“Where is God?” … “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I … What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? … Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? … There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

This tremendous event … has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.” (Nietzsche 1882)

Chapter links:
Secularism & Secular Humanism
Militant atheism / anti-theism & the rise of New atheism
Science vs religion on methodology
The harmfulness of religion
Whether secularism tends towards nihilism
The place (if any) for religion in modern society
Faith schools
Faith schools & science
Faith schools & democracy

Introduction

This topic debates the rightful relationship of religion with society and politics.

We think of these terms ‘religion’, society’ and ‘politics’ as referring to meaningfully distinct categories, which already betrays our modern perspective. In ancient society, religion, law, political authority and communal identity were often woven together. Historian Michael Sugrue argues we can see this in the ancient tradition of epic literature like the epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, which contain a culture’s politics, ethics, law and understanding of the natural world within a single inherited tradition. He argues we can understand the Hebrew Bible similarly, where what we would now distinguish as religion, morality, law, history and politics are knitted together within the same texts.

“the epic tradition in the ancient world contains within it their political theory … their sense of ethics, their sense of law, their understanding of things like physics and the physical world; all of their knowledge is packed together in one easily transferable form … [what] this oral tradition contains is the entire accumulated wisdom of the society that produces them” (Sugrue 1997)

As civilisation developed, an increasing tendency emerged to separate these previously interwoven dimensions of human life, which gradually took on their own distinct identities, institutions, procedures and specialists. This process was uneven and repeatedly resisted, and at times even reversed. But it accelerated during the Enlightenment, when the relationship between religion and political authority became especially contested.

The modern debate is therefore not simply over whether religion and politics should be separated, but over how far that separation should extend and what legitimate role religion should retain in public life.

Theocracy is the opposite end of the spectrum to secularism. It is a political system where religion and state power are directly connected.

It rejects the separation of religion and political power, arguing religious principles can determine law, enforce standards of public behaviour, punish blasphemy and legitimate war. Premodern European states were rarely strict theocracies, but rulers, churches and law commonly supported one another, and religious truth was frequently understood to legitimate political authority (E.g., the ‘divine right of kings’).

The Reformation fractured Western Christianity, which contributed to centuries of persecution and religious conflict. This was greatly destructive in Europe. The intellectual elite began to seek ways to arrange a politics capable of maintaining peace despite religious disagreement. John Locke argued for toleration and religious freedom. He argued that genuine saving religion depends on internal acceptance, not external force. It follows that in religious matters, society ought only to allow ‘persuasion’ and ‘argument’, not ‘command’ and ‘penalties’:

“The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force.” (Locke 1689)

The Enlightenment strengthened this development by increasing confidence in reason, science and individual judgement as alternatives to religious authority. Kant sought to radically re-engineer religion. He argued that traditional religion divides people through competing revelations, miracles, doctrines and rituals, and hoped these historically specific claims would become subordinate to a universal “religion of reason” centred on moral principles discoverable by reason and thus available and authoritative for everyone.

“conflict over historical dogmas can never be avoided,” (Kant 1793)

Liberalism increasingly separated citizenship from religious conformity and defended freedom of conscience and debate. Kant called on people to have the courage to make use of their own mental abilities, capturing the move toward intellectual autonomy in his motto of the Enlightenment:

“Dare to know!” (Kant 1784)

Initially, secular ideas were concentrated among intellectual and educated circles, while popular Christianity remained strong. By the twentieth century, and especially from the 1960s, declining churchgoing, belief and religious identity showed secularisation spreading through the wider population. As traditional belief weakened, many feared that secularism would not merely challenge Christianity but destroy the moral and social order that religion had sustained. J S Mill pointed to a popular characterisation of his age as:

“destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism” (Mill 1859)

Secular humanism developed to answer this charge, offering not just a negative critique of religion but a positive view of social and moral order without it. It extends the Enlightenment epistemology of reason and experience into ethics and politics, grounding morality and social order in human wellbeing, autonomy, equality and universal rights rather than divine commands.

Secularisation is the sociological process through which religion declines or changes in belief, participation and social influence.

It asks what is happening to religion in society.

