrats. On closer examination, the aristocrats in question were generally middle-class entrepreneurs elevated to the aristocracy by virtue of their newly acquired wealth.
Interesting though this observation may be, it is still a long way from establishing any connection between Protestantism and atheism. In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Max Weber argued that there was an intrinsic connection between Protestantism and capitalism. Although this thesis has been widely challenged and is perhaps not adequately grounded in the historical evidence, it has drawn attention and study. Protestantism is seen to be allied to the cultural trajectories that have determined the shape of the modern Western world. This is not to adjudicate the question of whether modernity caused the rise of Protestantism, or vice versa; it is simply to note that some connection seems to exist. The connection with atheism lies in another feature of the modern era that is widely associated with the rise of Protestantism—the divorce of the realms of the sacred and secular.
THE DIVORCE OF THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR
A distinctive feature of the Reformation, particularly associated with the leading reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, is the “desacralization” of nature. The distinction between the sacred and the secular is widely thought to have contributed to the rise of the natural sciences, which is particularly (but by no means exclusively) associated with Protestantism. The declaration that the natural world was not in any way sacred opened the way to its scientific investigation. There could be no religious obstacles to the analysis of the world. The world increasingly became seen as a machine or instrument—of divine origins, of course, but increasingly distant from God. The material world might have been created by God; it could not, however, convey the divine presence. God’s presence was no longer channeled directly into the world through natural means; God had to be known indirectly.
Medieval Catholicism had a strong and pervasive sense of the presence of the sacred in the world, seeing an intimate, direct link between God and the world. The spiritual, social, and political worlds were interwoven and seen as inseparable. Every level of society was understood to be interlocked with another, in one vast organic entity that was ultimately grounded in God as its origin and source. Popular religion often centered on the affairs of rural communities, reflecting its rhythms and seasons. The agrarian needs of such a rural community—such as haymaking and harvesting—were firmly enmeshed in popular religious cults. Thus in the French diocese of Meaux in the early sixteenth century, religious cults were well established in which the saints were invoked to ward off animal and infant diseases, the plague, and eye trouble, or to ensure that young women found appropriate husbands. The direct connection of religion and everyday life was taken for granted. The spiritual and the material interconnected at every level.
As Eamon Duffy points out in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), a massive and well-researched study of traditional English religion on the eve of the Reformation, in popular Catholicism sacred and secular times, events, and places were so closely associated that they were often indistinguishable. The rhythms of the year were primarily determined by the feast days of the church and the necessities of agriculture. The individual had a strong sense of place within a cosmos that radiated the glory of God and displayed a divine structure. The sacred was present within the world’s events, rhythms, and patterns. One expected to encounter and experience the divine in everyday life.
The Protestant reformers were strongly critical of any such suggestions. Not entirely without reason, they suspected that medieval Catholicism occasionally degenerated into a folk religion of nature. An immediate encounter with God through nature was excluded, almost as a matter of principle. God had chosen to reveal himself through the Bible, and the authorized mode of knowing God was therefore through reading that Bible, and hearing sermons based upon its contents. The architecture of Protestant churches was developed in accordance with this emphasis. Whereas medieval Catholicism saw the focus of worship as the altar of the church, the pulpit now became the focal point of Protestant worship. Attention was thus shifted away from the idea of a direct presence of God in the sacramental bread and wine to an indirect manner of knowing God through preaching.
Throughout the Middle Ages, God was held to be encountered in the natural world and through the sacramental mysteries of baptism and the mass. Whatever risks such an understanding entailed, it nevertheless affirmed that it was possible to experience God in the patterns of day-to-day living. This point was developed further by medieval mystics—such as Meister Eckhart (1260–1327)—who argued for a direct encounter between the believer and God. In the seventeenth century, the church made some halfhearted attempts to control the influence of mystics, generally by stressing the importance of revelation channeled through the centralized authority of the church. Yet the fundamental principle that the sacred could be known through and be present in the secular, the spiritual in and through the material, was not challenged.
