The Execution of God: The Atheist State
6
THE DEATH OF GOD: THE DREAM OF A GODLESS CULTURE
ON OCTOBER 22, 1965, time magazine ran a cover story that stopped America in its tracks. Emblazoned on an all-black cover were three huge red words: “Is God dead?” Although the article focused primarily on a few relatively unknown theologians who had launched a theology that everyone suspected was stillborn and was going precisely nowhere, it raised broader issues. Had God been sucked out of American culture? Was America entering a new secular era, in which God would merely be a memory of an increasingly distant past?
The headline writers had a feast. What had once been spoken in whispers was increasingly stated openly: God had ceased to be a living reality in Western culture—even in one of its most openly religious nations. The new religionless and godless era that the French Revolution initiated would now finally come to pass, marking a turning point in the history of the world. The death of President John F. Kennedy had made headlines two years earlier. The death of God would be the scoop of the millennium.
So how did the rumor that God was dead come about? As we shall see, many streams converged to form this torrent. We can only hint at the many developments that created an impatience with traditional religious belief, and led many to conclude that God had died or been put to death. The public atheism that had taken its first faltering steps in the eighteenth century had finally come of age.
So where should we begin to tell this tale of the loss of any sense of the presence of God in the West? For many scholars, the most obvious place is the massive protest registered against God in one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
DOSTOYEVSKY AND THE REVOLT AGAINST GOD
Two interrelated questions can be identified throughout the writings of Dostoyevsky, especially The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed: Is atheism a credible worldview, and if so, what kind of world does it envisage and sustain? There is no doubt that Dostoyevsky was well aware of the arguments of many Russian bourgeois liberals around this time, to the effect that the espousal of atheism would heal Russia’s wounds and lead to her social and political regeneration. Vissarion Belinsky and others in the Russian Utopian Socialist group in the late 1840s had argued for precisely such an approach, holding that revolution must begin with atheism, above all the overthrow of Christianity.
Dostoyevsky’s novels can be read as an implicit critique of such revolutionary optimism, exploring both the grounds of such a belief and its implications. In effect, he pictures certain of his characters as already inhabiting an atheist worldview, and uses them as a way of exploring its strengths and weaknesses. Although careful to note the clear attractions of a godless world, especially during a particularly repressive period of Russian history, Dostoyevsky is clearly determined to highlight some of its more troubling features. Against the facile argument that atheism will liberate Russia from its backwardness and authoritarianism, he argues that it could open the door to unprecedented brutality and oppression, precisely because it removes any divine limitation to human actions.
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) is the last and perhaps the greatest of Dostoyevsky’s novels. Set against the social fragmentation of Russia in the 1870s, it explores the intense intellectual and physical rivalry among three brothers. One of its great themes is the tension between belief and atheism. Dostoyevsky splendidly presents the two sides of the question of God, one believing and the other doubting, in two of the brothers: Alyosha and Ivan. The one submits, the other rebels. Ivan Karamazov acts as a spokesperson for those who question the coherence of traditional Christian belief. Ivan’s criticisms are directed not so much against God as against the world that God is alleged to have created. How can one believe in God, when the created order itself seems riddled with injustice and contradiction?
Ivan’s polemic against God has become a classic instance of “protest atheism”—a revolt against God on moral grounds. A refusal to believe in God (a mutiny, to use Ivan’s language) is the appropriate principled response to the inequities of the world, and the God who is alleged to have brought it into being, yet such a response seems curiously distant from the world’s sorrow and pain. Raging against injustice, Ivan asks Alyosha to imagine a shocking scene. An eight-year-old child accidentally bruises the leg of a general’s favorite beagle. Outraged, the general sets a pack of dogs upon the child, who is torn to pieces in front of his mother. What’s the justice in that, asks Ivan? How can anyone sing, “You are just and true, O God, for your ways are made clear”? Ivan continues: “I hasten to return my entry ticket. And if I am at all an honest man, I am obliged to return it as soon as possible. That is what I am doing. It isn’t God I don’t accept, Alyosha. It’s just his ticket that I most respectfully return to him.”