Secularism is the political principle that religion should not possess privileged coercive authority over the state.

After the catastrophes of twentieth-century Europe, freedom of conscience was given international legal protection in the European Convention on Human Rights (1950).

Its Article 9 protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion absolutely at the level of internal personal belief. But crucially, their outward manifestation or public expression was made a qualified right, meaning it may be restricted where necessary to protect public safety, public order, health or morals, or the rights and freedoms of others. Modern secular societies therefore continually negotiate between freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

In the twenty-first century, New Atheism revived a more confrontational critique of religion, often called ‘anti-theism’. This goes beyond ordinary secularism by arguing that religion itself is a net negative to society, even in its liberal forms, even merely as a private belief, so that it ideally should disappear altogether.

Prominent New Atheists (sometimes jokingly referred to as the ‘four horsemen’ New atheism) include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Journalist Christopher Hitchens, Writer Sam Harris and Philosopher Daniel Dennett.

“I’d like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people’s lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.” (Dawkins 2013)

The secularism topic therefore centres on two connected debates, the first sociological and the second political/philosophical:

Is religion actually declining, and if so how?
Is or would such decline be a good thing? In other words, what place, if any, should religion have in society?

The second debate typically turns on disagreements over whether religion is a net benefit or harm to society and, if it is harmful, what a liberal society is justified in doing about that.

Secularism & Secular Humanism (ꜛ)

Secularisation is a sociological process. It describes changes in the influence of religion within society. E.g., declining religious belief and participation, weakening political influence, or religion becoming increasingly confined to private life rather than shaping public institutions and culture.

Secularism is a political and normative principle. It concerns how society ought to organise the relationship between religion, the state and the public sphere. It comes in different forms:

Procedural or open secularism seeks to create a neutral framework within which religious and non-religious citizens can participate equally.

Its method is therefore inclusive cultural participation: religion may remain publicly visible, provided that no particular religion is given unfair privilege.
Its goal is a pluralistic society in which Christianity, other religions, atheism and other worldviews can coexist.

Programmatic or closed secularism seeks actively to reduce religion’s public influence.

Its method may involve laws or institutional rules to prevent religious symbols, practices or arguments from entering areas such as state education or government.
Its goal is the relegation of religion to the private sphere.

The intellectual background to modern secularism is closely connected with the Enlightenment, which challenged the assumption that religious authorities should determine truth and morality. The scientific revolution increasingly demonstrated the power of observation, experiment and mathematical reasoning. The controversy surrounding Galileo Galilei, for example, became symbolic of the possibility that empirical investigation could challenge and eventually overturn beliefs defended by religious authority.

“in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.” (Galileo 1612)

Political philosophers also increasingly defended individual freedom of thought. John Locke argued for religious toleration and against the state coercing belief. Immanuel Kant pushed the authority of reason further, arguing that religion should be brought “within the limits of reason alone.” Religious claims and practices should therefore be compatible with universal rational morality rather than accepted simply because they were revealed by a particular religious tradition. This was partly intended to overcome the conflict produced by competing religious denomenations which had been greatly destructive in Europe.

Secular humanism develops these Enlightenment trends into a more comprehensive worldview. It does not merely reject religion, it offers a positive case of how human beings can establish both truth and morality without God. Knowledge should be based upon reason, evidence and scientific enquiry rather than revelation or religious authority. Because new evidence may correct previous conclusions, truth claims remain probabilistic and open to revision, rather than being eternally settled by sacred texts.

This approach to knowledge also influences secular humanist ethics. Very broadly, if we subtract the supposed commands of a God and focus our ethical concern empirically, we end up focused on humans and their needs. Hence ‘humanism’. Moral decisions become about promoting human wellbeing, autonomy and flourishing. Further, our moral deliberation about our individual and collective needs can also employ the enlightenment empiricist epistemology. Humanists typically affirm the intrinsic dignity of individuals, drawing partly upon Kant’s principle that persons should be treated as ends in themselves, an idea influential upon modern conceptions of human rights.

