How I Stopped Being an Atheist

I stopped being an atheist in 2006, or 2007, or maybe 2008; I can't really remember. I should point out that I didn't come to a robust faith at this time. I hit a devastating spiritual crisis a few months later (or maybe it was a few years later), from which I eventually emerged with a sturdy and reflective belief in God.

But my original lapse from atheism happened like this. I was invited to a party that was taking place in a house I had been lodging in some months previously. I'd actually ended up spending as much time in my family home as I did in the lodging; so that my landlady (I'll call her Sheila) use to haggle me down from the rent I was paying. We were briefly colleagues and I was also good friends with a couple who knew her, who were also at the party.

Everybody there was about ten to thirty years older than me. That's how I like parties, anyway.

The first fellow to arrive was a man I'll call Barry, who might have been in his forties. As soon as he arrived, he began to talk to me about a chest-of-drawers (or maybe it was a bedside table) that he had seen on sale in one shop at a price far higher than it had been on sale in another shop. He told me how he had taken the sales people to task about this descrepancy. I later learned that finding bargains was a near-obsession with him. He was a pleasant kind of chap, though his eagerness to launch into such a specific topic as soon as he met me rather took me aback.

Than more people began to arrive. It wasn't a big party; there were probably no more than eight people in total. I seem to remember there was a programme about the poet John Betjeman on Sheila's big colour TV.

That was the night I had my first brandy mixed with Bailey's Irish cream. I had been a teetotaller until I was 27, when two female friends solemnly initiated me into the pleasures of alcohol by buying me a Stella Artois. I didn't think much of it, and it took me a little while to find my personal poison, which was (and is) brandy. I always mix it with cola, which I call a brandola; I can't abide it straight. That evening, however, I learned that it was very nice mixed with Bailey's Irish Cream-- although something of a waste, since both drinks are pleasing in themselves.

I drank a lot of brandy and Bailey's that night. I think I was trying to get drunk, which was something I had never achieved before.

I can't remember what the conversation was about until it turned to the subject of religion. I learned that Barry, the hunter of bargains, was a born-again Christian. This seemed incongrous to me as he seemed like the least otherworldly person you could imagine. (He was wearing a cosy sweater, though, which is apparently de rigeur for born again Christians.) Soon he began to discuss his beliefs with a mixture of assertion and defensiveness, and since it was as good a topic as any to get the party going, we all got talking about religion.

Barry set his sights on me. Maybe I looked like a potential convert. I can remember him asking, with obvious conviction, "What would you think if I told you the world is going to end probably within the next twenty years?". I tried to say something tactful. He asked me if I was a Catholic (in a tone that made plain that he wasn't one). I said that I was. I may have been an atheist, but I always knew which side I was on when it came to the battle for civilization.

After a while, Barry seemed to give up on me. "You're obviously a very logical person", he said, graciously, which sticks in my mind because the last thing I ever think I am is logical.

The theological discussion was raging on all sides. One middle-aged lady (who I subsequently heard was mortified at her drunkenness that night, which seemed entirely unnecessary to me), kept repeating over and over: "I think it's a load of b------", with great solemnity and deliberation, as though she was delivering a very carefully-thought out philosophical thesis.

My friend Adam (not his real name), who was the person there I had known the longest, and who constantly surprises everyone by being in his sixties when he doesn't look a day over forty-five, was challenged about his spiritual beliefs. He was very drunk at his stage. He spread his arms and declared-- no, declaimed-- "I believe that Jesus Christ is my Messiah", with a broad grin on his face. This surprised me a lot. I had spoken to Adam for hours upon hours upon hours, over several years-- library work leaves a lot of opportunity for chatting-- and he never mentioned any religious beliefs. I would have sworn he was an agnostic at the most. I soon discovered that he was Church of England, which explained a lot. All the same, I was still surprised.

The party kept going well into the small hours, Eventually, people began drifted from the house, with the usual emotional embraces that drunkenness inspires. (At least, I think so. I don't really remember too well.) I was staying over for the night-- one final sleep in my old lodging. So was Barry, who got my old bed, while I made do with the couch.

I'm pretty sure I slept soundly, because I always sleep soundly.

The next morning brought my usual struggle with the front door; I had struggled with the knob every morning that I'd lodged there, meaning Sheila had to come downstairs in her bath-robe every morning and let me out. It had become a running joke. I was constantly reassured that it was a tricky lock and lots of people struggled with it.

