There was once a time when I could reasonably be defined as ‘religious’, if in a vague protestant/CofE way: I held my hand up in an earlier fragment. With a degree of embarrassment I suspect it coincided with a phase of my life during which I was a more or less decent human being (though I may just have been shy and retiring): religion, like many another ‘closed’ narrative, can confer comfort enough to allow for the emergence, even ascendency, of decency. It was a phase which carried on into my first year as an undergraduate. I debated theology awhile as an Surrey University undergraduate, in Courland Grove hall of residence (in Battersea) in my first year and into Markenhorn (in Godalming) in my second. I have to add that Annette was wonderfully understanding and patient: no, more than that, she did her level best to empathise, and out of love not duty. I’m not sure now when and how my fervour faded and died, but it did. Following many a precedent I have swung quite vigorously towards a Dawkins-like atheism. Why?
I have a few observations/reflections to offer, not least as a sociologist. It needs to be recognised that any religion (or indeed equivalently closed or definitive ‘story’) can afford a degree of psychological security and comfort, more than a touch significant in our post-1970s era of accentuated social and political volatility. From the vantage point of lifeworld angst this is understandable, in terms of ideology, less so.
What is ideology? In my view, and in accord with that of classical sociology, an ideology represents a conveniently distorted ‘view of the world’ that suits the vested interests of a privileged minority. So what am I saying here? Marx suggested that religion too often amounts to a goodly dose of opium. So it does. It misleads, hides human culpability and points people in wrong directions. Moreover they look for fantastical answers to problems for which they can see no human solution. They talk to themselves and call it praying, then go home to resume normal living, sometimes – in deepest Surrey at least – as rentiers, tax evaders or financial predators (or elsewhere even as child-abusing priests).
Unsurprisingly given their long and potent histories, (state-)religions are often ‘fit for ruling purpose’, even when not explicitly ideological.
I used at Tower Hill and Hyde Park Corner as well as on radio and television to listen to the unorthodox Methodist orator Donald Soper, a socialist much given to open-air preaching: ‘we don’t want pie in the sky, we want ham where we am’ he used to announce (he was incidentally the best public speaker I have ever heard). Quite right too. Religion too often reconciles believers both to their own cognitive dissonance and to a status quo in rank contradiction with the values their sacred texts espouse.
My local vicar – and no, I don’t go to church – recently confessed that praying for world peace is asking a lot; and he suggested in the parish magazine that those with a predisposition to kneel, put their hands together, close their eyes and mutter in unison might be less ambitious: why not, he counseled, pray that one soldier somewhere misses his target. Any additional comment from me is, I trust, superfluous!
But religion is not of course just or only a politically expedient opiate the consumption of which the rich and powerful encourage in their publics. Furthermore, during financial capitalism there have occurred distinctive cultural shifts. Financial capitalism has been (conveniently) accompanied by (even if it hasn’t directly ‘caused’) a ‘postmodernisation’, or relativisation, of culture. The core notion that truth can be distinguished from, and in the process expose, ideology has been displaced by a corrupted sense that in the current era of post-truth ‘we all have our ideologies’, and can indeed pick and choose them at will. This has arguably weakened the influence of the major world religions. But, and as they say ‘it’s a big but’, a significantly relativised culture also encourages fundamentalisms. Why? Because people in personally difficult and volatile times are all the more inclined to search for absolute answers to questions about meaning, purpose and the future. Hence the emergence of (ethno-)religious fundamentalisms. Of course this too can be ideologically functional for political factions, and for resisters to Western imperialist capitalist regimes as well as for their promoters (eg some Islamicist groups).
If this is amounting to something of a diatribe I remain confident that those with religious convictions whom I know (at least) will feel obliged by doctrine and conviction, even compassion, to forgive me. But I conclude with a couple more statements. The first is that I think anything that takes away from the sense that we are (just) one species that happens to find itself on a particular planet alongside others, and that it is down to us to organise and re-organise our affairs to our collective advantage is diversionary at best, dangerous at worst, and in any case mistaken. The second is that I see people first and last as people, and I owe each and every one of them respect as such; but I also insist that I have the right to criticse their beliefs, some of which, as Dawkins has illustrated, are entirely fatuous (I worry about the fancy dress and arcane rituals too). I think intelligent adult humans should learn to face up to societies as they indubitably are, human and amendable constellations of institutions. I got there by my mid-20s, and I’ve grown a tad more militant about it all since.