And now, a poem by Elon Musk:
Atheism left an empty space
Secular religion took its placeBut left the people in despair
Childless hedonism sans careMaybe religion’s not so bad
To keep you from being sad
I pass over the subject of its literary merit in a tactful silence. Nobody’s good at everything.
But the sentiment is now shared by too many prominent figures to count. Faith is undefeated as what they call a social technology, or an operating system that keeps people from smacking repeatedly into walls like glitchy Sims.
For a while the fashionable consensus was that we had upgraded to better software—enlightenment rationalism, global capitalism, scientific positivism, maybe even a little worldwide proletarian revolution, as a treat—but it turned out these were just threads of defective code spooled off from the original program.
Isolated from their religious context, these derivative social scripts went rogue and produced fatal syntax errors. Christianity gave us human rights and the sistine chapel; secularism gave us plummeting birth rates and whatever you call a $120,000 banana taped to a wall.
It got so hard to keep pretending that this was fine, actually, that people started wondering if there was a way to patch Christianity back in. Maybe an emulator would do the trick: in 2008 two books, Don Cupitt’s The Meaning of the West and Marcello Pera’s Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, argued that liberal democracies should take Christian ethics but leave Christian theology.
In 2019 Tom Holland’s Dominion, which I would call a watershed in this area, drove home just how utterly transformative Christianity had been across the West, how inescapably distinctive its principles were. If you want universal human dignity, respect for the weak and the infirm, civil liberties and science as we understand them, the Bible really is the only game in town. Sooner or later, Holland argued, you would find its teachings at the root of your most dearly held convictions.
He was proven alarmingly right in short order when the Great Awokening demonstrated just how different the world looks in the grip of—ahem—alternative faiths. When militant utopians forcefully assert their own unlimited autonomy as the basis for a worldwide social order, Nietzsche has well and truly entered the chat.
Cue two very prominent atheists, the unbreakable ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, declaring their preference for Christianity in two tellingly different ways. Dawkins, alarmed at England’s Houellebecquian flimsiness against a surging Islamic tide, declared himself a “Cultural Christian.” This means, he explained, that he prefers “hymns and Christmas carols” to Ramadan decorations.
Pity the poor New Atheists; they’re just a little slow. Dawkins has simply arrived, decades late, at the same conclusions Cupitt and Pera already drew. He wants to live in a Christian society, but this has not prompted him to re-evaluate the claims of the Christian church. For him to do so at this point would be such a dramatic repudiation of his long career in public letters that the psychological obstacles alone are probably formidable.
But Ali, who was no less firm in her prior unbelief, took a different approach. In a much-discussed essay on Why I Am Now a Christian, she argued that “nothing” was simply not a strong enough rallying cry in the coming fight to defend “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience and of the press,” which turn out to “find their roots in Christianity.”
There are those who see no functional difference between Dawkins’s approach and Ali’s. St. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most miserable”—in other words Christianity isn’t designed to furnish ethical or material success, except maybe as a by-product. So, as T.S. Eliot wrote centuries later, “to justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.”
True enough. But I suspect something meaningfully different is going on with Ali than with Dawkins, and on that difference may hang the fate of the West. Dawkins saw good fruit growing from the branches of a tree and wondered if he could pluck off a couple to munch on; Ali wants fruit enough for generations, so she’s digging into the soil for root stock.
You can love a good thing because of what it happens to do for you, the way some decorators choose books for the color of their spines to ornament the palate of a room. Or you can love a thing as a consequence of what it is. “A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her,” wrote C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, “nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it.”
The second kind of love is magnetic. God, of course, is higher and better than the civil liberties we enjoy in the West. But if those liberties follow naturally from his nature, as a consequence of his ultimate goodness, then to want them will lead in time to wanting him. Faith isn’t there “to keep you from being sad.” But if it does seem, on the whole, to stave off despair and feed the soul as no other food can, one might invite to our boy Elon to wonder why.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Image: Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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