Protestantism, on the other hand, insisted that the ways and will of God were to be known through the Bible, and preaching based on that sacred text. For the great Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, this knowledge tended to take the form of information—for example, the great foundational truths of the Christian faith, or the moral duties of believers. For medieval Catholicism, the Mass made Christ physically present for believers, as an object of adoration and devotion. For Zwingli, the Lord’s Supper reminded believers of Christ’s death, and its implications for humanity in Christ’s absence. Where Catholicism allowed a direct encounter between the believer and spiritual realities, Zwingli resolutely refused to acknowledge that spiritual realities could ever be known through the material world. Christ was in heaven; Christian worship was about recalling what Christ had done in the past and looking forward to his future return. But in the present—in the here and now—Christ was known only as an absence.
The rise of Protestantism thus gave rise to an absent God who was known only indirectly—and then through the mind rather than the imagination. For Protestants, especially those tracing their lineage back to Calvin or Zwingli, there can be no sense of sacred space or place—no possibility of a direct encounter with the sacred or an experience of the divine other than that which is mediated indirectly through reading the Bible and the public exposition of its message. The Bible sets out God’s will and God’s ways, providing information about what was to be believed and what was to be done. Preaching and the study of the Bible were seen as being of supreme importance in bringing about a sound knowledge of God. But this knowledge all too often took the form of direct familiarity with the Bible, and a highly indirect and circumspect knowledge of God.
The outcome was inevitable and predictable. God became an absence in the world. Where Catholic writers might speak of the world’s being “charged with the grandeur of God” (a phrase attributed to the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins), Protestant writers tended to think of God in terms of a divine architect or mechanic. It was very clear what God required people to believe and do; a direct knowledge of the living presence of God was, however, regarded as theologically unsound. Any sense of immediate contact with the divine was thus excluded from nature, which was “disenchanted” (Max Weber).
By the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant theology was seen as spiritually dry and dusty, of interest only to those with a troubling obsession with pure ideas. The idea that God could be encountered directly was considered dangerous. One of the most significant reactions against this bookish conception of an absentee God is found in Pietism, which argued that God could be known through the personal experience of believers. It was possible to feel the living presence of Christ in the soul, and thus be reassured of God’s love and care. Consider, for example, a verse from Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be?” (1738), which speaks of a subjective conviction of the truth and relevance of faith:
Still the small inward Voice I hear,
That whispers all my Sins forgiv’n;
Still the atoning Blood is near,
That quench’d the Wrath of hostile Heav’n:
I feel the Life his Wounds impart;
I feel my Saviour in my Heart.
This remarkable hymn speaks of Christ as a living experienced reality—something that Wesley clearly expected his audiences to share and appreciate.
Pietism was an important correcting influence in Protestantism, restoring an awareness of the possibility of experiencing God directly in everyday life. Yet the dominant voices of mainline Protestant orthodoxy presupposed a disembedded God—a God who was now dislocated from the world of nature, culture, and human experience. It is a relatively small step conceptually from an absentee God, who is uninvolved in the workings of an autonomous natural world and who cannot be known directly, to a God who does not exist. The God of Protestant orthodoxy, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out, might as well not exist, in that his supposed existence seemed to make very little difference to anything. A permanently absent God can quickly become a dead God. If the existence of God makes little or no impact upon the experiences of everyday life, the business of living might as well be conducted without reference to Him. As Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the great Dutch Protestant lawyer, pointed out, the end result of all this was a world in which people lived etsi Deus non daretur, “as if God did not exist.” Many were happy to make the increasingly easy jump from a pragmatic atheism (we will live as if there is no God) to an ontological atheism (there really is no God).
This point has been stressed by a series of sociologists—including Max Weber, Charles Taylor, and Stephen Toulmin—who have, in their different ways, shown how Protestantism was the means by which a society that originally possessed a strong sense of the sacred became “desacralized” or “disenchanted,” eventually leading to a culture which, to all intents and purposes, had no sense of God’s presence in its midst. The inevitable result of this was secularization—the final elimination of God from the world. As Francis Fukuyama points out in his End of History and the Last Man (1992), “the generally accepted agent for this secularization in the West was Protestantism.”
