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at he i st del usio ns
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david be ntley hart

Atheist Delusions
The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

YALE UNIVERSITY P RESS NE W HAVEN & LONDON

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2009 by David Bentley Hart.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in FontShop Scala and Scala Sans by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hart, David Bentley.
Atheist delusions : the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies / David Bentley
Hart.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-11190-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Church history—Primitive and early church,
ca. 30–600. 2. Civilization, Western. 3. Christianity—Influence. I. Title.
BR162.3.H37 2009
909′.09821—dc22         2008040641

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). It

contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship
Council (FSC).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Solwyn
This page intentionally left blank
 C O N TE N TS

Introduction ix

Part One: Faith, Reason, and Freedom: A View from

the Present

1 The Gospel of Unbelief 3

2 The Age of Freedom 19

Part Two: The Mythology of the Secular Age: Modernity’s

Rewriting of the Christian Past

3 Faith and Reason 29

4 The Night of Reason 36

5 The Destruction of the Past 49

6 The Death and Rebirth of Science 56

7 Intolerance and Persecution 75

v i i i  co n t en ts

8 Intolerance and War 88

9 An Age of Darkness 99

Part Three: Revolution: The Christian Invention of

the Human

10 The Great Rebellion 111

11 A Glorious Sadness 129

12 A Liberating Message 146

13 The Face of the Faceless 166

14 The Death and Birth of Worlds 183

15 Divine Humanity 199

Part Four: Reaction and Retreat: Modernity and the

Eclipse of the Human

16 Secularism and Its Victims 219

17 Sorcerers and Saints 229

Notes 243

Index 251
 i nt ro d uct ion

T h i s b o o k i s i n n o s e n s e  an impartial work of history. Perfect

detachment is impossible for even the soberest of historians, since the
writing of history necessarily demands some sort of narrative of causes
and effects, and is thus necessarily an act of interpretation, which by its
nature can never be wholly free of prejudice. But I am not really a histo-
rian, in any event, and I do not even aspire to detachment. In what follows,
my prejudices are transparent and unreserved, and my argument is in
some respects willfully extreme (or so it might seem). I think it prudent
to admit this from the outset, if only to avoid being accused later of hav-
ing made some pretense of perfect objectivity or neutrality so as to lull
the reader into a state of pliant credulity. What I have written is at most a
“historical essay,” at no point free of bias, and intended principally as an
apologia for a particular understanding of the effect of Christianity upon
the development of Western civilization.
This is not to say, I hasten to add, that I am in any way forswearing
claims of objective truth: to acknowledge that one’s historical judgments
can never be absolutely pure of preconceptions or personal convictions is
scarcely to surrender to a thoroughgoing relativism. It may be impossible
to provide perfectly irrefutable evidence for one’s conclusions, but it is
certainly possible to amass evidence sufficient to confirm them beyond
plausible doubt, just as it is possible to discern when a particular line
ix
x in t ro d uc ti o n

of interpretation has exceeded or contradicted the evidence altogether

and become little better than a vehicle for the writer’s own predilections,
interests, or allegiances. I can, moreover, vouch for the honesty of my
argument: I have not consciously distorted any aspect of the history I
discuss or striven to conceal any of its more disheartening elements.
Such honesty costs me little, as it happens. Since the case I wish to make
is not that the Christian gospel can magically transform whole societies
in an instant, or summon the charity it enjoins out of the depths of every
soul, or entirely extirpate cruelty and violence from human nature, or
miraculously lift men and women out of their historical contexts, I feel
no need to evade or excuse the innumerable failures of many Christians
through the ages to live lives of charity or peace. Where I come to the
defense of historical Christianity, it is only in order to raise objections to
certain popular calumnies of the church, or to demur from what I take
to be disingenuous or inane arraignments of Christian belief or history,
or to call attention to achievements and virtues that writers of a devoutly
anti-Christian bent tend to ignore, dissemble, or dismiss.
Beyond that, my ambitions are small; I make no attempt here to
convert anyone to anything. Indeed, the issue of my personal belief or
disbelief is quite irrelevant to—and would be surprisingly unilluminat-
ing of—my argument. Some of the early parts of this book, for instance,
concern the Roman Catholic Church; but whatever I say in its defense
ought not to be construed as advocacy for the institution itself (to which I
do not belong), but only for historical accuracy. To be honest, my affection
for institutional Christianity as a whole is rarely more than tepid; and there
are numerous forms of Christian belief and practice for which I would
be hard pressed to muster a kind word from the depths of my heart, and
the rejection of which by the atheist or skeptic strikes me as perfectly
laudable. In a larger sense, moreover, nothing I argue below—even if all
of it is granted—implies that the Christian vision of reality is true. And
yet, even so, the case I wish to make is intended to be provocative, and
its more apologetic moments are meant to clear the way for a number of
much stronger, and even perhaps somewhat immoderate, assertions.
This book chiefly—or at least centrally—concerns the history of the
early church, of roughly the first four or five centuries, and the story of
how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity. My chief
ambition in writing it is to call attention to the peculiar and radical na-
 INTRODU CTION  xi