Ivan follows this critique of the injustices of the world by telling a long parable. He asks Alyosha to imagine the reappearance of Christ during the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century. Labeled a heretic, the Son of God is brought to judgment before the cynical Grand Inquisitor, who launches a diatribe against Christ for having committed the unthinkable and unforgivable sin of giving humanity freedom of choice. This, the Inquisitor declares, is an intolerable burden, which humanity simply cannot carry. The church, out of a deeper concern for humanity, wishes to deny them freedom, and replaces the curse of freedom with the intellectual and spiritual opiates of miracle, mystery, and authority. By revering the mystery, believing and accepting the miracles, and following the dictates and directives of the church, people can live their lives without the heavy load of accepting responsibility for their own actions. The majority of people, according to the Grand Inquisitor, are weak and are to be likened to sheep. Happiness can only be achieved by the surrender of human freedom. People may cry out for it, but in fact they prefer slavery. Only the strong, those few at the top of the power structure, should have to bear the weight and responsibility of freedom.
The Brothers Karamazov explores some of the antireligious arguments that were circulating widely in Russian liberal circles at this time—most notably, the idea that atheism would liberate them from the stifling social customs and morals of the day, and allow society to break free from its servile past. Dostoyevsky clearly believes that this assumption is as superficially attractive as it is unexamined. Although the issue is explored to some extent in The Brothers Karamazov, a more explicit and engaging assessment of the idea is found in an earlier novel: The Possessed.
The Possessed, also known as Devils, is the third of Dostoyevsky’s five great novels. The work, published over the years 1871–72, is loosely based on the Nechayev case of 1869. It describes the fortunes of a revolutionary group seeking to overthrow the Russian government and weaken the influence of the church. This demands absolute secrecy and the ability to commit a series of horrific crimes in pursuit of their political goal. In Dostoyevsky’s hands, this becomes a major political tract in its own right, marked by a penetrating engagement with the appeal and implications of atheism.
For our purposes, the most important character in the novel is Kirillov, who argues that the nonexistence of God legitimates all forms of actions. The importance of this theme for the novelist is best appreciated from an 1878 letter to N. L. Ozmidov, in which he sets out the implications of atheism for morality: “Now assume that there is no God, or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds, if I am to die entirely on earth? . . . And if that is so, why shouldn’t (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught by the law) cut another man’s throat, rob and steal?”
In The Possessed, Kirillov adopts a related line of argument: if there is no God, it follows that he, Kirillov, is God. This puzzles Stephanovich, who asks him to explain what he means. Kirillov responds as follows: “If God exists, then everything is His will, and I can do nothing of my own apart from His will. If there’s no God, then everything is my will, and I’m bound to express my self-will.” Since the idea of God is a pure human invention, Kirillov reasons that he is free to do as he pleases—in this case, take his own life. Suicide is the ultimate expression of human autonomy. “There’s no idea greater than the fact that God doesn’t exist,” Kirillov continues. “Human history supports me. The only thing man has done is to keep inventing God to go on living and not kill himself; this alone constitutes global history up to now. During the entire course of global history I alone am the first person who doesn’t want to invent God.”
What Kirillov regards as a rather hopeful possibility—that God does not exist and thus everything is permitted—was seen by Dostoyevsky himself as a threat. To remove limits to human action was to open the gates to less welcome developments, leading to unrestricted tyranny and violence. While Dostoyevsky’s writings give little hint of the horrendous evils to come in the Stalinist era, there can be little doubt that he was trying to draw the attention of his readers to the darker side of atheism. Atheism, it has often been argued, was the necessary precondition for the Stalinist era. Yet many Russian bourgeois liberals of the 1870s saw atheism as a liberator that would free their culture from the oppressive political absolutism and moral conservatism of their age. Dostoyevsky, with the true vision of a prophet, foresaw something much more disturbing. To remove God is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality.
NIETZSCHE AND THE DEATH OF GOD
If any philosopher is associated with the “death of God,” it is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). We find no crisis of faith, no road away from Damascus, marking Nietzsche’s commitment to atheism. As he himself remarked, it was more a matter of instinct than a response to any event. Yet Nietzsche’s personal atheism must not be confused with his understanding of the essentially cultural development by which belief in the Christian God has become virtually untenable in modern Western society. Nietzsche’s discussion of the grounds of (un)belief is actually rather disappointing, and is in any case not where his real interests lie. As Albert Camus pointed out, Nietzsche “did not form a project to kill God” but instead “found him dead in the soul of his contemporaries.” The primary emphasis of Nietzsche’s mature writings is that “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”—a statement that represents a cultural observation rather than a philosophical argument. “What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.” Western culture has not ceased to believe in God on account of unassailable philosophical reasons, but because of its shifted mood. Although clearly aware of the growing arsenal of atheist arguments, Nietzsche does not make much use of them. His basic approach is pragmatic: it is a simple matter of fact that God is gradually being eliminated from modern culture. Whether this is right or wrong, good or bad, it is happening. As a matter of observable fact, Nietzsche suggests, Western culture has ceased to find belief in God plausible. And what, he rightly wonders, might the implications of this be?
