The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 2:12 am by Ken

Under an Atomic Sky

I went into a church house
where the citizens like to sit.
They say they want the kingdom
but they don't want God in it.

- U2, 'The Wanderer'

Between 1970 and 2000 there were, to my knowledge, exactly two new atheist books that found mass-market paperback publication in English: The Misery of Christianity by Joachim Kahl (Hamburg, 1968; English translation Pelican, 1971) and God is Not Yet Dead by Vítězslav Gardavsky (Pelican, 1973; originally published in German in 1968 following serial publication in Prague, 1966-1967). Kahl, like Gardavsky, was a Marxist, but there they parted. The significance of Gardavsky's book is exhausted by its dates; by the tenure of its author: Professor of Philosophy at the Brno Military Academy (retired 1968, aged 45); and by the Christian-Communist dialogue over whose brusque interruption the book's provenance placed a cross. Kahl's work, on the other hand, is an underground classic: the most caustic, contentrated critique of Christianity written in the 20th century (and most others, for reasons all too obvious from Kahl's tally of the Church's resort to the rack). One mainstream book, Michael Arnheim's Is Christianity True? (Duckworth, 1984) gives the eponomous question its Jewish answer. (No.) Muir Weissinger's The Failure of Faith (1984) was sceptical, eccentric, and fell dead-born from the presses. Richard Robinson's donnish but plain-spoken An Atheist's Values (Oxford, 1964) was reissued as a Blackwell paperback in 1975.

And that, more or less, was it. The freethought publishers - the Rationalist Press Association in England, Prometheus Books in the US - kept plugging away. Hume, Nietzsche, Russell remained in print. Academic presses published philosophical critiques: Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Anthony Flew. Three lively translations of Lucretius came out in paperback. But most of my six-foot shelf of godless books, three decades in the filling, consists of small hardbacks from the RPA's Thinker's Library, long out of print, and two or three 60s Pelicans on humanism, all picked up in second-hand bookshops.

The uptick of interest in humanism was part of the 60s ferment around religion. I sometimes think the best mood-capture of that ferment is the second appendix to Frank Herbert's SF epic Dune (1965): new Bible translations, novel theologies, ecumenical congresses, the shock of space travel ... it's all there. Everyone (so it seemed) had heard of Bishop J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, which popularised the radical theologies of Bultmann and Tillich. The publication of the complete New English Bible was splashed in Sunday colour supplements. Questionings of Christian orthodoxy, from the loopy (Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods) through the bizarre (John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross) to the far-fetched (Hugh Schonfield's The Passover Plot) saw major extracts published in British popular newspapers. In the words of one of Herbert's fictitious scholars: 'Those were times of deep paradox.'

In retrospect, one of the deepest paradoxes was that the Christians and the atheists were singing from the same hymn-sheet. All of them took as given what science and scholarship had established in the nineteenth century: that the Bible, whatever else it might be, was not history, and not science. The quarrel was over what message it still spoke. Darwin and the Higher Critics had done their worst. The Thinker's Library had spread the word. Kahl's scathing contempt - and Gardavsky's wary respect - were for the most radical modern readings of the scriptures. 'The final conclusion,' said Kahl, 'can only be this - the modern theology based on interpreting the Bible existentially and symbolically is not modern and is completely worn out. What really arouses my anger and scandalizes me deeply is that so much of university theology has tried to justify its existence for more than two hundred years by means of apologetic tricks of this kind.'

Beneath the polar radar of the superpowers in this cold war lay a contraflow of dissent. One deep current was the silent withdrawal of belief. The other was the rise of fundamentalism. In 1975 I mentioned to one of my professors - a palaeontologist and a Christian whose faith was as sound as his science - the creationist critiques of evolution. 'Nobody,' he said, 'takes these people seriously!'

In 2001 the iceberg struck.

I haven't found out what happened to Gardavsky, but I can guess. Kahl's still going strong, an independent philosopher, still an atheist, and no longer a Marxist. I don't know why he repudiated Marxism, but I can guess. A recent re-reading of his book reminded me of some of his points against Christianity: the complete emptiness of the signifier, covering total disagreement in belief and ethics; the endless splintering of its sects; their sanguinary mutual persecutions; the apologetic and academic 'manipulation of authoritative texts so that they can still be put to use today'; above all, its complete failure 'measured by the yardstick of its own claims'. 'Immanent criticism', as he says, 'lays bare the ideological limitations of the conceptual structure of theology'. The problem with the universal acid, as the old joke goes, is to find a container.

16 Comments:

Everyone (so it seemed) had heard of Bishop J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, which popularised the radical theologies of Bultmann and Tillich.

You're describing the church I grew up in (I was still calling myself a Christian at 19 or 20, some time after I'd encountered Marx). It always seemed to be a place to ask questions about faith - and open-ended questions at that: the sceptical & hard-fought arguments shared that space with the flaky hippie musings. It was an unstable mixture, though - as the 70s wore on I seem to remember less of the "can a Christian take up arms against an oppressive regime?" and more of the "aren't all religions basically telling us the same thing?".)

And if you ever met an atheist they'd probably be a socialist of the old school, and if you ever met a creationist they'd probably be Plymouth Brethren or Elim. I did know one new-style evangelical creationist at school; he was also our local National Front member, so I think you could say he was an outlier.

But I'd say the iceberg hit (or the icebergs converged on us) long before 2001. Ten years before, to be precise.

By Anonymous, at Sunday, July 08, 2007 8:37:00 am

Non Serviam?

As far as RE's comment about Mr. Hitchens, I believe his break with the left had a lot to do with what he perceived as the dogmatization of the Marxist factions within the socialist and communist organizations most leftists identify with.

There's something to the criticism; one of my college friends is a Syrian Communist Organiser trying to cut his teeth in Québec and it's almost disturbing to hear him go on about communism. The words of Lenin and (yes, disturbingly) Stalin echo throughout his rhetoric as though they're self-evident to the point of tautology: there's no question as to whether or not they were right, it's simply a question of enlightening other people to their inspired message.

I am of course taking liberties with his wording, but the point is that there is a cult-esque following to these political philosophies & thinkers which repels the secularist in me and, apparently, Mr. Hitchens.

My personal political views - while rooted in socialism - have become very much libertarianized in recent years and well I guess Oym en individialist enerchist, ecktchelly...

By Steven Alleyn, at Saturday, July 14, 2007 12:03:00 am