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The celebration of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 marked the high point of British imperial history. It was, without doubt, a supreme moment of national self-confidence and self-congratulation, exceeding in enthusiasm even the Golden Jubilee of a decade earlier. The British had created the greatest empire that the world had ever known, on which the sun never set - and much of its colorful diversity was on display in the streets of London that summer. Londoners watched amazed as processions of native soldiers of all races paraded past in dazzling uniforms. If ever the British needed reassurance of the grandeur of their empire, this was it.
But earth's proud empires fade away, as an old hymn had it. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) had his doubts. Writing at the height of the Jubilee celebrations on June 22, he expressed his deep unease with things in the poem "Recessional." The crowds were "drunk with sight of power"; but was there anything to sustain the empire other than force? Unless founded upon God's will, the empire must surely pass into history, to join others that were great in their day, and now lay forgotten. Far-called, our navies melt away;Perhaps Kipling had realized that the foundations of that empire were already shifting beneath his feet. It could not go on. Something had to give. But for many on that momentous day, such thoughts would have been completely out of order. What could go wrong? The same process of rise and fall, growth and decay, can be seen in the great empires of the human mind. There comes a point when their growth stalls, their attraction pales, and their credibility falters. And often it comes as a surprise, its predictability - like a decline in the stock market - only evident with the benefit of hindsight. Atheism is in trouble. Its glory days lie far behind it. Its future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its natural habitat. The attraction of atheism proved not to be universal, but was limited to certain situations - situations that were rapidly disappearing into the past, losing their impact on the popular imagination. Distant memories of atheism as a liberator competed with more recent memories of atheism as an oppressor. So how did this reversal of roles come about? But my young mind was not quite ready for such complicating ideas; I preferred to keep things simple, and the fundamentalist atheism I knew was ideal for my purposes. Religion was bad for you, at every level - socially, personally, and politically. The French and Russian Revolutions showed us what atheists could do when they put their mind to changing the world. It was time for another major revolution, to accomplish at the global level what these had achieved locally. I freely admit that with the benefit of hindsight, these ideas were simplistic in the extreme, making many religious ideas look sophisticated by comparison. But these were the ideas that were in circulation in the 1960s, and I and many others found them entrancing. The bottom line of the argument is that liberation is an excellent thing and oppression a bad thing. As religion oppresses and atheism liberates, you can work out the politics for yourself. But what if these roles are historically conditioned? In other words, what would happen if the role of atheism as a liberator was determined by the specifics of a given historical situation, and was not universally true? Or if religion was only oppressive in certain contexts, and liberating in others? There is no doubt that many French intellectuals of the mid-eighteenth century despised the church for its social backwardness and its unsophisticated theology, and saw atheism as a much-needed and long-overdue breath of fresh air. But it is not a universal pattern, as can be seen from a more detailed study of history. One case study - the development of Christianity in Korea during the twentieth century - illuminates the point at issue with special clarity and force. The origins of Christianity in Korea go back to the late eighteenth century, when a small Catholic community was established following initiatives from Beijing, China. The small Christian community was vigorously persecuted during the nineteenth century. Of the total Christian population of about 18,000, it is thought that 8,000 were massacred. However, a degree of stability resulted when a friendship treaty was signed with the United States in 1882. Shortly afterward, American Protestant missionaries arrived in Korea and began to establish major medical and educational missions in the country. Nevertheless, at the dawn of the twentieth century only a tiny proportion of the country was Christian - just under 1 percent, according to the best estimates. Yet an authoritative survey of the religious commitments of the Korean people published in 2000, the closing year of the twentieth century, showed that 49 percent of the population was Christian. So how and why did this massive change come about? How did a country with virtually no Christian presence come to be very nearly a Christian nation? There is no doubt that a decisive factor in this development was that Christianity was perceived as a liberator, not an oppressor, by Koreans in the twentieth century. Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 and remained under Japanese rule until the end of the Second World War. Christianity was seen as allied with Korean nationalism, especially in the face of Japanese oppression. Elsewhere in Asia, Christianity was easily depicted by its critics as the lackey of Western imperialism. In Korea, however, the enemy was not the West, but Japan. Throughout this time, Christians played an active role in the Korean independence movement out of all proportion to their numbers. Of the 123 people tried for insurgence by the Japanese in the 1911 popular revolt against Japanese rule, 98 were Christians. At this time, Christians made up just over 1 percent of the Korean population. Though a tiny presence in the nation, Christianity was a liberator in the Korean context. History is about the specifics of any given situation, and religion is seen as liberating in some contexts, and restrictive and oppressive in others. Today, South Korea sends out Christian missionaries to nations throughout Asia. The large Korean populations in major Western cities, from Sydney to Los Angeles, from Melbourne to New York, are closely linked in a network of churches, which often act cooperatively and provide mutual support and spiritual nourishment. And as North Korea shows signs of economic crisis and political instability, the question of the future religious development of this hardline Communist state remains completely open. The anecdotal evidence suggests that Christianity has already made deep inroads within the northern population, and is expected to grow further in the next decade. The credentials of atheism as a political and intellectual liberator have also been called into question. Once more, its social role is found to be determined by the historical context. Without doubt, atheism was seen as a liberator in France in the 1790s, in Germany in the 1840s, and in Russia during the 1910s, to mention just a few especially important moments in recent Western history. But at other times and places, atheism has been seen as socially and intellectually repressive - for example, throughout Eastern Europe after the Second World War. The ruthless repression of academic freedom at that time (largely ignored, it must be said, by the Western liberal intelligentsia) is a powerful reminder that a worldview that demands freedom when in opposition can become astonishingly intolerant of its rivals when in power. It is not of the essence of atheism to be a liberator, nor of religion to be an oppressor. Those roles are determined by the contingencies of history. Perhaps the social conditions may return under which atheism is once more liberating, and religion oppressive. But that day now seems far away. "New presbyter is but old priest writ large." With these words, written in 1646, John Milton expressed the depressing insight that radical religious change often led to tinkering with the vocabulary, rather than eliminating the vices, of the religious establishment. Rather than proving the exception to this rule, atheism has simply confirmed it. Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. On closer inspection, and with greater familiarity over time, it turned out to be just as bad, possessed of just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as its religious alternatives. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. When young and innocent, and seen against the backdrop of a weary and stale religious establishment, atheism possessed the double appeal of novelty and integrity. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, atheism seems to have ended up by mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively. Yet this is not to say anything especially negative about atheism - merely that it is just as prone as any other system of thought to the frailties and failings of human nature. Far from being a solution to the human dilemma, it has become part of the problem. A further question may be raised here. As we have seen, Nietzsche argued that God is dead - meaning that God has ceased to be a meaningful reality in Western culture. But was this actually good news? Nietzsche himself was far from sure. If God is dead, Nietzsche pointed out, people would transfer their old faith in God to something else. They had to believe in something. With precocious foresight, Nietzsche declared that, having lost faith in God, people would now put their trust in barbaric "brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers." For many, this was an alarming prediction - precisely because it was predictable - of the rise of the tribalism of the Nazis and other dubious groups. It is as if humanity has to have faith in and be loyal to some individual or group. If God is declared to be out of the running, Nietzsche argues, we turn to other absolutist groups and creeds - such as Adolf Hitler or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The elimination of God from Western culture has its darker side, which regrettably has yet to be conceded and explored fully by those who urge it. Yet liberation embraces more than social and political issues. One of the most important criticisms directed against religion by Sigmund Freud was that it encouraged unhealthy and dysfunctional outlooks on life. Having dismissed religion as an illusion, Freud went on to argue that it was a negative factor in personal development. His views have had a major impact on the practice of health care in the West, especially in the United States. At times, Freud's influence has been such that the elimination of a person's religious beliefs has been seen as a precondition for mental health. Yet Freud is now a