Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (10 page)

Nevertheless, perhaps the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully address our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

This acknowledgement of our inhibitions brings us back to the influence of that foremost upholder and propagator of culture in the modern world, the university. The methodologies which universities today employ in disseminating culture are fundamentally at odds with the intense, neo-religious ambitions once harboured by lapsed or sceptical Christians such as Arnold and Mill. While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom – this latter term referring to a kind of knowledge concerned with things which are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, a knowledge which can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.

We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture
religiously
enough, in other words, as a source of guidance. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.

5.
The differences between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for.

It is a question which tends to vex those in charge of teaching culture in secular institutions. Enquiries as to why, exactly, people should bother to study history or literature usually strike them as impertinent and argumentative and are often left unanswered. Academics in the humanities appreciate that their opposite numbers in the technical and scientific departments can without trouble justify their work in utilitarian terms to impatient government officials and donors (in the unlikely event that anyone should idly wonder what the purpose of rocket science or public health might be). But fearing that they cannot compete effectively against these rivals, the denizens of the humanities prefer to take refuge in ambiguity and silence, having carefully calculated that they retain just enough prestige to get away with leaving the reasons for their existence somewhat murky.

When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become disdainful. Their ideal audiences are students who are uninclined to drama and self-involvement, who are mature, independent, temperamentally able to live with questions rather than answers and ready to put aside their own needs for the sake of years of disinterested study of agricultural yields in eighteenth-century Normandy or the presence of the infinite in Kant's noumenal realm.

6.
Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death – and most of all in need of God.

What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.

We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities – history and anthropology, literature and philosophy – as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.

In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, unempathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.

Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension – and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the
soul
. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.

Throughout its history, Christianity indulged in lengthy debates as to the nature of the soul, speculating on what it might look like, where it might be located and how it might best be educated. In its origins, the soul was thought by theologians to resemble a miniature baby inserted by God into an infant's mouth at the moment of his or her birth.

At the other end of the individual's life, at the moment of
death, the soul-baby would then be expelled again through his or her mouth. The trajectory it was to follow would be more ambiguous this time: it would be either taken up by God or snatched away by the Devil, depending on how well or badly its owner had tended to it over the years. A good soul was one that had managed to find appropriate answers to the great questions and tensions of existence, a soul marked by such godly virtues as faith, hope, charity and love.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one – that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

By its own standards, Christianity therefore has no choice but to tilt its educational emphasis towards explicit questions: How can we manage to live together? How do we tolerate others' faults? How can we accept our own limitations and assuage our anger? A degree of urgent didacticism is a requirement rather than an insult. The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers
lectures
, Christianity
sermons
. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives. Sermons by their very nature assume that their audiences are in important ways lost. The titles alone of the sermons by one of the most famous preachers of eighteenth-century England, John Wesley, show Christianity seeking to dispense practical advice about a range of the soul's ordinary challenges: ‘On Being Kind', ‘On Staying Obedient to Parents', ‘On Visiting the Sick', ‘On Caution Against Bigotry'. Unlikely though it seems that Wesley's sermons could ever seduce atheists through their content, they nevertheless succeed, like any number of Christian texts, in categorizing knowledge under useful headings.

While it was at first hoped by Arnold, Mill and others that
universities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people, these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels of
Henry James might be read with an eye to discovering parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world.

Yet a search for parables is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian approach to texts. Wesley himself was a profoundly scholarly man in ways that the modern university would honour. He had an intimate textual knowledge of Leviticus and Matthew, Corinthians and Luke, but he quoted verses from these only when they could be integrated into a parabolic structure and used to leaven the hardships of his listeners. Like all Christian sermonizers, he looked to culture principally as a tool, asking of any biblical passage what general rules of conduct it could exemplify and promote.