ture of the new faith in that setting: how enormous a transformation of

thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christi-
anity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from
fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense
dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest
aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of politi-
cal power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed
before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues. Stated in
its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is,
first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the
evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political
or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been
only one—the triumph of Christianity—that can be called in the fullest
sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s
prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its
consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of
history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. To my mind, I
should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural
creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other move-
ment of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the
history of the West. And I am convinced that, given how radically at vari-
ance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced,
its eventual victory was an event of such improbability as to strain the very
limits of our understanding of historical causality.
There is also, however, a negative side to my argument. It is what I
suppose I should call my rejection of modernity—or, rather, my rejec-
tion of the ideology of “the modern” and my rejection, especially, of the
myth of “the Enlightenment.” By modernity, I should explain, I certainly
do not mean modern medicine or air travel or space exploration or any
of the genuinely useful or estimable aspects of life today; I do not even
mean modern philosophical method or social ideology or political thought.
Rather, I mean the modern age’s grand narrative of itself: its story of the
triumph of critical reason over “irrational” faith, of the progress of social
morality toward greater justice and freedom, of the “tolerance” of the secu-
lar state, and of the unquestioned ethical primacy of either individualism
or collectivism (as the case may be). Indeed, I want in part to argue that
what many of us are still in the habit of calling the “Age of Reason” was in
x ii in t ro d uc ti o n

many significant ways the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority

as a cultural value; that the modern age is notable in large measure for
the triumph of inflexible and unthinking dogmatism in every sphere of
human endeavor (including the sciences) and for a flight from rationality
to any number of soothing fundamentalisms, religious and secular; that
the Enlightenment ideology of modernity as such does not even deserve
any particular credit for the advance of modern science; that the modern
secular state’s capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which
Christendom might justly be indicted, not solely by virtue of the superior
technology at its disposal, but by its very nature; that among the chief
accomplishments of modern culture have been a massive retreat to su-
perstition and the gestation of especially pitiless forms of nihilism; and
that, by comparison to the Christian revolution it succeeded, modernity is
little more than an aftereffect, or even a counterrevolution—a reactionary
flight back toward a comfortable, but dehumanizing, mental and moral
servitude to elemental nature. In fact, this is where my story both begins
and ends. The central concern of what follows is the early centuries of the
church, but I approach those centuries very much from the perspective
of the present, and I return from them only to consider what the true
nature of a post-Christian culture must be. Needless to say, perhaps, my
prognostications tend toward the bleak.
Summary is always perilous. I know that—reduced thus to its barest
elements—the argument I propose lacks a certain refinement. I must
leave it to the reader to judge whether, in filling in the details below, I in
fact achieve any greater degree of subtlety. What, however, animates this
project is a powerful sense of how great a distance of historical forgetful-
ness and cultural alienation separates us from the early centuries of the
Christian era, and how often our familiarity with the Christianity we know
today can render us insensible to the novelty and uncanniness of the gos-
pel as it was first proclaimed—or even as it was received by succeeding
generations of ancient and mediaeval Christians. And this is more than
merely unfortunate. Our normal sense of the continuity of history, though
it can accommodate ruptures and upheavals of a certain magnitude, still
makes it difficult for us to comprehend the sheer immensity of what I
want to call the Western tradition’s “Christian interruption.” But it is
something we must comprehend if we are properly to understand who
we have been and what we have become, or to understand both the happy
 INTRODU CTION  xiii

fortuity and poignant fragility of many of those moral “truths” upon which
our sense of our humanity rests, or even to understand what defenses we
possess against the eventual cultural demise of those truths. And, after
all, given how enormous the force of this Christian interruption was in
shaping the reality all of us inhabit, it is nothing less than our obligation
to our own past to attempt to grasp its true nature.

I have called this book an essay, and that description should be kept in
mind as one reads it. What follows is not a history at all, really, if by that
one means a minutely exhaustive, sequential chronicle of social, political,
and economic events. In large part, this is because I simply lack many
of the special skills required of genuinely proficient historians and am
acutely conscious of how much my efforts in that direction would suffer
by comparison to their work. What I have written is an extended medita-
tion upon certain facts of history, and no more. Its arrangement is largely
thematic rather than chronological, and it does not pretend to address
most of the more contentious debates in modern historical scholarship
regarding the early church (except where necessary). So my narrative will
move at the pace my argument dictates. As this is an essay, I would have
preferred to do without scholarly apparatus altogether, in order to make it
as concise and fluid as possible; but I found I could not entirely dispense
with notes, and so I had to satisfy myself by making them as few and
as chastely minimal as common sense and my conscience would allow.
The arrangement of my argument is simple and comprises four “move-
ments”: I begin, in part 1, from the current state of popular antireligious
and anti-Christian polemic, and attempt to identify certain of the common
assumptions informing it; in part 2, I consider, in a somewhat desultory
fashion, the view of the Christian past that the ideology of modernity has
taught us to embrace; in part 3, the heart of the book, I attempt to illu-
minate (thematically, as I say) what happened during the early centuries
of the church and the slow conversion of the Roman Empire to the new
faith; and in part 4 I return to the present to consider the consequences
of the decline of Christendom.
What I have tried to describe in this book, I should finally note, is very
much a personal vision of Christian history, and I acknowledge that it is
perhaps slightly eccentric in certain of its emphases, in its shape, even
occasionally in its tone. This is not to say that it is merely a ­collection of
x iv in t ro duc ti o n

