12
We have seen in the previous chapters how science and religious belief related to each other over many centuries, and how, from the “Enlightenment” onwards, a body of myths came to be fabricated about their supposed antipathy. We also saw how positivism and its derivatives, along with the “conflict” scenarios built up by John W. Draper and Andrew D. White, set the stage for part of what would occur – as seen with the dubious gift of hindsight – in the twentieth century. So what happened during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to undermine so much of the Christian tradition in Great Britain and Europe – yet far less so in the United States of America?
Yes, there were two horrendous world wars which, as we have seen, did much damage to the late nineteenth-century notion that God was an English or German gentleman. Yet far more destructive over the past few decades, I would suggest, has been the escalating turbulence within the Islamic world. This turbulence perhaps originated with the dissolution of the Turkish Ottoman Empire after 1919 (though we should not forget that the Ottomans had taken Constantinople from the Christian Greeks by force in 1453), and was then sparked afresh by the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, when globally scattered Jews were enabled to return to their ancestral homeland. And in the wake of the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, Muslim turbulence has become a global menace. But while the politics of Islam work in a fundamentally different way from those of Christendom, what both faiths share, along with Judaism, is a belief in God. And tragically, this has been seized upon by militant atheists and secularists, especially following the “Twin Towers” mass murders of 9/11/2001. Are not the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, along with the endless bloodshed in the middle eastern states reported daily in the news, the work of people who have a passionate belief in God? So the sooner we get rid of God and turn to science and reason, the better!
Indeed, this argument has become a standard line with evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Yet quite apart from their very edited version of the peaceable, God-free politics that prevailed from 1789 to present-day North Korea, the sad thing is that so many atheists have been allowed to spin this myth without serious opposition.
And this is one of the biggest challenges facing post-1960s Christians. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century British history, in particular, has become a record of self-doubt, self-negation, and apology which would have been unimaginable in any earlier era. Sudden and fundamental changes in population structures, accompanied by a fear, in official circles, of offering the least offence to non-Christian groups – especially potentially violent groups – have led to a government doctrine of multiculturalism, in which it is enunciated that all belief systems and lifestyles are of equal merit. So, the ensuing logic proceeds, if we give any priority to that historic Christendom which has formed our civilization and moral values, someone’s human rights might be offended, and people might even get blown up! A circumstance, indeed, that has played directly into the hands of secularizers who are doing their best to remove Christian values from public life.
And in addition to responses to non-Christian religions, we have to factor in the impact of philosophical attacks both upon Christianity and upon Christian thinking which have grown up in the twentieth century. For several positivist and post-positivist-inspired philosophical movements have come into being since 1900, and one highly influential writer in the first half of the twentieth century was the “Old Atheist” Bertrand Russell with his anti-Christian books. Then there came logical positivism and the new philosophies of linguistics, while from France came existentialism and its offshoots.
So distilling all of these influences into one “portmanteau” body of ideas that would come in various ways to be used against Christianity, one might identify the following strands. One was that only “science”, and not religion, could supply “objective truth”. Indeed, some twentieth-century philosophical trends, leading to modernism and postmodernism, even saw objective knowledge itself as a passing illusion (shades of Epicurus and the classical Stoics). A second was that “truth” was relative, and resided only in the interpretations we as individuals give to words. And thirdly, there were the politically driven philosophies, which deemed it offensive to suggest that Christianity was better than any other faith.
And when all of this is filtered through what might be called an elite class of intellectuals, media people, teachers, and politicians, often ignorant of science and with little regard for historical objectivity, who blandly promote “received myths” and are terrified of putting a foot wrong for fear of reprisals, then you get some sense of the dilemma facing Christianity in the modern world. In short, we find ourselves in the Age That Lost Its Nerve!
Nowadays, people in Great Britain are constantly regaled by politicians and other prominent figures with the litany that we live in a secular society. Religion, we are told, is for the private sphere, and should be kept out of the public eye. And as we saw in Chapter 1, public employees, such as nurses and even some doctors, have been disciplined and threatened with suspension for wearing discreet crosses on their persons or for mentioning the word “God” to an individual under their care – a religious discrimination which, in legally “multicultural” Britain, appears to be directed primarily against Christians.
But where does the concept of a “secular society” come from, and how did it emerge? One must be careful to differentiate historically between secularism and anti-Christianity. We saw at the beginning of the book, for example, that medieval Europe recognized a saeculum, or acknowledged that there were aspects of life which, while in no way anti-religious, were not in themselves sacramental or holy, such as English Common Law and the judicial system, Parliament, the civil service, town councils, markets, and even the fellowship and student bodies of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. In the latter case, the fellowships were composed of men who were generally ordained priests or deacons, yet whose academic business also involved the study and teaching of pagan writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, the Roman lawyers, and even Muslim philosophers such as the physician Avicenna.
