CHAPTER 5

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GODNAROK

The reformers had cracked the world apart. They had broken it for God, but a broken world, for whatever reason it has been broken, is unified no longer. With the old medieval unity of vision lost, all manner of ideas were suddenly possible. Things that had once been, quite simply, inconceivable were now swimming into imaginative reach. The spiritual history of London after the Reformation is the history of these previously undreamed ideas. So, rather than continuing to march through the centuries, in this second part of the book I will switch to examining each of these master ideas in turn. The first idea was the one that would have been most unimaginable to the medieval mind: Godnarok – the twilight of God.

The 27 June 1971 is a day chiefly remarkable for its lack of history. Searching for anything significant that happened, I’m reduced to the closure of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway and another ending: the doors shutting on Fillmore East, the rock venue in New York that became known, apparently, as “the church of rock ’n’ roll”. But while that Sunday passed unnoticed in the wider world, it was significant for me, for it was the day I finally became a proper, honest-without-God atheist.

That may not have been quite the desired outcome, as 27 June 1971 was also the day of my first Holy Communion. Oh, I’d been toying with disbelief for two or three years by then, first threatening God with withholding my faith whenever I needed a goal in a crunch playground football match (“Let us win and I’ll definitely believe in you”), moving to ultimatums (“I’ll only believe in you if we score in the next two minutes”) and, finally, threats (“You’d better let us win or I definitely won’t believe in you”), but God, for his part, had always come through: we’d won all those matches. So while the books I revered might suggest that the world could get on perfectly well without God – evolution and science had shuffled him out of the picture – when it came down to the nitty-gritty of a child’s faith, God had been doing the deity work: he’d answered my prayers. So I was prepared to give him the benefit of my doubt.

Besides, there was a big event coming up, when I finally would get to meet God, in the most intimate and personal way imaginable: by eating him. That was what Sister Paula told us. She was the head teacher of my primary school and, in the league table of scary nuns, occupied a mid-ranking spot, high above such failures of fright as Sister Maureen, who actually made you feel as if the sun had come out whenever she smiled, but well below out-and-out monsters such as Sister Sheila, who taught me in secondary school and who managed to terrify generations of tough Islington teenaged boys. She was herself outdone when, in a move to show that God was not above playing jokes on his own religious devotees, she had to change her original name in religion. As a result of the huge success of a 1974 film, her original name became untenable: Sister Emmanuelle had acquired other connotations apart from “God is with us”.

So, the day came. All the girls from my primary school class were dressed up in white and having their photos taken looking angelic – and, in truth, most of them were. While the 1960s may have swung, in my immigrant suburb of north London the mores of a decade earlier largely prevailed: I went through my entire primary school life until eleven without hearing any swear word worse than “bloody” and, not realizing that it was a mild expletive, had my mouth washed out with soap by my mother when I used it myself at home. I suppose all us boys were dressed up too, although this was a time when cameras were still rare, so I cannot say if our trousers were flared, our lapels broad, and our ties so psychedelic they might induce flashback in acid heads in the congregation. I have no memory of any of this. What I was interested in was God.

I’d already uncovered the truth about Father Christmas – he was, in fact, not portly, white haired, white, and bearded, but brown skinned, moustached, and my dad – and scientists, as they said in books, had dug up dinosaurs, conspicuously absent from the Bible, and shown that it took rather longer than six days to make the world. The angel light that lights babies into the world and, for some children, continues to illuminate what they see into their childhood, had gone out early for me: the world was prosaic, a puzzle to be uncovered rather than a wonder to be discovered. Each time I re-read my favourite book, The Wind in the Willows, I always skipped past the haunted halfway chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, in favour of the adventures of Mole, Ratty, Badger, and Mr Toad. I must have been a boring child!

But one uncertainty still intruded into my controlled little world, and a big one at that. However, there was a time and date when it would all become clear and, come the big day, I still remember the excitement as we walked up Highgate Hill to church. Of a blessing, since my first Holy Communion programme was done in conjunction with my school, it was to take place in St Joseph’s rather than St Gabriel’s, the concrete faith abattoir that was our parish church. St Joseph’s, on the other hand, is something of a London landmark, its green great dome visible from miles around. The church, from the outside, particularly when climbing the hill, seems like some sort of monastic fortress, surmounted with slightly incongruous green domes, but within it’s all marble, statues, candles, and baldacchino: a Catholic fantasy church.

The building of it must have seemed a fantasy too, back in 1849, when a Fr Ivers rented a room in Highgate, at 17 High Street, to celebrate Mass, only for the presence of papists to bring rioters onto the streets of Highgate (nowadays, the only thing likely to bring protestors out on the street there would be McDonald’s trying to buy its way into the area). But nine years later, when the site of what was once the Old Black Dog pub was auctioned, Fr Ignatius Spencer (yes, he was from that Spencer family, which a century later produced Princess Diana), a convert to Catholicism, put in the winning bid. The first church soon proved too small for a Catholic population being swelled by the Irish workmen coming over to build the Victorian railways, many of whom settled in the network of terraced streets around Archway, near the new railway lines where many of them worked. So in 1889 a new church, the one we see now, was built on the site. This was an era of Catholic confidence: the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829 and Fr Spencer was himself a product of and instrumental in that self-confidence: that a scion of such an aristocratic family should convert to Catholicism suggested much had changed in the previous half-century.

