Life without God
At the end of the 19th century, the prospect of the death of God filled people with terror.
It would — we were told — lead to anarchy and despair.
Worried intellectuals assembled new religions — Marxism, Spiritualism, psychical research, Social Darwinism, western Buddhism — and scrambled onto them like life rafts as they awaited the deluge.
But 150 years on, it is extraordinary how absent ‘God’ is from people’s lives, and how little people notice.
God has been completely forgotten by most people in my country (the UK), who are often second or third generation atheists.
The very headline of my article must have struck them as quaint.
‘Life without God?’ That’s like saying ‘Life without the abacus’ or ‘Life without the spinning jenny.’
People have moved on.
Far back in the fog of our forgotten past, there is a vague remembrance, a stirring…
Do you remember?
People used to get extremely worked up about things like ‘God’, ‘the soul’, ‘the afterlife’.
Yes I…I think I remember.
How strange.
Of course, it depends in which part of the world you are.
But within European cultures, particularly Britain, there is an incredible absence of God.
God is dead and buried, and the cemetery has been long since turned into a multi-story car-park.
God is not even mentioned.
Totally forgotten.
And — this is an important point — the result has not been chaos, anarchy and despair.
There was, it is true, a sharp rise in some aspects of social turbulence after the so-called ‘religious crisis of the 1960s’.
During that decade, church attendance began to fell steeply, while divorce spiked, as did violent crime.
This led to prophecies of doom from the faithful.
Yet the rates of both violent crime and divorce have fallen in the last two decades.
We seem to have survived the death of God.
Have we gone through a profound moral transformation, since Big Daddy disappeared?
It’s hard to say.
Clearly, and most visibly, we have shifted to a multicultural society, in which a variety of sexual preferences and gender identities are accepted and celebrated.
Less visibly, we are also a society which accepts abortion, including the abortion of embryos with hereditary illnesses like Down Syndrome. In other words, eugenics has to some extent become normalized.
Yet I am not sure we have become a less religious society. Aldous Huxley once said, humans make religions, just like spiders make webs. We can’t help weaving them.
So what are the dominant religions of today?
I can think of seven in western countries:
1) Middlebrow Humanism
2) Populism / anti-elitism / nationalism and ethno-nationalism
3) Inclusion / diversity / ‘Wokeness’
4) Environmentalism
5) The religion of Innovation
6) New age spirituality
7) The traditional religions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism
The dominant religion in the UK, among the 50% of the population who are middle class graduates, is Middlebrow Humanism.
Its values are still more or less Christian — be nice.
Its twin pillars are faith in the NHS and the BBC.
The BBC is its central pulpit, particularly Radio 4.
Its priests are humanists like Stephen Fry, Brian Cox, Alice Roberts, Matt Haig, Simon Schama, AC Grayling, Alain de Botton, Ricky Gervais, Graham Norton, Neil MacGregor, Claire Balding and so on.
These priests may be vocal in their humanism, may produce texts like ‘The Little Book of Humanism’.
But really, humanism is so utterly the water we swim in, there’s no need to preach it.
Its festivals are BBC programmes like Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing, and the occasional sporting jamboree.
Middlebrow Humanism is the gospel of the status quo.
It is the faith that every year things are getting slightly better.
It is the religion of the civil servant, the bureaucrat, and it hates anything that threatens bureaucracy — budget cuts particularly.
It offers no grand solutions to life’s Big Questions. What Big Questions? Is it not in bad taste to ask such questions?
The idea of ‘self-transcendence’ seems incredibly distant from the cosy comforts of Middlebrow Humanism.
Instead, it offers the small satisfactions of a nice London home that accrues in value, career achievements, smart kids, the occasional holiday in Italy, and a painless passage into the Big Sleep.
In the arts, it produces novels like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which despite being set in Ireland is so utterly humanist you’d never have guessed God ever existed or mattered to the human race. God or religion is not even mentioned. It is about as far from Dostoevsky as one could imagine.
Instead, middleclass people tootle along, falling in love, having sex, getting jobs, wearing clothes, drinking coffee, getting sad sometimes.
Of course, the cruel winds of mental illness occasionally shake this placid faith.
And then the comforts of career, kids and Chianti seem a little threadbare.
But for that, Middlebrow Humanism has discovered the Gospel of Wellness.
Yoga, CBT, mindfulness, Prozac, Stoicism, more Prozac, Xanax, gardening, and, yes, Chianti.
And above all, talking about it.
Sharing your pain, your trauma, your story.
The Middlebrow Humanists have had a tough time of it of late.
First of all, the long financial crisis has shaken their faith that everything is slowly getting better.
Their children are struggling to get onto the property ladder, and seem to be getting more and more anxious.
And then, in 2016, they were astonished to discover that there were large swathes of the population who did not believe Everything Is More Or Less OK, who in fact felt passionately the opposite, and who despised them and all they stood for.
This was the second religion, which has grown unseen until it bubbled up into the mildly-sedated consciousness of the Middlebrow Humanists.
This is the populists, the anti-elitists, the nationalists and ethno-nationalists.
The populists have reacted to the complexity of modern life by a return to simple clear stories.