subjective impressions; I am keen to score as many telling blows as I can

against what I take to be false histories and against dishonest or incompe-
tent historians, and that requires some quantity of substantive evidence.
I think one must grant, though, that to communicate a personal vision
one must do more than prove or refute certain claims regarding facts; one
must invite others to see what one sees, and must attempt to draw others
into the world that vision descries. At a particular moment in history, I
believe, something happened to Western humanity that changed it at the
deepest levels of consciousness and at the highest levels of culture. It was
something of such strange and radiant vastness that it is almost inexpli-
cable that the memory of it should have so largely faded from our minds,
to be reduced to a few old habits of thought and desire whose origins we
no longer know, or to be displaced altogether by a few recent habits of
thought and desire that render us oblivious to what we have forsaken. But
perhaps the veil that time draws between us and the distant past in some
sense protects us from the burden of too much memory. It often proves
debilitating to dwell too entirely in the shadows of vanished epochs, and
our capacity to forget is (as Friedrich Nietzsche noted) very much a part
of our capacity to live in the present. That said, every natural strength can
become also an innate weakness; to live entirely in the present, without
any of the wisdom that a broad perspective upon the past provides, is to
live a life of idiocy and vapid distraction and ingratitude. Over time, our
capacity to forget can make everything come to seem unexceptional and
predictable, even things that are actually quite remarkable and implausi-
ble. The most important function of historical reflection is to wake us from
too complacent a forgetfulness and to recall us to a knowledge of things
that should never be lost to memory. And the most important function of
Christian history is to remind us not only of how we came to be modern
men and women, or of how Western civilization was shaped, but also of
something of incalculable wonder and inexpressible beauty, the knowledge
of which can still haunt, delight, torment, and transfigure us.
Part One F aith, Reason, and Freedom:
A View from the Present
This page intentionally left blank
C HA P TER o ne

The Gospel of Unbelief

One would think these would be giddy days for religion’s most pas-
sionate antagonists; rarely can they have known a moment so intoxicat-
ingly full of promise. A mere glance in the direction of current trends in
mass-market publishing should be enough to make the ardent secularist’s
heart thrill with the daring and delicious hope that we just might be enter-
ing a golden age for bold assaults on humanity’s ancient slavery to “irratio-
nal dogma” and “creedal tribalism.” Conditions in the world of print have
never before been so propitious for sanctimonious tirades against religion,
or (more narrowly) monotheism, or (more specifically) Christianity, or
(more precisely) Roman Catholicism. Never before have the presses or the
press been so hospitable to journalists, biologists, minor philosophers,
amateur moralists proudly brandishing their baccalaureates, novelists, and
(most indispensable of all) film actors eager to denounce the savagery of
faith, to sound frantic alarms against the imminence of a new “theocracy,”
and to commend the virtues of spiritual disenchantment to all who have
the wisdom to take heed. As I write, Daniel Dennett’s latest attempt to
wean a credulous humanity from its reliance on the preposterous fanta-
sies of religion, Breaking the Spell, has arrived amid a clamor of indignant
groans from the faithful and exultant bellowing from the godless. The God
Delusion, an energetic attack on all religious belief, has just been released
by Richard Dawkins, the zoologist and tireless tractarian, who—despite
3
4  fait h , re a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

his embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning—never fails to

entrance his eager readers with his rhetorical recklessness. The journalist
Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat
exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great,
a book that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialecti-
cal method. Over the past few years, Sam Harris’s extravagantly callow
attack on all religious belief, The End of Faith, has enjoyed robust sales
and the earnest praise of sympathetic reviewers.1 Over a slightly greater
span, Philip Pullman’s evangelically atheist (and rather overrated) fantasy
trilogy for children, His Dark Materials, has sold millions of copies, has
been lavishly praised by numerous critics, has been adapted for the stage,
and has received partial cinematic translation; its third volume, easily the
weakest of the series, has even won the (formerly) respectable Whitbread
Prize. And one hardly need mention the extraordinary sales achieved by
Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, already a major film and surely the most
lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate. I could go on.
A note of asperity, though, has probably already become audible in
my tone, and I probably should strive to suppress it. It is not inspired,
however, by any prejudice against unbelief as such; I can honestly say that
there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many
forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists
entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance,
made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contempt-
ible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes
difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of
invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the
sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves. Take for instance
Peter Watson, author of a diverting little bagatelle of a book on the history
of invention, who, when asked not long ago by the New York Times to name
humanity’s worst invention, blandly replied, “Without question, ethical
monotheism. . . . This has been responsible for most of the wars and
bigotry in history.”2 Now, as a specimen of the sort of antireligious chatter
that is currently chic, this is actually rather mild; but it is also utter non-
sense. Not that there is much point in defending “monotheism” in the
abstract (it is a terribly imprecise term); and devotees of the “one true God”
have certainly had their share of blood on their hands. But the vast major-
ity of history’s wars have been conducted in the service of many gods; or
 th e g o s pel o f unb el ief 5