Why is this point so important? At a recent conference in Oxford, which brought together leading Christian writers and statesmen from across the world, I had the opportunity of exploring some of the themes of this book with some senior Christians from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. They found themselves having some difficulty appreciating the plausibility or attraction of atheism. From their African perspective, everything about the natural world and human existence proclaimed the existence of a spiritual reality. The sense of a divine presence within nature and human experience was self-evident. Many villagers throughout this region are highly aware of spiritual forces, which they often seek to consult or control through a complex system of divinations, charms, and spells. With the arrival of Christianity, these spiritual forces are understood to have been tamed or conquered—though not eliminated—through the death and resurrection of Christ. The Christian gospel is interpreted in terms of deliverance from spiritual oppression, release from the power of curses, and liberation from the baleful influence of ancestors. Significantly, my colleagues commented that the only part of Africa in which atheism had secured any meaningful presence was the highly Westernized (and largely Protestant) nation of South Africa; even then, the movement seems to be limited to the white population.
A major determinant for atheism is whether a sense of the divine has been eliminated from a culture. The absence of any expectation of encountering the divine directly through nature or in personal experience inevitably encourages belief in a godless world—a world that lives etsi Deus non daretur, “as if God did not exist.” The charge against Protestantism is that it has brought about precisely such an erosion of any sense of direct encounter with the divine. Protestantism can respond, with excellent grounds for doing so, that the expectation of an encounter with the divine can lead to paganism, idolatry, or the vagueness of a nature religion. Far better to limit such knowledge of God to what can be known reliably about God through reading or studying the Bible. Yet by limiting knowledge of God to what can be known about God’s words and God’s will, some highly influential forms of Protestantism have ended by placing an embargo on any direct knowledge or experience of God. It is a high price to pay.
Protestantism is open to another related criticism—namely, that it has impoverished the Christian imagination, and by doing so, made atheism appear imaginatively attractive. For Protestantism has been severely critical of any appeal to imagery in the Christian life, holding that words are to be preferred to images in representing God. As we shall see, this understandable concern has once more had unintended consequences.
THE IMAGINATIVE FAILURE OF PROTESTANTISM
Medieval Christianity valued the importance of imagery, seeing this as a vitally important means of keeping the people of Europe in direct contact with the realities of faith. The distinctive architecture of Gothic cathedrals was intended to accentuate a sense of spaciousness and light, anticipating the Christian hope of heaven. As Bonaventure (1221–74), the great Franciscan theologian of the Middle Ages, pointed out, imagery played a vitally important role in Christian piety and spirituality. Religious images enabled the less educated members of the church to learn about their faith, offering anchor points for theological education. The wisdom of this insight is evident from the church architecture of the era: the altarpieces of the great churches of the Renaissance helped to stress the importance of the crucified Christ, and imprint the scene in the “baptized imagination.” Furthermore, Bonaventure noted that since human “emotions are excited more by what is seen than what is heard,” images offered a far greater capacity to stimulate personal devotion among the faithful.
This use of images seemed entirely natural to medieval Catholicism. If the Bible spoke of heaven, why not try and depict heaven visually, to help the faithful focus on it? After all, the Bible used images—such as the “New Jerusalem”—to depict heaven; why not allow the believing imagination to linger on these images? If the Gospels placed great weight on the devotional and theological importance of the Crucifixion, why not depict this artistically in altarpieces, or represent it in wooden carvings?
While the great theologians of the era—such as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure—were careful to insist that it was not the physical image itself, but the transcendent reality to which it pointed, that was the proper object of Christian adoration and reflection, there is no doubt that religious paintings, stained-glass windows, sculptures, and woodcuts came to play a very significant role in popular Catholic devotion. It was widely assumed that physical images—such as altarpieces, crucifixes, statues of saints, and manuscript illuminations—were invaluable aids in maintaining the public presence of divine realities in the culture of the day.
Worship was seen as a means of connecting up with the divine—of anticipating entry into heaven and imagining what is encountered. It is impossible to understate the place of worship in sustaining the Christian life in the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. Especially within the Greek Orthodox tradition, in public worship the faithful seek to draw close to the threshold of heaven itself and peer through its portals to catch a glimpse of the worship of heavenly places. The Orthodox liturgy celebrates the notion of being caught up in the worship of heaven, and the awesome sense of mystery that is evoked by gazing beyond the bounds of human vision.
In the Orthodox view of things, whenever the divine liturgy is celebrated on earth, the boundaries between heaven and earth are removed, and earthly worshipers join in the eternal heavenly liturgy chanted by the angels. During these moments of earthly adoration, worshipers have the opportunity of being mystically transported to the threshold of heaven. Being in a holy place and about to participate in holy things, they on the one hand become aware of their finitude and sinfulness, and on the other gain a refreshing glimpse of the glory of God.