As I was walking out the garden gate, I heard my name called, and turned around. Barry was standing at the upstairs bedroom window, waving me goodbye. He'd got out of bed to do so.

It was a Sunday morning, and I took the long, long bus journey into the city centre. This had been the bus journey I'd taken every morning I'd lodged in that house, and it was ridiculously long. Even when I got the earliest bus, I was in danger of being late for work. I think I re-read most of David Copperfield on that bus. I also made a start on The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, though a start was all I made. It was always packed. Today it was especially busy, because there was a big sports game in the city.

I remember looking out the window of the bus at a Gaelic games pitch (Gaelic games are Gaelic football and hurling; the goal-posts are the same for both, and they look rather like rugby goal-posts). I was staring at the goal-posts when I realized-- like someone hearing the vote of a meeting from which he'd been excluded-- that I could believe in God. I decided that I did believe in God. It was like the moment nausea disappears all of a sudden, or oppressive hot weather breaks.

I remember standing on Dublin's main street, waiting for my second bus back to my home. I don't remember what I felt. I do remember that there was a two euro coin lying on the pavement-- this was at the height of Ireland's economic boom. I watched in fascination as person after person, in the crowded street, simply walked past it, for five or ten minutes at least. I don't remember if it was ever picked up, before my bus arrived.

Don't Be a Nervous Reader!

I paid a visit to Chapters today, one of the better Dublin bookshops, in Parnell Street. I usually confine my browsing to the first floor, where the second-hand books are shelved. Today, though, I took a brief tour around the ground floor, and I was amused to see, in the children's books section, a shelf marked "Confident Readers".

Confident Readers! I've always wanted to be one of those, but the ambition continues to elude me. I always worry that I'm missing the author's point, that I won't retain anything that I've read, that my critical judgement is dreadful, and that maybe I shouldn't even be reading the book I'm reading in the first place.

Oh, to be a Confident Reader! I think there should be such a shelf for adults, as well as children. It could contain books like Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, the Cantos of Ezra Pound, and Finnegans Wake. I'm sure you can think of many others....

Bothered by the Bard: Or, What Shakespeare Doesn't Mean to Me (1)

Yesterday I bought a complete edition of the works of William Shakespeare. It was very cheap, and it has no introduction or essays or footnotes. It's not the first complete edition of Shakespeare that I've bought. Some years ago I bought the Riverside Shakespeare, which comes with all the trimmings you could wish for. But (despite its great bulk) it has disappeared somewhere or other.

Shakespeare has been a problem all my life. Even before I had read a single line of him, he loomed large in my imagination. I had the combined benefit and curse (mostly benefit, of course) of having a father who was a wonderful salesman for the experience of life. He hyped everything. I definitely remember him hyping Shakespeare. I remember him explaining to me once that, "Shakespeare was like a sponge-- he took in all of human experience". Or something like that. He definitely used the word "sponge" and I knew exactly what he was conveying.

He also recited poetry to me, and I can remember vividly the time he quoted me the famous words from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

I can remember being powerfully struck by the opening lines and the closing lines. In fact, though I have read a lot of poetry since those days, this soliloquy has always remained with me as a candidate for the most profound and sublime piece of writing ever. I got it.

I can also remember a season of Shakespeare plays shown on BBC television (or perhaps on some other English channel), that was screened some time in my childhood. My father was watching them, though he doesn't remember them now. All I can remember is that they were shown over several days at least, and-- most importantly-- they were played against a background of perfect darkness. (At least, that's how I remember them. I doubt it's an accurate memory) Nothing could have been more guaranteed to fill me with a sense of wonder and awe. The darkness behind and around the actors seemed to make the drama intensely more significant, as well as more timeless and more serious. I can't remember anything at all of the actual content-- in fact, I think I didn't watch them, simply presuming that they would be way above my head. But they added to the mystique of Shakespeare that was already building up in my mind. The works of Shakespeare, I understood, were something definitive.

Another memory; we had a school copy of Hamlet lying around the house, probably from one of my elder brothers' or sisters' years in school. I read the introduction and one particular line-- "Hamlet is a prism through which the reader sees his own self", or something like that-- excited me greatly. I think it was the first time I had come across that prism metaphor, and it was not a cliché to me, but a startling and novel idea. (I don't think I even knew what a prism was, but I guessed from the context.) The idea that literature could be, so to speak, interactive-- that a reader could have a relationship with it, and a writer could be so wise and deep that his words might say different things to different people-- exhilarated me. But I still didn't read Hamlet. Or maybe I started it and put it back down, frightened to plunge into those deeps.