fallen idol, the fall having been all the heavier for its postponement. The toppling of Freud from his seemingly unassailable position in American culture was a slow process. Frank Sulloway's Freud-Biologist of the Mind (1979) raised some difficult questions concerning Freud's scientific credentials. Adolf Griinbaum's Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984) drew attention to the many failings and vulnerabilities of his theories. It was left to Frederick Crews, however, in his Unauthorized Freud (1998), to popularize a growing body of professional literature that challenged Freud at every level, calling into question the reliability of his original case studies and the integrity of his therapeutic methods, and highlighting the credulity of his followers. Freud, it was argued, had a worrying tendency to convert the accidents of social history into the necessary truths of human nature. The long-overdue outcome was to bring about a collapse of confidence in Freud's judgments concerning religion at the level of popular culture, this conclusion having been reached at least a decade earlier in professional circles. There is now growing awareness of the importance of spirituality in health care, both as a positive factor in relation to well-being and as an issue to which patients have a right. The major conference "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine," sponsored by Harvard Medical School in 1998, drew public and professional attention as never before to the issue of incorporating spirituality into professional medicine. It was there reported that 86 percent of Americans as a whole, 99 percent of family physicians, and 94 percent of HMO professionals now believe that prayer, meditation, and other spiritual and religious practices exercise a major positive role within the healing process. Atheist writers, such as Kevin Courcey, generally dismiss this as superstitious nonsense. Yet these viewpoints are grounded in a growing body of empirical evidence that has established a positive correlation between spirituality and health, especially in relation to how patients cope with illness and subsequently recover from it. Without in any way offering a judgment on the truth of patients' religious beliefs, this evidence points unequivocally to the health benefits of faith. It does not exclude the possibility that such beliefs are indeed "superstitious nonsense" - but that was not the object of the investigations. Whatever the truth of these religious beliefs, they are increasingly regarded as therapeutic by medical practitioners. The outcome of this is significant. There is now growing pressure from patients and health care professionals for the religious views of patients to be incorporated on a consensual basis into medical treatment, especially in relation to the care of the dying. The simple fact of the matter is that religion matters profoundly to many in the West, who wish - without forcing those views on others - to have them incorporated into the health care they receive. Whatever atheists may feel about this, Christians and other religionists believe that their faith has a positive impact upon their lives, and wish to exercise their freedom in this matter. One of those positive aspects of religion concerns the creation of community, to which we may now turn. The role of religion in creating and sustaining communal identity has been known for some considerable time, and has become increasingly important since about 1965. One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms. Great Britain has seen substantial immigration from the Indian subcontinent. Yet the communities that have arisen within British cities self-define using religious (rather than national) parameters, with places of worship acting as community centers. The British media have learned not to speak of "Indian" communities in Britain, but of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities, and to expect the identities of these communities to be focused on the local gudwara, temple, or mosque. A similar pattern is found in France, where substantial immigration has taken place from Algeria and other North African countries. Once more, these communities define themselves primarily in religious terms, with the mosques of Paris and Marseilles sustaining the identity of France's five million Muslims. The importance of religion in shaping the identity of this community has forced the French government to reconsider its traditional secularist attitudes and give increasing recognition to the importance of religion in national life. Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. The more entrepreneurial of American churches have recently begun to develop this role further, seeing the church as an oasis of communal stability in a rapidly changing culture. The August 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly ran an article by Charles Trueheart entitled "Welcome to the Next Church," which featured some of the more radical and innovative approaches now being adopted in Christian worship and life. A good example of these new approaches is found in the Mariners Church, close to Newport Beach, California, which has recently merged with a neighboring megachurch to become Mariners Southcoast Church. The success of this church, and countless others like it, can be attributed to their recognition of the importance of creating a sense of community identity. People want to belong, not just believe. Such churches see themselves