8
In traditional hunter-gatherer societies, there was no distinction between religion and the rest of social and cultural life. The existence of spirits, the invisible influence of ancestors, and participation in collective rituals were taken as a given.
Likewise, in traditional agricultural societies and ancient civilizations, everyone was included in the community’s religious life, although there was often a specialized priesthood. In Europe as recently as AD 1500, practically everyone believed in God and took part in religious ceremonies, festivals, and rituals. To become an atheist or to deny the importance of religion was almost inconceivable. The same is true today in many parts of the world.
By contrast, in twenty-first-century Europe, the public space is secular. An atheist or agnostic worldview is the default position in academic, intellectual, commercial, and media circles. The practice of religion is a minority pursuit, and there is also a wide plurality of religions and spiritual practices, rather than one agreed-upon set of practices adhered to by almost everyone. We live in a secular age unprecedented in human history.
The word secular itself shares a linguistic root with the word seed, and its primary meaning has to do with generation. In the Middle Ages, it referred to worldly affairs—activities within the realm of time, as opposed to eternity. Within the medieval church, there was a division of labor between the religious orders of monks and nuns, who had the time and opportunity to turn their hearts and minds to God’s eternity, and the secular priests, who ministered to laypeople and their worldly concerns. The same terminology is still used in the Roman Catholic Church today: Monks and nuns are called religious, and parish priests, secular.
But secular now has far wider meanings. The long process of secularization in Europe has roots that stretch back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation undermined the authority of religious institutions, practices, and doctrines that almost everyone had taken for granted.
As the philosopher Charles Taylor shows in his book A Secular Age, during the Reformation, spiritual and magical powers were removed from the outer world, while significance and meaning were transferred to individual human minds. In the pre-Reformation world, spiritual power resided in physical objects, such as the relics of saints or the consecrated Host, as well as in people. Humans were porous. They were vulnerable and healable, open to blessings or curses, possession or grace. As Taylor puts it, “in the enchanted world, the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn.”1 By contrast, in the post-Reformation world, objects could affect minds, but their meanings were generated by or imposed on things by minds. Meaning and significance were internal, inside human minds, not in the external world. The world was disenchanted.
The rising influence of mechanistic science accelerated this process from the seventeenth century onward. God was removed from the workings of nature, now seen as inanimate, unconscious, and mechanical, functioning automatically. Some Protestant theologians responded by emphasizing God’s role as the creator of the world machine. As we have seen, God was like an engineer who had ordered the universe benevolently for human benefit. God also retained a role at the end of time as the judge who distributed rewards and punishments. In this process, God was reduced to a creator and religion to morality.2 This stripped-down form of Christianity left little place for the saving action of Christ, the role of devotion and prayer, or a transcendent goal for humanity. The traditional Christian doctrine of human participation in God’s nature was eclipsed.3
The evangelical religious movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably the Methodists, reacted against this intellectual conception of God. Instead, they offered an internalized, heart-centered faith, an intensely personal form of religion, as opposed to the formal, collective observances of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, which sought to include everyone.
In Roman Catholic countries, the official assumption was that people should be Roman Catholics; in Lutheran countries, Lutherans; and in England, Anglicans. By contrast, new denominations like the Methodists were more like affinity groups or voluntary associations.4 They did not claim a monopoly on religious correctness, and people felt free to move from one denomination to another. The United States was born in this context, and its many denominations provided, and still provide, a kind of religious free market. In the twentieth century, Pentecostalists and other evangelical churches spread this personal form of a relationship with God throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
By the end of the eighteenth century, for many Enlightenment intellectuals, this rational creator had become the remote God of Deism, who could be known through reason, science, and the study of nature. There was no need for revelation, or for the practices of the Christian religion, or for the enthusiasm of the evangelicals. The word enthusiasm means “possessed by God,” from the Greek en, or “in,” and theos, or “god,” and for Enlightenment intellectuals it was a term of disparagement. Once the universe had been made and set in motion, it functioned automatically, with no need for divine interference. God did not respond to prayers, nor did he intervene by reaching into the universe and temporarily suspending the laws of nature to bring about miracles.
