The Return to Religion ~ Part Two
The Return to Religion ~ Part Two
The second in a two-part essay about whether we're seeing a renewal of religion in Western culture and what it might mean. Today, celebrity conversions and rediscovering something strikingly familiar.
A lot has been made of some very recent, very public, religious conversions. In the last six months alone, comedian Russell Brand was baptised in the Thames; actor Shia LaBeouf received the sacraments of confirmation into the Catholic church; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once a prominent “new atheist”, wrote an article titled “Why I Am Now a Christian”. A whole book and podcast series – both titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God – have been devoted to documenting this trend.
But there have always been Christian conversions, and we’ve always had Christian intellectuals. At best, this latest spate of converts is simply a return to the norm after a blip of culturally dominant atheism over the last twenty years. Besides, if a public conversion can count in religion’s favour, surely a public deconversion counts against it. Let’s not make this a numbers game.
What I find more interesting is the sense of familiarity, of return or homecoming, that underscores this recent renewal of faith. There seems to be less a feeling of discovery, of stumbling across religion as a previously unknown entity, and more a spirit of rediscovery. It’s as if childhood memories that stood dormant for decades are suddenly resurfacing. The old stories we once knew so well that they’d lost their vitality are now fresh again, saying something very old that we’re hearing as if for the first time. In the video announcing his baptism, Russell Brand says:
“As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all of our lives, within us and around us.”
Brand obviously believes this beckoning figure is Jesus Christ, but (as I wrote in my previous essay on my own rediscovery of religion) many of us are unable to put a face or a name to this mysterious figure. Depending on my mood, I might even prefer Roger Scruton’s imagery, not a person but a glimpse through a window in the winding staircase of life, where we “catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter”. This is what Wordsworth described as an “intimation”, and which Scruton himself describes as “moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words”.
Our trouble comes from our insistence on describing this view of the ineffable in terms that are definite, static, and with pre-defined boundaries into which this transcendence must be made to fit. People label this view through the window “God”, and they usually mean a very specific god with a particular name such as Yahweh or Allah; they give the figure a recognisable face, one attached to those aforementioned names. Often, the shadowy, familiar figure or the distant, wondrous place is taken as justification for faith or evidence for religious claims.
Some of us, however, take it not as the answer to a question, but as the question itself. A challenge. A revelation that who I am is not all I could possibly be, and that what I know is not all there is to know. In fact, what I know and who I am are incredibly small compared to the totality we glimpse fleetingly. Smallness within infinity. Brokenness contained in the whole. Mystery woven into the fabric of the known. It’s all these things and more. It’s also strikingly familiar, and yet somehow changed.
There’s a short story by Grant Allen called The Missing Link, in which these two lines burn like the white-hot filament inside a lightbulb:
“In his own study, he knelt down and prayed earnestly, fervently, to the God that never was, that never had been. You can’t conquer in a day the habits of a lifetime.”
This inability to build Rome in a day – or cause its collapse in twenty-four hours – has much to do with our culture’s losing battle in rejecting everything religious or founded on faith. Not only are we struggling to replace it with something, I’m convinced that even if we found some metaphysically stable and emotionally sustaining secular humanism (one that met our need for ritual, communion, and metaphor), the echoes of faith would still resonate through the walls of what we’d built. The tabula rasa that modern rationalists seek is impossible – the canvas will never be clean of the impressions and blemishes left by the images religion once painted there.
There are those who take this to mean we should simply repaint the religious picture on the canvas, that what we require to overcome nihilism and vacuous materialism is a return to traditional Christianity. I’m not convinced by this. To turn back to the source of problems that gave rise to our current forms of secularism and atheism, because the problems associated with those seem far worse, is obviously doomed. Regression leads to repetition.
There’s a section of society that proudly plumps itself on the opposite end of the spectrum; those who wish never to see religion again and, very often, have no deep knowledge of faith. This group not only rejects religion but (without knowing what they’re doing) denies also the fundamental human necessities that gave birth to religion in the first place. This hyper-practical, myopically-logical rejection of spiritual longing isn’t uncommon. I believe it’s based on a conflation of two distinct yet overlapping things that need parsing out to be understood: your tastes as an individual and the needs of your culture.
There are happy, intelligent people who don’t like to read, just as I live a fulfilled life absent an appreciation of dance (I neither speak nor understand its language). But an individual’s disregard for books or ballet does not negate society’s need for literature and dancing. There are those who get by with no more consideration of religion than entering a church for weddings or funerals. It’s possible that they manage this by not knowing what they’re missing – that in understanding nothing of religion and their cultural history, they also don’t know what’s lost in this salve of ignorance. Whatever the reason, these individuals are happy without Biblical stories and religious ritual. But that doesn’t prove that a culture can do without it.
It’s often at this point that a certain kind of religious believer will spring the trap, catching you in what they assume is an existential “gotcha” moment. “Aha,” they might say, “now that you appreciate where your values spring from, and can see that religion isn’t going away and that it would be to our detriment if it did, why not go all the way? Why not take the baptismal plunge and become a Christian?” It isn’t so easy, of course. Douglas Murray spoke of this challenge extended by the faithful, replying:
“History has happened, discoveries have happened, biblical criticism has happened, Darwin has happened, science has happened, discoveries have happened. The way in which we used to explain things we didn’t know, by putting God in there, has increasingly been narrowed so that, increasingly, we know through science and discoveries how certain things in our universe happen, how certain things in our bodies happen – and the role of God has diminished and diminished.”
In other words: we can’t believe in the way we used to believe. We know too much now. So where does that leave us?
For some, like the celebrities mentioned above, the conflict between what we know and what we feel leads to an embrace of religions from our past. They enter a faithful yesterday as a way of living in today. For others, it’s hard-headed atheism that makes sense of this dissonance, by drowning the religious impulse in fact-based knowledge.
And then there are those of us who recognise something familiar and profound and, quite possibly, vital in religion, and see the outstretched hand, yet cannot quite make contact. We won’t deny the Divine, as one group would have us do, nor pretend to know some things and pretend not to know others, as the other group would like.
We’re like the adventurer long-gone from the village that raised us, having travelled great distances over many years and, finally, returned to that land of our youth. Can we ever be who we once were? Would we want to if we could? Can this place ever be home again?
Or perhaps I’ve got it all wrong; perhaps it’s not we who are the returning wanderers – maybe it’s religion that’s returning to us, familiar yet changed. Now that I think of it, this is precisely how it’s been for me. It’s not been my return to religion after all. It’s religion that has returned to me. The distant figure approaches, beckons. How will we greet it?
Further Reading:
• “Why I Am Now a Christian”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in UnHerd (2023)
• “Effing the Ineffable”, Roger Scruton, in Confessions of a Heretic (2016)
• The Rare or Unread Stories of Grant Allen: 1848-1899, “The Missing Link”, Grant Allen (2019)
• “Douglas Murray and Jonathan Pageau | EP 290”, The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (2023)