The idea of liminality—that is, being on the threshold of the sacred, peering into the forbidden heavenly realms—is represented visually in the structure of Orthodox churches, especially the way in which the sanctuary and the altar are set apart from the people, thereby enhancing the awesomeness of the mystery of God. In their treatises on worship, John Chrysostom and other early Greek-speaking Christian writers repeatedly draw attention to the liturgical importance of this sense of the sacred. The altar is the “terrifying table”; the bread and the wine are “the terrifying sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ which worshippers must approach with fear and trembling.” For the Orthodox, there is an especially close link between the Eucharist—the sacrament celebrated with and through bread and wine—and the experience of the worship of heaven. Although physically located in the empirical world, the worshiper is transported over the mystical threshold of heaven, and enabled to anticipate its future delights. Religious imagery (especially icons) and architecture serve to focus the worshiper’s attention on the transcendent.
The Protestant Reformation saw any such use of imagery in worship subjected to devastating criticism. Although Martin Luther opposed the abuse of religious images, he had no doubt of their positive role in stimulating and informing the Christian imagination. Christian pedagogy and devotion were aided by images as much as by words. Yet Luther would be a minority voice in this debate. Religious unrest often led to the violent destruction of religious images at the hands of angry crowds. Had not the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4–5) forbidden making images, or worshiping them? Throughout Western Europe, the Reformation was generally accompanied by the smashing of religious statues in churches and the whitewashing of their walls to destroy imagery. Nothing would be allowed to remain that could become the object of false worship for believers.
This concern is particularly well expressed by Huldrych Zwingli, whose reforming ministry was based in the city of Zurich. While conceding that religious images had considerable imaginative potential, Zwingli believed that this was more likely to lead people away from the true religion rather than confirm them in its truths. Images of God or Christ were held to be potentially idolatrous, and were not to be tolerated within churches. Protestant churches should be devoid of anything that would distract from the preaching of the word. In Zwingli’s view, churches should have plain, whitewashed walls, to prevent worshipers from thinking about anything other than the sermon and the reading of the Bible.
John Calvin shared this critical attitude toward religious imagery. It has often been pointed out that Calvin’s views on the manner in which buildings designed for public worship should be decorated resonate with those of Islam. No portrayals of God in human form were to be permitted within churches. It was, Calvin suggested, all too easy for something created to be confused with the creator. It was to open the way to idolatry, “to imagine or possess something in which to put one’s trust in place of or in addition to the one true God who has revealed himself in his word.” For Calvin, the point is not simply that God should not be pictured; it is that God is intrinsically incapable of being pictured.
While many Roman Catholic churches around this time adopted elaborate styles of ornamentation, with extensive use of visual aids to piety in the form of religious images and portraits, these were rigorously excluded from Calvinist places of worship. While it would be inaccurate to say that Protestantism was intrinsically iconophobic, there is no doubt that a profound mistrust of any form of imagery is characteristic of the movement. There is perhaps more than a hint of intellectual superiority in the Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism (1563). Calvinists do not need visual images of God, being perfectly capable of understanding and making full use of the wide range of verbal images conveyed in Scripture:
QUESTION 96. What does God require in the [second] commandment?
ANSWER: That we should not portray God in any way, nor worship him in any other manner than he has commanded in his Word.
QUESTION 97. So should we not make any use of images?
ANSWER: God cannot and should not be depicted in any way. As for creatures, although they may indeed be depicted, God forbids making use of or having any likeness of them, in order to worship them or to use them to serve him.
QUESTION 98. But should we allow pictures instead of books in churches, for the benefit of the unlearned?
ANSWER: No. For we should not presume to be wiser than God, who does not want Christendom to be taught by means of dumb idols, but through the living preaching of his Word.
The religious concerns that lay behind the Reformation ought to be respected. There is no doubt that religious imagery was abused during the Middle Ages, often being seen as objects of adoration in their own right, rather than as means of focusing the mind on the transcendent reality they were intended to point to. For writers such as Calvin, the use of images in personal worship or personal devotion could distract from the “word of God,” or compromise the critical distinction between the realm of the created and its ultimate ground in God himself. Yet this concern for theological correctness was achieved at a price. God ceased to be a living reality in the popular Protestant imagination.