Nietzsche imagines news of the death of God being proclaimed to a disbelieving crowd by a madman—a visionary, even somewhat apocalyptic figure whose message is resisted. Nietzsche sets out his “Parable of the Madman” as follows in The Gay Science:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. “Has he got lost?” asked one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” asked another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?” —Thus they yelled and laughed . . . The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Unable to take this in, the crowd assumes it is the babbling of a fool. For Nietzsche, however, the unspeakable—the unthinkable—has happened, even if the crowd cannot and will not believe it. God has ceased to be a presence in Western culture. He has been eliminated; squeezed out. In short: we have killed God. The madman wants to believe in God (unlike many in the crowd); the problem is that he cannot. Yet he realizes that his audience is not yet ready to acknowledge the truth of his message.
The madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
So what are the implications of this development? Nietzsche insists that news of the death of God will be slow to travel; those in the know may expect to encounter resistance. “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” Yet the day will come, he insists, when God will be finally eliminated from the world. “When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature?” The consequences of this de-deification of the world are immense. Morality is no longer defined with reference to God, but solely with reference to human needs and aspirations. “Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.” Moral and philosophical truths are simply beliefs that we create to enable us to cope with the world. There are no facts; simply interpretations—and those interpretations are to be judged by their utility in coping with a meaningless world.
For many, this nihilism was a new gospel. This was certainly not the case for Nietzsche himself, who spent many anxious moments trying to find a way around the conclusions that he knew must follow from nihilism. If there is no God, or if God has become a culturally discredited notion, then there are no absolute values or truths. “How much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined, because it was once built upon this faith, propped up by it, and grown into it—for example, the totality of our European morality.” Yet others saw this erosion of the foundations of morality and truth as liberating.
Although best remembered for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley—grandson of Darwin’s colleague T. H. Huxley—gave considerable thought to the question of how true human freedom could be attained. In his Ends and Means (1937), he pointed out how nihilism had some admirable qualities.
For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.
If there is no meaning within the world, we are free to impose whatever meaning we please upon it. It is something that we freely and actively create, not something we are obliged passively to accept. To relinquish belief in God is simultaneously to affirm that our identity is placed beyond challenge or judgment, opening the way to new, creative ways of conceiving ourselves and the world in which we live. And this is Nietzsche’s legacy to the West, however much he may have had misgivings concerning it.
One of the most penetrating criticisms of this approach is found in the writings of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (born 1911), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Having found himself stifled intellectually, first under Nazism and then under Stalinism, Milosz had no doubt as to the ultimate source of despair and tyranny in the twentieth century. In a remarkable essay entitled “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,” he pointed out that it was not religion, but its nihilist antithesis, which lay at the root of the century’s oppressive totalitarianism: “Religion, opium for the people! To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.” The Marxist creed has now been inverted. The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please. Life can become our privately scripted and controlled story, without any impeding thought of “a scale to weigh sins and good deeds.”
For nihilism, a religious worldview is oppressive because it insists that we will be held accountable for our actions—that there will come a future judgment for crimes over which human courts are powerless to rule. Nihilism, Milosz argues, abolishes any such threat. There is no judgment against sins; indeed, there are no sins, other than those actions that we ourselves determine to be sinful. Earlier, Ludwig Feuerbach had argued that humanity constructed its own religious ideals for its convenience and consolation; we can see in Milosz’s argument the recognition that both belief in God and a refusal to believe in God are themselves the result of human longings—the former a longing for consolation and immortality, the latter a longing for autonomy and a lack of accountability. Both are “opiums of the people”—different groups of people, it is true, but both needing their respective opiums.
Where some were attracted by the moral flexibility of nihilism, others found themselves drawn by its creative aspects. In his final volume of prose, The Necessary Angel (1951), the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) reflected on the imaginative possibilities of atheism. If there is no God, the imagination is liberated to create whatever possibilities it finds pleasing. The precondition for imaginative creativity is that there is nothing to constrain it, nothing to hold it down or limit its capacity to soar heavenward and create its own heaven and its own divinities. “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.” Stevens argues that if one no longer believes in God, it becomes impossible to disbelieve. It becomes necessary to believe in something else—and what else is there to believe in, other than the free creation of the unrestrained and unfettered human imagination?
Others were more hesitant concerning the proposed virtues of nihilism. To explore how this legacy was evaluated more critically, we turn to the French existentialist tradition, focusing especially on the remarkable writings of Albert Camus.
