Notes toward a Supreme Fiction

Reading Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion, has intermittently caused me to shout agreement, to despair and to suffer long stretches of demotivation. Or at least I felt that way for most of last Wednesday. Dawkins paints a sad picture of a Christianity that is, strangely, still growing in popularity. Historians of contemporary religious culture are saying that it is replacing traditional european models to become the new face of "Christendom".

A reaction I did not have to The God Delusion was disillusion. I have never believed in the stuff Dawkins attacks, nor have most of my friends. Though Dawkins protests to the contrary, what he is attacking is bad religion in the same way Ben Goldacre attacks bad science in his Guardian columns. The human capacity for credulity is amazing, and our brains are loosely wired, it is true. All this makes for bad religion, and bad religion, as Dawkins says, is dangerous.

Good religion recognizes that religious discourse is fundamentally symbolic discourse, poetic discourse. Poetry does things that the science of genetics finds difficult to accomodate. It uses things like sound patterns and metaphors to create dimensions of meaning unavailable in ordinary language in order to recall, celebrate and share experience that is characteristically non-verbal. What was the name of the anthropologist who said, "first the dance, then the god"? I can't remember. But even before the dance comes the raw experience that the dance attempts to interpret. The next generation uses god language in order to teach a new generation without such raw experience what the dance "means". All god-language misses the mark, in the same way metaphor does. Robert Burns' love was not really a red, red, rose. But his metaphor points to a certain level of truth unavailable to the gynecologist.

The big problem comes with the institutionalisation of religion in the second and third generation. Anyone who has ever tried to run a church, which management theorists say usually has a more complex structure than General Motors, knows that you need fairly unimaginative people who are good at accountancy and personnel management and building maintenance. We make people who like to chair meetings into bishops. By nature, such people have commitments to institutional stability, which, in the church, leads in turn to concerns for orthodoxy and literalism. Imagination, the history of the church shows, is the enemy. The Church by nature produces bad religion. Christianity had already formed itself into the perfect medium for empire by the time Constantine co opted it as his official Roman mascot. You can already see such a drift taking place in the Pastoral Epistles.

Any conventional reading of the gospels shows that liberation from such institutional rigidities and injustices was a major concern for Jesus and the evangelists who wrote these documents. Indeed, this was a major concern throughout scripture, and not only for the prophets. Israel in Babylonian exile reflected on the collapse of their national faith in terms of the chronic failures of their kings to uphold justice and compassion. In what is known as the Deuteronomic History they told the story of their kings as a record of judgement, and told their pre-history in a way that Pharaoh became a metaphor for the kings of Israel and Judah and exodus became a metaphor for a grandly imagined return home. Throughout scripture we see this struggle not just between king and prophet but also between religion as a legitimation of central authority and religion as liberation. In the twentieth century such concern for the liberation from the shackles of traditional religious authority became Dietrich Bonhoeffer's call for a religionless Christianity. Much of Dawkins has already been anticipated in our own deep tradition of self-criticism.

Christianity has not only had to bear the yoke of institutionalisation but has also had to deal with the ever present phenomenon of popular credulity. Dawkins does not make converts, I feel, by attacking the hard shell of fundamentalist credulity straight on. The Apostle Paul had a different strategy, which was traditional in the rhetorical practice of his day. He started with where people were.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (Pulitzer Prize 1974), has shown that humanity's innate fear of death has projected mythologies of eternal life into our thinking from the earliest years of human culture. In Paul's time such thinking took various forms, like the Jewish belief in the resurrection of martyrs or the life-after-death beliefs of the gladiator cults. Paul doesn't argue with popular belief. He starts with where his readers are, and moves them forward in a dialectical process of discovering the meaning of resurrection in the experience of conversion, which he calls dying with Christ and being re-born with Christ. It could very well be that Paul didn't believe in life after biological death at all. It is clear, in any case, that for him such a desire to live forever would be self-concerned. For Paul the reality of death was spiritually important. One dies to self-concern, to be reborn to a life for others. For the new born Christian, one's personal survival beyond death is inconsequential. Whether we live or whether we die, he said, we are the Lord's. I find Paul's theology of death and dying has much in common with Ernest Becker.

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