Features > Why I am not a Christian

New Introduction by Simon Blackburn

The London Times reported quiet days at the beginning of March, 1927. In the shires, hunting was only moderate, but in London, following an anonymous telephone call, there was hope that the stolen £20,000 necklace belonging to Mrs Bruce Ismay might be retrieved. For seventy-three pounds and ten shillings the Church Travellers Club would take you to Palestine, Egypt, Athens and Constantinople. There were lot of advertisements for parlourmaids, but few would be on the Church trip, since the modest-sounding sum represented a good year’s wages. Many letters to the Editor concerned a proposed reform to the prayer book; indeed the Bishop of Norwich gave a special meeting about this reform (‘Brigadier-General H. R. Adair, who presided, said that what was wanted was not a new prayer book but a book of discipline’). Church events were extensively reported.¹

About the only event The Times did not announce was the Sunday lecture of the South London branch of the National Secular Society in Battersea Town Hall on 6 March, and neither did it report it afterwards. The lecture was ‘Why I am not a Christian’, the most famous and most forthright of Bertrand Russell’s many writings about religion.

It has been fashionable to decry Russell’s lecture, and subsequent writings on religion, as shallow and unspiritual, inadequate to the depths of the subject. The high-minded patronizing of Russell says, in effect, that if religion were mere superstition, Russell would be relevant, but it is not, and he is not. The first such attack came in August of the same year, from the newly religious T. S. Eliot, in his journal The Monthly Criterion.² Since Eliot anticipates most subsequent criticism, I shall concentrate on the issues as he raises them.

Eliot seizes upon Russell’s words ‘I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds’. ‘What he does not remark explicitly, though I am sure he would admit it’, says Eliot, ‘is that his own religion also rests entirely upon emotional grounds’. Eliot disdainfully cites the emotional rhetoric with which Russell winds up his lecture, quoting the peroration ‘We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world . . . Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it . . .’, remarking contemptuously that Russell is very keen on standing up rather than sitting down, and his words will ‘stir the hearts of those who employ the same catchwords as himself’.

Eliot’s short counterblast goes on through three phases. He agrees with Russell that fear, which Russell sees as the force that propels religion, is generally a bad thing. But he urges that a skilled theologian would distinguish good from bad fear, and insists that a proper fear of God is a very different thing from fear of burglars, insolvency, or snakes. He does not specify any farther, but we can suppose him to have had in mind fear of God as some kind of remedy for existentialist fear, fear of rootlessness, the loss of bearings in an amoral and meaningless world.

Eliot goes on to point out that Russell’s arguments are all quite familiar. This is in a sense true, given that we have read Hume or Kant or Feuerbach, although few would claim to remember, as Eliot says he does, that the problem of the regress of causes, that Russell says he learned from Mill, ‘was put to me at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid’. But if Eliot is right that Russell’s essay is not philosophically original, he is wrong to imply that arguments are any the worse for being familiar, as if they thereby lose their title to control our beliefs.

Finally, and far more importantly, Eliot claims that in these matters Russell ought to agree that it is not what you say, but how you behave, that counts, and hence that ‘Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity’. There are many varieties of atheism, Eliot says, such as the ‘High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold’ or the ‘Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D. H. Lawrence’. Eliot winds up: ‘Just as Mr. Russell’s Radicalism in politics is merely a variety of Whiggery, so his Non-Christianity is merely a variety of Low Church sentiment. That is why his pamphlet is a curious, and a pathetic, document’.

Eliot’s polemic may seem perversely beside the point to the many humanists, agnostics, liberals and atheists who have been fortified by Russell’s essay for more than seventy- five years. But it deserves attention, not only because it heralds the vicissitudes Russell’s essay has had to undergo, but because in a number of respects it takes us closer to the modern world than does Russell. This does not mean that Eliot wins any intellectual argument – far from it – but that he well suggests the cultural atmosphere that would force Russell’s Enlightenment rationalism to struggle for air, and in some peoples’ minds would snuff it out for good.

So consider Eliot’s popular strategic point that if emotion leads people to religious belief, similarly emotion underlies rejection of it. At first sight this seems a neat rejoinder, hoisting Russell on his own petard. But on a second glance it is not quite as neat as it looks. We all of us believe countless propositions of the kind ‘there does not exist any . . .’: we believe that there does not exist any tooth-fairy, or any such person as Santa Claus, or Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, a belief in such things would be so outlandish, so contrary to what we take as central to our understandings of the world, to count as a delusion. And then, in the absence of a longer story, perhaps our only way of ‘getting inside’ the mind of the deluded would be to suppose them gripped by strong emotional forces, unconscious determinants of belief that speak only about the mind of the deluded, and not at all about what there might be in the world. It does not follow, and is not true that the ordinary state of mind, believing that there are no such things as those mentioned, requires a similar emotional explanation. On the contrary, it is entirely and satisfactorily explained by our sensitivity to the way of the world, in which there are no such things.

Although this is right as far as it goes, it does not take us to the heart of the matter. For given a consensus on what is obviously true, we will also find a consensus on whom to diagnose as victims of strange forces: those who believe otherwise. When Christianity was the consensus view, it was atheists who were put down as the victims of strange forces. The text ‘the fool hath said in his heart that there is no God’ was frequently taken to show that atheism was not so much an intellectually driven state, as a state of corruption, caused by the libertine atheist’s desire to escape his conscience.³ Given no consensus, but a debate between Christians and atheists, each side will advance the mechanism as an explanation of their opponent’s blindness. So the introduction of emotional diagnoses cannot advance the debate either way, unless, indeed, one side has what should neutrally be regarded as better diagnoses than the other.