Then, when I was fifteen (which has been my favourite age so far), the time came to study Shakespeare in school. It was The Merchant of Venice. (I remember one girl, when the teacher told us what books we had to acquire, innocently asked who wrote it. I can remember the derision the poor girl provoked with her question, and how my embarrassment on her behalf was mingled with Schadenfreude.)

My feelings on finally studying Shakespeare were exactly those C.S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, when he recounts how his tutor told him that they would begin studying Homer in the morning. "Now for Homer. Golly! The name struck awe into my soul". That was how I felt. "Now for Shakespeare. Golly!"

I think my class-mates must have felt the same, because I remember noticing-- even at the time-- how the first lines of The Merchant of Venice seemed to stick in all our minds:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

I can find nothing especially memorable in those lines, yet I seem to remember them being rather bandied about that year, and I remember one boy quoting the first line when we eventually came to studying Hamlet, two years later.

We were all keyed up for Shakespeare, and we were already inclined to see him as super-human. When the teacher started to discuss the anti-Semitism in the portrayal of Shylock, and to explain to us the anti-Semitic assumptions of Shakespeare's time, one student said: "But maybe Shakespeare knew people would read the play differently in the future." Like myself, she (or he-- I can't remember who it was) automatically assumed that Shakespeare was above the prejudices of his day. Without ever encountering Ben Jonson's claim that "He was not for an age, but for all time", we had imbibed the idea.

We studied The Merchant of Venice pretty intensively. We watched a video, we memorized passages, we even had an acting company come to perform it in the school. And my nervousness before Shakespeare evaporated somewhat. It was comprehensible! It was entertaining! And the teacher's analysis of it-- all the talk of character and themes and dramatic tension-- made sense to me.

But more than anything else, I found that I really did thrill to much of the poetry. Memorizing Portia's famous "quality of mercy" speech was not at all difficult-- the lines engraved themselves on my memory, and mentally reciting it moved me to tears.

I also remember that, as part of my personal strategy of making school lessons more appealing to myself (a strategy that involved coming up with pleasant imaginative associations), when we studied The Merchant of Venice, I would always imagine the smell of coffee and spices on the air, the kind of aroma that seemed appropriate, not only to the Venice of the play, but to the sensual, worldly richness of Shakespeare's worldview.

But a sourness was already entering my relationship with the Bard of Avon. At this time, I was discovering poetry, and slowly and methodically going through Palgrave's Treasury. I found myself falling in love with the poetry of Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy, Housman, Larkin, Swinburne, and many others.

But some poets, no matter how lauded they were, just didn't appeal to me. Alexander Pope and John Dryden, with their clanging heroic couplets, were two examples. John Donne was another. And then there were Shakespeare's sonnets.

I knew Shakespeare's sonnets were meant to be the summit of Mount Parnassus, but I just couldn't bring myself to admire them. They seemed (dare I even write it?) sickly sweet, laboured, overdone, conventional to a fault. Even the rhyming scheme displeased me; the closing couplet seemed irritatingly trite and pretty.

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter
In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter.

Ding-a-ling! It seemed infinitely inferior to me to the ending of a Petrarchan sonnet, with its gracefully delayed final rhyme:

Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific; and all his men
Looked at each other, with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Not that I disliked all of the Shakespeare poems that appeared in the Palgrave Treasury. I loved "Fear no more the heat o'the sun", which seemed entirely different from the courtly, contrived, affected style of the sonnets-- it was earthy, direct, elemental. Qualities which applied even more to "When icicles han by the wall":

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

This was the poetry of the workaday world and the soil, of cold and hard and stubborn and ruefully humorous things. It seemed so much fresher and keener to me than the tedious compliments of the sonnets.

If I was less than impressed by the sonnets, that certainly didn't apply to what I considered Shakespeare's real poetry-- that is, his matchless soliloquies. Here I had no problem at all echoing the applause of the ages. It seemed to me that, once Shakespeare went from rhyme to blank iambic pentameter, he soared into heights almost too dizzy to bear.