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge” (Bertrand Russell 1925)

Secular humanism is compatible with a spectrum of political approaches to religion:

Emphasising autonomy and pluralism can support procedural secularism, protecting religious expression alongside non-religious viewpoints.
Emphasising rationality, equality or the prevention of harm can instead support more programmatic restrictions on religion’s public role.

Secular humanism therefore seeks to provide an alternative source of truth and values to religion while still permitting disagreement about how secular society itself should be organised. Which makes sense, since rejecting eternal settled authority on truth was its objective.

Militant atheism / anti-theism & New atheism (ꜛ)

Militant atheism, or anti-theism, became especially culturally prominent in the early twenty-first century through the movement commonly called New Atheism. Its best-known figures include the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, journalist Christopher Hitchens, writer Sam Harris and philosopher Daniel Dennett.

New Atheists do not argue that religious belief should be banned by the state. They accept religious freedom. Their goal is to actively persuade religious people to abandon their faith by challenging religion in public debate. In this sense, their method resembles open or procedural secularism. They engage in cultural persuasion within the “marketplace of ideas”, rather than through state coercion. However, their goal is more radical even than ordinary programmatic secularism. They are not satisfied merely with religion being removed from government and public culture. The claim is that society would be better off if religion dissapeared alltogether, even from private life. Since on this view, religion is too harmful to be safely confined to a private belief, as Hitchens explains:

“[Religious people are] totally miserable until they can get everyone else to believe it too. This is why it’s sinister. This is why it’s always dangerous … if they managed to contain themselves … but by definition religion cannot do that. Its beliefs are too arrogant and too total and too certain. It is the origin of totalitarianism and it threatens those who don’t take its offer with eternal torture for them and their children” (Hitchens 2011)

Dawkins’ criticises the way religion reproduces itself. In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the term “meme” for a cultural equivalent of a gene. A meme is an idea, practice or behaviour which spreads between people through imitation and cultural transmission. He later applied this concept to religion, suggesting that religious beliefs can spread “epidemiologically”, like viruses passing between hosts. Their widespread survival therefore reflects how successfully they reproduce themselves.

Children are particularly important to this argument. Human evolution has disposed children to trust adults, because learning about dangers, food and social behaviour has survival value. However, Dawkins argues that this useful tendency also creates a vulnerability, which religion exploits to transmit itself to each new generation. Indoctrination can saturate children with religious teachings before they possess sufficiently developed critical abilities to judge for themselves.

Dawkins thinks this becomes especially serious when children are taught ideas such as hell and eternal punishment, which children can understand vividly as literal and terrifying threats. Dawkins points to adults who have required psychological help because fears of hell remained powerful even after they abandoned their religious beliefs. He controversially concludes that some forms of religious indoctrination can amount to “child abuse”.

New Atheists also make the older psychological criticism associated with Sigmund Freud:

“[Religious doctrines] are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.” (Freud 1927)

Religion can be explained partly through human emotional needs. Fear of death, desire for protection and authority, the need to understand the world, to have meaning and purpose, and the hope of reunion with dead loved ones, all make religious beliefs psychologically attractive. The fact that a belief is comforting, however, is no evidence that it is true.

Dawkins consequently compares belief in God with childhood beliefs such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. He also rejects the idea that meaning must be supplied by an external authority as an “infantile” attitude:

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” (Dawkins 2006)

Daniel Dennett similarly argues that many people value religion because it provides community, morality, hope and purpose. He provocatively suggests that most believers may therefore not actually believe in God, only “believe in belief in God”. Namely, they believe that it’s good to believe, because they think religious belief socially and psychologically valuable,

These epistemological criticisms connect New Atheism with secular humanism. If beliefs should be based upon evidence and reason, no authority should be immune from criticism. Individuals should instead exercise autonomous judgement, and moral and political rules should be capable of rational public justification. New Atheists therefore object not only that particular religious doctrines may be false, but that faith can legitimise irrational ways of forming beliefs, which can then generate irrational and harmful moral and political views.

Hitchens argues that religion can idealise submission to an unquestionable divine ruler, becoming especially dangerous when believers claim divine authority to control others. Harris similarly argues that treating faith as a legitimate source of certainty creates intellectual protection for extremism. Even moderate religion can therefore be a problem if its general respect for “faith” makes it difficult to criticise extremists, who also appeal to faith.