as "islands in the stream," like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, offering safety and community to travelers on the journey of life. Identity is about belonging somewhere. And the community churches see themselves as providing a place where its members belong. A community church is like small-town America of bygone days, with a population numbered in the low thousands. There is a sense of belonging to a common group, of shared values, and of knowing each other. People don't just go to community churches; they see themselves as belonging there. "Belonging to Mariners or any other large church conveys membership in a community, with its benefits of friends and solace and purpose, and the deep satisfaction of service to others." At a time when American society appears to be fragmenting, the community churches offer cohesion. Thus Mariners offers its members a whole range of social activities, all designed to meet needs, offer service, and forge community. On the morning that Trueheart visited the church, he discovered seminars on single parenting, meetings on recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, women's Bible studies, a session on divorce dynamics, and a men's retreat - to mention just a few. As Trueheart notes, these churches "are proving themselves to be breeding grounds for personal renewal and human interconnectedness." It is important to make this connection with the changing face of America. In a much-cited article published in the November 1994 number of the same Atlantic Monthly, management guru Peter Drucker made the following point concerning the "Age of Social Transformation": "The old communities - family, village, parish, and so on - have all but disappeared in the knowledge society. Their place has largely been taken by the new unit of social integration, the organization. Where community was fate, organization is voluntary membership." In the old days, community was defined by where you lived. It was part of the inherited order of things, something that you were born into. Now, it has to be created - and the agency that creates this community is increasingly the voluntary organization. Christian churches are strategically placed to create and foster community, where more negative social forces are destroying it in American society as a whole. The community churches have proved especially effective in this role, and have grown immensely in consequence. But what of atheism? The importance of creating a sense of community was recognized at an early stage in the history of the Soviet Union. Having eliminated religion from the public life of the nation, Soviet planners recognized the importance of creating rituals and events that fostered social cohesion and a sense of identity. These were often deliberately conceived as alternatives to their Christian counterparts. Thus the Saturday just before Easter was celebrated as Communist Saturday. Other holidays in the official Soviet calendar included May Day, Victory Day (May 9), Constitution Day (October 7), and Revolution Day (November 7-8). The Soviet year was thus organized in such a way as to commemorate and affirm the fundamental principles of the government and the events that founded it and preserved it. Additional rituals were devised as counterparts to the Christian rite of baptism and confirmation - for example, the "family event" to mark the birth of a new child, or the ceremony to mark admission to the Communist Party. As the Gennan sociologist Benno Ennker has shown, the cult of Lenin was developed as a means of ensuring social cohesion and political loyalty throughout the Union (the parallel with the Roman emperor cult of the first century is both remarkable and illuminating). The origins of this development go back to 1924, and can be seen as an attempt to inculcate the idea that Lenin's ideals are immortalized in the ethos of the Soviet Union, with the Communist Party as the guardian of this heritage. Historians have noted the obvious and presumably intentional substitution of secular alternatives for Jesus Christ and his church, the anticipated outcome being that the Russian people would make this switch of allegiance without undue difficulty, and show the same loyalty to the party as they once had to the church. Once invented, these rituals became part of nonnal Soviet life. Yet their potency derived from their imposition by the state, and the fact that no alternatives were permitted. They were intended to represent and solidify the values and beliefs of Marxism-Leninism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, these rituals and cults were replaced by a renewed commitment to those of the Russian Orthodox church, or retained with drastic modifications to make them more acceptable in a post-Soviet and postatheist era. The nearest thing in the West to this Soviet model is found in Canada, which seems to think that a sense of community identity can only be created by eliminating any religious presence in the public arena. Religions create division, right? So the best way of creating social cohesion is to keep them out of the public square. Archbishop Michael Peers used his 2002 New Year sermon, preached in Ottawa Cathedral, to raise doubts about this kind of approach: "Secularism, according to some contributors to this debate, will bring unity and strength to our country by removing from its life the divisiveness of religion," he noted. "This kind of thing, I think, would prove to be not only a suppression