The faith St Joseph’s had proclaimed by so grand an architectural statement at the close of the nineteenth century had grown somewhat flat by the end of the 1960s. The excitement of the Second Vatican Council had trailed away into the liturgical and clerical confusion of the 1970s (it’s notable that the majority of the abuser priests who were to prey on children later had their formation during this time33), but I knew nothing of that. I had grown up in the new church; all I knew was Mass in the vernacular and priests, generally sporting hideous polyester vestments, facing us in the congregation. But I lived in an Irish/Italian Catholic milieu: first Holy Communion was a big deal. And I was tremulous with excitement, waiting in line, hands in the prayer position, then kneeling at the altar rail (most Catholic churches still asked people to kneel to receive Communion then), staring at the open tabernacle behind the altar, its polished interior glowing like a glimpse of heaven, and glancing down the line as the priest, with solemn altar server, approached, placing the flat white discs on proffered pink tongues.

Then it was my turn.

“The body of Christ.”

And there he was, on my tongue. I closed my mouth. The Host stuck to the suddenly dry roof of my mouth.

Should I bite it?

Should I chew God?

I was walking back to my pew, hands back in the prayer position, and then I knelt again.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the choir was singing. The Lord tasted… dry. And tasteless. He wasn’t even bread. More like a cream cracker.

I swallowed.

Was that it?

I looked up. Heaven had not opened. God had not spoken.

Was that really it?

I glanced sidelong, saw the other children beside me, heads bowed in prescribed prayer positions, mouths moving.

Words.

They were just words, mumbled to the dark.

I had given God his last chance and he had failed. Worse, he had disappointed me.

I left church an atheist in mind and heart.

At the heart of much modern atheism seems to me to lie a hurt disappointment: a question has been posed, an answer sought, and the only response has been silence. But if God had disappointed me, he must have really pissed off Christopher Marlowe.

Philosophy is odious and obscure.

Both law and physic are for petty wits.

Divinity is basest of the three,

Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible and vile…34

Shakespeare wrote of old crones upon a blasted heath, a magic of the past, but the subtlest of all playwrights had heard the fate of his contemporary, the man who wrote magic into the circles of wealth and privilege where it was finding new practitioners, and Shakespeare had sense enough to call no curses down upon his own head. But his friend and rival, the man who drew the devil from hell and placed him upon the Elizabethan stage, played no temporizing games and called down the heavens and declared the old terrors empty:

Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine

That after this life there is any pain?

Tush, these are trifles and old wives’ tales.35

Christopher Marlowe was the first modern metropolitan. And, as is proper for a metropolitan, he was not born in London, but in Kent, and later educated at Cambridge. But his milieu, in his short life, was the violent, shifting world of Elizabethan drama and espionage, and most of that was played out in the new theatres and old taverns of London. The absolute facts of his life are almost as scanty as those of his contemporary, and the web of rumour that surrounds him is every bit as sticky as that around Shakespeare (one theory even equates the two, positing that Marlowe faked his own death and reinvented himself as another playwright). Most likely a Catholic once himself, Marlowe turned double agent and went abroad, to Rheims, to act as agent provocateur against the Catholic exiles there; then, in London, he wrote shifting plays of damnation and desire: The Jew of Malta begins with Machevill announcing, “I count religion but a childish toy,/And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim protagonists then all bid to outdo each other in venality, concupiscence, and savagery.

The only surprise is that Marlowe lived so long. He died on 30 May 1593, stabbed to death by one Ingram Frizer. Frizer, and two other men present, had all been agents of Elizabeth’s spymasters. The coroner’s account, that Marlowe and Frizer quarrelled over the bill (“the Reckoning”) so violently that Marlowe attacked Frizer who killed Marlowe in self-defence, is possible – this was a time of prickly tempers and everyday deadly weapons – but the motto upon a portrait, said to be of Marlowe, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, says, Quod me nutrit me destruit (“That which nourishes me destroys me”).36 Marlowe mixed dark worlds and deep desires:

That like I best that flies beyond my reach.

Set me to scale the high pyramids

And thereon set the diadem of France;

I’ll either rend it with my nails to nought,

Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,

Although my downfall be the deepest hell.37

But though Marlowe’s greatest creation, Dr Faustus, sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of wealth, power, and the uncovering of all the secrets of the world, Marlowe himself was no sorcerer but something much more dangerous. When a world collapses, everything may be called into question and, if the allegations laid against Marlowe by informers and by fellow playwright Thomas Kyd were true, Marlowe did indeed question everything: God, religion, sexuality, power. But, lest we forget the world of shattered mirrors that made men fools throughout these years, remember that Kyd spoke after torture, and Marlowe, a well-known friend and associate of Sir Walter Raleigh, may have been the victim of smears directed towards the downfall of his patron.

