If our experience in Ireland since March 2020 has taught us anything, it is that religion can flourish without God. Once upon a time our lives revolved around a belief in the unseen presence of an omnipotent deity. Nowadays, daily life is governed by the reported doings of a mysterious virus imperceptible to the naked eye.
Instead of hanging on the words of a priest in the pulpit as we once did, the faithful now listen to the statistics and prognostications of government officials. Before entering a church, men used to remove their hats or caps while women donned a head scarf. Now both sexes automatically put on a face mask before going into a shop (or a church for that matter). For Roman Catholics the practice of confession and holy communion used to be the accepted routes back to righteous living. These have now been supplanted by the PCR test and the “double jab” of a hypodermic needle.
Have we simply substituted one set of irrational practices for another? Are both types of ritual evidence of our species’ stubborn adherence to unfounded superstition? Or do we just like being told what to do by experts, whether they wear white collars or white coats?
For whatever reason, we have adopted the trappings and customs of Covid-19 as if they were the visible signs of a new religious faith. Ironically the new behaviours I have described are being adopted just as the old forms of religious observance are dying out.
But if religion without God is possible, is the inverse also true? Is it possible to believe in God - without following the precepts and creeds of any religious denomination?
In Part 3 of this series I wrote:
As individuals we can ask God for help in any difficulty and it will be there, immediately. But even God will not intervene to save the human race unless and until we demonstrate that we are worth saving.1
Of course not everyone accepts the existence of God. So I cannot assume that those who share my belief that we are being deceived about the threat of a virulent pandemic also agree with my assertion above.
Some people do not believe in God because that is how they were raised. But such people are rarely found in a country where the population, until quite recently, was almost wholly religious. Much more likely, in this part of the world at any rate, was for someone to become an atheist or agnostic after rejecting the religious beliefs of their families and teachers. A good example is the late Christopher Hitchens, an English writer from a Christian/Jewish background.
In his book, God is Not Great, Hitchens applied his intellectual and verbal skills to the task of rationalising his own atheism. However, as his book’s subtitle suggests, Hitchens’ primary target was religion - God or an afterlife, not so much.2 While he took several swipes at Judaism and Islam, Christianity was his main focus.
Whether it was evangelist Billy Graham or film maker Mel Gibson, Hitchens excoriated any public figure whom he deemed to be claiming inside knowledge of the workings of divine providence. He did not hold back when he tackled religious commentators like fellow writer, C. S. Lewis, either. Although I read the book as a believer I found myself nodding in agreement at some of Hitchens’ points, especially his repeated claim that “religion is man-made”.3
For example, he devoted one of his chapters to the New Testament and its protagonist, Jesus Christ. His criticisms may be predictable, but they are also hard to refute. Hitchens described the New Testament as having been “hammered together long after its purported events”.4 He also highlighted numerous discrepancies between the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life. He even questioned whether Jesus was an historical figure at all.
However, even as he cast doubt on his very existence, Hitchens could not quite make up his mind about Jesus. Based on his reading of the Gospels, Hitchens was perplexed by Jesus’ sometimes strange behaviour. For instance, if Jesus intended to start a new religion, why did he or his disciples not leave any written record behind? For Hitchens, such lack of foresight was “The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus”.5
Secondly, when Jesus urged his listeners to “take no thought for the morrow”, was he also telling them to ignore the virtues of thrift and innovation? Surely, pondered Hitchens, that would have been irresponsible?6
Finally why did Jesus not uphold the Mosaic law by agreeing that the woman taken in adultery should be stoned? Instead he “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground”. Hitchens also referred to what Jesus said to the crowd gathered round the unfortunate woman.
Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.7
Was Jesus condoning sexual permissiveness? Hitchens wondered. Was he undermining the justice system by insisting that only non-sinners could adjudicate in criminal trials? If Hitchens was confused by all this, he “love[d]” the idea that what Jesus was writing on the ground were the sins of those present.8
Christopher Hitchens took a direct approach when he dismantled the religious beliefs of his youth. Another writer of greater literary distinction went about the same task in quite a different way.
As a young man, James Joyce turned his back on the Roman Catholic religion of his childhood. Joyce traced the development of his thinking on religion in two autobiographical novels, Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In both works, Joyce used the protagonist Stephen Dedalus as a proxy for himself. Dedalus’ growing antipathy towards religion and its proponents is evident in these writings.