have been fought under the aegis, or with the blessing, or at the command
of one god among many; or have been driven by the pursuit of profits
or conquest or power; or have been waged for territory, national or racial
destiny, tribal supremacy, the empire, or the “greater good”; or, indeed,
have been prosecuted in obedience to ideologies that have no use for any
gods whatsoever (these, as it happens, have been the most murderous
wars of all). The pagan rhetorician Libanius justly bragged that the gods
of the Roman Empire had directed the waging of innumerable wars.3 By
contrast, the number of wars that one could plausibly say have actually
been fought on behalf of anything one might call “ethical monotheism”
is so vanishingly small that such wars certainly qualify as exceptions to
the historical rule. Bigotry and religious persecution, moreover, are any-
thing but peculiar to monotheistic cultures, as anyone with a respectable
grasp of human culture and history should know. And yet, absurd as it
is, Watson’s is the sort of remark that sets many heads sagely nodding
in recognition of what seems an undeniable truth. Such sentiments have
become so much a part of the conventional grammar of “enlightened”
skepticism that they are scarcely ever subjected to serious scrutiny.
My own impatience with such remarks, I should confess, would
probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that,
among Christianity’s most fervent detractors, there has been a consider-
able decline in standards in recent years. In its early centuries, the church
earned the enmity of genuinely imaginative and civilized critics, such as
Celsus and Porphyry, who held the amiable belief that they should make
some effort to acquaint themselves with the object of their critique. And,
at the end of Europe’s Christian centuries, the church could still boast
antagonists of real stature. In the eighteenth century, David Hume was
unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished.
And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and the other Enlight-
enment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, they were at least
marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity. Edward
Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his
account of Christianity’s rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of
positively titanic gifts, whose sonorously enunciated opinions were the
fruit of immense labors of study and reflection. And the extraordinary
scientific, philosophical, and political ferment of the nineteenth century
provided Christianity with enemies of unparalleled passion and visionary
6  fait h , re a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

intensity. The greatest of them all, Friedrich Nietzsche, may have had a
somewhat limited understanding of the history of Christian thought, but
he was nevertheless a man of immense culture who could appreciate the
magnitude of the thing against which he had turned his spirit, and who
had enough of a sense of the past to understand the cultural crisis that the
fading of Christian faith would bring about. Moreover, he had the good
manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was—
above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion—rather than allow
himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had
been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual
neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he
hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude
for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he
was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never
deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while
simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal
social conscience or innate human sympathy. He knew that the disappear-
ance of the cultural values of Christianity would gradually but inevitably
lead to a new set of values, the nature of which was yet to be decided. By
comparison to these men, today’s gadflies seem far lazier, less insightful,
less subtle, less refined, more emotional, more ethically complacent, and
far more interested in facile simplifications of history than in sober and
demanding investigations of what Christianity has been or is.
Two of the books I have mentioned above—Breaking the Spell and The
End of Faith—provide perhaps the best examples of what I mean, albeit in
two radically different registers. In the former, Daniel Dennett—a profes-
sor of philosophy at Tufts University and codirector of that university’s
Center for Cognitive Studies—advances what he takes to be the provoca-
tive thesis that religion is an entirely natural phenomenon, and claims
that this thesis can be investigated by methods proper to the empirical
sciences. Indeed, about midway through the book, after having laid out
his conjectures regarding the evolution of religion, Dennett confidently as-
serts that he has just successfully led his readers on a “nonmiraculous and
matter-of-fact stroll” from the blind machinery of nature up to humanity’s
passionate fidelity to its most exalted ideas. As it happens, the case he has
actually made at this point is a matter not of fact but of pure intuition,
held together by tenuous strands of presupposition, utterly inadequate
 th e g o s pel o f unb el ief 7