of the pluralist reality, but also a folly of the worst sort for society. If we think we can achieve unity by the suppression of knowledge of, and respect for, religious diversity, then we will never understand our world." Canada prides itself on its multiculturalism, he argued, yet is moving to eliminate references to the faiths that underpin that culture. "Imagine telling Sikhs and Muslims that their culture is respected in this country but the society has no place for their faith. Faith and culture are intimately connected." But what of atheism in the United States, where the kind of social and intellectual uniformity demanded and imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is unthinkable, let alone unrealizable? Here, atheism spawns organizations; it does not create community. To give one example: the state chapters and national convention of American Atheists, coupled with this organization's atheist equivalent of creeds, certainly did something to create a sense of shared identity. Yet the community thus created seems to be based solely on a distaste for religion. It doesn't even have a good organizational base, and lacks charismatic leadership - a fatal weakness, to which we now turn. This comprehensive failure of leadership within their institutions is widely discussed within atheist circles. Howard Thompson, sometime editor of the Texas Atheist, is undoubtedly one of the most able and reflective atheists in the United States. In his op-ed piece "Who Speaks for Atheism?," Thompson criticized the movement for its lack of direction: "Atheism in America is poorly defined with little organization. We have less social and cultural infrastructure than even the smallest religious groups. . . Atheism desperately needs effective public voices. We need informed, well-spoken people presenting our material realism in opposition to supernaturalism. We need honest, effective representatives building a positive public image for atheism." And why has this failed to happen? Thompson lays much of the blame at the feet of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whom he regards as the movement's greatest liability. To his indignation, her organization has failed to learn from her mistakes, and persists in depicting her as a hero, even a martyr, for the atheist cause. Can't atheists learn from their mistakes? Atheism has a problem. For thirty years Madalyn O'Hair was the most visible atheist. What Madalyn did and said WAS atheism to the public, and it was nasty. The disappearance of the O'Hairs in September 1995 gave hope that more positive atheist initiatives might develop. That's why atheists should worry about the revival of Madalyn's American Atheists, Inc. under the leadership of Ellen Johnson, who assumed the office of President in a questionable Board of Directors meeting. Ellen Johnson is also a die-hard Madalyn fan who continues to present Madalyn as an atheist heroine. What atheism doesn't need is a continuation of Madalyn's negativity. . . Madalyn's style and limited vision stifled positive atheist growth.What we find in modem American atheism is one of the great dilemmas of all movements that owe their origins and inspiration to a charismatic founding individual. As time passes, the limitations of the founder become a liability rather than an asset. Madalyn's atheism was crude, anti-intellectual, and homophobic, making even the more zealous fundamentalist Christian seem a model of liberal values. So what is to be done? For Thompson, the answer is clear: grow leaders. It is something that the Christian churches have been doing for years, and they have rather overwhelmed atheism's somewhat unimpressive attempts to date in this area. In another op-ed piece, "The Unlit Bonfire," Thompson argues that a new dawn lies around the comer - if only the leadership issue can be resolved. "Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition by programming or choice." But who will lead them? And can this goal actually be achieved? The fatal flaw within Thompson's argument, found within many other atheist tracts and publications, is his strident insistence that humanity has been enslaved by supernaturalist superstition. It is merely necessary to educate people, he believes, and these mad ideas will fall away, leaving everyone the better for having lost them. Thompson and his colleagues have not even begun to understand a fundamental fact about religion: people actually like their faith, find it helpful in structuring their lives, and inconveniently believe that it might actually be true. More worrying for Thompson, his alternative to the rich fare of a transcendent faith is "a materialistic culture that frees humanity from superstition." This sounds dull, dated, and gray, about as exciting as a lecture on Bulgarian Marxist dialectics. The failure of atheism to capture the public imagination in the West is a reflection of its failure to articulate a compelling imaginative vision of a godless future, capable of exciting people and making them want to gather together to celebrate and proclaim it. The same dullness pervades the National Secular Society (founded in 1866), the nearest thing Great Britain has to an atheist network. Its Web site, which I visited late in 2002, was a museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity. You can buy a secular mug with the slogan "Just say no to religion!" Or even better, you can download an official Certificate of De-Baptism (medieval font needed) that lets your