CAMUS AND THE ABSURD SILENCE OF GOD
Albert Camus (1913–60) argued that human life is rendered meaningless by death, preventing the individual from making sense of existence. Any philosophy that believes it is possible to make sense of things is deluded, whether this takes the form of a “vertical” religion such as Christianity or a “horizontal” religion such as Marxism. In his first major work, The Stranger (1942), Camus argues that the only option is to rebel against the “ultimate negation” of death by throwing ourselves into life and making deliberate choices that challenge this futility. There is no god, no meaning—but we can create our own meanings, and throw ourselves into the world that they mediate.
In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus sets out his reasons for insisting that any form of faith in God is tantamount to “philosophical suicide.” He uses Sisyphus, the mythical king of Corinth, as a metaphor for the absurdity of human existence. Having scorned the gods, Sisyphus was condemned by them to spend eternity in the underworld repeatedly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, at which point the stone would roll back down again because of its own weight. Sisyphus was then obliged to begin the endless and pointless cycle all over again.
For Camus, Sisyphus is an image of the absurd hero. Condemned by the contingencies of history to a futile and meaningless existence, he sets out to make the best of things. The situation cannot be changed; it can only be accepted. There is no end in sight for Sisyphus, no respite from the pain of existence, and no possibility of knowing that what he is doing has any meaning. This is the metaphor that Camus chooses to illuminate the human predicament. If we eliminate the notion of God, we are left with a titanic and lifelong struggle that we can only lose. We are condemned by history to a painful struggle from which we cannot escape and which we cannot ultimately rationalize. “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms . . . I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.” There is no God to give meaning to events. The only way to be happy is by acknowledging the absurdity of the situation. “You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.”
For Camus, death is not to be seen as representing a release from our struggles, but as a denial of all that we accomplish by our efforts. Death is what makes life meaningless. So, in the face of death and in the face of the discouraging knowledge that we are defeated before we begin, can we be happy? Camus certainly thinks so.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Like The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus was written against a backdrop of despair and meaninglessness, during the depths of the Second World War. How could life have any meaning?
Camus is equally critical of the nineteenth-century tendency to divinize humanity, which found new expression in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. For Sartre, the desire to be God is constitutive of human nature. To be human is to aspire to divinity as a rightful and meaningful goal: “To be human is to long to be God; or, if you prefer it, humanity is fundamentally a desire to be God.” Sartre argues that we invent God in order to account for meaning in the world. We are haunted by the specter of cosmic meaninglessness, which we find unbearable. In consequence, we invent God so as to explain the unexplainable. For Sartre, atheism is both the presupposition and consequence of human autonomy—a freedom that must be affirmed. If there is a God, it is one which we have freely invented, and freely chosen to adopt—in other words, a humanized divinity, made in our own image.
Camus poured scorn on this crude divinization of humanity and human desires. In The Rebel (1951), Camus writes scathingly of the “horizontal religions of our times,” which elevate humanity to the position of a deity—a role which, he argues, we are simply incapable of discharging responsibly and competently. The “metaphysical revolt” against God has caused humanity to grossly overestimate its capacities and overreach itself, leading to the messianic utopianism of Marxism. Camus argues that humanity is characterized by a double rebellion: the metaphysical revolt against the absurd and the historical revolt against injustice. In both cases, a link with atheism is established. The denial of God can be said to lie at the heart of Camus’s understanding of politics and morality. Yet Camus rebels against both the idea that there is a God and one of its polemical inversions—namely, that humanity is God. In rejecting God, we must not succumb to the temptation of believing that we are divine.
The confident, optimistic atheistic faith that we find in the writings of Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Ludwig Feuerbach gave way to the darker, more uncertain questioning of Camus and many other writers, such as Franz Kakfa. The early atheist belief that a brave new world would result from the elimination of God and the deification of humanity gave way to a more somber estimation. Humanity may have revolted against God and declared itself to be autonomous; yet the outcome is a world ridden with anxiety, despair, and alienation—a far cry from the secular paradise envisioned by the dreamers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Somehow, that paradise seemed to get postponed yet again. One of the most significant aspects of Camus’s existentialism is his careful evasion of any suggestion that atheism leads to a brilliant new world, in which human alienation is overcome.
Convinced that the world is “unreasonable,” Camus nevertheless yearns for it to possess some meaning. We find here nothing of the serene optimism of the Enlightenment concerning the idea of an entirely rational universe, and nothing of the agnostic’s insistence that it does not matter that the universe is meaningless. These things matter profoundly to Camus. Yet he finds himself caught up in the anxiety of the contradiction between what he calls “the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world,” which ultimately propels him toward the position that he calls the absurd—namely, the view that human life is rendered meaningless by death and that the individual cannot make any sense of human existence.