And, I would suggest, it was in this sense of the word that the founding fathers of the United States established their secular constitution after 1776. There was no state church or official denomination, yet eighteenth-century America was deeply and passionately Christian, from Maryland Catholics to New England Calvinists, along with a much smaller spread of Unitarians, deists, and Jews. American secularism, therefore, was in no way anti-religious, and stood four-square in the Judeo-Christian tradition – as it remains in many respects today. “In God we trust” is still proclaimed on dollar bills (although some present-day atheists are trying to have it removed), and presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have sworn by “Almighty God” to serve their country at inauguration. And the United States remains perhaps the most churchgoing nation in the Western world (along with the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe), in clear contradiction to the atheist myth that prosperity and science banish a dependence upon God, for America possesses both the largest economy and the most extensive science research establishment in world history!
But where does anti-religious secularism come from, and how does it relate to science? Before we address this topic, however, we must examine the works of one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century: a man who was not an atheist, moreover, but whose writings had an incalculable impact on his own and future times, and are still very much with us today. This was the Scottish philosopher and “founder” of the science of economics, Adam Smith.
In 1776, and coincidentally in the same year as the American Revolution, Smith published the first part of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It was by no means the first book about buying and selling, but what made it unique was the wider context in which Smith set his ideas, for in his thinking, business was part of the human condition, and controlled by natural laws which were just as real as those of gravity. The value of goods, money, interest, and exchange were governed by “iron laws”, and in Smith’s thinking, human beings were also economicbeings. And these “iron laws” of supply and demand governed vast tracts of our lives, how human beings behaved, calculated advantages, invested, and accumulated resources. He also conducted philosophical investigations into the nature of “value”, “interest”, “rent”, and “money”. And living as he did at the start of that age which later historians would call the “Industrial Revolution”, Smith was all too aware of how the carefully organized mechanization of manufacture could transform the availability of goods. Man, in short, was an “economic” being: the word “economics” deriving from the classical Greek word oikonomia, “management of a household”.
We must remember, however, that while Smith’s religious views were vague, he personally had no secularizing agenda, and even spoke of a sort of beneficence moving through progressive economic activity, which he styled an “invisible hand”. It is unfortunate, though, that in the nineteenth century Smith’s “iron laws”, governing wealth creation and even human economic behaviour in a free market (and carrying as they could a suggestion of naturalistic inevitability), were sometimes interpreted as a justification for a greedy and exploitative capitalism: a thing never intended by Smith, who saw capitalist enterprise as conducing to a general benevolence and growing prosperity.
Perhaps the first society to aggressively secularize was that of Revolutionary France in the 1790s, when “Liberté”, “Égalité”, and “Fraternité” were seen as deriving exclusively from a secular or quasi-pagan ancestry, and certainly not from Christianity. It was, however, the radical materialist philosophers of the middle and late nineteenth century, such as Karl Marx and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, whose ideas became conspicuously antithetic to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Especially by Marx’s time, after 1848, economic science had developed apace, although many of Smith’s basic concepts, such as “iron laws” and, to a certain degree, economic determinism, still lay at its foundation. To Marx, however, a form of economic determinism lay at the root of his entire analysis of the human condition; a circumstance which the twentieth-century historian Norman Cohn saw as a secularization of Christian millennialism. And for better or worse, Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) became one of the most influential books ever written. And central to its thesis was the argument that man’s primary relationship did not lie with God (whom Marx rejected as an out-of-date myth), but in access to “the means of production”, or control over economic resources.
Irrespective of what one might think of Marxism as a creed, what cannot be denied is that Karl Marx himself was a deeply learned man. And with the resources of the British Museum Library at his disposal (he lived most of his adult life in London as a refugee from his native Germany, where he would probably have been arrested), he formulated a view of history which was to mould much of the thinking and politics of the twentieth century.
In Marx’s system, a purely material force of change moved throughout history, throwing down outdated and redundant states of society, and replacing them with new ones, in a sort of evolutionary process. He called it “dialectical materialism”. (Marx’s admiration for Charles Darwin’s work was yet another embarrassment to Darwin.) Religion, needless to say, belonged to an earlier and more rudimentary and superstitious state of society, in which humans worshipped invisible beings. A money-driven industrial, scientific age, however, was now well under way, while in the future, the current capitalistic age would be replaced by pure communism.
It was not until after 1917, however, with Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the other ideologues of the Russian Revolution, that these ideas would have an opportunity of being put into political practice, and Communist Russia would become the prototype for a “secular society”, in which not only would religion be driven underground and victimized – if not totally abolished – but materialism would be proclaimed as the only truth, and backed up by the Soviet education system. And while this was a million miles from Adam Smith and his immediate successors, the concept of economic determinism suggested by his “iron laws” would inadvertently feed into Marxism, as the early communist thinkers came to see man as a purely material being, driven entirely by physical forces, and a new form of society was being developed in Russia that was designed to conform to these criteria – an axiomatically secular society.
In addition to materialistic, economic, and political determinism, however, new ideas were emerging about the nature of human personhood, and the degree to which that which we traditionally called our “minds”, as well as our bodies, were no more than just machines.