I remember the first time I came across Prospero's great speech from The Tempest-- I was seventeen years old, I was spending the first ten pounds I had earned in my life (for cleaning a shed), and I was standing in the second-hand basement of a bookshop and reading my planned purchase, The Library of World Poetry. And my soul melted in bliss at the lines:

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It occurs to me now, right now, that the reason I loved the great soliloquies is because nearly all of them are making a philosophical point-- they are great thoughts, expressed more magnificently there than anywhere else. And not only are they great thoughts, but they are great thoughts on the deepest and most consequential themes in human life. The "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech expresses the idea of the absurd, of nihilism, much better than any existentialist writer ever did. Prospero's "we are such stuff as dreams are made on" speech expressed an idea that has always haunted humankind, and that occurs independently to most of us in childhood-- much the same idea that is often labelled the "brain in a vat" or "evil demon" theory, and that in the twenty-first century became rebranded as the "Matrix" theory-- the theory that we are simply figments of somebody's imagination, that this world that seems so sturdy may be simply a computer programme or an idea in the mind of God. And this isn't just an idle fancy-- everybody at some time really feels that the world is as airy and as fleeting as a dream, even if we don't seriously believe it's a hallucination.

As for Hamlet's great "to be or not to be" speech, this deserved its pride of place because it tackled the prime existential question, the question that transcends every circumstance of history or fortune or personality: why should we go on living? Why should existence itself continue? You could hardly get more primal than that.

Jacques's "All the world's a stage" speech from As You Like It takes up another theme of universal and grand human relevance, the theme of transcience. I remember a substitute English teacher-- one I had an enormous crush on-- writing that single word, Transcience, in chalk on the blackboard during one English lesson. This was when school was hastening to its end, and I was feeling sick at the onrush of the unknown future. I remember thinking that, even when the word "transience" was written in white chalk on a blackboard, I still couldn't really grasp it. I knew school was ending and that youth was passing away, but I couldn't really believe it or appreciate it. I stared at the word as at something alien and dreadful.

The amazing thing about the "All the world's a stage speech"-- just like the "unto every thing there is a season" passage from Ecclesiastes-- is the strange and counter-intuitive comfort that it instils in the reader. Why should a speech that ends in one of the bleakest and most brutal lines imaginable, the line describing extreme old age--

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything--

Fill us with a strange serenity? I think it might be because of its sheer matter-of-factness. When we read it, we seem to be looking down on human existence from such a lofty height that even our own impending decrepitude is not distressing. We feel equal to reality.

Then there is the "course of true love never did run smooth" speech from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which captures a sentiment that anyone with a drop of red blood has felt poignantly at one time or another.

(It's true that some of Shakespeare's great soliloquies don't share this trait of universality. King Henry's great speech before Agincourt may be the most eloquent expression of the thirst for military glory ever, but military glory is a passion that animates relatively few of us. Mark Antony's defence of Julius Caesar-- the "Friends, Romans and countrymen" speech-- seems very much tied to the circumstances of the story. But I think my observation is true of most of Shakespeare's celebrated speeches.)

When I was seventeen, in my penultimate year in school, we took on Hamlet-- and this really felt like going into the deep end of the pool, like the stabilisers were off the bicycle. I even remember how the grey-blue, gun-metal colour of my edition seemed appropriate to the dark, adult, no-holds-barred atmosphere of the play. We weren't kids any more, and we were ready for Hamlet.

I remember that there was a meningitis outbreak in Dublin that year, and we heard about real deaths-- real deaths of people our own age, people who were on the brink of adulthood just like we were. I remember listening to my class-mates talking about this before an English class and feeling (without thinking of it consciously in these terms) that it was strangely consonant with the spirit that Hamlet had dispersed through the class-room-- the sensation that we had come face-to-face with ultimate things, with death and sex and adulthood and the fabric of reality. And, of course, with Hamlet.

But I have already written more than I had expected to, and I have only made a start on describing my troubled relationship with the Swan of Avon. The rest will have to wait for another post; soon, I hope.

On A Box of Christmas Decorations, Seen in Summer

In the corner of the cupboard lies
A cardboard box of Christmas things.
Huddled as not to scandalize
The summer time, it hides its joys
Until the carol singer sings.

How sad, how sweetly sad it seems!
How far away seems Christmas now!
These trinkets are an old man’s dreams
Of boyhood, or a boy’s glimpsed gleams
Of what his future might allow.

What is so achingly, shyly tender
As the dark vigil these baubles keep?
Sad as the melting snow’s surrender
Or the submission a child’s eyes render
To the triumphant tyrant, sleep.

It seems like a legend, an idle story
That ever there was a Christmas Day.
These tinsel treaures that glitter before me;
The thought of them raised again in glory
Seems so impossibly far away.