Camus does not know that God does not exist; he chooses to believe it. How could there be a God? If there is a God, he is silent, offering no justification of himself. For Camus, the idea of the death of God is best expressed in terms of his silence rather than his absence. Yet paradoxically, having rejected Christianity, Camus seems to embrace a faith of his own—a rather negative faith, it is true, but a faith nevertheless. We simply cannot know our situation; we are unable to make sense of it. The universe is silent when the question of “why” arises (le “pourquoi” s’élève), when we cry out for an explanation of our situation. We cannot make sense of things, and we obtain no answers from any other source. God and his antimetaphysical alternatives remain tantalizing hypotheses, not certainties. We simply cannot know, and must live our lives against the backdrop of a silent universe that declines to clarify its purposes—or ours.
THE DEATH OF GOD THEOLOGY
The 1960s marked a period of transition, in which the settled assumptions of the Western past were called into question with unprecedented vigor. It was as if there was an unrelenting impatience with the ways of the past, a sense of sheer boredom with existing ideas and values, and a strong belief that a new beginning lay just around the corner. The cultural mood of the period is caught well by Tom Wolfe in his essay “The Great Relearning.” It was all about sweeping everything aside and starting all over again, “following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero.” To its critics, it seemed madness, a surefire recipe for chaos and superficiality. But to those who caught the vision, it was nothing less than entrancing, promising a rosy future unfettered by the outdated constraints of their parents’ generation.
How could such a massive cultural upheaval leave Christianity unaffected? For the trendy young things of the 1960s, God was an outmoded idea that belonged to the past—or, even worse, to their parents’ generation. Reaction against God was the hallmark of a right-thinking and intelligent young person. In Europe there was a surge of interest in Marxism in the 1960s. The May 1968 student riots in Paris were hailed as the harbinger of a shake-up at least as great as that which had swept away the ancien régime in 1789. “The existing moral order is the enemy,” commented the editor of Libération, the left-leaning newspaper. The students were joined by nearly ten million workers—half the French workforce. For several weeks it looked as if France was facing a shutdown. Similar student protests at Columbia University in New York, together with widespread discontent with the Vietnam War, hinted at a global shift in values. In Northern Ireland, where I grew up, the vision of revolution also shimmered just over the horizon. The civil rights movement seemed poised to topple the old ways of living. A new dawn was just around the corner. Who could fail to be moved by such a powerful vision, especially when this one, unlike the pipe dreams of the past, seemed about to happen?
The 1960s marked a crisis point for Western Christianity. It suffered a severe crisis of confidence over these years, from which it has still not recovered. In the United Kingdom, the Church of England had been busy dealing with something that it regarded as being of ultimate importance: the revision of canon law, the internal legal codes of the church. While the bishops fiddled around with the arcane world of church legislation, their nation came close to losing its faith in God. John Robinson’s book Honest to God (1963) suggested that Christians ought to dispense with the idea of a God “out there,” and bring its ideas into line with some of the leading ideas of modern culture. This resonated with the cultural mood of the time. It made no small difference that Robinson was a bishop of the Church of England. Shortly before the publication of the book, Robinson had contributed an article to a leading British Sunday newspaper with the provocative title “Our Image of God Must Go.” The book became a best-seller in England, and earned the nickname Honest John for its author. A new world had dawned, it was argued; Christians would just have to bring their ideas into line with it. The message was clear: Christianity had to update itself—or die. There was no shortage of those expecting the latter. If God was dead, it was only a matter of time before the increasingly faint candle of faith in the West flickered, finally to die. Religion would be eroded, to be replaced with a secular, materialist world.
Still more radical developments took place in the United States, prompting the famous Time magazine cover story of October 22, 1965. The magazine highlighted a small group of theologians whose watchword was “God is dead.” The most interesting of these theologians was Thomas J. J. Altizer, whose brief book The Gospel of Christian Atheism had recently been published. The story was picked up by the media and became a sensation. In its February 1966 issue, the leading theological journal Christian Century provided a satirical application form for its readers to join the “God-Is-Dead Club.” The state of God’s health was debated on TV talk shows, in the columns of the New York Times, and on car bumper stickers. Rarely, if ever, has a theological debate so captured the imagination of a nation. Yet the nation’s attention span was brief. After discovering that the death of God did not, after all, mean that Americans had ceased to believe in God, the media lost interest in the movement. Altizer and the death of God ceased to be a hot item.