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” (Hitchens 2007)

The New Atheist / anti-theist dispute over religion is consequently also a dispute about what should legitimise authority in modern society. Science, autonomous ethics and liberal politics depend upon claims remaining open to evidence, criticism and justification. New Atheists regard religion as dangerous because faith allows beliefs to avoid those demands.

Science vs religion on methodology (ꜛ)

A common attack on religion is that it conflicts with science. This version of the critique focuses not primarily on the conflict betwen religious and scientific beliefs, but on the conflict in their method. The accusation is that religion encourages an unscientific mindset in the population, which has harmful social effects.

“When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.” (Freud 1927)

The scientific method attempts to proportion belief to the available evidence. Scientific conclusions are always open to correction. As such they purport to be nothing more, but also nothing less, than what we currently have most reason to believe.

Dawkins argues that religious faith is the opposite. Rather than asking what the evidence justifies, faith provides permission to believe something because it is desired, comforting or religiously authoritative. He points to the biblical story of the doubting Thomas, who didn’t initially believe the resurrected Christ was really Jesus. Thomas asked for evidence, the wounds in the hands and feet, upon which he then professes belief. Jesus seem to rebuke him: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This appears to be making a virtue of blindly believing without evidence. One could even make the argument more forcefully, that this is cult-like behaviour. It’s manipulative, to say that the most blessed and valued are those who suspend their critical faculties.

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” (Dawkins 1992)

The concern arising from this is for the reasoning and critical thinking capabilities of the population, and the consequences for society of an epistemically impoverished populace. society. Religious convictions have, for example, contributed to opposition to some forms of embryo research and, among Jehovah’s Witnesses, blood transfusions. More broadly, reliance upon authority rather than critical scrutiny may conflict with the intellectual independence required for a healthy democracy. Citizens accustomed to accepting claims without adequate evidence could also become more susceptible to emotionally persuasive political demagogy.

Sam Harris puts it that religion legitimates belief without adequate evidence; this weakens the norms of critical reasoning in public discourse; and beliefs formed under those conditions can then produce harmful political action and policy.

“Religious beliefs also cause people to think badly—or not to think at all—about questions of immense social importance.” (Harris 2006)

“Religion is the only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and—all too often—what they will kill for. This is a problem because, when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable—to have our beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments—can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.” (Harris 2005)

McGrath responds that Dawkins is attacking a straw man, a cartoonish version of Christian faith. He points to the Christian tradition of natural theology, in which reason and evidence are used to support religious belief. Aquinas’ Five Ways, for example, begin with observations about features of the world such as change, causation and contingency and reason inductively towards a necessary or ultimate cause. Religious belief can therefore be presented as a rational response to evidence rather than an alternative to it. McGrath himself moved from atheism towards Christianity, while philosopher Antony Flew later became a deist partly because of modern versions of the 5th way.

This argument doesn’t depend on Aquinas’ arguments being correct. The point is that, even if they are ultimately unpersuasive, they can’t be dismissed as unscientific irrationality. They are, unmistakably, reasons to believe in a God. They can be dismissed, but only with counter-arguments. So religious belief cannot be dismissed as dangerously non-thinking.

Evaluation defending Dawkins:

However, this defence is insufficient to defeat the accusation of irrationality. McGrath is right that Dawkins didn’t appreciate the nature, let alone the aims, of natural theology. Arguments like the 5 ways only aim to establish something like a first cause, necessary being or intelligent source. They do not intend to independently establish Christianity’s much more specific claims about the Trinity, incarnation, resurrection or revelation. Natural theologians claim that reason establishes a foundation; a belief in ‘some’ higher power or creator. Faith then legitimately completes what reason cannot prove, namely, the belief in a particular God.

The problem with this appeal to natural theology to defend the reasonableness of belief is that it effectively concedes the central methodological critique. That religious faith extends beyond what the available evidence itself warrants. At best, arguments for God are evidence for ‘some’ higher power. So, any theist whose notion of God is more detailed than that cannot be defended by natural theology as being supported by reason and evidence in that view.

