Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry
Eagleton
Yale, £18.99; 185pp Buy
the book
God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World by
Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait
Allen Lane, £25; 401pp Buy
the book
Back in the limply liberal religious environment of the 1980s, any who
suggested that we might in 2009 be witnessing a global revival of religious
fervour would have been dismissed as a credulous fool, or worse. My chief
mentor at The Times had little more to do with me after I applied to
be religious affairs correspondent in 1989. I confess that one motive was,
indeed, to flee the cut-and-thrust news environment of sexual politics,
drugs, plane crashes, wars, death and grieving widows into a world of
encyclicals, books, ideas, gentle men in cassocks and Oxford common rooms.
The plane crashes returned, piloted by religious extremism, to haunt us all.
Of all the books that have attempted to understand this extraordinary
post-millenium phenomenon, none has yet truly succeeded. But among the best
attempts so far is by John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, and
Adrian Wooldridge, its Washington bureau chief, in their latest book, God
is Back. In a highly readable 375 pages they ostensibly address “how the
global rise of faith is changing the world”, as their full title suggests.
In fact, such a broad analysis is probably not possible at the present time,
with change taking place at a speed faster than it takes a terrorist to blow
himself up. What they really do — with terrifying clarity — is report how
the rise of religion in the United States is changing that country — and the
world. The authors are journalists, and this is news journalism at its best:
witty, succinct, occasionally sensationalist and replete with the kind of
unassailable facts that are too often a scarce commodity in the world of
faith.
Borrowing from the title of an earlier book by Daniel Benjamin and Steven
Simon, they write: “We are living in ‘the age of sacred terror’.” The
greatest change in foreign policy in the recent past has been the revival of
religion, and it is impossible to understand international affairs today
without taking faith into account, they write. To all on the front line of
religion this is self-evident, yet there are still policymakers out there
who are reluctant to accept it. “The most important single political act of
the 21st century so far — the terrorist attacks of September 11 — was an act
of religious war,” they say.
They don’t go into the Christian history of martyrdom on which the West itself
was won centuries ago, and a thorough historical, theological and
philosophical analysis of what we are now witnessing is a work still waiting
to be written. But most of the book, significantly, is not about Islam at
all but about Christianity. It answers one question that has puzzled many,
which is why the evangelical revival that has been such a dominant theme in
the US, even if running parallel with the secular “decadence” condemned by
strict Muslims around the world, has not been mirrored in Europe. The UK and
many other European countries have effective welfare states. The US does
not. “Mega-churches” are almost towns in their own right and one reason that
they are so popular is that they plug the gaps in social care left by the
State. And extremely good they are at it, too, to the extent that other
emerging nations with little or nothing in the way of state welfare, such as
countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, are following paths of
religious evangelical revival closer to the US than the European model.
“How frightened should we be?” they ask. “In one way, the answer is simple:
extremely.” As a strand of hope, they argue that wars of religion today
differ from their predecessors and that rather than being violent and
state-driven, they are usually “bottom-up affairs” with the main weapon
being the ballot box. That argument, outside the democratic West, is sadly
probably just plain wrong. But they are certainly correct to posit that
dealing with religious extremes will require more subtlety than the West,
and the US in particular, has displayed so far. The new factors in the
equation that the authors have not been able to add in because they are so
novel are Barack Obama’s rather complex approach to religious issues in the
Middle East, and the recent financial crash. The intrinsic unbeatability of
the market model of capitalism is simply taken as a given by these two —
along with nearly all their predecessors — when writing about and fitting it
in with the evangelical revival in the US. I would love to see what these
economists had to say about the effect of the recession on religious
practice. In the UK, early studies show little return to church as a result.
If anything, the opposite has happened. None has yet asked, let alone
answered, the question of whether loss of faith in the market will bring
about an attendant loss of faith in a God who has become synonymous in the
US with prosperity.
It might take a Marxist of Terry Eagleton’s stature to answer that question,
and he gets close at times with his new polemic against an entity he rather
crudely labels “Ditchkins” — an elision of Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens, two prominent atheist writers — though it would be foolish of any
believer to posit this as proof of the existence of God in the company of
any such as Eagleton.