as an explanation of religious culture, and almost absurdly dependent

upon Richard Dawkins’s inane concept of “memes” (for a definition of
which one may consult the most current editions of the Oxford English
Dictionary). And, as a whole, Dennett’s argument consists in little more
than the persistent misapplication of quantitative and empirical terms to
unquantifiable and intrinsically nonempirical realities, sustained by clas-
sifications that are entirely arbitrary and fortified by arguments that any
attentive reader should notice are wholly circular. The “science of religion”
Dennett describes would inevitably prove to be no more than a series of
indistinct inferences drawn from behaviors that could be interpreted in
an almost limitless variety of ways; and it could never produce anything
more significant than a collection of biological metaphors for supporting
(or, really, simply illustrating) an essentially unverifiable philosophical
materialism.
All of this, however, is slightly beside the point. Judged solely as a
scientific proposal, Dennett’s book is utterly inconsequential—in fact, it
is something of an embarrassment—but its methodological deficiencies
are not my real concern here (although I have written about them else-
where).4 And, in fact, even if there were far more substance to Dennett’s
project than there is, and even if by sheer chance his story of religion’s
evolution were correct in every detail, it would still be a trivial project at
the end of the day. For, whether one finds Dennett’s story convincing
or not—whether, that is, one thinks he has quite succeeded in perfectly
bridging the gulf between the amoeba and the St. Matthew Passion—not
only does that story pose no challenge to faith, it is in fact perfectly compat-
ible with what most developed faiths already teach regarding religion. Of
course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to
deny that? It is ubiquitous in human culture, obviously forms an essential
element in the evolution of society, and has itself clearly evolved. Perhaps
Dennett believes there are millions of sincere souls out there deeply com-
mitted to the proposition that religion, in the abstract, is a supernatural
reality, but there are not. After all, it does not logically follow that simply
because religion is natural it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or
that it is not in some sense oriented toward ultimate reality (as, according
to Christian tradition, all natural things are).
Moreover—and one would have thought Dennett might have noticed
this—religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one
8  fait h , re a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

(apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it. Rather, there
are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake
of convenience, we call “religions,” though they could scarcely differ more
from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion
that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature. Chris-
tians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather,
they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose
from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his
church as its Lord. This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual,
and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions:
moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious. As for “religion”
as such, however, Christian thought has generally acknowledged that it
is an impulse common to all societies, and that many of its manifesta-
tions are violent, superstitious, amoral, degrading, and false. The most
one can say from a Christian perspective concerning human religion is
that it gives ambiguous expression to what Christian tradition calls the
“natural desire for God,” and as such represents a kind of natural open-
ness to spiritual truth, revelation, or grace, as well as an occasion for any
number of delusions, cruelties, and tyrannies. When, therefore, Dennett
solemnly asks (as he does) whether religion is worthy of our loyalty, he
poses a meaningless question. For Christians the pertinent question is
whether Christ is worthy of loyalty, which is an entirely different matter.
As for Dennett’s amazing discovery that the “natural desire for God” is
in fact a desire for God that is natural, it amounts to a revolution not of
thought, only of syntax.
The real significance of Breaking the Spell (at least for me) becomes
visible when it is set alongside Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. This latter
is also a book that, in itself, should not detain anyone for very long. It is
little more than a concatenation of shrill, petulant assertions, a few of
which are true, but none of which betrays any great degree of philosophi-
cal or historical sophistication. In his remarks on Christian belief, Harris
displays an abysmal ignorance of almost every topic he addresses—Chris-
tianity’s view of the soul, its moral doctrines, its mystical traditions, its
understandings of scripture, and so on. Sometimes it seems his principal
complaint must be against twentieth-century fundamentalists, but he
does not even get them right (at one point, for example, he nonsensically
and scurrilously charges that they believe Christ’s second coming will
 th e g o s pel o f unb el ief 9

usher in a final destruction of the Jews). He declares all dogma perni-

cious, except his own thoroughly dogmatic attachment to nondualistic
contemplative mysticism, of a sort which he mistakenly imagines he has
discovered in one school of Tibetan Buddhism, and which (naturally) he
characterizes as purely rational and scientific. He provides a long passage
ascribed to the (largely mythical) Tantric sage Padmasambhava and then
breathlessly informs his readers that nothing remotely as profound is
to be found anywhere in the religious texts of the West—though, really,
the passage is little more than a formulaic series of mystic platitudes, of
the sort to be found in every religion’s contemplative repertoire, describ-
ing the kind of oceanic ecstasy that Christian mystical tradition tends to
treat as one of the infantile stages of the contemplative life. He makes
his inevitable pilgrimage to the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition,
though without pausing to acquaint himself with the Inquisition’s actual
history or any of the recent scholarship on it. He more or less explicitly
states that every episode of violence or injustice in Christian history is
a natural consequence of Christianity’s basic tenets (which is obviously
false), and that Christianity’s twenty centuries of unprecedented and still
unmatched moral triumphs—its care of widows and orphans, its alms-
houses, hospitals, foundling homes, schools, shelters, relief organiza-
tions, soup kitchens, medical missions, charitable aid societies, and so
on—are simply expressions of normal human kindness, with no neces-
sary connection to Christian conviction (which is even more obviously
false). Needless to say, he essentially reverses the equation when talking
about Buddhism and, with all the fervor of the true believer, defends the
purity of his elected creed against its historical distortions. Admittedly,
he does not actually discuss Tibet’s unsavory history of religious warfare,
monastic feudalism, theocratic despotism, and social neglect; but he does
helpfully explain that most Buddhists do not really understand Buddhism
(at least, not as well as he does). And in a disastrous chapter, reminiscent
of nothing so much as a recklessly ambitious undergraduate essay, he
attempts to describe a “science of good and evil” that would discover the
rational basis of moral self-sacrifice, apart from religious adherences: an
argument composed almost entirely of logical lacunae. In short, The End
of Faith is not a serious—merely a self-important—book, and merits only
cursory comment.
If Harris’s argument holds any real interest here, it is as an ­epitome—
10  f ait h , r e a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

