The dawn of the Age of Reason instigated the emancipation of the West from the Age of Faith and its Christian delusions. Or so, at any rate, goes the predictable anti-religion narrative. A.C. Grayling, prominent ‘secular humanist’ British philosopher, encapsulates this worldview in The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (2016). During the seventeenth century, according to Grayling, Europe’s scientific and philosophical geniuses took a blowtorch to religious superstition and ushered in a brave new mentality, the coolly cogent modern mind. Credulous religious believers remain in our midst, alas, but reason (and enlightenment) is on the side of the “the Brights”, as Richard Dawkins calls atheists. Nonetheless, given the fashion and folly of wokism, a post-Christian faith of sorts, perhaps we need to re-think the customary Age of Faith/Age of Reason storyline.
Modernity, asserts Grayling, is the result of the impact on Western thinking by a “luxuriance of genius”, including Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and so on. The transition from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason was both seismic and swift:
The claim that I think might be made about the audience at Macbeth in 1606 and the crowds at the execution of Charles I in 1649 is that the former consisted of pre-moderns, the latter of moderns or at any rate those who were fast inventing the modern; and this is a change discernible by the middle of the eighteenth century.
Reason, as delineated by this new learning, should have finished off religion and all other fancies and chimera once and for all. Scientific method, along with logic, rigorous thinking, objective evaluation, transformed astrology into astronomy, magic into science, alchemy into chemistry, geocentric fiction into heliocentric truth, and last but not least, God into a medieval relic.
The victory of rationalism or free thinking, according to Grayling, has only been held back by Christian holdouts. Religious folk, whether born-again fundamentalists voting for the GOP or Salafi jihadists blowing up the Twin Towers, are a danger to the world’s survival. In Against All Gods (2007), he writes: “If the tone of the polemics here seems combative, it is because the contest between religious and non-religious outlooks is such an important one, a matter of life and death, and there can be no temporising.” Grayling’s ‘philosophical’ position had acquired the belligerence of the New Atheists of the time, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. Grayling, in 2010, was one of 55 public figures who sent a letter to The Guardian expressing disapproval of Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit to the United Kingdom. The New Atheist polemic routinely assumes that religious belief is not only redundant but actively toxic as per the title of Hitchens’ tome, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).
The triumphalism of these New Atheists is comprehensively critiqued in David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (2009). Bentley Hart submits that killing God does not guarantee the victory of reason. Why? Because the Western mind, so infused with Christian precepts, struggles to find meaning and purpose without God. As the madman in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gay Science declares:
‘Whither God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how we do this? How could we drink up the sea?’
The abyss, from this standpoint, is the likely destination of those without a cosmological reference point. The God-shaped hole in Nietzsche’s own heart drove him to contrive the Doctrine of the Eternal Return, the idea that all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time and space, a belief-system as mystical as any religious faith. Lou von Salomé, a formidable intellect in her own right and briefly Nietzsche’s companion, summed up his intellectual trajectory as well as anyone: “Nietzsche the God-seeker, who came from religion and was moving towards religious prophesy.” In the final months of sanity, Nietzsche openly pitted his self-hewn creed against Christianity. At the conclusion to Ecce Homo, he wrote: “– Have I been understood? – Dionysos against the Crucified…” But the god of Friedrich Nietzsche could not save him from the abyss.
Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics from the French Revolution to WWI (2005) and Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (2007) go a long way to explaining how post-Christian Europeans found meaning and purpose by converting religion into ideology. Consider the French Revolution. During a two-year de-Christianisation campaign, in which Catholic and Protestant worship were both prohibited, the civil Religion of Reason was granted primacy. But the supremacy of the Religion of Reason and the marginalisation of Christianity did not generate an Age of Reason, a truth even Maximilien Robespierre might have conceded before being guillotined without trial in the Palace de la Revolution.
Reason and Christianity, on the other hand, are not so much adversaries as partners. After all, many of the prodigies who brought us to a fuller understanding of the laws of the universe were not only Christian but emboldened to make their discoveries about the workings of the material world because of their assumptions about the infinite rationality of the Christian God. Bentley Hart even makes the case that modern science – “its methods, its controls and guiding principle, its desire to unite theory to empirical discovery, its trust in a unified set of physical laws, and so on” – only arose “within Christendom, and under the hands of believing Christians.” As Pope Benedict outlined in his famous 2006 Regensburg Address, Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections, modern-day science is not the slayer of Christianity but the product of Christian genius. For Westerners to think otherwise, warned Benedict, is to be “endangered” by an “aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality”.
As Christianity loses its grip on Western civilisation – and because human-beings are homo religiosus – it is not surprising that new types of worship keep striving to replace the Christian faith. Nietzsche’s pessimism about impending Western nihilism was not unfounded. Nazism and Communism, with millenialist promises of heaven on earth the idolatry of their twisted crosses – the swastika and hammer and sickle, respectively – are two prime examples of Christian heresies. Wokism, formerly known as PC orthodoxy and identity politics, is the latest post-Christian “sacred cause”. This faith is today insinuating itself into every aspect of contemporary Western life, not excluding Christian institutions. Former Anglican bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, on being received into the Catholic Church in 2021, wondered why the Church of England was adopting wokism as its holy creed when it already had a religion of its own:
The Church councils and synods are permeated by activists who each have a single-issue, often faddish agenda, whether it is about cultural correctness, ‘climate change’, identity politics, multi-culturalism (which actually encourages communities to live separately) or critical theory on race, religion and gender – a neo-Marxist theory developed to create conflict by dividing people into victims and villains.
If Pope Benedict and Bentley Hart are right about the Christian faith – that it is not antithetical to reason but actually serves to “underlie its rationality” – then we need to know if Christianity’s prospective replacement is similarly supportive of reason. Latter-day transgender activism, the tautological consummation of identity politics, suggests not. Bernard Lane’s Gender Clinic News, a weekly online global review of the harm caused by the denial of biological sex markers, suggests we are in the midst of an anti-science psychosis. In a recent edition of GCN (May 5, 2023), Dr Carrie Mendoza, an emergency physician working in the south side of Chicago, pointed out the dangers of medical records which edit out the biological sex of a patient in favour of a self-chosen gender:
This registration [of gender in medical records] based on what somebody feels, has implications…There is a generation I see of staff who are either scared or ignorant about asking for a full exam because it’s, you know, politically incorrect to ask to do a testicular exam or to do a breast exam – that’s dangerous because you can miss things.
Meanwhile, in Scotland during the same week, a male GP, Dr Steffen McAndrew, was prevented from donating blood to the Scottish National Health Service because he refused to sign a form saying he was not pregnant. A spokeswoman for the Scottish National Blood Transfusion, responding to an inquiry about the matter, played it entirely straight: “Giving blood may be harmful for individuals who are pregnant, or who have been pregnant recently.” Steffen McAndrew’s appeal to common sense and basic science went entirely unheeded.
The Age of Unreason was not extinguished in the seventeenth century. Contraire Grayling, it is just getting started.
This essay appeared in Volume II of Agony.