Natural theology does show Christianity has a significant tradition which employs genuine reason and philosophy. However the charge of irrationality is not sufficiently answered by pointing out that Christians sometimes use reason in certain areas of their worldview. If reason is not allowed to be the full judge of everything, then those beliefs it is excluded from can still fairly be called irrational. Natural theologians like Aquinas designed it to only justify belief in a higher power. So, the belief in the particular God of Christianity is a conclusion for which faith is necessary. Natural theology might provide some reason in support of that conclusion, but not sufficient reason. If we understand irrationality to involve belief which is unanchored from evidence, then the critique stands.

Ultimately, McGrath appears to overlook the distinction between the mere use of reason and reason which is evidence-proportioned. Consider Hume’s famous dictum of empiricism:

“a wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence” (Hume 1748)

A belief should become stronger, weaker or be abandoned as the evidential balance changes. Sophisticated theology may make Christianity consistent with available evidence, but faith prevents belief from being proportioned to that evidence. So, Dawkins’ misunderstandings of natural theology aside, the critique stands that religious faith lives on an unscientific epistemology. Harris is then correct that religiosity ought to prompt our concern for the health of our society.

The harmfulness of religion (ꜛ)

Dawkins argues that religion can exacerbate existing human tendencies towards violence and prejudice. He notoriously describes the God of the Old Testament thus:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction … [a] bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser … misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal” (Dawkins 2006)

Dawkins’ point is that it’s dangerous to respect the bible as a source of moral guidance. If believers regard the God depicted in these texts as perfectly good and worthy of worship, religious authority can make attitudes that would otherwise appear cruel or discriminatory seem morally justified.

Dawkins connects this with an evolutionary explanation of human conflict. Humans evolved in small groups where cooperation with members of one’s own tribe and suspicion of outsiders could aid survival. This unfortunately makes evolutionary sense, since we are genetically closer to those in our tribe, than those of others. The they is that we therefore possess a tendency towards in-group loyalty and hostility towards the ‘other’. Religion can reinforce this tendency by creating a powerful division between believers and unbelievers, or between members of rival faiths. The extensive history of religious conflict therefore suggests that religion can turn ordinary tribalism into a cosmic struggle each side imagines to be backed by divine authority.

“My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders, and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all.” (Dawkins 2003)

“Religion is a label of ingroup/out-group enmity and vendetta, not necessarily worse than other labels such as skin colour, language, or preferred football team, but often available when other labels are not.” (Dawkins 2006)

“it’s not part of my case, and I’m sure it’s not part of Professor Grayling’s or Professor Dawkins’s either, to say that religion is the reason for all of this or the exclusive or sole reason for all of it. I think it would be crude and reductionist to say that. But who is going to argue … that the matter of faith, the religious allegiance, that the preachings of religion have not in all these cases gravely exacerbated, gravely deepened, gravely poisoned, and prolonged all of these things that have made our tenuous civilization extremely difficult to defend, uphold, maintain, let alone to advance? I don’t believe this case could be made. That’s for a simple reason, because religion is not provided to us by revelation. It doesn’t come from the heavens. It doesn’t come from the beyond. It doesn’t come from the divine. It’s man-made. And it shows. It shows very well, that religion is created, invented, imposed by a species half a chromosome away from the chimpanzee. It shows, doesn’t it? Well, why do we deceive ourselves on this point?” (Hitchens 2007)

McGrath counters that Dawkins unfairly treats extremist religion as representative of religion as a whole. Fanatics can use almost any ideology to legitimise prejudices that they already possess, including non-religious ones:

“The reality of the situation is that human beings are capable of both violence and moral excellence—and that both of these may be provoked by worldviews, whether religious or otherwise.” (McGrath 2007)

Religion may therefore be seized upon by people already inclined towards violence, to generate an excuse for acting on their desires. McGrath argues that the reality of Christian doctrine actually points in precisely the opposite direction of violence. Christians regard Jesus as their primary moral example, and his teaching emphasises agape, selfless love which extends beyond social and ethnic boundaries. His parable of The Good Samaritan, for example, deliberately presents a despised outsider as morally righteous. Christianity can therefore challenge rather than reinforce humanity’s tribal tendency to dehumanise outsiders.