For instance, in Stephen Hero, Dedalus lambasted the “sycophants and hypocrites” who claimed to be Christian but did not follow the church’s precepts.9 In Portrait, Joyce recounted a dialogue between the student Dedalus and a Jesuit priest. The exchanges are more like a verbal duel, at least on Dedalus’ side, in which the young student demonstrates his intellectual superiority over the older man.10 In one passage Dedalus seems almost contemptuous of the priest whom he considers to be a dullard.11 Joyce projected that feeling onto the Creator himself, whom Dedalus dismisses as “The half-witted God of the Roman Catholics”.12
Yet despite his rejection of Christianity, Joyce/Dedalus shared Christopher Hitchens’ fascination with Jesus and his “enigmatic utterances”.13 Dedalus even comes close to expressing admiration for the “good-humoured” attitude with which Jesus approached his crucifixion.14 And both writers were puzzled by what Joyce described as Jesus’ “humane” attitude towards “loose women”.15
Nevertheless the strange attraction that Jesus continued to exert over these men did not stop either from becoming an atheist. Admittedly it is difficult, even for intellectuals like Hitchens and Joyce, to find the “real” Jesus amidst the accretions, distortions, and fabrications embedded in the canonical Gospels. I believe it is possible, but it is also unlikely that anyone predisposed to scepticism about the subject would think it worth their time.
As I described elsewhere, Beatle John Lennon suspected that there is a fundamental difference between Jesus the man and Jesus the myth. But he never probed any deeper. Nor did Hitchens or Joyce. All three are dead now so the whys and wherefores are beyond our concern.
But it is not just Jesus is it? The God that critics like Hitchens attack is the deity imagined by the man-made religions they deplore. In Christian terms that is the God of Old Testament fire and brimstone, of petty rules and prohibitions, of indifference to human suffering. In other words, he is the God we have created, an anthropomorphised being who reflects the many flaws and imperfections of our damaged species.
But can we learn about God without the mediation of organised religion?
A consequence of government restrictions in Ireland is that places of worship have been closed for quite some time. This prevents Christians from participating personally in formal devotions like Sunday Mass. In effect, it means that people have not been able to practise their religion as they used to.
When the predictable rhythm of our lives is suddenly halted, especially in a fundamental area like religion, the effects may be traumatic. Precisely how difficult this has been for ordinary church-goers is unknown and may remain so. But could there be an upside?
In her novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë recounted the spiritual and material trials of her protagonist, a young woman who has to choose between her love for Mr. Rochester and her Christian principles. To anyone from a Roman Catholic background, Brontë may seem quite unorthodox in her thinking about Christianity. She wrote this in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre:
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.16
As a recent study contends, Brontë’s free thinking sprang from her religious background.
One of the central tenets of Protestant Christianity is the belief that individuals have the ability to hear from God directly, to interpret God’s will for themselves, to act accordingly, and thus to become responsible for their own salvation. 17
Charlotte Brontë was a lifelong Anglican who never lost her faith. This explains why the character Jane Eyre is not like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in that she does not become disillusioned with God or Christianity. But, in the face of extreme personal deprivation, Jane Eyre demonstrates that her faith is not dependent on the familiar supports of religious dogma and ritual.
At a certain point in Brontë’s narrative, Jane is tired, hungry, and utterly alone in a barren landscape. She is ready to surrender her life as she teeters on the brink of despair. But she summons up her last reserves of hope and courage, uttering these words aloud:
I can but die…and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence.18
These are not the words of an atheist or a sceptic. Neither Christopher Hitchens nor James Joyce would have allowed such a sentiment to enter their minds, never mind speak it. For them it would have been hypocritical to turn to a God they did not believe in, just because He/She might exist and could save them from some extreme peril.
But in the relative calm before peril struck, would they have paused to consider the possibility that belief in God can exist irrespective of adherence to any religious creed? Could they have imagined that God might not be the stern and hirsute figure depicted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling? That He might not be a “He” at all?
Is it fanciful to think of God as a young girl smiling in the sunshine? Or as a butterfly that flits across the meadow on a spring morning? Or as the breeze that blows through the leaves in the corner of the garden? Or as all these things - and much, much more besides?
Because how can the mind of any human capture or compress a Divine Creator, if such a being actually exists?
As we enter a new world, devoid of the familiar trappings and comforts of the old, perhaps opening our minds to these possibilities is a first step in transforming our Hell into Heaven.
J. P. Bruce, ‘Hell into Heaven (Part 3)’, History In The Making, 19 Jun. 2021 [https://jpbruce.substack.com/p/hell-into-heaven-part-3].
Christopher Hitchens, God is not great: How religion poisons everything (New York, 2007).
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 110.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid., p. 118.
John, 8:2-11.
Hitchens, God is not great, pp. 121-2.
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (New York, 1963), p. 141.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ware, 1992), pp. 142-7.
Ibid., p. 144.
Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 210.
Ibid., p. 112.
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 141.
Quoted in Emily Griesinger, ‘Charlotte Brontë's Religion: Faith, Feminism, and "Jane Eyre"’, Christianity and Literature, 58/1, 2008, p. 33.
Ibid., p. 32.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, in The Bronte Sisters: The Complete Novels (London, 2006), p. 325.