A Review of Redeeming the Dial by Tona J. Hangen

Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America
Tona J. Hangen
The University of North Carolina Press
2002

Academic writers rarely succeed in writing dispassionately about religious fundamentalism, especially (gulp) American religious fundamentalism. Your average sociologist, political philosopher, professor of English, or (especially) lecturer in media studies tends to regard the Religious Right with a kind of horrified fascination, somewhat akin to children turning the carcass of some dead mouse or bird with a stick.

How refreshing, then, to read Redeeming the Dial, which traces the story of Christian evangelical radio preachers from the dawn of the technology to the beginning of the Billy Graham era. Tona Hangen describes the pioneers of the genre, not only without passing judgement upon their beliefs, but also with sympathy for their human struggles and aspirations.

I spotted this book in Book Worms, a little bookshop in Middle Abbey Street, Dublin. Like all good bookshops, it has a character all of its own. It boasts several shelves full of military history DVDs, a corner filled with incense sticks and New Age totems and tarot cards, lots of showbiz gossip books, and a goodly amount of highbrow literary and cultural works. (Interestingly, and incidentally, it also has a sign forbidding mobile phone use-- something strangely rare in bookshops.) I came across Redeeming the Dial amidst books about Hollywood stars and rock music, and I resisted buying it two evenings in a row before finally succumbing to temptation on the third evening. I was glad that I did.

I love the passage with which the book opens, and I think it perfectly captures the fascination-- even the poetry-- of the book's subject matter:

Imagine a wind-scoured farmhouse and beside it a small barn, huddled together under an ashen gray Montana sky. It is 21 January, the dead of winter, so cold that a widow woman will not venture out for anything but to milk her cows-- and even then, not too early, not until long after daybreak. She is sixty-seven years old, farming alone, tending her herd with stiffening hands that have known hard times...Inside the barn, the air is a little warmer; the cows breathe by snorting clouds of vapour, which hang in the air. The woman sings and prays as she milks, listening to a radio set on a shelf amongst the pails and coils of baling wire. She sings a familiar gospel song, adding her voice to the rippling chords of a piano and a jubilant-sounding choir in sunny Long Beach, California, thousands of miles away. They cannot hear her, of course, yet she sings. Only the cows hear; the cows, and God.

I loved this passage for several reasons. First, because I think that every book whatsoever should begin with a flourish. Scholarly works, however, seem to almost make a point of avoiding this. (My personal "favourite" opening line of academese is from Male Masochism by Carole Singer: "In the wake of Michel Foucault's discussions of the construction of sexualities, much important work has been done in recent literary theory to historicize theory's primarily classic psychoanalytic, and thus synchronic, vision of textual representation of gender difference and, relatedly, heterosexuality and homosexuality." Snappy.)

Secondly, I loved this passage because it captures the magic of radio itself-- its ghostly, intimate, disembodied, transporting enchantment. As this book explains, fundamentalist evangelists were able to make use of this intimacy to make their preaching seem, not the mass media message that it was, but a kind of fireside chat between the preacher and the listener. Listeners were made to feel like they were participating in a cosy chapel service, even when the show was being broadcast from a theatre in front of an audience of hundreds.

Finally, I loved this passage for the idyll of rural American piety that it evokes. Here in crowded, suburban, jaded Europe, I think pretty much everybody-- even the most ardent secularist-- harbours a poetic vision of a vast, spacious, corn-fed, Bible-thumping, God-fearing American heartland, swarming with old ladies in front porch rocking chairs and Norman Rockwell families saying grace around the dinner table. I remember, when The Passion of The Christ was released, how eagerly the media and the general public lingered over stories of churches block-buying tickets to screenings of the controversial film. Everybody--- left and right and all the way in between-- seemed strangely satisfied that Mel Gibson's movie had proved such an industry-shocking success. God was in the Bible Belt and all was right with the world-- or wrong with the world, if you were a secular liberal. But still, wrong in a comfortable and reassuring kind of way.

However, Christian fundamentalism in America has not always had an easy time of it, and Redeeming the Dial describes the lean and anxious years that fundamentalism endured between the two World Wars, and indeed during the Second World War, before the triumphant rise of Billy Graham and the post-war boom of conservative Christianity. This revival, Hangen shows, did not come out of the blue but was the fruit of many years of foundation-laying-- much of it by radio evangelists, whose fund-raising appeals helped to found the colleges, seminaries and publications that were instrumental in bringing about the eventual revival, when it came. This might be a salutary tale for orthodox Catholics in Ireland today!