“Far from endorsing ‘out-group hostility’, Jesus both commended and commanded an ethic of ‘out-group affirmation’ … Christians may certainly be accused of failing to live up to this demand. But it is there, right at the heart of the Christian ethic.” (McGrath 2007)

Evaluation defending Dawkins:

McGrath’s response is partly correct, but it is incomplete. He points to the positive teachings in the bible, but what about the negative. Simply classifying violent Christians as distortions of “true Christianity” arguablly commits a No True Scotsman fallacy, because the bible itself contains material capable of supporting discriminatory attitudes. Passages have historically been used to justify the subordination of women, condemnation of homosexuality and acceptance of slavery. Extremists therefore do not simply import prejudices into an entirely innocent tradition. Aspects of the tradition can also attract, legitimise and intensify those prejudices. Religion is, to use Hitchens’ phrase, a ‘force multiplier’. The balanced view is that religion is both a symptom and a cause of human tribalism.

McGrath doesn’t just ignore the negative teachings; he can respond that sophisticated theology interprets such passages within their historical context and through Christianity’s wider emphasis on love. The problem for McGrath, and all such sophisticated liberal reframing, is that this sits uneasily with religion’s claim to hold divinely revealed truth. This makes revision harder than in a purely human secular moral system. This explains why religious ethics had to be fought tooth and nail into a domesticated form by modernity:

“The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.” (Harris 2004)

Even granting McGrath his premise that religion itself contains the resources and tools to reinterpret problematic texts, the problem is that it also contains the resources to not reinterpret them. Religion therefore contains a tension between revelation and reinterpretation. Sophisticated theologians like McGrath can push the balance towards reinterpretation, but to really solve the propensity to immorality, they would have to eliminate the claim to revelation altogether. There are some extreme liberal or even postmodern theologians which go that far, but they are marginal. So, religion appears stuck with its revelation aspect.

Fundamentalists, therefore, can always simply point to the prima facie meaning of morally suspect passages and claim revealed divine authority for them. McGrath’s frustration is understandable, as he rightly points to a possible version of Christianity which avoids this new atheist critique. But the issue is, fundamentalism is also a possible version of Christianity. This tension is inherent to Christianity and while it might sometimes be balanced positively, it always has the potential to manifest negatively. As Sam Harris puts it, the problem with religious fundamentalism is the fundamentals of religion. Religion will thus be forever burdened by the brute reality of its ancient texts, which J. S. Mill described as “in many respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people.”

Whether secularism tends towards nihilism (ꜛ)

One of the most popular religious criticisms of secularism is that removing God removes the objective foundation of morality necessary for social stability. Dostoyevsky is often paraphrased as warning that if God does not exist, “everything is permitted.” Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) develops this concern. If we give up on the idea that morality comes from a transcendent divine order, then all we appear to have left is human preferences. Ratzinger argues this leads to moral relativism, the view that there is no objective standard by which competing moral claims can finally be judged.

“[excluding] God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’”. (Pope Benedict XVI – Ratzinger 2010)

Here, Benedict XVI references his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, where he argues that although religious fanaticism can threaten religious freedom, the state promotion of religious indifference or practical atheism can likewise deprive people of “spiritual and human resources”.

If human beings are merely a “lost atom in a random universe”, products only of chance or necessity, then humanity may experience growth and evolution, but not genuine integral human development, which for Benedict includes humanity’s moral, spiritual and transcendent dimensions.

For Ratzinger, this can manifest dangerously in politics. If rights and duties are created entirely by human institutions, it’s hard to see what higher moral standard might hold the state to account. Political authority could therefore award itself the power to determine what counts as right and wrong. Ratzinger connects this with the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which subordinated individual dignity to political ideology. Underlying his argument is a “dependence” anthropology. For humans to flourish ethically requires grounding moral authority in a transcendent source beyond human power and above human opinion:

“ideological rejection of God and an atheism of indifference, oblivious to the Creator and at risk of becoming equally oblivious to human values, constitute some of the chief obstacles to development today. A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism. Only a humanism open to the Absolute can guide us in the promotion and building of forms of social and civic life — structures, institutions, culture and ethos — without exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment.” (Pope Benedict XVI – Ratzinger 2009)

However, liberal political philosophy challenges this view. State power can be constrained without religion through democracy, constitutional government with its check and balances, human rights and the rule of law. Kant grounds this kind of liberalism in an “autonomy” anthropology; rational beings can recognise and negotiate moral duties through reason itself, without needing the belief in an ultimately transcendent authoritative source.

