Everything Comes Back to Religion

"Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless."

This C.S. Lewis quotation (from Surprised by Joy, my favourite book) pretty much expresses my view of the world before I accepted Christianity. I was an instinctive sceptic and agnostic, but I wasn't at all happy about that. I had virtually no interest in scientific progress, although I enjoyed science fiction. I was interested in ghost stories, folklore, traditions, ceremony, ritual-- everything that was, in fact, giving way to "progress". Even as a child, I can remember feeling depressed that there was nowhere left on earth to explore. As soon as I was old enough to know the word, I started (pretentiously) calling myself an obscurantist.

That everything gets worse (or at least, less interesting) was, to me,...well, I was going to write "an article of faith", but it wasn't even an article of faith, in truth. It was just a fact. I didn't think about this much. It was pre-reflective.

Even today, now that I believe in God and the miraculous and the supernatural, I'm still haunted by this worldview. Or at least, something very similar to it.

The world itself, without the supernatural and the religious, doesn't seem satisfying to me, or ultimately that interesting.

Take history. I've started reading the book pictured above, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada by Mark A. Noll. After some time reading secular history I grew increasingly bored with it.

The more you dig down into secular history, the less interesting it becomes. The story of mankind is the story of power politics, the quest for status and prestige, for supremacy. And, where it's not power politics, it's basically utilitarianism. We are all utilitarian most of the time. People stopped telling stories around the fire because the TV was more convenient-- and, frankly, more entertaining. I hate Aldi and Lidl and Tesco, but I give them my custom because I can't afford not to. And so on.

Take nationalism as another example. I'm a nationalist, in the sense that I strongly believe the nation should be preserved and cherished. But really, the emergence of a national culture is generally an accident of history. People developed a distinct culture because of geographical barriers, or some such mundane explanation. There's nothing mystical about it. Perhaps asking people to cling to their national cultures, in the face of the overwhelming pressure of globalization, is like asking people to avoid supermarkets for family-run firms.

They might do it for a while. The Gaelic Revival is proof of that. But, as the Radiohead song puts it, gravity always wins. Whatever aspects of national cultures will survive (if any) will ultimately depend on their price-tag of inconvenience. Sentimentality will go so far and no further. Many people will eagerly sacrifice their lives for their fatherland. But very few indeed will sacrifice their convenience, or their hunger for novelty.

When nations emerge for reasons other than an accident of history or geography, it can generally be traced to religious reasons, even if not directly-- as, for instance, with modern Israel and the USA.

I've recently written about Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama thought that history had, in a sense, ended with the end of the ideological battle between the West and the Soviet bloc. Democracy and capitalism now reigned supreme, even if wars might continue.

But how much of the conflict in history has ever been ideological, anyway? Very little, I would suggest. It's overwhelmingly been about power politics-- not under the surface, but on the surface. I'm reminded of the infamous reply of the Athenians when the neutral islanders of Melos complained about being invaded, during the Peloponnesian Wars: "The powerful take what they can, and the weak yield what they must." Might it be said, in fact, that the Cold War was an anomaly in being ideological? What was ideological about the Napoleonic Wars, or World War One, or indeed most wars?

I believe, contra revisionists, that Brian Boru was fighting the Danes to defend the Christian faith and Gaelic civilization. But why was most of his career spent fighting all the other Gaelic petty kings?

I'm especially baffled by the nostalgia of Catholic integralists for the political order of Christendom. What was it except an incessant dogfight between kings and aristocrats, using peasants as ammunition? Aside from the Crusades, it very specifically wasn't about religion because-- as intregalists always approvingly emphasise-- everybody was Catholic.

I'm not denying there are exceptions to this primacy of power politics in conflict. It really seems to be the case that the American Civil War, to a great extent, was fought for the sake of freeing slaves. People from all over Europe volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, for whatever side they believed in. But the exceptions are just that, exceptions.

And the great exception is, of course, religion. There have been religious wars, even if power politics generally played a role in these as well. Personally, although I hate all war (as does every ordinary sane person), I've never understood why fighting over religion is wrong in principle. Religion seems as good a reason to fight as any other, and better than most.

The point I'm making about history applies to everything else. Literature, for instance. It seems obvious to me that literature quickly descends to decadence and triviality when it ceases to be nourished by the religious impulse, however distantly it is receiving that nutrition. I don't have the energy to make that argument right now. Probably most of my readers already agree.

"Life is first boredom, then fear" wrote Philip Larkin, somewhat famously. In history, I suggest, the order is reversed. We've had millennia where life was mostly fear for most people-- fear of starvation, sickness, or violent death. In developed societies, this is now changed to boredom, whereby we live comfortable but humdrum lives, in commuter towns and office blocks, and entertain ourselves by watching stories about fear and violence.

This is a huge overstatement, of course. I don't even think it's true, ultimately. But there is a certain truth to it. Without religion, the human story is a pretty paltry thing.