verging on unintentional parody—of contemporary antireligious rhetoric

at its most impassioned and sanctimonious. As such, it gives especially
vivid and unalloyed expression to two popular prejudices that one finds
also in the work of Dennett (and of Dawkins and many others), but no-
where in so bracingly simplistic a form. These prejudices are, first, that all
religious belief is in essence baseless; and, second, that religion is princi-
pally a cause of violence, division, and oppression, and hence should be
abandoned for the sake of peace and tolerance. The former premise—the
sheer passive idiocy of belief—is assumed with such imperturbable con-
fidence by those who hold it that scarcely any of them bothers to argue
the point with any systematic care. That there might be such a thing as
religious experience (other, of course, than states of delusion, suffered
by the stupid or emotionally disturbed) is naturally never considered,
since it goes without saying that there is nothing to experience. Dawkins,
for instance, frequently asserts, without pausing actually to think about
the matter, that religious believers have no reasons for their faith. The
most embarrassingly ill-conceived chapter in Breaking the Spell consists
largely in Dennett attempting to convince believers, in tones of excruciat-
ing condescension, that they do not really believe what they think they
believe, or even understand it, and attempting to scandalize them with
the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical
jargon full of obscure Greek terms like “apophatic” and “ontic.” And Har-
ris is never more theatrically indignant than when angrily reminding his
readers that Christians believe in Christ’s resurrection (for example) only
because someone has told them it is true.
It is always perilous to attempt to tell others what or why they believe;
and it is especially unwise to assume (as Dennett is peculiarly prone to do)
that believers, as a species, do not constantly evaluate or reevaluate their
beliefs. Anyone who actually lives among persons of faith knows that this
is simply untrue. Obviously, though, there is no point in demanding of
believers that they produce criteria for their beliefs unless one is willing to
conform one’s expectations to the kind of claims being made. For, while
it is unquestionably true that perfectly neutral proofs in support of faith
cannot generally be adduced, it is not a neutral form of knowledge that is
at issue. Dennett’s belief that no one need take seriously any claim that
cannot be tested by scientific method is merely fatuous. By that standard,
I need not believe that the battle of Salamis ever took place, that the wid-
 th e go s pel o f unb el ief 11

ower next door loves the children for whom he tirelessly provides, or that
I might be wise to trust my oldest friend even if he tells me something I
do not care to hear. Harris is quite correct to say, for instance, that Christ’s
resurrection—like any other historical event—is known only by way of
the testimony of others. Indeed, Christianity is the only major faith built
entirely around a single historical claim. It is, however, a claim quite
unlike any other ever made, as any perceptive and scrupulous historian
must recognize. Certainly it bears no resemblance to the vague fantasies
of witless enthusiasts or to the cunning machinations of opportunistic
charlatans. It is the report of men and women who had suffered the devas-
tating defeat of their beloved master’s death, but who in a very short time
were proclaiming an immediate experience of his living presence beyond
the tomb, and who were, it seems, willing to suffer privation, imprison-
ment, torture, and death rather than deny that experience. And it is the
report of a man who had never known Jesus before the crucifixion, and
who had once persecuted Jesus’s followers, but who also believed that he
had experienced the risen Christ, with such shattering power that he too
preferred death to apostasy. And it is the report of countless others who
have believed that they also—in a quite irreducibly personal way—have
known the risen Christ.
It cannot be gainsaid that Christians have faith in Easter largely be-
cause they belong to communities of believers, or that their faith is a
complex amalgam of shared confession, personal experience, spiritual
and ethical practice, and reliance on others, or that they are inevitably
obliged to make judgments about the trustworthiness of those whose word
they must take. Some also choose to venture out upon the vast seas of
Christianity’s philosophical or mystical traditions; and many are inspired
by miracles, or dreams, or the apparent working of grace in their lives, or
moments of aesthetic transport, or strange raptures, or intuitions of the
Holy Spirit’s presence, and so on. None of this might impress the com-
mitted skeptic, or seem like adequate grounds for faith, but that does not
mean that faith is essentially willful and irrational. More to the point, it is
bizarre for anyone to think he or she can judge the nature or credibility of
another’s experiences from the outside. If Dennett really wishes to under-
take a “scientific” investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his
efforts to describe religion (which, again, does not really exist), and at-
tempt instead to enter into the actual world of belief in order to weigh
12  f ait h , r e a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