But what about morality and the social order? If moral behavior no longer depended on God’s commandments, guidance, or grace, then it had to depend on humans themselves, on reason and the rational ordering of mutual benefit. Christianity was based on a moral universalism, with Christ’s call to care for others and to show love for neighbors, even to enemies. This Christian ideal was secularized into a humanist morality, whereby we ought to be altruistic and we ought to be concerned with others.5
These secularizing changes were expressed most dramatically in the French Revolution. When the revolution began in 1789, Catholicism was the official religion of the French state. In 1793, the Cult of Reason was proclaimed the state religion and, as we have seen, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason.
One of the leading revolutionary slogans was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.” At least forty thousand people were executed in the Reign of Terror (1793–4), including many priests, and the guillotine became a symbol of the revolutionary cause. Churches, monasteries, and religious orders were closed down, and religious worship was forcibly suppressed.
The Reign of Terror left a sour taste in the mouth, and so the revolutionary slogan was shortened to “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” This is still the official motto of the republics of France and Haiti.
Deism soon gave way to full-blown atheism. By assuming that the universe was eternal, there was no need for the creator God of Deism. Atheism became intellectually credible, and atheist revolutionary movements, including communism, spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. Because the old regimes had been backed by the power of the church, the revolutionary cause was strengthened by undermining the power of religion.
Especially in Russia, where the authority of the tsar and of the Orthodox Church had rested on God, radicals saw atheism as a necessary stance. By the 1850s, revolutionary thinkers in Russia were aiming to replace the corrupt authority of church and tsar not only with a new social and political system, but also with a new concept of mankind.6 By rejecting the delusions of religion—the “opium of the people,” in Marx’s famous phrase—humans would be liberated into the light of science and reason.
The atheist ideology found a powerful ally in materialist science, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, portrayed a purposeless, unconscious, mechanical universe where humans, like all life, had evolved without purpose or guidance. In this godless world, humanity would take charge of its own evolution, bringing economic development, brotherhood, health, and prosperity to all mankind through progress.
Modern Secularism
There are three main ways in which secularism is expressed in the modern world. The first is political and cultural. Public spaces have been emptied of God. As Taylor puts it:
As we function within various sphere of activity—economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational—the norms and principle we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to any religious beliefs . . . This is in striking contrast to earlier periods, when Christian faith laid down authoritative prescriptions, often through the mouths of the clergy, which could not be easily ignored in any of these domains, such as the ban on usury.7
This form of secularism is not necessarily anti-religious. In the United States, the separation of church and state, laid down in the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, was intended to allow religious freedom, a burning issue for early Americans, many of whom had fled from state-sponsored religious persecution in Europe. Likewise, political reform movements in Europe in the nineteenth century were more often driven by a need for toleration of different Christian churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant, than by anti-religious fervor. The increasing secularization of Europe also made it much easier for Jews to participate in public life and to become part of the secular world.
But some secular states were explicitly anti-religious, following the precedent of revolutionary France. In the Soviet Union, atheism became the official ideology, and children were given an anti-religious education. The state-sponsored League of the Militant Godless, which in the 1930s had more than five million members, orchestrated campaigns for the closure of churches and monasteries, silencing church bells, suppressing religious festivals, and stamping out Russian Orthodox practices.8 A similar atheist ideology was imposed on the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In Communist China, Mao Zedong instituted a policy of state atheism in 1949.9
The second sense in which secularity has increased is through the decline of religious practice and affiliation, especially in Europe, where a large minority, or even a majority, of the population says they have no religion. Although the roots of this change go back to radical intellectuals in the eighteenth century and to anti-religious political movements in the nineteenth century, the process of alienation from traditional religion accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century and has continued in the twenty-first.
The third sense of secularity is the transformation of a society from one in which practically everyone believed in God to a society in which belief in God is one option among others, and frequently not the easiest option to embrace.10
In most of Europe, and increasingly among young people in North America, the current default option is to be nonreligious, or even anti-religious.
The Ambiguities of Atheism
In part, this cultural drift toward atheism is the result of the continuing efforts of evangelical atheists to convert people to their point of view. Historically, modern atheism grew out of Christianity, and as the philosopher John Gray argues, it is best seen as a Christian heresy:
Unbelief is a move in a game whose rules are set by believers. To deny the existence of God is to accept the categories of monotheism . . . Atheism is a late bloom of the Christian passion for truth . . . Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of illusion. In claiming that there is only one true faith, it gave truth a supreme value that it had not had before. It also made disbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long-delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism.11
Gray is himself an atheist, but neither a proselytizing atheist nor a secular humanist. But many modern atheists, like Richard Dawkins, are still on a crusade against God. They are the missionaries of an anti-religious ideology. They see themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment.