However Eliot hints at something much more radical. He seems to think that being a Christian is not a question of believing anything at all (that would make it mere superstition). He implies that it is purely a matter of having a certain emotional stance towards the world, and possibly towards some texts. At one point Eliot says of his old teacher at Harvard that ‘being a real Atheist (he) is at the same time essentially a most orthodox Christian’. This sounds merely paradoxical, for why not substitute ‘Buddhist’ or ‘Hindu’ or ‘Shi’ite’ or ‘Sunni’? Eliot must be talking of some shared emotion, a lowest common denominator of humanity that might be common to just about anyone, of whatever creed they claim to be. It is as if you could say: all religions (and atheism) preach Love, so let us identify them. This soggy ecumenicism is also part of the modern world. It would be nice as a solvent of religious conflict, but apart from anything else, it makes it impossible to understand the history of Christianity, where people cheerfully burned each other over whether there was any such thing as transubstantiation, an identity of substance between God and man, redemption by deeds or predestination.

For Russell it was a fairly simple matter to identify what Christians believe. At the minimum, they believe in God, and immortality, and believe that Christ was the best and wisest of men. It can be run through like a checklist. Where Russell takes pains to say what he means by a Christian, Eliot is wilfully loose about it. Eliot’s defense is that not your words, but only your behaviour counts. For Eliot, someone might say that they believe these things, or say that they do not. But the real question comes next, in seeing what they make of whichever words they choose. Russell, who at the time was certainly sympathetic to the view that a person’s mental life was wholly exhibited in their behaviour, is not very well placed to disagree with this. But it opens up the whole problem of interpretation or hermeneutics, for where, in the swirl of a person’s linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, are there fixed points that tell us whether to interpret them as believing something or not? If, in spite of his victim’s strenuous denial, Eliot interprets Russell as a Low Churchman, what is to show that he is wrong? Again, a modern chord is struck, as determinate meaning disappears under a welter of conflicting interpretations.

But like the game with emotion, this is a game that two can play. If in turn Russell chooses to interpret Eliot as a card-carrying atheist, who happens to take pleasure in reciting various words or visiting various buildings, what is to show that he is wrong? If indeterminacy rules, we can reverse Eliot’s paradox to describe him: like all orthodox Christians, he is at the same time essentially a real atheist.

Russell distinguished three elements in a religion: a Church, a creed or set of doctrines, and religious feeling. It is well known that while he relentless attacked the Church as an organization, and maintained that religious creeds were simply unbelievable to any rational person, he himself not only admitted to religious feelings, but at various times of his life made them absolutely central to his sense of the world and his place in it. Well into old age he would lament the distance between what his intellect told him, and what emotionally he desired to believe:

I have always ardently desired to find some justification for the emotions inspired by certain things that seem to stand outside human life and to deserve feelings of awe. And so my instincts go with the humanists, but my emotions violently rebel. In this respect the “consolations of philosophy” are not for me.⁴

Russell wrote of two reasons for which he entered philosophy: ‘The desire to find some knowledge that could be accepted as certainly true . . . and the desire to find some satisfaction for religious impulses’.⁵ Russell’s daughter, Katharine Tait wrote that ‘He was by temperament a profoundly religious man’.⁶ In his earlier years he wrote to his first wife Alys of his admiration for Spinoza, who preaches a ‘rich voluptuous asceticism based on a vast undefined mysticism’.⁷

In admitting to the feelings and their extreme importance, but denying the creed and condemning the organized Church, Russell opens himself to attack on another front. Why should not religious language be the best expression of religious feelings? That is surely what it is for. So the poet and literary critic in Eliot is bound to oppose the separation of feeling and expression that Russell innocently imposes (although that means that Eliot is inconsistent in championing the soggy ecumenicism identified above, since atheists certainly express themselves differently from Christians and the rest).

If feeling and expression are one, religious feelings just are the feelings about life, fate, memory, and loss, that get expressed in the finest religious writings. And if behaviour gives meaning to words, the continued life of those writings is just the life of the Churches which disseminate them and keep and refresh their meaning by investing them with due continuity with the past, due solemnity and ritual. If religion is seen as a seamless practice, Russell’s analytic distinctions cannot stand. They betray the essential unity of feeling, words, and rituals that make up a religious stance towards the world. On such a view the words ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ do not so much say anything true or false, but have whatever meaning is invested in singing them, or singing them in church, at Christmas. Neither Russell nor any atheist before him foresaw such an account.⁸ However, even if it were a correct account of what religious ‘believers’ are doing, Russell would still be able to deploy his genuine, and severe, moral reasons for opposing them. The rituals and words are not self-contained expressions of feeling, but also the harbingers of prohibition and persecution.

We can see Eliot’s quarrel with Russell as a foretaste of modernity’s long problem with the Enlightenment. Russell stands on reason, belief, truth, science, and analysis, with feeling and emotion being only unfortunate, if strangely important, outriders. Russell thinks religious beliefs are simple beliefs, to be tried at the bar of probability, science, logic, and history, and when tried they are to be found wanting. Eliot classes them with poetry, feeling, emotion, expression and tradition, while rationality and science, analysis and probability, are exiled to the margins.⁹

The battle over interpretation is still being fought in our own times, as religious ideologies again contest for the minds even of the educated West. One of the glorious things about Russell’s lecture is the clarity with which he took up one position on the battleground. Anyone taking a different position has to meet him head on, which will require better arguments than Eliot managed to muster.

SIMON BLACKBURN
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 2003