In the end, the debate probably generated more heat than light, due largely to Altizer’s astonishing inability to express his ideas clearly in plain English, and his penchant for numbing overstatement. Like John Robinson in Great Britain, Altizer was convinced that the traditional notion of a transcendent God was problematic for modern culture. He was unpersuaded that his ideas would be misunderstood if he persisted with the slogan “the death of God.” “My greatest failure,” he once remarked, “was that I imagined I could write in such a way that it could affect the common reader. I couldn’t even make myself clear to intelligent, educated readers with a background in theology.”
Yet there were many who wanted to believe that God had indeed been eliminated from the public forum, who found the “death of God” movement a convenient, if temporary, ally. The elimination of religion as a serious public intellectual option has always been close to the heart of American intellectual life. God is to be respected, just as long as people don’t get too serious about him. Talking about God was seen as something that consenting adults do in private. The 1960s seemed to represent the dawn of a long-awaited religionless era. It was no accident that many theological works speaking of a “religionless Christianity”—including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters and papers from prison—soared in popularity at this time. God had been squeezed out of the Western consciousness, and replaced with . . . well, what? Altizer’s God substitute was mystifying and beyond comprehension, its obscurity only partly due to Altizer’s prose. The growing interest in atheism in America around this time, however transient it may have been, was spurred by the incomprehensible concepts of God proposed by rattled liberals in the mainline denominations.
THE SUICIDE OF LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY
Atheism, like Marxism, never really caught on in America. Why not? The analogy with Marxism is illuminating, and we may pursue it briefly. Many Marxist writers in the early part of the twentieth century were deeply perplexed by the failure of their philosophy to gain a significant following in the United States. On the basis of its European experience, it ought to have built up a mass following. The same economic deprivation and social alienation that had led to the rise of Marxism in Europe ought to have precipitated a workers’ revolt by this stage. Jim Connell’s populist socialist song “The Red Flag” (1889) certainly anticipated some serious action in downtown Chicago:
Look ’round, the Frenchman loves its blaze,
The sturdy German chants its praise,
In Moscow’s vaults its hymns are sung
Chicago swells the surging throng.
Large parts of France, Germany, and Moscow all saluted the red flag in due course. But Chicago? Hardly.
A ferocious and not a little impenetrable debate on the American failure of Marxism broke out between two leading Marxist theoreticians, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein’s explanation has won wide acceptance: Marxism failed to win a following in the United States because its outlook was too deeply embedded in the social situation of 1840s Germany. It did not relate to the social realities of twentieth-century America, and Marxist theoreticians were making no effort to alter this situation by interpreting Marxism in a North American context. In short: it had become so conditioned by its original context that it failed to relate to dissimilar contexts.
The same was true of atheism in the United States. Its appeal was standortsgebunden, to use an inelegant but deadly accurate German term—specifically linked to one specific time and place. The appeal of atheism in Europe rested partly on its social role as a liberator from the bondage of the past and partly on the challenge it posed to the state. In Europe, the phenomenon of state churches (a relic of medieval Christendom) made Christianity an integral part of the establishment. To revolt against the status quo was to seek to overthrow Christianity. But the social situation in North America was quite different. The constitutional separation of church and state prevented any Christian body from exercising influence save through its function as an interest group. There was no link between church and state to revolt against, no established church to oppose. For much of its existence, American atheism had to actively seek out a meaningful enemy to oppose. Its moment finally came in June 1963, when Murray v. Curlett removed the reading of the Bible and prayers from America’s public schools.
Buoyed by its new success, American atheism discovered it had an unlikely and largely unwitting ally—the intellectual leadership of the mainline Protestant denominations. The “death of God” controversy persuaded many more advanced thinkers that the glory days of God in heaven were over. God would have to be located somewhere else, and visualized in quite new and different ways. Convinced that nobody (well, nobody who really mattered, that is) could believe in a transcendent God anymore, revisionist theologians launched a makeover of their faith. Ideas such as eternal life, Resurrection, a “God out there,” and any sense of the mysterious were unceremoniously junked as decrepit embarrassments.
If this was meant to pack them into the churches, it completely failed. The statistics reveal a grim picture. From 1955 to 1995—a generation in biblical terms—the mainline denominations suffered a massive loss of members, while churches that retained traditional teachings grew, not least from refugees aiming to escape from the rampant modernism of their denominations. The view of mainline church leaders has tended to be that modern America will take seriously only those churches that are progressive and liberal on core beliefs—such as the transcendence of God, the Resurrection of Jesus, and so on. This was certainly the perception of the 1960s, when many of the church leaders of the 1990s were in college. The decisive ethos of those years has remained firmly stamped in their minds. It’s just too bad that things have moved on since then, leaving them beached. To their critics—and there are plenty of them—the mainline denominations have got stuck in a rut, and are being overtaken by new understandings of what it means to be a church—like the megachurches, with average Sunday attendances numbered in the thousands.