However, the mud stuck – and such mud. According to Kyd, “It was his custom … to jest at the devine scriptures, gybe at praiers, & stryve in argument to frustrate & confute what hath byn spoke or wrytt by prophets & such holie men,”38 and it is worth quoting in full the note delivered by professional informer Richard Baines to the Privy Council concerning Marlowe’s views:

That the Indians, and many authors of antiquity, have assuredly written of above 16 thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within six thousand years.

He affirmeth that Moses was but a juggler, and that one Hariot being Sir Walter Raleigh’s man can do more than he.

That Moses made the Jews to travel 40 years in the wilderness (which journey might have been done in less than one year) ere they came to the promised land, to the intent that those who were privy to many of his subtleties might perish, and so an everlasting superstition reign in the hearts of the people.

That the beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe.

That it was an easy matter for Moses being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians to abuse the Jews, being a rude and gross people.

That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.

That he was the son of a carpenter, and that if the Jews among whom he was born did crucify him, they best knew him and whence he came.

That Christ deserved better to die than Barabas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabas were both a thief and a murderer.

That if there be any God or any good religion, then it is in the Papists, because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.

That if he were put to write a new religion, he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method, and that all the New Testament is filthily written.

That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly.

That Saint John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom; that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.

That all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.

That all the apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth; that Paul only had wit, but he was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience.

That he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England, and that he was acquainted with one Poole, a prisoner in Newgate, who hath great skill in mixture of metals, and having learned some things of him, he meant through help of a cunning stamp-maker to coin French crowns, pistolets, and English shillings.

That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more ceremonial reverence, it would have been in more admiration; that it would have been better much better being administered in a tobacco pipe.

That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, because he brought the salutation to Mary.

That one Richard Cholmley hath confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become an atheist.39

Whether or not Marlowe really believed this is almost beside the point: that such ideas could be raised and seem credible shows how, in the shattering of the old medieval world view, everything had changed.

In such an atmosphere, where whispers and lies and innuendo could see even the most powerful men in the land brought down and which would have anyone without the highest patronage put to torture, it is no surprise that men sought power, and urgently. At a base level, it was a matter of self-preservation; at its highest, a manifesto of hope. Outside the nobility, there was a growing body of educated men who lacked the retainers, power, and influence of the old landed families, and were thus even more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the time. In London, the lawyers of the Inns of Court formed an intellectual counterweight to the clergy, while the spread of printing and the increase in trade meant that the merchant and, increasingly, the artisan classes were becoming educated. Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker.

The two most important facts of London geography are the river and the people. The river divides and feeds the city, with food and money and ideas, while the people, the press and buzz and swirl of humanity, are the most important fact of the city. London exists because of, and for, and through, its very excess of people. Where the most important fact of existence becomes other people, and the powers they exercise over others, it becomes less extraordinary that a mind as caustic and creative as Marlowe’s might have come up with such an extraordinary litany of abuse towards Christianity. For, looking around at the other world religions, it is clear that atheism is very much a product of Christianity, a consequence of aspects of Christian theology and Christian behaviour, rather than an independent critique of religion as such. No such streams of thought exist in the other great world religious cultures. How appropriate that the first great Christian atheist grew up amid the blood and paranoia of the Reformation: we should have known. All the reformers and the counter-reformers should have known: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). We sowed blood and burning; we reaped defiance and despite.

But in his (alleged) atheism Marlowe was a man born out of time. The sixteenth century was not ready for such views and nor even was the seventeenth, despite the civil war that tore the country apart being in part the result of rival religious views. Even modern science, the fundamentally new way of viewing and manipulating the world that really got under way in the seventeenth century, owed much of its early appeal – indeed, its very legitimacy – to the religious convictions of its practitioners. Francis Bacon, the propagandist for the scientific method, saw this new way towards the Advancement of Learning as religiously sanctioned: “For as the Psalms and other scriptures do often invite us to consider and magnify the great and wonderful works of God, so if we should rest only in the contemplation of the exterior of them as they first offer themselves to our senses, we should do a like injury unto the majesty of God.” God, a rational spirit, had made a rational creation, bound by laws which could be discovered, discerned, and understood.

Bacon was born on the Strand. Thomas Hobbes, on the other hand, was born in Wiltshire and spent much of his life travelling, but having written Leviathan, the book that was to make his name and remade political philosophy, he took refuge in London, on Fetter Lane. Published in 1651, Leviathan was written in the shadow of the English Civil War and the Thirty Years’ War, the two conflicts that had devastated much of the continent in the first half of the century. In it, Hobbes sought to prove definitively that the secular authority was supreme. As England restored a monarchy and recovered from civil war, Hobbes’ views began to seem a way through the contending views of the religious. But the man himself, despite the many accusations hurled against him, averred that he was a believer. “Do you think I can be an atheist and not know it?”40 Besides, the Restoration in 1660 brought an end to religious enthusiasm: Charles II was no fanatic and his notoriously libertine court had little interest in theology when the days and nights could be spent in wit and sport, while the new mercantile spirit set about restoring the wealth of the nation.

