Two friends, Christian and Hopeful, are travelling in search of Heaven. On the road, they meet a man named Atheist. When they tell him about their quest, he erupts into ‘a very great Laughter’: ‘I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are, to take upon you so tedious a Journey … There is no such place as you Dream of.’[1]
In John Bunyan’s fable, the travellers stop their ears to these siren words and continue on their way. But as Bunyan knew all too well, Atheist’s defiance was in fact dangerously compelling. The thought he gave voice to was already haunting the historically Christian cultures of Europe and North America when he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in the 1670s, and has done so ever since. Perhaps you disagree with Atheist, but you are certainly familiar with the point he was making. Or perhaps you think he spoke the plain and self-evident truth.
This book is about one of the most momentous changes in modern history: the appearance in the once-Christian West of post-religious societies.[2] This is not a total transformation (at least, not yet). Europe and especially North America still have a great many believers, who still have a powerful public voice, and Western culture is steeped in Christianity’s cultural residue. But in every Western society a rapidly rising share of the population, and especially of young people, claims to have no religion. Even in the assertively pious United States, in 2007 this was true of an unprecedented 16 per cent of adults. By 2014 that share had risen to 23 per cent (that is, around 55 million people), including well over a third of those born since 1980.[3] In many of the regional, educational and political subcultures that make up the modern United States, open and unapologetic unbelief is now the norm: something that has never been true before the current generation. In Europe, the share of adults who profess no religion now ranges from a sixth (in Italy and Ireland), to around a quarter (Britain, France, Germany), to well over 40 per cent (Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands). Other studies put the figures even higher. A 2015 survey had 43 per cent of British adults claiming no religion, a figure rising to 70 per cent of those under 24.[4] And on both sides of the Atlantic, many of those who do still claim a Christian identity do so only nominally or residually, their daily lives largely undisturbed by their professed religion.
‘Why,’ the philosopher Charles Taylor asks, ‘was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?’[5] Many of those who (like Taylor himself) continue to believe are conscious of swimming against a cultural tide. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously claimed that ‘God is dead … and we have killed him’. In large and growing parts of Western society, that shocking claim has turned into a self-evident truth.
As a historian, my question is: so, who killed him, when, and how? The usual answer is: philosophers, scientists and intellectuals; during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and by means of a frontal assault. In the 1660s, so the story goes, Baruch Spinoza first showed that a world without God could be philosophically coherent. In the eighteenth century there was a double assault: polemicists such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine openly attacked the Church’s moral authority, and philosophers as varied as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau constructed systems which, whether or not we classify them as strictly atheist, left Christianity far behind. God became, as Pierre-Simon Laplace supposedly told Napoleon in 1802, a redundant hypothesis. Nineteenth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer found the case against religion to be almost self-evident. By the time Charles Darwin provided an explanation for the origins of life without reference to God in 1859, the work was virtually completed. All that the wider culture has done since then is catch up.[6]
I wrote this book because I am not satisfied with that stereotypical account. The timescale, the suspects and the nature of the murder are all wrong. Telling the story a different way not only changes our sense of history; it casts our current moment of pell-mell secularisation in a different light.
To take the simplest problem first: the death-by-philosophy narrative is a poor fit with the actual chronology of Western secularisation. Were the religious revivals of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the apparent Christian resurgence across the West in the 1950s, simply religion’s death throes? Was the sudden collapse of the West’s religious cultures in the 1960s merely the shattering of a husk after centuries of patient hollowing-out?[7] Even if you can explain away this chronological mismatch, the conventional starting point is plainly wrong. If atheism only became a live possibility in the 1660s, how could Bunyan, who was nobody’s intellectual elitist, depict such an assertive and recognisable ‘Atheist’ in the 1670s? How could it be said in the 1620s that there were fifty thousand atheists in Paris, or in the 1590s that ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheism’? How could a preacher in Florence in 1305 warn that the question ‘how can it be that God exists?’ was being ‘put by madmen every day’?[8]
These early testimonies to unbelief are often dismissed on the grounds that they lacked philosophical sophistication. If you are only interested in the history of ‘atheism’ as a system of ideas, then that is the end of the matter, and this book is not for you. What interests me is that unbelief clearly existed in practice (in some form, at some level) before it existed in theory. In which case, we have not only been looking at the wrong centuries, but profiling the wrong suspects. Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it. People who read and write books, like you and me, have a persistent tendency to overestimate the power of ideas. Some of us may occasionally change our beliefs and our lives as the result of a chain of conscious reasoning, but not very often or very honestly. Our own age has forcibly reminded us that intellectual elites often struggle to bring their societies with them. Their default role is to tag along, explaining with perfect hindsight why things inevitably turned out as they did.
The conventional story has it that philosophers attacked religion and people therefore stopped believing. But what if people stopped believing and then found they needed arguments to justify their unbelief? ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ cautioned Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century’s shrewdest wrestler with doubt.[9] Apart from a heroic or cold-hearted few, most of us make our lives’ great choices – beliefs, values, identities, purposes – intuitively, with our whole selves, embedded as we are in our social and historical contexts, usually unable to articulate why we have done it, often not even aware we have done it. If we have the inclination, we might then assemble rationalisations for our choices: rationalisations which may be true, but in a meagre, post hoc way.[10]
My point, simply, is that it is not only religious belief which is chosen for such instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons. So is unbelief. In which case, the crucial juncture in the history of atheism is the period before the philosophers made it intellectually respectable: when the raw dough began to bubble with unexplained energy, making it urgent that intellectuals discover ways to bake, slice and package it. It is no great surprise that Enlightenment thinkers could develop atheistic philosophies. Anyone who needs a philosophy badly enough will find one, and as we will see, arguments against God and against Christianity’s core doctrines were nothing new in the mid-seventeenth century. The question is not, where did these criticisms come from, but, why did some people start to find them compelling?[11] To answer that question, we do not need an intellectual or philosophical history of atheism: we need an emotional history.
I do not mean to imply that the intellect and emotions are opposites, or that emotion is irrational. The notion that ‘head’ and ‘heart’ are opposites is a seventeenth-century canard that we are still struggling to shrug off. My gripe is with what one outstanding recent historian calls the ‘intellectualist fallacy’: ‘a tendency to privilege the clean logic of ideas above the raw fuel of human experience among the forces of historical change’.[12] The term ‘emotion’ here does not refer only to spontaneous or involuntary passions. Indeed, it includes (but is not exhausted by) the conscious intellect. We may not be able to govern our emotions fully, but we curate and manage them, and we learn them from the