For people who are brought up within religious families, becoming an atheist involves an enormous shift of perspective, a revolutionary change in worldview. Many contemporary atheists have made that switch themselves, by rebelling against or drifting away from their Christian or Jewish upbringings. Others were raised by nonreligious parents, and some are third-generation secular, with nonreligious grandparents. Few nonreligious ancestries go back much further. I was a first-generation atheist and went through this paradigm shift when I was a teenager.
Many atheists regard this shift from religion to atheistic secularism as historically inevitable, and to some extent this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who convert to atheism, or simply to a nonreligious lifestyle, often see themselves as progressive and, like Dawkins, inheritors of the Enlightenment ideal of progress. And in some ways, the Enlightenment program seems to be coming true, at least in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Public life, the educational system, and the media have become increasingly secular, and the nonreligious grow in numbers as churches decline.
One of the most common atheist arguments against religion is that religions cause conflicts. This is true. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) between Catholic and Protestant states claimed over three million lives in Europe. The notorious Spanish Inquisition (1478–1835), over its 357-year history, charged about 150,000 people with offenses and executed about 3,000.12 Religions have led to violence, and some still do.
But so has nationalism led to violence, as in Nazi Germany; so has imperialism, as in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Belgian empires; and so has colonialism. The settling of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world by Europeans was disastrous for the indigenous inhabitants, many of whom were killed, enslaved, dispossessed, or wiped out by diseases.
The most destructive system of all was the atheist ideology of communism, as in the Soviet Union under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. By conservative estimates, the death toll in the Soviet Union under Stalin was about twenty million people,13 with a further twenty million soldiers and civilians killed in the Second World War.14 In China under Mao, there were forty to seventy million deaths as a result of his policies.15 In Cambodia under Pol Pot, about two million people perished, around a quarter of the population.16
No nation, no religion, no ideology, and no commercial system comes out well from a close examination of its history. All human institutions are fallible.
Historical arguments about the bad deeds of religion are an important part of the atheist worldview, while ignoring or brushing aside the vast death toll of atheist regimes. But even more important is the atheist belief that science has already explained the nature of reality in purely physical terms, with no need for God. The universe itself and living organisms are machines. They have evolved automatically and unconsciously, with no creator, no creative intelligence, and no purpose.
This “scientific worldview,” the materialist theory of nature, rests on assumptions that are all highly questionable scientifically, as I show in my book The Science Delusion (called Science Set Free in the U.S.). For example, materialists have not proved that matter is unconscious, or that nature is purposeless, or that minds are confined to brains. These are assumptions. The materialist worldview is a belief system, not a statement of scientific facts.
Another common reason for converting to atheism is the assumption that religions are primarily about propositions and beliefs, rather than about experiences. Then religions can be dismissed as dogmatic, dependent on the authority of scriptures, prophets, and priests. By contrast, so the argument goes, scientists are open to evidence; they ask clear questions, test them by experimentation, and establish a reliable consensus through repeatable observations.
I used to believe this myself. But I was disillusioned when I found that some people have made science into a kind of religion and are often exceptionally dogmatic. They accept the scientific worldview on faith, impressed by the authority and prestige of scientists, and imagine that they have arrived at this worldview by their own freethinking. I still believe in the ideal of open-minded science. But I see the religion of science, scientism, as a dogmatic ideology. In my own experience, believers in scientism are much more dogmatic than most Christians.
Most believers in scientism are not scientists. They are devotees rather than researchers. Most have made no empirical observations or scientific discoveries themselves. They have not worked at the Large Hadron Collider studying subatomic particles, nor have they sequenced genomes, examined the ultrastructure of nerve cells, done research in radio astronomy, or penetrated the mathematics of superstring theory. They take what they are told on trust, accepting the prevailing orthodoxy of institutional science as conveyed by textbooks and popularizers. They are incapable of questioning the authority of the scientific priesthood because they lack the necessary education and technical knowledge to do so. And if they do raise awkward questions, they are likely to be ignored or dismissed as ignorant, confused, or stupid.