its phenomena from within. As a first step, he should certainly—purely

in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigor—begin
praying, and then continue doing so with some perseverance. This is a
drastic and implausible prescription, no doubt; but it is the only means
by which he could possibly begin to acquire any knowledge of what belief
is or of what it is not.
Rather than court absurdity, however, let us graciously grant that there
is indeed such a thing as unthinking religious conviction, just as there is
a great deal of unthinking irreligious materialism. Let us also, more mag-
nanimously, grant the truth of the second conviction I attributed to these
writers above: that religion is violent, that religion in fact kills. At least, let
us grant that it is exactly as true, and as intellectually significant, as the
propositions “politics kills” and “color reddens.” For many things are true
in a general sense, even when, in the majority of specific cases, they are
false. Violent religion or politics kills, and red reddens; but peaceful reli-
gion or politics does not kill, even if it is adopted as a pretext for killing, just
as green does not redden, even if a certain kind of color blindness creates
the impression that it does. For, purely in the abstract, “religious” long-
ing is neither this nor that, neither admirable nor terrible, but is at once
creative and destructive, consoling and murderous, tender and brutal.
I take it that this is because “religion” is something “natural” to hu-
man beings (as Dennett so acutely notes) and, as such, reflects human
nature. For the broader, even more general, and yet more pertinent truth is
that men kill (women kill too, but historically have had fewer opportunities
to do so). Some kill because their faiths explicitly command them to do
so, some kill though their faiths explicitly forbid them to do so, and some
kill because they have no faith and hence believe all things are permit-
ted to them. Polytheists, monotheists, and atheists kill—indeed, this last
class is especially prolifically homicidal, if the evidence of the twentieth
century is to be consulted. Men kill for their gods, or for their God, or
because there is no God and the destiny of humanity must be shaped by
gigantic exertions of human will. They kill in pursuit of universal truths
and out of fidelity to tribal allegiances; for faith, blood and soil, empire,
national greatness, the “socialist utopia,” capitalism, and “democratiza-
tion.” Men will always seek gods in whose name they may perform great
deeds or commit unspeakable atrocities, even when those gods are not
gods but “tribal honor” or “genetic imperatives” or “social ideals” or “hu-
 th e go s pel o f unb el ief 13

man destiny” or “liberal democracy.” Then again, men also kill on account
of money, land, love, pride, hatred, envy, or ambition. They kill out of
conviction or out of lack of conviction. Harris at one point approvingly
cites a platitude from Will Durant to the effect that violence follows from
religious certitude—which again, like most empty generalities, is vacu-
ously true. It is just as often the case, however, that men are violent solely
from expedience, because they believe in no higher law than the demands
of the moment, while only certain kinds of religious certitude have the
power to temper their murderous pragmatism with a compassionate ideal-
ism, or to freeze their wills with a dread of divine justice, or to free them
from the terrors of present uncertainty and so from the temptation to act
unjustly. Caiaphas and Pilate, if scripture is to be believed, were perfect
examples of the officious and practical statesman with grave responsibili-
ties to consider; Christ, on the other hand, was certain of a Kingdom not
of this world and commanded his disciples to love their enemies. Does
religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it
often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing
to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest
ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the
truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a
human constant.
I do not, I must note, doubt the sincerity of any of these writers. I
maintain only that to speak of the evil of religion or to desire its aboli-
tion is, again, as simpleminded as condemning and wanting to abolish
politics. Dennett, for example, on several occasions in Breaking the Spell
proclaims his devotion to democracy, a devotion that one can assume
remains largely undiminished by the knowledge that democratic govern-
ments—often in the name of protecting or promoting democracy—have
waged unjust wars, incinerated villages or cities full of noncombatants,
abridged civil liberties, tolerated corruption and racial inequality, lied to
their citizens, aided despotic foreign regimes, or given power to evil men
(Hitler seems a not insignificant example of this last). By the same token,
one may remain wholly unswayed from one’s devotion to Christianity by
the knowledge that men and women have done many wicked things in
Christ’s name. If the analogy fails in any respect, it is only that Christian-
ity expressly forbids the various evils that have been done by Christians,
whereas democracy, in principle, forbids nothing (except, of course, the
14  fait h , r e a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

defeat of the majority’s will). Moreover, I am fairly certain that Dennett

would not be so feeble of intellect as to abandon his faith in democratic
institutions simply because someone of no political philosophy what-
soever had emerged from the forest and told him in tones of stirring
pomposity that politics is divisive and violent and therefore should be
forsaken in the interests of human harmony. Similarly, the vapid truism
that “religion is violent” is less than morally compelling. As no one has
any vested interest in “religion” as such, it is perfectly reasonable for
someone simultaneously to recite the Nicene Creed and to deplore Aztec
human sacrifice (or even the Spanish Inquisition) without suffering any
of the equivocator’s pangs of conscience, or indeed sensing the least ten-
sion between the two positions.
What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have
mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a
truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to
violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the mod-
ern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely
violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable
magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence. (Cer-
tainly the ridiculous claim that these forms of secular government were
often little more than “political religions,” and so only provide further
proof of the evil of religion, should simply be laughed off as the shabby
evasion it obviously is.) It is not even especially clear why these authors
imagine that a world entirely purged of faith would choose to be guided
by moral prejudices remotely similar to their own; and the obscurity be-
comes especially impenetrable to me in the case of those who seem to
believe that a thoroughgoing materialism informed by Darwinian biology
might actually aid us in forsaking our “tribalism” and “irrationality” and
in choosing instead to live in tolerant concord with one another. After
all, the only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt
at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have
been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and
the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously, stupid or evil social
and political movements should not dictate our opinions of scientific
discoveries. But it scarcely impugns the epochal genius of Charles Dar-
win or Alfred Russel Wallace to note that—understood purely as a bare,
brute, material event—nature admits of no moral principles at all, and
 th e go s pel o f unb el ief 15