Wade Roof Clark, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, published a pioneering study of the spirituality of the baby boomers demonstrating that a market-driven and culturally sensitive version of Christianity can be strong on the basics of its faith. A very different line is taken by James Spong, formerly Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey. Spong argued that Christianity needs to ditch its outmoded ideas if it is to survive. If Bishop Spong applied his ideas in his own diocese of New Jersey before his recent retirement, they do not seem to have had much impact. The Episcopal church there seems locked into decline, when others are growing. What it thought was a confident manifesto has turned into a suicide note. Change is certainly needed, but the basics of faith are not the problem. Spong’s remedy for the ills of the mainline denominations will probably just hasten their ending. The real issue is how well churches are able to adapt to their host populations and communicate their faith in ways that connect up with people’s needs.
Even worse: these new ideas were so adapted to the ideas of modernity that they were fatally compromised by the death of modernity and the rise of postmodernity. Postmodernity reacted against just about every single aspect of modernity. The rather insipid ideas propounded by modernizers were not merely difficult to recognize as Christianity; they also turned out to be diametrically opposed to the new values and preferences of postmodernity, which often polemically inverted the certainties of its predecessor. The liberal church leaders of the 1960s and 1970s often seemed to advocate ideas that were temporarily popular at the time, but went out of fashion within a decade. They were unwise enough to believe that the cultural mood of the 1960s represented a permanent shift in Western culture, valid for at least another century. As it happened, that mood was on the skids within a decade. A movement that had tried to make God relevant to one social grouping ended up making that same God irrelevant to just about everyone else.
The settled view in the West throughout the 1960s was that God would die of old age and exhaustion, probably within the next decade. It was just a matter of time. The conventional wisdom of the sociologists of religion was that a secular age lay ahead. Admittedly, most of these were based in Western Europe and made the unwise assumption that the pattern of decline in religious belief and fervor typical of that region applied globally. Yet this seemed entirely reasonable at the time; it became the accepted wisdom of the age.
Yet many were impatient, and were not prepared to wait around for God to die. Their social and political experiments required the permanent elimination of God. Sterner—and rather more permanent—measures would be required.
THE EXECUTION OF GOD: THE ATHEIST STATE
The Russian Revolution of 1917 is, by any standard, one of the most important events in the history of the world. Although one of Europe’s most backward nations, Russia possessed the potential to dominate a substantial geopolitical arena. Its traditional sphere of influence was immense. With the overthrow of the czar and the formal adoption of Marxism-Leninism, Russia was poised to export a radical new ideology throughout Eurasia, whether by argument or by force. Although the French Revolution had experimented with atheism, not entirely successfully, Marxism-Leninism held that a true socialist state was necessarily atheistic. The road to socialism demanded the death of God. Yet in Russia, faith obstinately persisted—to a far greater extent than anyone realized, as recently published material makes clear. So what was to be done?
The persistence of faith following the Russian Revolution was something of an embarrassment to Marxist theory. It had been assumed that religion would disappear once social alienation had been abolished through revolutionary action. As Lenin wrote in his essay on religion: “Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual intoxicant in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and blunt their desire for a decent human existence . . . The class-conscious worker of today . . . leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois hypocrites. He fights for a better life for himself, here on earth.” Yet religion refused to die, causing a serious problem for Marxist-Leninist theory. The accommodation of observation to theory became an increasingly difficult issue. There were limits to which Marxist theory could be adjusted to cope with the anomalous persistence of religion. In the end, the theory triumphed: reality would have to be brought into line with what the theory predicted. Religion would have to be forcibly suppressed.
A desire to eliminate belief in God at the intellectual or cultural level has the most unfortunate tendency to encourage others to do this at the physical level. We simply cannot separate means and ends here. Lenin, frustrated by the Russian people’s obstinate refusal to espouse atheism voluntarily and naturally after the Russian Revolution, enforced it, arguing—in a letter of March 1922—that the “protracted use of brutality” was the necessary means of achieving this goal. A further judicious application of this foolproof approach during the Stalinist era ensured that the official atheism of the Soviet Union would not be blemished by any unfortunate lapses into religious belief. The December 1927 edition of Pravda, the ideological publication of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, pilloried religion as the class enemy of the proletariat and socialism. It was to be eliminated.