The contrast with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy on this point could not be greater, in that both were convinced of the need to engage with the human capacity to imagine. Convinced of the importance of the imagination in nourishing personal faith, the Roman Catholic church sought to challenge the Protestant Reformation at the level of church decoration as well as in the more abstruse arena of theology. The period of the high baroque in the seventeenth century made extensive use of all the visual arts—architecture, painting, and sculpture—to create ensembles intended to exert an overwhelming emotional impact on worshipers and visitors. Classic examples of this style include the crossing of St. Peter’s Basilica and the Cornaro Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, both in Rome. The intention was to imprint the realities of the Catholic faith on the minds of the faithful through a deliberate appeal to the senses. Originating in Italy, the new style was soon taken up in Spain, Southern Germany, and Austria. Churchgoers could listen to the proclamation of spiritual realities and have them reinforced by the visual art and architecture around them.
Protestantism offered a God who was known through the preaching of the word of God; Roman Catholicism, while not being inattentive to the importance of preaching, reinforced that message visually. Slowly but surely, any sense of God as a living, engrossing reality began to slip from Protestantism. The dull, joyless, and unattractive churches of Protestantism conveyed the subliminal message that the God who was to be found in them shared these disagreeable characteristics. Protestantism has been chided by many cultural analysts for its failure to stimulate the arts. The great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas castigated the movement for this failure, dubbing it “the adroit castrator of art” and “the bitter negation of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy.” Our concern is, however, rather more profound. Protestantism encouraged the notion that God was absent from human culture and experience.
A substantial part of my activity as a scholar focuses on the history and thought of the Protestant Reformation. As a result, I am a frequent visitor to some of the great centers of the movement, including Zurich. I have often sat within the Great Minster of that city, looking around its vast interior, unadulterated by imagery or decoration, and noting the values it affirms—most notably, the absolute priority accorded to preaching, made clear by the size and location of the pulpit. Its simplicity is admirable, and totally in conformity with the spirit of Zwingli’s reform program of the 1520s. But the building speaks subtly of a silent, absent, and distant God. The Protestant reluctance to picture God has all too often led to an envisioning of the world that is bleak and barren, where it ought to be saturated with the radiance of the glory of God. Once more, it is a small step from declaring that God cannot be pictured to suggesting that he cannot be conceived as a living reality in the rich imaginative life of humanity.
THE ATHEIST CHALLENGE AND THE FUTURE OF PROTESTANTISM
A book on atheism cannot be anything other than controversial. Indeed, it might be argued that anyone dealing with the topic who neglects to be contentious has failed to do justice to it. Given the complexity of the issues and the clear absence of agreement within society, such a work can hope to encourage debate, but hardly settle the matter. If the arguments presented in this chapter are correct—which I believe them to be—there are clear implications for the futures of both Protestant Christianity and atheism, not least that certain traditional forms of Protestantism will decline further, while those which affirm and celebrate a direct engagement with the divine will grow at the expense of the former. I can only present this as something for debate, not something that has in any way been settled. Yet given the importance (and intrinsic interest!) of this point, I propose to explore it further, asking what its implications might be for the future of Protestantism.
It might reasonably be argued that Protestantism is perfectly capable of responding to such criticisms by rediscovering some of its foundational themes, as they are found, for example, in the works of Martin Luther. Only a form of Protestantism that is obsessed by theological correctness, and fails to articulate the experiential aspects of faith, is vulnerable at this point. It is true that within both the mainline Protestant denominations and the evangelical constituency there are some who commend a purely “text-centered” understanding of the Christian faith, seeing preaching as nothing more than teaching the contents of the Bible and spirituality as a deepened understanding and internalization of its message. Yet, as the rise of Puritanism, Pietism, and “experiential religion” in England and elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries makes clear, it is entirely possible to develop an approach to Christianity that is rigorously grounded in theological principles, yet sees these as laying the foundation for an encounter with the living God.