Although it is hard to imagine now-- given the culture war that rages in America, and the popularity of polemical media like Fox News and talk radio-- the early days of American radio were marked by a studious effort to avoid controversy. That religious broadcasting was a public good was generally accepted-- so much so that radio stations granted free air-time to religious organizations. Significantly, though, this "sustaining time" was only granted to mainstream Protestant, Catholic and Jewish voices. Fundamentalists and evangelicals-- deemed to be too controversial, dogmatic and divisive-- were more or less confined to the commercial airwaves. This generally led to them buying airtime, which they funded through direct appeals to their listeners for donations.

And the donations poured in. Redeeming the Dial is not just the story of pioneering figures in American religious broadcasting, but-- just as much, perhaps-- the story of the very ordinary, often impoverished, listeners who kept the show running with their widow's mites. Hangen reproduces many of the fan letters that accompanied these donations (in fact, the letters were often an important feature of the shows themselves). Some of them are so poignant that they moved me to tears: "Like so many others" one letter reads, "the flood took the crop on our small farm, and as it is the only form of income I have, won't have a tithe much longer, so I am sending you this small offering of what I have on hands."

It is touching, too, to read just how much the broadcasts meant to many of the listeners. A lonely widower in Montana wrote: "I walk back and forth from one window to the other. I know no one is ever coming but out of nervissness I look just the same. In the forenoon it is not quite so bad as I can listen to all the Sermons over the Radio."

The book introduces us to a colourful cast of radio preachers, nearly all of them trail-blazing mavericks who felt called to take God's word to the airwaves, and found their own ways of doing so. Catholics will not enjoy reading about Father Charles Coughlin, the fiery Catholic priest who started out with a legitimate message of economic justice but who eventually descended to anti-Semitism and fascism. At one point he drew ten million listeners, but eventually the hierarchy condemned him, and his radio career had ended by 1942. It was Father Coughlin's polemics, to a great extent, that led broadcasters to view religious programming with such caution in this period, and to favour non-controversial material.

The torch then passed to Protestant fundamentalists; the emotional Paul Rader, the glamorous Sister Aimee Semple McPherson (a larger-than-life figure who I had never heard of before), and the much more sober and appealing Charles Fuller, who (along with his wife Grace) created the famous Old-Fashioned Revival Hour show.

Hangen's description of Fuller's preaching style is interesting, given the stereotype of fundamentalist media evangelists: "He spoke simply, without flowery language or much sentimentality. He addressed the listeners directly, calling them "Beloved" or "Fellow strangers and pilgrims"; "Notice this verse", he would say, or "Will you pray with me?". His sermon themes stayed narrowly rather focused around the necessity of salvation and of the individual sinner's responsibility to accept the gospel of Jesus-- although he spoke little of hell and its horrors. Instead he tended to emphasize God's mercies, blessings on the righteous, and promises that their regenerated lives would buoy men and women up to endure their everyday lives."

All of these figures attained enormous success, and drew enormous amounts of donations. But the survival of fudamentalist preaching on radio remained precarious, always vulnerable to shifts in network policy, especially when it came to the soliciting of donations on air. There were continual tussles between mainline religious denominations (Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholic, and Jewish) and fundamentalist sects over religious broadcasting regulations.

At one point, an atheist even got in on the act-- in 1946, a San Francisco radio station gave Robert Scott a half-hour to broadcast his anti-theistic arguments. This was enormously controversial, becoming a cause celebre-- seventy-five per cent of the correspondence the station received was critical of the decision-- and Scott never broadcast again. ("It has always been regarded as contrary to public interest that atheism be promoted", one evangelical leader claimed. America was still not ready for the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, it seems.)

I think the lesson of Redeeming the Dial is that nothing is pre-ordained, when it comes to the place of religion in modern society. Modern technology, often seen as a threat to religious faith, was used effectively to propagate it by skilled and visionary preachers. Religious conservatism, apparently on the wane in inter-war America, made an exuberant come-back after years in the wilderness. The exclusion of fundamentalists from public service broadcasting time, apparently a disadvantage, may well have motivated them to make a better and more aggressive use of the airwaves. I think this a book from which orthodox religious believers can take great heart.

I Love This Prose Passage from W.B. Yeats

"Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten."

From his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Three Cheers for Feminism

A feminist group in the UK is threatening to sue newsagents and supermarkets who display smutty magazine covers on their shelves for sexual harrassment against staff. I wish them all success.

I have no "freedom of speech" problems with this at all. Freedom of speech is there to protect the serious exchange of ideas, not blatant smut.