friends know that you have rejected the "creeds and all other such superstition" in the name of reason. Rationalism, having quietly died out in most places, still lives on here. Yet Western culture has bypassed this aging little ghetto, having long since recognized the limitations of reason. The Enlightenment lives on for secularists. Atheism is wedded to philosophical modernity, and both are aging gracefully in the cultural equivalent of an old folks' home. And, for those who find their tracts wearisome, the society thoughtfully provides a religious jokes page, which will interest those who like to fantasize about the size of Adam's penis in the Garden of Eden, or the masturbatory habits of nuns. It's the best bit of the site, with a significantly higher intellectual content than what surrounds it. It's grossly offensive, of course, to Christians and others - but hey, that's part of the game! With arguments of this caliber, it can only be weeks before Britain embraces atheism for its cultural sensitivity and good taste. Here's an example of atheism's winsome arguments: Q. What's the difference between Jesus and a painting?It makes my friends outside the church cringe with embarrassment. Yet I have the impression this is actually meant to persuade people of the intellectual and cultural superiority of a world without religion. Howard Thompson clearly has a point. Nevertheless, serious issues are occasionally debated on the Web site, including the question of why secular humanism, with its commitment to atheism, has so singularly failed to capture the public imagination. One obvious answer might be the National Secular Society itself, which exudes a pious tedium, trapped in a time warp of the closing decades of the nineteenth century, that seems almost to have been deliberately designed to alienate potential recruits. This is not mentioned on the site, for some reason. However, one of those to wrestle with the issues - a Dr. Reginald Le Sueur - put his finger unerringly on the real point at issue: "The problem with Humanism as such, is that although rational, secular, and 'true,' it is, in comparison with major religions somewhat wishy-washy, and just plain unexciting. It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, as it has no great myths and legends, or blood and thunder sermonising, and no eschatology of its own, but only a denial and criticism of that of the religions." Atheism is here recognized as derivative, its attraction residing primarily in what it denies, rather than what it articulates as an alternative. On this showing, secularism is as dull as it comes, making a pallid appeal to the reason and failing to engage the imagination and emotions. A Pentecostal worship experience is going to trump anything atheism can offer by way of the secular equivalent of worship. So does atheism have a future? I have no doubt that it does. But it does not seem to me to be an especially distinguished or exciting future. Listen to John Updike. "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position." I have to confess that I now share his catatonic sense of utter tedium when I reread some of the atheist works I once found fascinating as a teenager, and now see as simplistic, failing to engage with the complexities of human experience, and seriously out of tune with our postmodem culture. It is easy to write atheism off as something that need no longer be taken with great seriousness. But that would be a massive misjudgment. In bringing this work to a close, we must appreciate the deadly seriousness of the atheist critique of religion. While it is tempting to see atheism as a philosophy that is receding into the past, the reality is much more complex. Atheism stands in permanent judgment over arrogant, complacent, and superficial Christian churches and leaders. It needs to be heard. In the closing pages of this work, its concerns will be taken seriously and to heart. Paradoxically, history strongly suggests that those who are attracted to atheism are first repelled by theism. What propels people toward atheism is above all a sense of revulsion against the excesses and failures of organized religion. Atheism is ultimately a worldview of fear - a fear, often merited, of what might happen if religious maniacs were to take over the world. The existence and appeal of atheism in the West is thus largely derivative, mirroring the failings of the churches and specific ways of conceiving the Christian faith. As the critics of Homeric religion made clear, the attractions of a godless world rest upon a sense of revulsion against the god(s). Who wanted to worship or imitate gods such as Zeus and Athene, when they merely immortalized the worst moral failings of human beings? The rejection of the general idea of a god rested on the belief that gods were immoral and capricious. Voltaire held no brief for atheism; nevertheless, he believed that the corruption and arrogance of the French church of his day had done more than anything else to propel its antithesis to the forefront of debate, and give it an appeal that it would otherwise never have possessed. That same concern remains of fundamental importance to modem atheism. In the end, debates about whether God's existence can be proved remain marginal; it is widely conceded that neither the existence nor nonexistence of God can be demonstrated with anything approaching certainty. The central issue is moral and imaginative. Many individuals continue to find aspects of - for example - the