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http://www.crisismagazine.com/december2004/book3.htm

Atheism: Past, Present, and Future
By: John Omicinski

The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
Alister McGrath, Doubleday,
306 pages, $23.95

In his latest book, The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath contends that atheism is a spent force, discredited by the murderous circuses staged by its ringmasters in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and, not least of all, a victim of its own elitism, arrogance, and aimlessness. He tells one story of attending a recent, ragtag national convention of about 250 atheists in Boston, where his seatmate spent much time blacking over the word “God” on U.S. currency—an act as effectual as throwing rocks into the sea and hoping to fill it.

McGrath doesn’t seem to realize how devastating an insight he has stumbled upon here, a concrete example of the hatefulness and self-righteousness that gave us the gulags and Auschwitz.

Thank goodness these sorry sons and daughters of Marx, Freud, Lenin, Voltaire, Huxley, Darwin, and Nietzsche—names that once commanded armies of devout intellectuals convinced of their rightness and righteousness—have arrived at a blind canyon, at the other end of an arc launched at the Bastille and the guillotine and ending at a shabby Logan Airport meeting.

Even the scribbling, anti-God protester fits into McGrath’s theory as to why atheism rose—in his view—with the French Revolution of 1789 and fell exactly two centuries later when the Berlin Wall was pushed over in 1989.

“Paradoxically,” he writes, “the historical origins of modern atheism lie primarily in the extended criticism of the power and status of the church, rather than in any asserted attractions of a godless world.”

Atheism fell victim to its own lie: that cashiering religion would usher in an epoch of peace, moral righteousness, and equality. Instead, “The reality of the situation is bloody, messy, and brutal,” writes McGrath. “The eradication of faith tends to involve firing squads and gas chambers.”

He also notes the paradox of atheism: “The greatest intolerance and violence of that [20th] century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.”

McGrath traces the heady arc of atheism in an accessible, readable work that will become a standard. Why atheism rose, then fell, as an organized belief system is one of the more intriguing histories of our time.

The rise of science and the European Enlightenments all had something to do with atheism’s progress, and McGrath’s explanations are written clearly enough for any layman. His theory on why atheism didn’t become a part of the American Revolution should make it especially interesting to U.S. readers.

He is particularly good at noting how much various writers—notably the Romantic poets Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats—contributed to the legitimatization of the atheistic point of view. What makes the book more interesting is that McGrath, a Protestant who teaches historical theology at Oxford, was for many years himself an atheist. But this is not a personal book; perhaps he has left that for another time.

According to McGrath, atheism’s glory days are long gone, and “its future lies increasingly in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain.”

But if the book falters, it is at this point. McGrath fails to recognize that, though it lacks organization, atheism’s powerful legacy lives on in millions of unexamined secular lives.

Indeed, atheism—and its intellectual cousin, agnosticism—contributed greatly to what Pope John Paul II calls a “crisis of meaning...a perspective of life which neglects the search for the ultimate goal and meaning of human existence.”

Amorphous and harmless though this spiritual vacuum may appear to be, it is the same sort of atmosphere that proved fertile for the Protestant Reformation and its progeny, the French Revolution, which spun off atheism.

Marx, Feuerbach, Freud, and others in the atheist pantheon have been discredited (Darwin surely is next, for his theory remains unproved as “the origin of the species”). At times, McGrath all but suggests that Christians may drop their guards and laugh off the atheist challenge as dead and gone.

This would not be a good idea. With the devil still running about seeking the ruin of souls, love is not necessarily just around the corner. It may simply be some other enemy of Christianity, clad in a clever new disguise.


John Omicinski, a former national reporter in Gannett New Service’s Washington bureau, contributes frequently to crisis.