Not everyone was pleased. John Milton, the great Puritan poet, wrote in 1673 that “it is a general complaint that this nation of late years is grown more numerously and excessively vicious than heretofore: Pride, Luxury, Drunkenness, Whoredom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open atheism everywhere abounding”.41 But it was the genius of Charles II to fashion a century of religious toleration in England; even the deposition of his brother served to cement this general indifference to the different varieties of Christianity, as long as they were not tainted with the still unacceptable traces of Catholicism.

During the latter half of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth century, what inclinations there were to atheism were subverted by the general atmosphere of religious laxity and the religiosity of the men involved in setting in motion the scientific revolution of the time. The Royal Society, founded in 1660 and given its royal charter in 1662, was the first organization devoted, as its full name states, to “the Improvement of Natural Knowledge”; that is, the scientific investigation of nature. Alongside theology and philosophy, there was a new pretender to the throne of truth, and one that, as its prestige grew, would come to supplant its elders in esteem. But among the early members of the Royal Society, and particularly those who were most important in the development of scientific knowledge, this was not seen to be the case. Robert Boyle, physicist and chemist and one of the key founding members of the Society, left money in his will for a series of annual lectures “for the defence of the Christian religion againt atheists and other unbelievers”. These lectures continued until the mid-twentieth century and were revived in the twenty-first. After all, if the men actually uncovering nature’s truth believed it to be simply another way of revealing God’s glory, how could science be used against religion? If religion has its pantheon, so too does science, and sitting at the summit is the man who was also president of the Royal Society from 1703 to 1727: Isaac Newton.

It’s pretty well impossible to overstate Newton’s importance to the development of science, and his prestige matched his achievements. Alexander Pope, greatest of eighteenth-century poets, wrote in epitaph of the scientist:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.42

Newton split white light into colours, developed the reflecting telescope, invented calculus (although he spent many years involved in a bitter dispute with Gottfried Leibniz over priority), proposed the laws of motion and, most importantly of all in the minds of his contemporaries, discovered the law of gravity. By combining the laws of motion with the law of gravity, Newton was able to describe (and others, later, to predict) the motion of planets and stars, the movement of the tides, and the trajectories of ordinary bodies on earth (including falling apples!).

As the pre-eminent natural philosopher of his day, Newton’s views mattered. The relative importance he placed on science and religion might be gauged by the fact that he spent as much of his adult life on biblical interpretation and understanding as he did upon science. Although Newton’s views were unorthodox – he probably rejected belief in the Trinity – he did not make this aspect of his faith public, while his religiosity was public, based on his writings, letters, and work. For example, in The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton wrote:

And from his true dominion it follows, that the true God is a Living, Intelligent and Powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from Eternity to Eternity; his presence from Infinity to Infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not Eternity or Infinity, but Eternal and Infinite; he is not Duration or Space, but he endures and is present.43

Thus the attitude of the standard-bearers of the new knowledge, coupled with the general distaste towards “enthusiasm” in religion that prevailed in England through most of the eighteenth century, made it difficult for those so inclined to kick against the pricks, since there was relatively little to goad them to anger. In contrast to other countries in Europe, Britain became known for its relative religious tolerance, and London in particular offered refuge to religious refugees from the continent.

There was one atheist comet in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, but Percy Bysshe Shelley was no Londoner, although he did take lodgings in the city at various times through his itinerant life. Shelley, though, was almost as much an outlier as Marlowe. Adolescent intellectual confidence allowed him to write, while at Oxford, The Necessity of Atheism and send it to the heads of the university’s colleges (who, remember, were still required to be ordained in the Church of England and, generally, were expected to remain unmarried). He finished the pamphlet by concluding: “Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.” This suggests more the glibness of today’s new unbelievers than the philosophical rigour of the great nineteenth-century atheists such as Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx. This was atheism as adolescent rebellion, and the glamour that still attaches to the lives of Shelley and Byron (as opposed to their actual work) suggests that these most rock ’n’ roll of poets still retain their paradoxical ability, considering they were both aristocratic to the core, to appear anti-establishment.

However, the mature Shelley was more pantheist than atheist. The first publicly avowed atheist in England, although remaining anonymous, outed himself in 1782, writing in an Answer to Dr Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever:

As to the question whether there is such an existent Being as an atheist, to put that out of all manner of doubt, I do declare upon my honour that I am one. Be it therefore for the future remembered, that in London in the kingdom of England, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and 81, a man has publickly declared himself an atheist.44

The public atheist was probably a physician named Matthew Turner, and thus solidly a member of the middle classes. But the slowly building core of atheism in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries had little to do with the upper or middle classes. It was rather a function of the huge disruptions and movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as land was enclosed and a landless pool of labour created that found work in the newly industrializing towns of the north and, although this is seldom acknowledged, London too. Taken from the rhythms and conventions of rural life, and the pressure to conform exerted by gentry and neighbours, religious habits just… melted away.