MAGA. Take Back Control.
And to cartoonishly simple personalities, like Trump and Boris.
They have also reacted to the sense that the official story of the Middlebrow Humanists hasn’t been entirely honest.
That western countries have gone through the most profound demographic change in the last 40 years, and nobody is allowed to talk about it, or question immigration policies, without being labelled a racist bigot.
The anti-elitists are positively brimming with conviction, passion and outrage.
This has shaken the Middlebrow Humanists, and inspired in some a passionate — or at least lukewarm — response of hatred for the populists and fanatical devotion to…the European Union.
A third religion is the religion of diversity, inclusion and ‘Wokeness’.
Its chief emotion is outrage, but also celebration and liberation.
‘Demi Lovato comes out as non-binary, changes pronouns to they / them’, read one headline this week.
This was one of the main news stories on the BBC, which although managed by Middlebrow Humanists, is very keen not to be seen as too comfortable and white, therefore it champions the religion of Wokeness, thereby incurring the hostility of the Populists.
If you go to the BBC’s I-Player, to get a sense of its programming, you can see how eager it is to promote Black Britain and LGBT Britain, Rupaul and Steve McQueen, Grayson Perry and David Olusoga.
Then there is the religion of Environmentalism, which overlaps with Middlebrow Humanism, but is much less anthropocentric and more apocalyptic.
There is the Religion of Innovation — this is barely a religion in the UK, and is more of a faith in Silicon Valley.
There is the religion of New Age spirituality, though again, this is not that strong in the UK compared to the US.
And there are the traditional religions, maligned and side-lined, but growing in number thanks to immigration.
These faiths are like batteries. Sometimes they clash and polarise against each other. Other times they can attract and fuse together.
For example, Middlebrow Humanism and Wokeness are on the whole happy bedfellows — Wokeness would be a much smaller movement if it wasn’t for white liberal guilt.
But sometimes the faiths can clash, such as in arguments over free speech (see the recent defenestration of Richard Dawkins from the American Humanist Association).
Anti-elitist populism and Wokeness on the whole hate each other — Wokeness is seen by populists as a form of liberal elitism which silences the concerns of the white working class.
Prince Harry is the object of such popular disappointment because he is an apostate — he has renounced the religion of the nation-state for the personal faith of Wokeness and Wellness.
From ‘God save the Queen’ to therapy for my trauma.
Prince Harry tapping himself to heal his trauma, using a treatment called EMDR
The religion of Innovation has a more complicated relationship to Wokeness and anti-Wokeness. San Francisco has become extremely woke, to the extent of founders being booted out of their own companies for un-PC behaviour.
In rebellion against this, and against Middlebrow Humanist bureaucracy, some Innovators have made a Faustian pact with populists — see Peter Thiel’s support for Trump, for example.
In any case, Wokeism versus Populism is good for clicks.
Environmentalism also has a difficult relationship to Middlebrow Humanism. The Humanist tries to do their recycling but get freaked out when the Environmentalist insists we’re all doomed.
Environmentalists also have a tricky relationship with Wokeists (who point out they’re all white) and with the religion of Innovation.
You can find Environmenalist-Innovation hybrids, like Stewart Brand or Elon Musk, but also Environmentalists vigorously opposed to Innovation, preaching instead a neo-indigenous primitivism.
My own religion — New Age spirituality — can overlap with Middlebrow Humanism in the domain of Wellness.
It can overlap with Wokeness through the new more diverse spirituality, which is often led by women and People of Colour.
It can overlap with the religion of Innovation in transhumanism.
It can overlap with environmentalism in the form of permaculture and plant medicine.
And it can overlap with populism in the form of conspirituality.
Finally, the traditional religions tend to keep themselves to themselves, but of course you can also get blends –Anglican wellness, Anglican wokeness, Anglican spirituality, Anglican populism. Not so much Anglican innovation.
What all the neo-religions have in common is that God, in the traditional sense, is basically absent.
The human individual is at the centre of all of them, except for environmentalism.
They are also all largely virtual religions.
You mainly express your membership online.
We have lost spaces to gather together, and this partly explains the bad mood of neo-religions.
On the whole the neo-religions also lack grand myths and rituals in the usual sense.
For Wokeness, the chief ritual appears to be the sacrifice of the scapegoat.
In the absence of accepted myths, the neo-religions can fall prey to strange fairy tales and apocalyptic imaginations.
It seems like the dominant religion of Middlebrow Humanism may be in decline.
Its faith that everything is getting better seems out of touch with the mood of the times.
For Gen Z, something stronger seems to be called for, like the angrier faiths of Wokeness or Environmentalism, which shake their fists at the complacent baby-boomers. ‘How dare you!’ as Greta put it.
And some of Gen Z are turning to New Age spirituality, mysticism and the occult, which is perhaps a symptom of feeling out of control.
Meanwhile, the traditional religions are having the last laugh, as their numbers swell through immigration and a higher birth rate in more religious developing countries.
The people who believe least in evolution are proving the most evolutionarily adaptive.
Blessed are the fecund, for they will inherit the Earth.
God is waiting in the wings for His second act.