Christian rendering of God to be offensive, in that the Christian God seems to fall short in goodness or wisdom. Setting to one side spurious and fractious forms of atheism, which woodenly reject any spiritual dimension to life on a priori grounds, a serious and morally demanding atheism poses a fundamental challenge to concepts of divinity that are seen to be morally defective. The most fundamental criticisms directed against Christianity have to do with the moral character of its God, and often focus specifically on the issue of eternal punishment. No theological issue posed greater difficulties for Victorian England, as the writings of George Eliot make clear. It was for this reason that Charles Darwin found his faith, surprisingly unchallenged by his views on evolution, to be stretched beyond its modest capacity. Others had similarly serious misgivings. "Eternal punishment must be eternal cruelty - and I do not see how any man, unless he has the brain of an idiot, or the heart of a wild beast, can believe in eternal punishment" (Robert Ingersoll). Despite its opportunistic overstatement, Ingersoll's complaint resonates deeply with many who find an apparent contradiction between their deepest intuitions of fairness and the traditionally conceived Christian God. Christian apologists cannot hope simply to assert such doctrines as eternal damnation and expect Western culture to nod approvingly. This culture is not predisposed to reject Christian doctrines as a matter of principle; it is taken by surprise by what seems to represent a massive retreat from our culture's most fundamental notions of decency and evenhandedness. Atheism arises mainly through a profound sense that religious ideas and values are at least inferior to, and possibly irreconcilable with, the best moral standards and ideals of human culture. In its most intense and authentic forms, atheism enters a powerful protest against what it sees to be morally or intellectually inferior visions of reality, or institutions grounded in and proclaiming such visions, precisely because they enslave people, preventing them from achieving their true potential. In their place, atheism offered visions of a larger freedom, allowing humanity to throw aside its chains and enter a new and glorious phase in their history. It is perhaps not surprising that many sympathize with Dostoyevsky's character Ivan Karamazov when he respectfully returns God's ticket, in the face of the suffering, pain, and injustice of the world. Christianity must provide answers - good answers - to such fair questions and never assume that it can recycle yesterday's answers to today's concerns. But the real significance of atheism has to do with its critique of power and privilege. Whatever their failings - and they are many - atheist organizations are right in challenging the idea that any religious grouping can enjoy special privileges in a democratic society. Such groupings have a right to respect, but cannot expect to have influence beyond their demographically determined limits. When religion becomes the establishment, an abuse of power results that corrupts the worldview. When religion starts getting ideas about power, atheism soars in its appeal. The converse is, of course, true. The rise of militant Islam in Afghanistan was the direct outcome of the Soviet invasion of that nation in 1979, and its clumsy attempts to support an atheist regime. As Karen Armstrong has repeatedly pointed out in her Battle for God (2000), the best way to encourage the rise of religious fundamentalism is to try and impose a secular agenda on people who want to get on with their religious lives. The great secularist attempt to control religion by confining it to a purely private space has failed. More than that; it has backfired by causing a reaction against precisely those goals it hoped to achieve. Atheism's concerns about the Christian exertion of power, status, and influence resonate with many within the church, who find no such imperative to domination within the New Testament. The assumption of the foundational documents of the Christian church is that Christianity is excluded from the establishment, and thus insulated from the temptations and corruption that power brings in its wake - temptations and corruptions, it may be added, to which institutionalized state atheism has shown itself to be equally vulnerable. For many reflective Christians, the church began to lose its compelling moral and spiritual vision with the conversion of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. A movement that was at its most authentic while powerless and weak now became exposed to forces that compromised its integrity. Yet it must be noted that Christianity is a dynamic entity, constantly changing in its form as it seeks to relate its foundational heritage in the New Testament to the situations in which it finds itself. The churches possess an inbuilt capacity to reform and renew themselves, learning from past errors and exploring new ways of embodying the gospel vision in the future. As our survey has indicated, atheist criticisms of the church are at their most compelling and persuasive when they are directed against the failings of the institution of the church, particularly in the case of the state churches of Western Europe. But these are only one form of Christian self-expression, determined by historical contingencies - such as the politics of early modem Europe - not by the essentials of the Christian gospel. Such churches