In fact, if ever there was convincing proof of the idea that human beings are fallen creatures it lies in this: we shuck off good habits with barely a backwards glance – indeed, we feel a certain relief at their loss – but bad habits can hardly be shifted, despite employing all the strength and will available to us. The population movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries confirm this: taken from their homes and communities, people abandoned their old ways and beliefs as easily as they shook the cowpats from their feet.

When, in the nineteenth century, reformers started to investigate the religious habits of poor Londoners, they were appalled. It wasn’t really that the new working class disbelieved in God; rather that he, at least as he was presented to them by the church, appeared irrelevant. The City of London was well served – probably overserved – with churches, but the same was not true of London’s ever-spreading suburbs. Between 1730 and 1815, when the city was growing fast, only ten or so new churches were built to serve the new urban areas. As early as 1786, reformers had noted “the great estrangement that has taken place between the lower orders of people and their parochial ministers”.45 But, in 1851, there came the evidence to back up the general suspicion that, somehow, faith had leaked away from the working classes inhabiting Britain’s newly industrialized cities and, in particular, London.

The 1851 Census of Religious Worship investigated every place of worship in the country, including nonconformist chapels, synagogues, and Catholic churches. The survey was done alongside the national census that was being carried out at the same time, and asked the respondents how many people (adults and children) attended church on Sunday, 30 March 1851. The churches were also asked whether this figure differed significantly from normal, when the church had been built, and how many people it could accommodate.

Once the numbers were crunched, it became clear that church attendance was poor in all Britain’s cities, but worst of all in the working-class areas of London. At first glance, this might have been because there simply were not enough churches: there were 1,097 churches, chapels, and synagogues in London but, adding up their capacities, they could only hold 30 per cent of London’s population. But despite this inadequate provision, London’s churches were not full. On census Sunday, less than 20 per cent of Londoners went to a morning service and 13 per cent to an evening service (an unknown percentage attended both morning and evening, meaning that less than a third of Londoners attended church on Sunday). Churchgoing was more common in wealthier areas (39 per cent attending in Hampstead and 34 per cent in Wandsworth) and trailed away in the poorer parts of the city (15 per cent in the East End, 14 per cent in Bermondsey, and 9 per cent in Shoreditch).

Why didn’t the poor go to church? This was the question the Victorians faced – and, as was the way with the Victorians, they tried their darnedest to answer the question too.

One obvious cause was the practice of pew renting. The Synod of Exeter in 1297 had declared the practice illegal, a judgement confirmed by the new secular authorities in 1612 that averred a church “is dedicated and consecrated to the service of God, and is common to all inhabitants”, yet pew renting continued right up until 1970. A family could, with a discreet nod from churchwarden or vicar, rent a pew for their exclusive use; the ultimate expression of this was to be found in box pews, which were surrounded with wooden panelling and had gates and, sometimes, even fireplaces – churches were often cold and draughty, and sitting through an hour-long sermon in the long, cold winters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have required considerable fortitude. These pews naturally came to be seen as family property, being passed down the generations and allowing all the members of a family to sit together at church. But, just as naturally, in a socially stratified society, they tended towards the marginalization and exclusion of the poor – quite literally, as those who did attend church had to sit on benches or stools, or stand, in the odd bits of space left over.

One frustrated churchgoer wrote in 1882: “I did go once, but the people were all shut in, and the folk in the boxes looked at me as if I had got in without paying: so after walking up and down several times, like a man in a station trying to get a seat when the train is full, I went home.”46

Having identified a problem, the Victorians worked energetically to improve it, but the lack of accessible places to sit, and the sense of social inferiority that went with it, was not the only reason that the poor did not go to church. The reformers believed, probably rightly, that the working classes had not so much rejected Christianity but that there were few positive incentives to worship – and none of the social pressures that ensured the rural poor went, religiously, to church on Sunday.

One costermonger told the census: “Religion is a regular puzzle to the costers… the costers somehow mix up being religious with being respectable, and so they have a queer sort of feeling about it.”47 Many of the poor felt they were not wanted in church:

I never goes to any church or chapel. Sometimes I hasn’t clothes as is fit, and I s’pose I couldn’t be admitted into sich fine places in my working dress. I was once in a church, but felt queer, as one does in them strange places, and never went again. They’re fittest for rich people. Yes, I’ve heered about religion and God Almighty… I’m satisfied with what I knows and feels about it, and that’s enough about it.48

This sort of exclusion did not end with the Victorians. I knew a builder, Arthur Dare, whose family were old East Enders but, like most East Enders when they’d made some money, he’d moved out, to Chingford. He did some work for my family and I enjoyed talking with him when he took his tea break, carefully rolling a cigarette and smoothing out his copy of the Daily Mail to read. When Arthur first began in the trade, he worked with men who had themselves started on sites at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it paid foremen to employ boys to go round the site searching for bent nails and straightening them. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that so graphically illustrates the change in costs between labour and materials that has occurred over the last century. One afternoon, as we drank tea, Arthur told me how, as a young boy, he’d been quite religious until one day a parishioner, seeing him in his patched clothes, asked in the most supercilious of tones, “What are you doing here?” Arthur walked out of the church and never returned to it.