Nevertheless, some sects of Western Protestantism, often deeply influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, continue to this day to place an emphasis upon “theological correctness,” stressing the overarching importance of having right ideas about God. These prescribed notions of God are to be determined by a reading of the Bible, which is understood primarily as a doctrinal handbook. Faith thus becomes an indirect knowledge of God, stated in terms of beliefs about God which, however correct they may be as far as they go, convey the impression that Christianity is little more than abstract theorizing about a God whose will is revealed in the Bible. The mind is engaged; the emotions and imagination remain untouched. Historically, it is precisely such a spiritually and imaginatively impoverished reading of Christianity that resulted in Hugo Grotius’s argument that people of his day had come to live and think etsi Deus non daretur.
The contrast with Pentecostalism on this point could not be greater. Pentecostalism’s emphasis on a direct, immediate experience of God avoids the rather dry and cerebral forms of Christianity that many find unattractive and unintelligible. It is thus significant that Pentecostalism has made huge inroads in working-class areas of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in that it is able to communicate a sense of the divine and its implications without the need for prayer books and the other traditional paraphernalia of Protestant culture.
As we noted earlier, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing form of Protestant Christianity, having established itself firmly throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century, and shed any characteristics associated with its original North American context. This dramatic and rapid expansion has taken many by surprise. At the time of writing (2003), there are estimated to be more than half a billion Pentecostals throughout the world. Although unquestionably a global movement, it has shown itself able to adapt itself to a wide variety of cultural contexts, developing distinctive local characteristics in response.
Pentecostalism declares that it is possible to encounter God directly and personally through the power of the Holy Spirit. God is to be known immediately and directly, not indirectly through study of a text. Whereas traditional Protestantism is wary of allowing any such direct experience of God, Pentecostalism celebrates it and makes it a hallmark of Christian living. God impacts upon the totality of existence, and is not confined—as in some traditional Protestant traditions—to the world of the mind. Walter Hollenweger, the most distinguished historian of the movement to date, points to the importance of this aspect: “When you become a Pentecostal, you talk about how you’ve been healed, or how your very life has been changed. That’s something that Pentecostals talk about over and over, partly because people are interested in hearing that sort of thing. Pentecostalism today addresses the whole of life, including the thinking part. More mainline forms of Christianity address the thinking part first, and that often affects the rest of life—but not always.” This may be contrasted with what Harvey Cox describes as “text-orientated believers”—that is, those Protestants who believe that God can only be accessed (and then to a limited extent, in the form of abstract religious ideas) through reading the Bible or hearing an expository sermon. For Cox, Pentecostalism celebrates the resurgence of “primal spirituality” and absolutely refuses to allow its experience of God to be limited to ideas. God is experienced and known as a personal, transformative, living reality.
If the analysis that we have sketched in this chapter has any validity, it is this form of Protestantism that may be expected to resist erosion by atheism. Pentecostalism is strongly predisposed toward the dispossessed and oppressed, undermining one of the most effective atheist critiques of religion—that it oppresses. Just as significantly, Pentecostalism offers a direct, personal, transformative encounter with God in the worship of the church and in personal experience. On discussing the issues raised in this book with leading Pentecostals, especially in the great urban sprawls of Asia, I found them responding with an appeal to their experience. How can God’s existence be doubted, when God is such a powerful reality in our lives? And how can God’s relevance be doubted, when God inspires us to care for the poor, heal the sick, and work for the dispossessed?
On the basis of recent statistics, Pentecostalism is by far the largest strand of Protestantism, and shows continuing growth patterns globally. This has not really impacted as yet on Western observers, as this explosive growth has taken place outside Western Europe and North America. Yet the globalization of the movement is well under way. The immigration of Asian and African Christians to the cities of the West has made Pentecostalism a growing presence. Will it eventually come to have the influence in the West that it now has in the developing world? And if so, what are the implications for the slowly setting sun of atheism?
Alongside these developments, however, another must be noted. It has often been pointed out that atheism is the ideal religion of the modern period, reflecting its ideas, values, and agendas. Modernism has decisively shaped Western culture. Yet as Tennyson pointed out many years ago in his poem In Memoriam, things change: “Our little systems have their day, / They have their day, and cease to be.” If there is a symbiotic relationship between atheism and modernity, what happens if that synergy is ruptured through radical cultural change? Or if modernity were to die, to give way to a quite different cultural system in the West? Or if a new worldview arose out of a revolt against precisely what modernity cherished? The reason for asking these questions is simple: in the view of many analysts, this is precisely what has happened through the rise of postmodernity, with important—and largely negative—implications for atheism.