Reason, Faith and Revolution is based on the four Terry Lectures that
Eagleton delivered at Yale University in April 2008. While ostensibly a
defence of Christianity, it is tempting to speculate that this latest entry
into the great God debate is nothing more than yet another column, or
crusade, marching under the slightly tattered banner of Marxism. But who is
to say that there isn’t something in the theories of Karl Marx that could be
worth redeeming, or at least revisiting? To combine Marxism and Christianity
is to form a philosophy of “tragic humanism” where “only by a process of
self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own”, as
Eagleton writes. He is not the first to suggest such a syncretism, but in
the present age it is tempting to seek signs of the prophet that
Christianity is looking for, and to reflect on what a shame it is that he is
not ordained.
Eagleton, born into a large, poor, Irish and devoutly Roman Catholic family in
Salford, has been fascinated by religion all his life. Last year’s
introduction to the Gospels, presenting Jesus once again as an accessible
revolutionary, gives some context for this new book. A gifted writer and
polemicist, he is arguably better placed than any bishop or priest to
explain why it is that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Salman
Rushdie, Martin Amis and the rest have got the wrong man, or the wrong God,
in their sights. He takes us back to the old belief that it is not God, but
Man, or men and women, that are the problem. So he stands with, but not of,
the devout.
In some ways he is no different to the “Ditchkins” entity he has created. His
own tradition of humanist scepticism — or should that be sceptical humanism?
— should make him stand alongside his intellectual peers against the
gullible believers among us who are still so foolish as to imagine that
there might be a God. So we want to welcome him into our midst as a defender
of the faith, but suspect his motives, fearing that he might be a kind of
intellectual mercenary. He is simply too intellectually restless to buy into
any scheme in its entirety, including the Catholicism of his own cradle and
his acquired faith of Marxism.
Some of his literary work has shown his interest in the lesser characters of
great literature, where they came from, how and why they are there. This is
completely at one with Christ and Marx. It chimes with our fast-fading
celebrity culture and makes him prophetic. The people serving the
celebrities, the politicians and those serving the servants, become as much
of a focus of inquiry as the celebrities themselves. This lateral take on
culture is where Eagleton is at his strongest and is what we depend on him
for. It is the commonsense approach that we need now more than ever. Here
his polemic against Christianity matches that of those he attacks. In a
passage that could have come straight from Richard Dawkins’s The
God Delusion, he writes: “Far from refusing to conform to the powers of
this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant of lying
politicians, corrupt bankers and fanatical neocons, as well as an immensely
profitable industry in its own right . . . The Christian Church has tortured
and disembowelled in the name of Jesus, gagging dissent and burning its
critics alive. It has been oily, sanctimonious, brutally oppressive and
vilely bigoted.”
In the light of all this, he admits, the “bellicose ravings” of Ditchkins are,
if anything, too muted. Eagleton writes, revealing something of his own
yearnings towards faith: “It is hard to avoid the feeling that a God as
bright, resourceful and imaginative as the one that might just possibly
exist could not have hit on some more agreeable way of saving the world than
religion.” Don’t forget, though, it is only a “feeling”. What he is getting
at is a distinction between a scriptural and an ideological Christian faith.
His own creed remains basically unchanged: “Any preaching of the Gospel
which fails to constitute a scandal and affront to the political state is in
my view effectively worthless.”
One of Eagleton’s most endearing strengths, like the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Dr Rowan Williams, is that he can see the contradictions of his own
position. At times in this book he seems to come close to suggesting a “new
order” for the 21st century, in the mould perhaps of Christ himself in the
first. This seems particularly the case when the book is read in the light
of the present catastrophes brought on by the capitalist excesses of greed
and pride. But Eagleton is far too aware of hubris to fall into such error.
Instead, the book is a tantalising invitation for us to make that journey,
almost like a journey of faith, one that simultaneously mocks and invites.
Its very readability and brevity is deceptive, because the inner intellectual
and spiritual journey it prompts is arduous and daunting. Apart from
Eagleton, perhaps, we all rather thought Marx was history.