Scientism has a very wide influence, largely because of the undoubted triumphs of science and technology, such as computers, the internet, smartphones, antibiotics, keyhole surgery, jet engines, and space probes. It is easy to assume that all these triumphs are a result of the scientific worldview and that they support the materialist philosophy of nature. But many people, including me, think that this philosophy has hardened into a dogmatic belief system that is actually holding the sciences back.17
The least successful aspect of the modern sciences is in the understanding of consciousness. Materialists assume that it is nothing but the activity of brains. Their slogan is, “Minds are what brains do.” But the very existence of consciousness is a problem for materialists and is often called the “hard problem” (as discussed in chapter 1).
Religions are about consciousness, and are founded on the assumption that consciousness transcends the human level. That is one reason why believers in scientism are anti-religious; all religions assume that consciousness is more extensive than brain activity.
When people give up their ancestral religion, they stop most of the practices that religious people take for granted, including singing and chanting together, praying, participating in traditional rituals and festivals, and saying grace before meals. What are the effects of this paradigm shift from a religious to a nonreligious way of life?
The Effects of Religious and Nonreligious Ways of Life
Experimental scientific research on spiritual practices takes place in a secular context. The researchers usually assume that the participants are not religious and that they have no spiritual practices. They then investigate the effects of adding a particular practice and study its effects, compared with a control group that does not take part in this practice. For instance, research on gratitude compares the effect of expressing gratitude with that of not expressing gratitude (chapter 2). Research on meditation compares the effect of meditating with that of not meditating (chapter 1). Research on spending time outdoors compares being outdoors with being indoors, the default situation (chapter 3). Research on the effect of singing compares singing with not singing (chapter 6). Most of these studies show that spiritual practices have beneficial effects, compared with not taking part in these practices.
Another way of investigating spiritual practices is to look at the long-term effects of religious participation, as opposed to nonparticipation. People who regularly go to churches or synagogues, or other places of religious assembly, are compared with people who do not do so, matched for similar age ranges and economic and social statuses. Thousands of these studies have been carried out in the U.S. and elsewhere. The findings are clear.
People who regularly went to church tended to have less mental illness, suffer less depression, show less anxiety, and live longer than those with little or no religious participation.18 This effect was not confined to Christianity. There was a similar effect in Taiwan in a predominantly Buddhist context.19
There are exceptions. For a minority of people, especially those who are filled with guilt or fear, or who have experienced severe religious conflicts, religious beliefs can have negative effects on health and well-being.20
But most people who have given up their ancestral faith have not done so to escape extreme guilt or conflict. Many convert to a nonreligious lifestyle not for negative but for positive reasons, as discussed above; they want to align themselves with progress, reason, and science.
When people abandon their ancestral religion, they usually cease to take part in a whole series of practices that their ancestors took for granted, including:
By giving up religion and the practices that go with it, people’s lives are indeed freed from restrictions. For ex-Christians, Sunday need no longer be a special day of thanksgiving, rest, and recreation; it can be just another day for work or shopping. There is no religious barrier to a 24/7 lifestyle.
Much changes in this process, not only for first-generation nonreligious people, but also for their children. Unlike children of religious families, children of nonreligious families do not, as a matter of course, sing with their family’s community, give thanks together, or take part in rituals and festivals.
Atheism is a purifying fire. It burns up religious hypocrisy, corruption, laziness, and pretention. But its scorched-earth policy can leave many people spiritually hungry, thirsty, and isolated.
Over the last few generations, this paradigm shift from a religious to a nonreligious way of life has happened on a vast scale in previously Christian countries in Europe and North America, and in Australia and New Zealand. But the abandonment of religion has not involved a full-scale conversion to atheism. Most people who have given up their family’s religion or who are raised in a nonreligious family do not see themselves as atheists.21 Some call themselves agnostics; others retain a tenuous religious affiliation, like going to church at Christmas; others are spiritual seekers; others are New Agers; others adopt some of the practices of other religions, such as Buddhism, or become neo-pagans or neo-shamans.
In recent surveys in the U.K., about half the population said they had no religion,22 but only 13 percent described themselves as atheists. Even among the nonreligious, only 25 percent agreed with the statement that “humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element.”23
The proportion of atheists is higher among the scientifically educated. According to a survey in the U.K. in 2016, among scientific, engineering, and medical professionals, about 25 percent were atheists, and 21 percent agnostics, making 46 percent altogether. An almost equal proportion, 45 percent, said they belonged to a religion or that they were spiritual but not religious.24 Thus in the U.K., one of the most secular countries in the world, even in the scientific community, full-fledged atheists are a minority.
