Back to the Enlightenment: an historical reflection on current debates

Richard Dawkins has recently made a number of bold but well made claims about the corrosive and destructive consequences of all organised religion. Put simply his case suggests that religion has done much more harm than good in human history – it is the root of all evil. Regardless of the brand (Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh etc.) the product merits a social health warning more prominent than even the highest tar tobacco, or the purest narcotic. Torture, intolerance, terrorism, civil conflict, misogyny, homophobia, and ignorance, he argues are commonplace and routine side effects of religion. One might add that hypocrisy, corruption, and deceit were, and are, fundamental symptoms of this religious illness too. There may have been some good done by religious people, but that was despite, rather than because of, their faith. Although vilified as an irreligious innovator, Dawkins writes from within a long lived Enlightenment tradition.

The assumption that the Enlightenment had seen off the twilight of medieval superstition in the eighteenth century seems to be flawed. In a post-Darwinian age one might have expected the Age of Faith to be in retreat: the secularising processes associated with technological progress and the social trauma of world wars, massive urbanisation and global economic prosperity, (many academics suggested in the 1960s and 1970s) ought to have led to a disenchantment of the world. The sacred canopy that protected the kernel of true religion should have cracked exposing the seeds of faith as a dwindling and increasingly marginal phenomenon.

Admittedly mainstream Christian church attendances are in decline, but the evangelical fringes prove ever popular. This, it has been suggested, does not reflect a fracturing of certainties, or decay in core values, but a rebirth of commitment. The splintering of Christian evangelism is far from evidence of a guttering flame – from Waco to the Whitehouse, the potential power of such new believers is profound. The flames of religious conviction have been reignited rather than doused. Just as the Christian evangelical traditions reacted with fundamentalist vigour to the perceived promiscuous and permissive impiety of modern consumerist society, so have some elements of Islam. Where the Christian West had confronted the question of confessional diversity and the consequences of economic and social change with a series of radical reformations in the sixteenth centuries, so now have some Islamic societies. Confronted by the consequences of global capitalism: increased urbanisation, the growth of literacy and mass culture, the radical imams have called for a ‘reformation’ to counter the perceived threat to the traditional structures of those essentially agrarian societies,.

Despite this evident resurgence of faith, Dawkin’s many critics accuse him of being unnecessarily brutal and shrill. As one respondent (Madeline Bunting writing in the pages of the national press) recently complained ‘there’s the unmistakable whiff of panic’ about the rationalist attack on religion. The progress of modernity seems to have been hobbled by the reins of faith. It was ever so. Dawkins’ angle has been to eviscerate the false claims of faith by the cool instrument of scientific reason. If societies in the past were superstitious it was because they were scientifically immature: the age of reason ought to have heralded the destruction of ignorance and irrational belief. That it did not it one sense bewilders Dawkin – it also exposes one of the flaws in his style of polemic. Showing by rational argument that the assumption of Mary is silly, will not persuade the Godly. Their priests will tell them Dawkins is a fallen man, a heretic, at the very least infused with the hubris of the sinner. Simple theology is not at fault – belief in the miraculous, the implausible, the daft and the divine is not necessarily evil – it’s what people do with those beliefs that is problematic. This was a point made elegantly by the English radical Thomas Hobbes who pointed out that when we have faith in a religious ‘truth’ we give our assent not simply to the proposition, but to the person making the claim to truth. The most corrosive parts of religion are not the doctrinal or ritual elements but the power relationships between priest and believer.

Those thinkers of the early Enlightenment who prefigured Dawkins three centuries ago – Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle – all regarded traditional religious institutions as pathological – they ridiculed the ‘mystery’ of belief, while reserving the full thrust of their criticism for the Churchmen. As Voltaire, much later, insisted, the war against religion was conducted in a campaign against the men in black. All known history, in their understandings, was a battle between ignorance and liberty: priests crafted the mental shackles that empowered political tyranny. Exploiting the natural fear the ignorant manifested when faced with the unknown the ‘unpleasing priests’ fabricated beliefs to reinforce their own authority and status. It is little wonder then that the slogan ‘may the last king be strangled in the bowels of the last priest’ became a radical commonplace in the nineteenth century. Not only did such thinkers challenge the political power of religion, they also made the point that it was entirely plausible for atheists to be sociable, firmly breaking the assumption that all social and political order rested on religious orthodoxy. It is possible to be moral without being religious.

The thrust of much of Dawkins’ analysis suggests that religion is pathological because it’s philosophically wrong. The deeper Enlightenment critique suggested that while religious doctrine may have been a human phenomenon its corrosive qualities were primarily political. Enlightenment writers exposed the absurdity of organised religion with satire and ridicule – at its most extreme, in the clandestine manuscripts of the eighteenth century, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were damned as imposture and fraud, the scriptures were fables, the afterlife a misunderstanding, and God reduced to matter. As Marx later to remarked what started off as a critique of heaven ended up as a fundamentally political project.

Dawkins is correct to be anxious about the resurgence of faith in contemporary political life – whether it’s manifest in the apocalyptic evangelism that underlies George Bush’s foreign policy, or the motivation behind the assassinations of film makers in the Netherlands, or the proposal for ‘Faith’ schools in the UK the claims of churchmen, imams, rabbis, pastors, priests demand attention and shape the parameters of modern life. The most urgent manifestation of this is the ongoing debate about the tension between freedom of speech and the claims of religious conscience. Much is made of the liberty of religious expression: now all citizens are entitled to select their belief system from a veritable smorgasboard of rival faiths. Certainly no religious minority currently suffers legal discrimination for their beliefs, whereas those like Dawkins who express their sincere convictions are vilified as heretics and unbelievers. This ironic since it seems that the forms of tolerance that underpin the diversity of faiths evident in modern Britain are still hemmed in by religious principle.

We have then, it seems, the freedom to believe any type of theological absurdity we see fit, but we’d rather marginalise and condemn those who claim to be free from any such religious commitments and wish to encourage others to share this insight. To adjust Isaiah Berlin’s famous two concepts: we’re free to be religious, but not free from it.