I wonder if that woman ever realized, before she died, what she had done.

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14, NIV).

However, the avowed atheists of Britain’s higher classes had little interest in the toilers. Shelley summed up their attitude: “Let this horrid Galilean rule the Canaille [the common people]. The reflecting part of the community, that part in whose happiness we have so strong an interest, certainly do not require his morality which when there is no vice fetters virtue.”49 Shelley also intimates another aspect of upper-class atheism: the freedom to indulge sexual appetites, freed from guilt, while making sure the lower classes aren’t screwing around.

Chartism, the working-class movement for greater democracy and reform that flourished from 1838 to 1858, might have proved an avenue for radical atheism but many of its leaders, while not necessarily conventionally religious, often espoused Christian values. William Lovett, who founded the London Working Men’s Association in 1836, said he was “of that religion which Christ taught, and which very few in authority practise”.50 Although Chartism ostensibly failed, it’s worth noting that, of the six goals it sought by avowedly non-violent means, five have been implemented:

Only the Chartists’ sixth demand, of annual parliamentary elections, has not been enacted. We live now in a Chartist democracy, and the fact we do is due, in no small part, to the restraint of men like Lovett.

So while working-class anger was channelled into political action informed by Christian ideas of justice (it has often been remarked, with justification, that the Labour Party owed as much to Methodism as to Marx) the upper classes of Victorian England did what they always did when faced with a crisis: they formed clubs and societies.

Victorian Ethical Societies were the British version of Auguste Comte’s religion of humanity, enabling like-minded people to gather together but without all that French flummery with ritual that put off Anglo-Saxons. For a visitor from another world, it might have been a little difficult to see how these meetings differed from low-church and chapel services:

For the last four years I have been a member of one of the Ethical Societies and I can speak of the help and strength which it gives me in my duties to attend our Sunday meetings. Not only the addresses, but the instrumental music and singing, inspire me for the world of the coming week and rest me after that of the past. It is an unspeakable comfort to meet there others who are trying to surmount the difficulties of life in the ethical spirit.51

For some reformers, this church without God approach was too cooperative: religion was an enemy to be attacked, not something to be aped. Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, said: “We think the Christian religion an immoral illusion, and we wish to use any argument to persuade the people that it is false. Ridicule appeals to the people we have to deal with, with much greater force than any amount of serious logical argument. We want to make them disregard the mythical next world and live for this world.”52 Although Eleanor Marx proposed ridicule as a weapon, it was Charles Bradlaugh who perfected it.

Bradlaugh was born in 1833 in Hoxton and, apart from a couple of early years spent in Ireland as an enlisted soldier, he lived most of his life in the capital. In line with his medieval forebears, Bradlaugh was a lawyer, and a skilled one; to protect his employers from his growing notoriety he employed the highly suitable nom-de-plume of “Iconoclast”. But his iconoclasm resulted from disillusion. Bradlaugh had been a religious boy, attending Sunday school and preparing for confirmation, until he asked some questions about the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles. In a classic example of how not to deal with an inquisitive sixteen-year-old, the vicar, rather than attempting to answer the questions or simply admitting he did not know, told Bradlaugh senior that his son was an atheist in the making and forbade his confirmation. Bradlaugh junior, who might otherwise have continued as the enthusiastic Sunday school teacher he was, left church and faith altogether, and employed his considerable rhetorical gifts to advance the cause of atheism and secularism, founding the National Secular Society in 1866 and remaining its president for the next quarter-century. As such, his combative style formed the secularist approach, ensuring that it became intertwined with atheism when, as the American model proves, the two are by no means necessary bedfellows.

Speaking of bedfellows, in 1877 Bradlaugh re-issued a notorious pamphlet on birth control with Annie Besant, fellow freethinker and the one-woman nexus where atheism and secularism met theosophism and clairvoyance. In a country where birth control was illegal (and fairly ineffective in any case), The Fruits of Philosophy (the rather unlikely title of the pamphlet) saw Bradlaugh and Besant charged with obscenity, and found guilty but acquitted on a technicality.

According to Bradlaugh – a man not given to shades of opinion – there were just two possible intellectual positions, only one of which was plausible:

One, the completest submission of the intellect to authority: to some book, or church, or man. The other, the most thorough assertion of the right and duty of individual thought and judgement.53

No prizes for guessing which of the two Bradlaugh thought plausible. Still, it is good to see that the caricaturing of religious thought by the twenty-first century’s new atheists has a solid historical foundation.