In general, religious and spiritual practices make people happier, healthier, and less depressed. Conversely, not having these practices makes people unhappier, unhealthier, and more depressed. Militant atheism should come with a health warning.
Some atheists recognize this problem, which is why Alain de Botton advocates religion for atheists. This is why secular humanists train and license humanist officiants to carry out secular naming ceremonies, weddings, and funerals. This is why the Sunday Assembly provides weekly opportunities for group singing. This is why Sam Harris and secular Buddhists advocate meditation. A rigorously nonreligious lifestyle leaves too much out, impoverishing people’s lives.
Spiritual Practices as Ways of Connecting
The advantage of most spiritual practices is precisely that they are about practice rather than belief. They are therefore open to religious people and to nonreligious people. They are inclusive.
Spiritual practices take us beyond our immediate concerns. At first sight, the practices discussed in this book relate to very diverse aspects of human experience. What is the common thread?
Connection is the theme that unifies them all. They lead us beyond the mundane to deeper kinds of connection:
We are free to be as grateful or as ungrateful as we like. The more ungrateful we are, the greater our disconnection, discontent, and isolation. The more grateful we are, the deeper our connection with a greater life than our own, and the stronger our experience of flow. This consciousness of flow helps us to be more giving, more generous.
Plants are the source of qualities that we and other animals experience: forms, smells, tastes, textures, and colors. They feed us, directly or indirectly; they heal us as herbs or poison us. Some drug-containing plants can change our minds. And they are much older than we are. The main families of flowering plants have been around for tens of millions years; conifers for three hundred million years; ferns, mosses, seaweeds, and other algae even longer. Our species is only about 0.1 million years old, and civilization only about 0.005 million years old.
Pilgrimage has the great advantage of being both a practice and a metaphor. Through going on a pilgrimage, we experience the process of moving toward the goal and arriving at it, being there. Then we go home changed. We connect our ordinary, everyday lives with places that link us to a transcendent world.
We can see our entire life as a pilgrimage. Depending on our beliefs, this can either be a journey whose destination is our inevitable death, or a journey toward a spiritual connection at the hour of our death, as in a near-death experience, and a journey that continues beyond our death.
Journeys of Discovery and Rediscovery
There are many spiritual practices, and all religions include a wide range of them. These are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually reinforcing.
The seven spiritual practices I have discussed in this book are by no means an exhaustive catalog, and in a sequel to this book I hope to discuss a range of other practices, including prayer, fasting, psychedelics, and holy days and festivals.
Not all practices work equally well for everyone, and all of us have to make our own choices among them. For people who follow a religion, many of these practices are already part of their lives. But often their effectiveness is dulled through familiarity. By looking at these practices afresh, their power can be renewed.
Each religious path involves its own selection of spiritual practices, emphasizing some more than others. As a result, some are unfamiliar to people who are already following a religious path. For example, many Protestant Christians are not used to going on pilgrimages. These sacred journeys were familiar to their pre-Reformation ancestors and are still familiar in the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches. Likewise, contemplative prayer and other Christian forms of meditation are well known in communities of monks and nuns, but less well known among lay people, who often benefit from discovering them.
One of the areas in which religious people can learn from the nonreligious is in connecting with the more-than-human world in new ways opened up by science. Even the most atheistic scientists form a relationship with the natural world through their investigation of it, however specialized their field of study. Many religious people lack this sense of connection with the details of nature, and some seem impatient to soar beyond them.
This is an area with a huge potential for spiritual exploration. The natural sciences have unveiled a universe far larger, older, and stranger than anything previously imagined. They have revealed details about biological life that no one knew before, including the existence of realms of microorganisms around us, and also within us: the vast community of microbes that lives in our guts. The sciences have penetrated into realms of the very large and the very small which our ancestors knew nothing about. The trouble is that the sciences give us vast amounts of data, but it is devoid of personal or spiritual meaning.
By contrast, traditional spiritual connections with the more-than-human world found meaning and significance everywhere, but knew nothing of these recent discoveries of the sciences. To combine these two approaches is a uniquely modern challenge.
We are all on journeys. Spiritual practices can enrich our lives and give us a stronger sense of connection with each other, as well as with life and consciousness beyond the human level. These practices can help us accept some of the many gifts that we are offered and give thanks for them. The more we appreciate what we have been given, the greater our motivation to give.