are on their way out, to be replaced by more dynamic forms of Christian community with a concern for service rather than status. The dramatic rise of Pentecostalism among the urban poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a telling indication of the new trends within the worldwide Christian movement. The essential difficulty here is that the classic atheist criticisms of the church do not quite ring true any longer, even in the homelands of the much-derided state churches of Western Europe. The repetition of stale cliches from the golden age of atheism sounds increasingly out of touch with postmodern reality. The rise of atheism in the West was undoubtedly a protest against a corrupted and complacent church; yet paradoxically, it has energized Christianity to reform itself, in ways that seriously erode the credibility of those earlier criticisms. Where atheism criticizes, wise Christians move to reform their ways. The atheist dilemma is that Christianity is a moving target whose trajectory is capable of being redirected without losing its anchor point in the New Testament. And as the theologian John Henry Newman pointed out, Christianity must listen to such criticisms from outside its bounds precisely because listening may be a way of recapturing its vision of the gospel. A static atheism finds a moving Christianity highly inconvenient. Some atheists have argued that the phenomenon of globalization can only advance a secularist agenda, eliminating religion from the public arena. If the world is to have a shared future, it can only be by eliminating what divides its nations and peoples - such as religious beliefs. Yet many have pointed out in response that globalization seems to be resulting in a quite different outcome. Far from being secularized, the West is experiencing a new interest in religion. Patterns of immigration mean that Islam and Hinduism are now major living presences in the cities of Western Europe and North America. Pentecostalism is a rapidly growing force, strengthened by the arrival of many Asian and African Christians in the West. The future looks nothing like the godless and religionless world so confidently predicted forty years ago. Political opportunism and cultural sensitivity have led to religious beliefs being treated with new respect. The atheist agenda, once seen as a positive force for progress, is now seen as disrespectful toward cultural diversity. It is a highly significant trend, marking a decisive transition in perceptions. The attractions of a world without God depend on whether the presence of God is seen as a positive matter. For this reason, the appeal and fortunes of atheism do not entirely lie within its own control. If I am to assess the attraction of the atheist vision, I will need to be able to imagine a world with God before coming to any decision. Where religion is seen to oppress, confine, deprive, and limit, atheism may well be seen as offering humanity a larger vision of freedom. But where religion manages to anchor itself in the hearts and minds of ordinary people, is sensitive to their needs and concerns, and offers them a better future, the less credible the atheist critique will appear. Believers need to realize that, strange though it may seem, it is they who will have the greatest impact on atheism's future. Paradoxically, the future of atheism will be determined by its religious rivals. Those atheists looking for a surefire way to increase their appeal need only to hope (for we cannot reasonably ask them to pray) for harsh, vindictive, and unthinking forms of religion to arise in the West, which will so alienate Westerners that they will rush into godlessness from fear and dislike of its antithesis. When religion is seen as a threat to the people, it will fail; when it is seen as their friend, it will flourish. It is therefore important to note how the American Revolution singularly failed to promote atheism, in that forms of Christianity accustomed to opposing the British religious establishment played a leading role in its success. In his problematic but fascinating work The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued that history showed that cultures came into being for religious reasons. As they exhausted the potential of that spirituality, religion gave way to atheism, before a phase of religious renewal gave them a new sense of direction. Might atheism have run its course, and now give way to religious renewal? The tides of cultural shift have left atheism beached for the time being on the sands of modernity, while Westerners explore a new postmodern interest in the forbidden fruit of spirituality. But will it stay there? Might the tide change once more, and the ship of atheism return to the high seas? Its fate lies with others - with the uncontrollable and unpredictable shifts in Western culture and the equally erratic behavior of religious activists. Western atheism now finds itself in something of a twilight zone. Once a worldview with a positive view of reality, it seems to have become a permanent pressure group, its defensive agenda dominated by concerns about limiting the growing political influence of religion. But is this the twilight of a sun that has sunk beneath the horizon, to be followed by the darkness and cold of the night? Or is it the twilight of a rising sun, which will bring a new day of new hope, new possibilities - and new influence? We shall have to wait and see.
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