so can provide none; all it can provide is its own “moral” example, which
is anything but gentle. Dennett, who often shows a propensity for moral
pronouncements of almost pontifical peremptoriness, and for social pre-
scriptions of the most authoritarian variety, does not delude himself that
evolutionary theory is a source of positive moral prescriptions. But there is
something delusional nonetheless in his optimistic certainty that human
beings will wish to choose altruistic values without invoking transcendent
principles. They may do so; but they may also wish to build death camps,
and may very well choose to do that instead. For every ethical theory
developed apart from some account of transcendent truth—of, that is,
the spiritual or metaphysical foundation of reality—is a fragile fiction,
credible only to those sufficiently obstinate in their willing suspension
of disbelief. If one does not wish to be convinced, however, a simple “I
disagree” or “I refuse” is enough to exhaust the persuasive resources of
any purely worldly ethics.
Not that one needs an ethical theory to be an upright person. Dennett
likes to point out that there is no evidence that believers are more law-
abiding or principled than unbelievers, which is presumably true. Most
persons are generally compliant with the laws and moral customs of their
societies, no matter what their ultimate convictions about the nature of
reality; and often it is the worst reprobates of all who—fearing for their
souls or unable to correct their own natures—turn to faith. I might add,
though (drawing, I admit, mostly on personal observation) that outside the
realm of mere civil obedience to dominant social values—in that world of
consummate hopelessness where the most indigent, disabled, forsaken,
and forgotten among us depend upon the continuous, concrete, heroic
charity of selfless souls—the ranks of the godless tend to thin out mark-
edly. And it is probably also worth noting that the quantity of charitable
aid in the world today supplied and sustained by Christian churches con-
tinues to be almost unimaginably vast. A world from which the gospel
had been banished would surely be one in which millions more of our
fellows would go unfed, unnursed, unsheltered, and uneducated. (But I
suppose we could always hope for the governments of the world to unite
and take up the slack.) Still, it seems obvious that both the religious and
the irreligious are capable of varying degrees of tolerance or intolerance,
benevolence or malice, depending on how they understand the moral
implications of their beliefs.
16  fait h , r e a s o n , a n d f r e e d o m

What, however, we should never forget is where those larger notions

of the moral good, to which even atheists can feel a devotion, come from;
and this is no small matter. Compassion, pity, and charity, as we under-
stand and cherish them, are not objects found in nature, like trees or
butterflies or academic philosophers, but are historically contingent con-
ventions of belief and practice, formed by cultural convictions that need
never have arisen at all. Many societies have endured and indeed flour-
ished quite well without them. It is laudable that Dennett is disposed
(as I assume he is) to hate economic, civil, or judicial injustice, and that
he believes we should not abandon our fellow human beings to poverty,
tyranny, exploitation, or despair. Good manners, however, should oblige
him and others like him to acknowledge that they are inheritors of a social
conscience whose ethical grammar would have been very different had it
not been shaped by Christianity’s moral premises: the ideals of justice for
the oppressed the church took from Judaism, Christianity’s own special
language of charity, its doctrine of God’s universal love, its exaltation of
forgiveness over condemnation, and so on. And good sense should prompt
them to acknowledge that absolutely nothing ensures that, once Christian
beliefs have been finally and fully renounced, those values will not slowly
dissolve, to be replaced by others that are coarser, colder, more pragmatic,
and more “inhuman.” On this score, it would be foolish to feel especially
sanguine; and there are good causes, as I shall discuss in the final part of
this book, for apprehension. This is one reason why the historical insight
and intellectual honesty of Nietzsche were such precious things, and why
their absence from so much contemporary antireligious polemic renders
it so depressingly vapid.
It is pointless, however, to debate what it would truly mean for West-
ern culture to renounce Christianity unless one first understands what it
meant for Western culture to adopt Christianity; and this one cannot do
if one is content to remain fixated upon fruitless abstractions concerning
“religion” rather than turning to the actual particularities of Christian
history and belief. Nor, surely, does that turn constitute some sort of safe
retreat for the Christian: the realm of the particular is, by its nature, one
of ambiguity, where wisdom and mercy are indissolubly wedded to igno-
rance and brutality, often within the same institution, or indeed the same
person. It is hardly novel to observe that Christianity’s greatest historical
triumph was also its most calamitous defeat: with the conversion of the
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