This Great Absence
What's left of religion when we remove belief, and what can we fill that space with?
I was raised in a fundamentalist Evangelicalism that was dismissive of critical enquiry. There was no need (it was taught) to examine what was undoubtedly true. I held onto this Christianity until I was nineteen, when I was struck by the usual laundry list of life events that tend to precipitate a fall away from faith, and after one reading of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I began advocating atheism with the same proselytising zeal that had informed my previous faith.
Through my twenties, I found myself (to quote from the poet Hugh Mearns) continually crossing paths with a “man who wasn’t there”. As I travelled up and down the stairs of my late-twenties, I’d find “he wasn’t there again today” and I’d “wish he’d go away”. This man who wasn’t there and who haunted me took on many forms.
At first, he embodied literature, and I ran to books to answer his call. Then he resembled mythology, and I learned what I could of the old stories. Entering my thirties, he began to look like something I thought I’d left far behind: religion. This figure was twisting its thumb into the open wound of what the poet and doubt-filled believer R. S. Thomas called a “great absence”.
“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply ...”
The philosopher Jürgen Habermas once described the memorial service of an irreligious friend, at which there was an empty coffin and no priest or “amen”. This was designed, said Habermas, to point out that “the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rîte de passage which brings life to a close.” He told this anecdote in a lecture he titled with a phrase that you cannot forget once you’ve heard it: “An awareness of what is missing.”
This evaluation of modernity leaves out the complimentary realisation that there’s also an absence in the church. Without the religious trappings of priests and rites and so on, the humanist memorial seemed rather empty — but without those features of faith, the church is hollowed out too. What’s left of religion when we scoop out belief and scrape the interiors of faith clean of unjustified credulity?
More traditional believers would have it that nothing — or nothing of value — is left after this process. They point to this vacuity as the reason faith must be defended from criticism or modernisation. Where does that leave those of us so made (as Blaise Pascal described my kind) that we cannot believe? Are we supposed to pretend that we don’t know how to use logic, and pretend that we cannot see the fallacies in religious apologetics, and pretend that we are convinced in spite of a lack of evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary?
In his Pensées, this is precisely what Pascal’s imagined interlocutor asks of him. The mathematician offers his suggestion for how we might “cure [ourselves] of unbelief”. All we need do is “follow the way by which [previous converts] began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.” In short, act like a believer until habit anaesthetises you to your disbelief and inculcates faith within you. Shorter still: fake it until you make it.
Anyone can see that this is intellectually dishonest and even cowardly, hence the rising popularity of apologetics, which attempts to strongarm reason into demonstrating what the religious want it to show, that their particular religion is literally, philosophically, and scientifically true. So far, it’s a failed project, at least for me and a huge number of others through history and across the globe. So we’re left with metaphysically empty churches (which are increasingly becoming actually empty churches as congregations wither). We have a “god-shaped hole” left in us by a god inconsiderate enough to not exist.
The task of addressing this absence is left to nonbelievers and those who don’t fall within the brackets of traditional faith, whose collective response has been a form of “religion without religion” (in Jacques Derrida’s term for it). Ex-bishop Richard Holloway suggests treating formalised faith like “the rocket that has to fall away when it has established its satellite in space”, its payload here being the values and ideals of which religion has been the carrier for millennia.
The sticking point for some in our relativistic times is a self-refuting denial of any values or ideals. This reminds me of the Red King in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who, on being told that a particular text has no meaning, remarks, “If there’s no meaning ... that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.” But I don’t write for those who take the view that anything can mean anything and so everything means nothing at all. I write for those who suspect life is far deeper and grander and more difficult and worth grappling with — and that ordinary ways of speaking fail us in expressing that grandeur.
Time and again, those seeking somewhere to ask the deepest questions of human existence find that religion is still the primary place for such questions. Indeed, oftentimes they’re the only refuge for the spiritually curious or malnourished. At the church I grew up in, we often heard the “testimonies” of converts. These were often predictable: hadn’t taken religion seriously, in a bad place in their twenties, they go through something as dramatic as almost dying, or as banal as a minor existential crisis at the club while vomiting up that twelfth vodka and coke. Whatever it is, it convinces them there must be a better way to live. And they end up at a church because there’s nowhere else offering them something more.
This is their own “great absence” that they fill with belief. And when the religious sanctuaries they turn to harbour extremist renditions of the faith, it can be difficult to divorce this danger from the respite they’ve found. Better that these lost souls find a temple for “religion without religion”, a place that neither denies their brokenness nor masks it with false consolations, but confronts and transforms it. Their communion could be a confrontation with the absence of God, to creatively address the voids in their lives. A knowledge of what is missing might just be what fulfils us.
Perhaps, then, we should fill the empty space of abandoned religion with that empty space itself. For too long it was filled with absolutism, with the insistence on the literal existence of things better understood as metaphors. Perhaps what ought to replace this is radical uncertainty, a humble doubt that we bring to bear on our convictions. We can create spaces in which we inhabit our ignorance and meet with our errors, which allow us to glimpse transcendence. These spaces could — I’d even say should — be in our churches and other sacred places.
There will always be religious conservatives and ardent traditionalists who reject this approach to their deeply-held faiths. I think these well-meaning believers miss an undeniable truth, which is that, as Philip Almond puts it in his book God: A new biography (2018), “the biography of the unchangeable God is the story of his seemingly infinite capacity to change”. Religion has transformed in myriad ways, just as many of us have changed our minds on the question of whether a god literally exists. The egg cannot be unscrambled — it’s impossible to maintain one’s intellectual integrity and pretend to believe in the old style of belief. This is part of what constitutes the “great absence” we’re left with.
But the absence isn’t all that there is. There are things left to work with, stories to be retold and understood in new ways. What emerges from this endeavour might just be like Cervantes’ moon over Don Quixote, which “shone with a splendour that might vie even with that whence it was borrowed”. The void need not remain in darkness; we can fill it with light.