Bradlaugh’s fame grew when he was elected to parliament in 1880 as MP for Northampton. As an atheist, he asked to be allowed to make an affirmation rather than swear the oath of allegiance. A parliamentary committee ruled against him and, since his seat thus became vacant, a new election was held in 1881 – and Bradlaugh won it. He won the elections in 1882, 1884, and 1885, and then held his seat in the general election of 1886 as well. The Speaker finally allowed Bradlaugh to take his seat after the final 1886 election and, in 1888, he succeeded in having a new Oaths Act passed through parliament, allowing the oath of allegiance to be affirmed rather than sworn before God.

With such a high-profile case, interest in atheism and secularism also increased, with membership of the National Secular Society reaching a peak at 4,000.

But then Bradlaugh was admitted to parliament, new MPs were allowed to affirm allegiance rather than swear to God, and all the fuss vented slowly away before the British establishment’s ability to give ground where necessary. Deprived of a reason for rage, Victorian atheism lost its verve and, when Bradlaugh died in 1891, the fire went out of the movement. It had won its motivating battle: there was an accepted place for an avowed atheist in the highest chamber of public debate in the land. Now, with that fight won, it was time to move wholeheartedly into the realm of ideas, and with a new generation of thinkers coming to the fore, it seemed that the dawn of the twentieth century would see the final end of religion in general and Christianity in particular as a credible intellectual movement.

From the Restoration up until the start of the twentieth century, the city’s general attitude towards religion might be described, overall, as indifference. Oh, there was the Victorian revival, of course, when in reaction to the alarming evidence of the religious census of 1851, churches were built to serve the sprawling suburbs, and churchmen and women went on mission into darkest Hackney and foul St Giles. Yet the city remained steadfast in its orientation: God might be all very well, but money ruled the city. The expansion of trade that started during the reign of Charles II had grown explosively in the next 200 years, as London became both an industrial powerhouse in its own right – although its factories were smaller and less obvious than the great mills of the north – and, just as importantly, the main entry and exit port for trade with the rest of the world. Trade – free trade – became the city’s god, for it brought incalculable wealth in its wake. The actual God stuff had to fit in around that and, in general, it did. The great intellectual assault on God in the nineteenth century was written largely in German: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, Strauss. Frankly, not much could have stood up to such an assault, and God wilted a bit under the pressure of all those really long words. The main British contribution was Darwin, and curiously, as he has come to play such an important role for twenty-first-century atheists, his was the least important contribution.

The heavy intellectual groundwork having been laid, English-speaking philosophers started poking at God’s recumbent corpse, to make sure he stayed dead. Of these, the most high profile was Bertrand Russell. The Russells were an aristocratic family, his grandfather having been prime minister twice under Queen Victoria. Bertrand Russell’s parents died when he was young and he was brought up by his grandmother – and various nannies and tutors – at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. In his philosophy, Russell attempted to ground mathematics in logic, writing three volumes of Principia Mathematica to do so. This was a major element of the wider philosophical project to ground and verify language in logic; a project that became known as logical positivism.

The great proponent of this in Britain was the philosopher A. J. Ayer, a Londoner – but being a proper Londoner he was born of immigrant stock. He won a scholarship to Eton and became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London (which is where I went, eventually, to university, finally locating the library towards the end of my second year there). According to Ayer and the positivists, only scientific knowledge (that is, publically verifiable knowledge) is factual, and everything else – and Ayer particularly singled out the God language of theology – is literally meaningless. So rather than claiming that God does not exist, Ayer and the positivists argued that all the centuries of thought and speculation about him had been pointless, for such language contains no content: God was not so much dead as vacuous.

This was the fulfilment of one of the great attacks on belief. While it is, in principle, extremely difficult to prove a negative (“God does not exist”), what Ayer and co. had done was prove religious language meaningless: in talking of God, there was no there, there. Think of it like this. Suppose I were to say to you that last night I dreamed of you. Yes, you. Now, you don’t know me and I don’t know you, yet still I maintain I dreamed of you last night. You might believe me – I would imagine if you’ve read this far you might be inclined to follow me just that one little step further – but, on the other hand, maybe you do know me; then, like as not, you’d definitely not believe a word of it. In either case, though, my dream is not verifiable: I claim to have dreamed of you, but there is no way I can demonstrate this claim to anyone outside my own head.

God talk, according to Ayer, whether it be prayer or liturgy, the byways of systematic theology or the highways of Scripture, let alone the intensity of mystical experience, is like this: dream stuff locked into heads, having no more weight than words and considerably less substance.

There. That having been accomplished, humanity can get on with the serious business of sorting out the world.

And for a time in the mid-twentieth century it seemed as though this might happen. A. J. Ayer published Language, Truth and Logic in 1936 and it became an unlikely bestseller. “Freddie” Ayer, when he became a professor at UCL, took his place alongside Bertrand Russell as a major figure in London’s social and literary scenes – at least, for that rarefied class of beings who live in the sort of circles where everyone they know lives in Zone 1. Their private lives were as turbulent as that of any of the movie stars of the era, with Russell marrying four times in between many affairs. Ayer also married four times – the third wife being the former spouse of Sir Nigel Lawson, which made him Nigella Lawson’s stepfather – but he rather cheated by remarrying his first wife, so it was a case of four marriages and three wives. Both men were beloved of the camera and loved appearing on TV, they cultivated high profiles and were good value for them, and both attracted character anecdotes.

