Spufford - Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense

For

Jessica

Judith

David

my three reverend doctors

Contents

This is a book written in, and about, a different place from the one in which you are about to read it. In Britain, where I live, recent figures suggest that about 6 percent of the population goes regularly to church, and its a number that has drifted steadily downward over the past few decades, while the average age of churchgoers has just as steadily trended upward: presently the average worshipper is fifty-one years old. In the United States, by contrast, the equivalent figure (from 2006) is 26 percent of the population, with a youthful, rosy-cheeked age distribution. Thats not all, though. Some surveys, tellingly, reveal that a further 16 percent of Americans claim to be regular churchgoers. From the British perspective this second statistic is even more startling and alien than the first one. The idea of people pretending to be regular churchgoers because it will make them look virtuousor respectable, or serious, or community-mindedis completely bizarre to us. Here in Britain, it is more likely that people would deny they went to church even if they actually did, on the grounds of embarrassment, for embarrassment is one of the most powerfully motivating emotions in British culture and it now wraps religion round snug and tight. The very idea of faith carries a quiver of unease, of potential self-exposure as somebody needy and foolish and old-fashioned. And, crucially, humorless. To say youre religious in Britain is to risk excluding yourself from the consensual irony that pervades British life, the constant subdued self-conscious joking which oils all social difficulties here, and is the means by which we prove to each other that were normal, responsive, polite, self-aware human beings. GSOH (Good Sense of Humor) is by far the commonest demand made in British personal ads. We have a small, vociferous, recently acquired lobby of angry atheists, but far more influential in keeping religion marginal are the millions of people who are indefinably certain that strong emotions on the subject, pro and anti, would be squirmingly incompatible with a GSOH.

Writers who happen to believe tend to keep quiet about itat least the sensible ones doso as not to alienate their readership, or to get themselves associated with a distractingly unlikeable minority position. Politicians, far from feeling the need to name-check the deity, prefer to avoid mentioning any commitments they do have, calculating (correctly) that there would be only downside in so doing. When Tony Blair was prime minister, and a rare question arose about his religious views, his press secretary said firmly, We dont do God, and refused to answer. There is a lingering attachment to what you might call a passive culture-Christianity, manifested in church weddings and carols on the radio at Christmastime, and some of the logics of the culture are still very, very Christian deep down, which is not surprising given the countrys fifteen or sixteen centuries of Christian history; but we are well past the tipping point where the religion stops providing a language that can be confidently manipulated in the expectation that it will be powerful. Or even that it will be understood. Most of the British public are now two or more generations away from familiarity with the religions vocabulary, its stories, its personages, its Sunday-school kit of parts, let alone from familiarity with any kind of felt experience of belief. Many people seem to get their information about it primarily from news coverage of church scandals, which of course confirms their sense that beliefs operative contentsits principles that actually get put into practicemust be homophobia and misogyny and child abuse.

I am at home in this setting. It is what represents normal for me. In some ways, for both religious and other reasons, I kind of approve of it. It saves us, as I explain toward the end of the book, from quantities of pious bullshit; from a whole slew of temptations to do with this-worldly power; from the danger of presuming that conservative social attitudes somehow have divine sanction. But it has consequences that arent all obvious, from outside, and since they shape both the argument this book makes and the manner in which it makes it, it seems like a good idea to try to explain them a little as Unapologetic sets off, swearing like a drill sergeant, toward the bookshelves of the United States.

For one thing, it means that a book like this needs to carry all its own luggage. You may be surprised, at various points, by the way it appears to labor over explanations of basicsbut I wrote it knowing that I couldnt rely on readers necessarily being able to fit the particular things it said into an existing frame of reference, or to encounter it as part of an accepted conversation that had been going on for centuries. For a lot of the people who picked it up it would be the first encounter with even the possibility of that conversation, and it would need, to begin with, to create the frame of reference within which such a conversation could look intelligible, or desirable, or interesting. Hence the emphasis on conveying an experience, which has always been one of the imaginative tasks of this kind of writing, but this time comes overwhelmingly to the fore. Hence the need to produce from scratch, when required in the book, such things as a word for human destructiveness that could actually be heard without leading people away into visions of lingerie, and a portable version of the New Testament story, and a reckoning, ridiculous but necessary, with the whole of Christian history. Or to put it most simply: hence the need to ground a description of religion on something other than more religion.

On the other hand, along with these tasks came a corresponding freedom, also generated by the blankness of the British cultural landscape when it comes to religion. I didnt have to take a position in some vexed, deeply ingrained, ongoing tussle over the social implications of belief. I didnt have to sign up to one side or the other in the culture wars, because we dont really have them in Britain. We dont have aggressive and well-funded creationists. We dont have school-board arguments over biology textbooks. We dont have the assumption that (apart from the social gospel of African-American churches) religion probably lines up on the conservative side of a liberal/conservative cultural split, locked into place as an identity with a set of attitudes to taxation, guns, the climate, abortion, science funding, and sexuality. It isnt, on the whole, a left/right issue with us. I spend a little time in the book chasing away the shadows of the great American divide, because one of the consequences of British unfamiliarity with the local religious product is a slight tendency to take our images of religion from American TV, in just the same way that confused persons in British police stations have been known to demand their Miranda rights. But for the most part I dont have to worry about situating the forms of religion I find attractive and/or theologically defensible at a particular address on a partisan spectrum. Youll find as you read that I am, fairly obviously, a liberal in American terms, but I am not arguing for some special kind of left-Christianity. I dont have that burden, or that luxury. The most that Unapologetic is trying for is to persuade people that Christianity as such, in any variety, should be seen as something not axiomatically contemptible, something emotionally comprehensible even if not shared; something that provides one good-enough solution to a set of fundamental human needs.

I didnt write the book in order to engage in zero-sum competition with atheists. Ive had to push back against some of contemporary atheisms more insistent claimsand I cant deny that I enjoyed the combat involvedbut chiefly in order to clear a space in which to make a different, non-symmetrical claim of my own. I am not arguing that Christianity is true and atheism isnt. I do not know any such thing, and couldnt. I have no problem with respecting atheism as a philosophy, as an emotional position grounded in experience, and (on occasion) as a tool of liberation. What I want to assert, instead, is the religions imaginative legitimacy, its rightful (and for that matter inevitable) but non-exclusive place in the domain of what we all dream, hope, conjecture.