As I write this, I haven’t posted a blog for over a month, which I’m sure is fairly standard practice for very amateur bloggers. There’s a number of reasons for this, a primary one being the fact I picked up Hilary Mantell’s outrageously good ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bringing Up The Bodies’ books and found that I couldn’t actually put them down. But a second reason is because I didn’t really know what to write. I started this blog wanting to write about theology and society, but recently I’ve found myself wanting to write more and more about politics, liberalism and other ‘secular’ topics – topics that I’m even less qualified to talk about than theology. And the reason for this isn’t particularly hard to fathom, as I’ve spent the last month going through one of my frequent periods of existential doubt. As such, I’ve found it a lot easier to write and think about topics that don’t require me to confront the frailty of my own faith in any great detail.
I actually came very close to walking away from faith altogether at some point in my second year of university. Having my assurances swept out from under my feet was something that took a serious toll on my religious resolve. If the bible could not be relied upon as an infallible witness, then I struggled to find a sure foundation for faith. If my “experiences” of God could be analysed and dissected, then I failed to see how I could ever find any assurance again. If other people at other times had been so convinced of beliefs that I believe to be false that they were willing to give their life, then it was difficult to see how I could lay any claim to ‘the truth’.
If it weren’t for the fact that ‘coming out’ as a non-Christian would have been too difficult and painful a process to bear, I would probably have packed the whole thing in long ago.
Over time, I did come back to faith. Not in an old but a new way; no longer with unyielding assurance, but in tentative hesitancy and no great deal of confusion. Doubt became a part of my religious framework, and the rebuilding process of faith had to begin from a position of virtual agnosticism. As part of this process, I learnt to value my faith as a part of my identity, rather than something I simply believed. I came to see Christian belief as a framework for social justice, as well as a source of ethical action. I found value in the beauty of the Christian message, as well as in its truth. And I came to see the Christian story as a narrative that enables us to make sense of the world, as well as a historical account of Divine Action. In short, I committed to the idea of Christ, as well as the person. I found reasons to have faith that would sustain me, even in those moments that I doubted the veracity of the Christian story. I decided that I believed, knowing full well that I was standing very much in the air.
I know that many people will find this quite difficult to understand. Christians and Atheists alike might accuse me of lacking integrity; of tricking myself into valuing something I don’t really believe. But I’m not saying that I don’t believe in God. I’m saying I’m not sure, and that I doubt I ever will be. And that during the long, dark nights of the soul, I need reasons to cling to faith.
The idea that someone could need to cling to faith is a fairly widely derided one. High minded liberals of vastly superior intellect peer down their noses at those who are weak-minded enough to need such a crutch to get through the day. In particular vogue at the moment is the notion that this beautiful earth provides such a wonderful existence that it is churlish to fabricate some tedious fiction about life after death in order to escape it. The Magic of Reality is more than enough, Dawkins would surely say.
This is an important contemporary suggestion, which seems to be rooted in some bizarrely inverted appropriation of Karl Marx. Marx argued that religion was a fiction that alienated the working class from the poverty of their true existence, thus preventing them from revolution and the redemption of the established social order. But in the minds of many of those coming from the liberal end of philosophy, religion has become an unnecessary hang-over of the past that prevents us from truly appreciating the wonders of the world. It is an entirely unnecessary fiction, because the world is rosy enough without it. Human existence is already full of beauty and meaning, and without the need for tall tales.
Except I don’t buy it.
In the five minutes it’s taken you to read this far, 73 children have died from preventable diseases. 450 acres of rainforest have been destroyed, and this is showing no signs of slowing down. In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, at least 4 women have been raped, with recent reports suggesting the numbers could be much higher.
The world is not rosy or bright. Thousands of human beings of every age are butchered every day through war and violence. The global capitalist system that has given us the luxury of our technologies and our health care has decimated the developing world. Our pesticides have toxified the water, our trawlers have ruined fishstocks and we live with the constant knowledge that someday, somewhere, someone is going to push the big red button.
This world is not wonderful for the 1.3 billion who live in extreme poverty. I can’t imagine its particularly wonderful for the 50% who live on less than $2.50 a day either. The momentary anarchies of human history and nature may have been kind to Little England and the rolling hills of Surrey, but for the majority the world is a cruel and desperate place. Life without God is not a new dawn, but a dark and empty night. The death of God does not give us new perspective, but rips hope out of existence. To claim that this world is bright with meaning and purpose is an ignorance of the highest order.
Friedrich Nietzsche, an individual often paraded as the paradigm of liberal atheism, recognised this danger. For Nietzsche feared as much as celebrated the death of God. He feared that society would tear itself apart once confronted by the meaninglessness of existence. Some might survive that existential despair through their blessed incapacity for self-reflection, but others would be driven mad by it. Society, Nietzsche feared, would become suicidal if it were to recognise the futility of its endeavours and the utter meaninglessness of its existence.
Social progression, for Nietzsche then, was not simply a matter of shrugging off the old God and walking away free. Although he believed it had crippled the weak, Nietzsche makes it clear in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morality that he believes Christianity to have served an essential role in human history. Christianity was a poison that kept society alive, even as it weakened it, by imbuing life with a sense of meaning and purpose and staving off the existential despair of nihilism. And that role had to continue. Overcoming the death of God meant weaving new narratives to give human lives new purpose and new meaning. It meant creating new gods, as Heidegger later put it.
Of course, we saw the sort of gods that Heidegger advocated in the rise of National Socialism. Others have tried to deify human history and the inevitability of social progress, although this god too was brought crashing to earth with the wars of the 20th century. Others still have taken up the gods of individual self-fulfillment and hedonism, searching for their own personal meaning through whatever means they can find and choosing to ignore the untold misery of their fellow men and women.
And then there are those of us who have refused to surrender to the death of God. Who insist that the Christian narrative retold is the true locus of existential meaning.
This is why I cling to my faith. Because faith gives me a hope that this life isn’t an empty shell. I don’t believe in God because I want to escape this world, but because I need the hope that there is redemption at the end of all things. I don’t believe because eschatology absolves me of responsibility, but because hope of that redemption imbues me with a sense of purpose and a faith that my efforts are not in vain. Without God, and without the promise of redemption – not for me, but for the whole of the created order – life would be meaningless.
Of course, my own life would continue to be fairly rosy. But I need more for this earth than for me to have a pleasant existence.
In short, I need hope.
Standing in the Air 