For instance, the nonagenarian Russell struck up an acquaintance with the young and beautiful actress Sarah Miles, who lived in the same Chelsea street as he did. Inviting her back to his house, he proceeded to demonstrate how to make the perfect cucumber sandwich – apparently the sliced cucumber should be so thin as to be translucent – while fondling Miles’s thigh and peering down her blouse. Miles, a generous-minded young woman, allowed the old and lonely philosopher his fun.

Ayer, although not quite so old at seventy-seven, faced a more formidable foe: “Iron” Mike Tyson, heavyweight champion of the world and self-proclaimed baddest man on the planet. Ayer, always a social animal, had become friends with an American fashion designer, Fernando Sanchez. For the philosopher, this had the added bonus of bringing him into the orbits of beautiful young models when attending Sanchez’s parties. Ayer was at one such party when an agitated woman rushed into the room, asking for help: her friend was being assaulted. Going to the woman’s aid, Ayer found that the woman in question was a young and not-yet-famous Naomi Campbell, while the man pressing himself upon her was Mike Tyson. Ayer told Tyson to stop. Tyson, unused to anyone, let alone septuagenarians, telling him to stop doing anything, inquired if Ayer knew who he was: the heavyweight champion of the world. To which the unperturbed Ayer replied: “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both preeminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.”54 Having seldom faced such front, Tyson started talking with Ayer, and Campbell made her getaway.

From this, it’s easy to see why Ayer was such a superb subject for a biographer; how many other Wykeham Professors of Logic are samba dancers, or so cavalier towards lovers that they write identical letters to two different mistresses, unaware that the women are friends? The women in question compared their notes!

Russell’s tireless campaigning against nuclear weapons also raised his profile: his angular features and shock of white hair became the public face of philosophy in Britain. The two men might not have succeeded in killing off religion, but they had made the intellectual case for atheism; while it was obviously impossible to bury a non-existent being, at least his end was in sight. But God, whether or not he exists, is nothing if not slippery. Just when you think you’ve got him where you want him, he slips out of your grasp, and you find that all you’re holding is yourself. So it turned out with logical positivism. Hang on a minute, said other philosophers, how do you verify the principle of verification? What experiment can you run on the scientific method itself?

Turns out, logical positivism was self-contradictory and, what was worse, one of the great lines of attack on God – that all God talk was nonsense – had in fact succeeded only in digging up the ground on which atheists found certainty: logic and mathematics. Ayer fought the good fight gamely, but towards the end of his life even he realized the game was up. When he was interviewed and asked about the flaws in logical positivism, he replied with disarming honesty: “Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false.”55

Towards the end of his life, Ayer died – and then came back to life again. His near-death experience included an awareness of a (rather painful) red light that governed the universe and its two slightly incompetent ministers in charge of space, who had failed in their last inspection and left space out of joint. Ayer, being Ayer even though dead, decided to put them right, but unfortunately his experience ended before he could tell God how to run things better. It made little difference to his fundamental beliefs: “So there it is. My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.”56

For myself, I profess admiration for an atheist who sticks to his unbelief with all the stubborn self-regard of the band of defiant dwarves in The Last Battle. “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs,” as they said, while sticking fingers in their ears and screwing up their eyes, and I suspect that God will greet with more respect the atheist who looks him in the face and still proclaims his defiance than the one who cowers. For one thing writing this chapter has taught me is that the root of atheism is not disbelief in God’s existence but rather savage fury at the world and people God has made; the only way to get him back is to refuse him.

This savage fury is the defining characteristic of the New Atheism. Rather than fading gently from public life, God and his believers were back – sometimes in the most savage and bloodstained of forms. The old secure belief that religion would fade away as modernization spread around the world proved false.

On 18 September 2010 an old man knelt in silent prayer before the Eucharist. There was nothing particularly unusual about that. What was unusual was that he was praying in company with 80,000 other people in Hyde Park. The old man was Pope Benedict XVI and I was one of the people kneeling on the grass in the twilight. The sounds of London receded. Around me in the crowd I saw grand old English ladies in tweed and pearls, Nigerians in traditional dress, Filipinos, South Americans, Poles and Italians, Indians and Sri Lankans (Tamil and Sinhala – and yes, they do look different if you know what to look for). All the peoples of the world, who meet and live in the city, were there, praying in silence before the Lord in the company of the pope.

And earlier that day I’d been to see the protest march against Pope Benedict’s visit and, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a whiter, more middle-class group of people in London. And the self-righteous sanctimoniousness dripping from face and placard and Stephen Fry made even the most unctuous of believers seem a model of self-reflection by comparison.

As we travelled home in the tube that night, and saw other families waving their yellow papal flags not in triumph but in sheer joy, I knew I’d made the better choice.