Yet it must not be assumed that the state-sponsored campaign against religious belief and practice was entirely effective. Stalin is known to have been angered by the failure of the League of Militant Godless to suppress religious belief, especially in rural areas, which remained obstinately committed to the old faith. In 1937 the league was obliged to admit that possibly as much as one-third of the urban, and two-thirds of the rural, population of the Soviet Union were still practicing religious believers. Twenty years after the Revolution, God was still a living reality in the life of most of its population.
There were many who defied the silencing of God within the Soviet Union. The writer and Orthodox priest Gregory Petrov, who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1940, found the beauty of the natural world beyond his prison camp to be an indelible reminder of the presence of God. God might have been silenced within the Soviet Union. But who could prevent nature from singing God’s praise? Did not Psalm 19 declare that the heavens proclaimed the glory of the Lord?
O Lord, how lovely it is to be your guest.
Breezes full of scents; mountains reaching to the skies;
Waters like boundless mirrors, reflecting the sun’s golden rays and the scudding clouds.
All nature murmurs mysteriously, breathing the depth of
tenderness.
Birds and beasts of the forest bear the imprint of your love.
Blessed is mother earth, in your passing loveliness, which awakens our yearning for the happiness that will last for ever,
In the eternal native land where, amid beauty that will never grow old, the cry rings out: Alleluia!
Petrov found immense consolation in such thoughts, allowing the natural world that surrounded the inhuman and degrading life of the labor camp to remind him of his future homeland free of oppression and pain. The forests, mountains, and lakes around the camp signaled a future hope, which illuminated and transfigured his present situation. It was his opium, in Marx’s terms; yet in the terms of Petrov’s Orthodox faith, it was simply a confidence that God possessed a richness that could embrace and transfigure his present appalling situation and promise him security and peace in a place that lay beyond the reach of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
It is now clear that the various antireligious campaigns of the Stalinist era failed to eliminate personal faith. Yet perhaps this was not Stalin’s intention. If it is assumed that Stalin’s concern was to comprehensively break the power of organized religion, a much greater degree of success was achieved, especially during the 1930s. Apart from some awkward and clumsy concessions to believers during the darker days of the Second World War, when national unity was of critical importance in the face of the Nazi invasion, Stalin’s program of suppressing religion achieved considerable success.
Stalin’s death in 1953 did not lead, as some had hoped, to a relaxation of antireligious propaganda. In July 1954, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ordered an increased atheist commitment within the nation’s schools. Schoolbooks repeatedly asserted the malevolence of religion. Some examples: “Religion is a fanatic and perverse reflection of the world”; “Religion has become the medium for the spiritual enslavement of the masses.” Alarmed at the persistence of religion, the party decreed that “the teaching of school subjects (history, literature, natural sciences, physics, chemistry, etc.) should be saturated with atheism.”
Atheism was now the state religion of the Soviet Union, in much the same way as Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire following the conversion of the emperor Constantine. If that precedent was anything to go by, atheism could expect to be around and influential for a very long time. The accuracy of that perception seemed confirmed by the expansion of Soviet influence following the Second World War, as nation after nation in Eastern Europe and the Baltic region came within the Soviet sphere, economically, politically, and atheistically. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary gradually fell into place within the Soviet bloc. Farther eastward, additional expansion seemed imminent, as Mao Zedong’s revolutionary armies triumphed over their opponents in China.
Although its heartland was Eastern Europe, atheism was also gaining momentum in the West following the Second World War. Although there were some within Western Europe who hoped to eliminate religion through Communist revolutions similar to those that shook Eastern Europe, the dominant mood was that of the historical inevitability of atheism. Religious faith was eroding, partly through the breaking of the intergenerational transmission of faith in the 1960s and partly through the growing public perception of the fragility of faith. The final elimination of God from Western culture was felt to be at most a generation away.
These perceptions were reinforced by the sociologists. A secular society—in the sense of a society that had no place for religion, and saw no need for it either—was the inevitable outcome of the process of modernization, begun by the Enlightenment back in the eighteenth century. A minority argued that religion would be extinct by the year 2000; the majority regarded it as in terminal decline throughout the world, and supremely in the West. A landmark publication by a leading Christian theologian confirmed this inexorable trend. In 1965, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox wrote a book entitled The Secular City. It became a best-seller. The book took its stands on a series of what it regarded as incontrovertible core beliefs. Secularism was here to stay; God was dead; Christianity would have to accommodate itself to modern thought and values; religion was about humanity, not God. And that, in the view of most writers, was the end of the matter.