John Gray, atheisms and the truth about Christianity
by Nick Spencer, Theos.
Many of the arguments in Seven Types of Atheism will be familiar, and to those who have followed Gray closely over the last twenty years, very familiar. His essential argument is that much modern Western thought is a bastardized and degenerated version of Christianity, cherry picking the anthropological and ethical fruit while hacking away at its metaphysical roots. “The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self–realisation in history.” (157)
This applies to atheism as much – perhaps more – as it does other ideas. Beginning with the predictable hook of the New Atheists, Gray shows how most of modern atheisms are debased versions of the Christianity from which they emerged.
Gray is flamboyantly dismissive of the New Atheists themselves. “A remark made by Wittgenstein about Frazer applies equally to Richard Dawkins and his followers,” he notes: “‘Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages… His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves’.” (11) Not only do the “smears and fulminations” of the New Atheists make sense “only in a specifically Christian context,” but they only do so within “a few subsets of the Christian religion”. They are, in effect, a kind of mirror Protestant fundamentalism, a fact that we at Theos noted repeatedly during our 2009 Darwin project, when it became painfully clear that Young Earth Creationists and New Atheists were in lock–step about the incompatibility of Darwin and God.
Gray claims that the New Atheists are little more than a sideshow – albeit a noisy one – and his opening chapter on them is one of his briefest. The rest of Seven Types of Atheismparses his six other types, namely, (2) secular humanism, “the hollowed out version of the Christian belief in salvation in history”; (3) scientific atheism, the replacement of God with science (or pseudo–science) such as evolution, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism, or transhumanism; (4) political atheism, the replacement of a divine superstructure with a political creed and programme, such as Jacobinism, communism, Nazism, or “evangelical liberalism”; (5) anti–theism or misotheism, the replacement God–worship with God–hatred; (6) a progress–free atheism, such as Gray finds in the life and work of George Santayana and Joseph Conrad; finally (7) the “mystical atheism” that Gray sees in Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza, and the Russian–Jewish fideist Lev Shestov…
For all this he is right about atheisms, he is wrong about the Christianity from which so many descend…we are told, “the faith that Jesus asked from his disciples did not mean accepting a creed. It meant trusting in him” (17), it was his early follower Paul, who turned belief in into belief about Jesus, and, worse, turned a Jewish movement into a universal one. Jesus’ gospel “contain[ed] little of nothing of theology, [but] was concerned with deeds, not words” (17) He was a “prophet”, but he was turned into “God on earth”. It was St Paul who, to coin a phrase, invented Christianity.
For someone who has spent many years critiquing intellectuals for being wedded to outdated orthodoxies without realising it, there is some irony in the fact that when it comes to the origins of Christianity, Gray is wedded to an outdated orthodoxy without realising it. The deeds–not–words, movement–not–a–religion, local–not–universal line is hard to sustain.
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