Liberalism can certainly fail. Germany’s degeneration into Nazism demonstrates that democratic and rational institutions offer no absolute guarantee against tyranny. Clearly religious societies do not either, though. And so, we might settle this issue on empirical grounds. Secular democracies have generally avoided totalitarianism more reliably than theocracies, while highly secular societies typicalyl perform better in areas such as health, education and crime. Of course, correlation does not establish that secularism causes these positive outcomes. Yet, as Sam Harris argues, secularists do not need to prove causation. They need only demonstrate that secular societies are compatible with moral and social flourishing. This alone undermines the claim that abandoning religion necessarily produces nihilism.

“If religion were necessary for morality, there should be some evidence that atheists are less moral than believers … The most atheistic societies—countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom—are actually the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per-capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest by the UN in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious … Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society’s health.” (Sam Harris 2006)

Evaluation rejecting Ratzinger:

Even if we granted that secularism might sometimes cause some nihilism, Nietzsche’s insights shows that even this would not be the point against secularism and for religion which Ratzinger thinks it is. Nietzsche actually predicted that the “death of God” would produce nihilism. He explains it by European culture spending centuries locating ultimate truth and value in God and a transcendent moral order. Once belief in that foundation collapses, people may understandably experience moral disorientation.

Crucially, however, Nietzsche separates a contingent historical dependence upon Christianity from a necessary dependence upon transcendence. Europeans might struggle without God because Christianity had trained them for centuries to derive value from God, rather than because human beings are intrinsically incapable of creating non-religious values. Nihilism could therefore be a transitional crisis rather than secularism’s inevitable telos.

If Nietzsche is right, Ratzinger’s reasoning resembles the logic of an abusive relationship. Religion first cultivates the insecurity that humans cannot live meaningfully or morally without it. When we break free, it then activiates this insecurity through warnings (threats) that we cannot function without it. This is meant to encourage us to interpret our moral disorientation as proof that our independence was always as hopeless as it claimed.

Nietzsche’s view that nihilism is at most a temporary transitional crisis seems best justified by history. Long before Christianity, Aristotle and the Stoics developed sophisticated accounts of virtue, reason and human flourishing centred primarily upon human nature and life in this world. Modern secular philosophers likewise construct substantial ethical systems without appealing to revelation. Nihilism may therefore be one possible consequence of losing religious belief, but it is not a necessary, nor a permanent one. The moral disorientation Ratzinger identifies is a genuine concern, but his worldview appears to provide the weaker interpretation of it. The stronger conclusion is that the transition away from religion requires careful management. Historically and empirically, we are justified in concluding that the liberal-autonomy view is best positioned to be the source and safeguard of value. Humans should take up Nietzsche’s call to find the confidence to stand on their own two feet.

The place (if any) for religion in modern society (ꜛ)

Anti-theists argue that modern society would be better off without religion. Dawkins focuses on the epistemic danger of religion, in making a virtue out of unthinking faith. Interestingly he claims even moderate ‘tame’ forms of religion are a problem, because their legitimizing of faith indirectly supports extremists because they also appeal to faith.

Hitchens makes a similar but more politically considered case. He rejects the idea that religion could safely be confined to a private personal belief. In his view, it is in the nature of religion to be a threat to a free open society. Religion views itself as having objective universal ethics commands from a God. Hitchens argues this cannot be safely prevented from having political implications. He concludes that this creates a tendency in religion to seek authority over all non-believers, “not just in their public but in their private lives.”

“Religion now comes to us in this smiley-faced, ingratiating way, because it’s had to give so much ground and because we know so much more. But you have no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong.” (Hitchens 2011).

The problem is that if ethical commands are imagined to come from a God, they are naturally treated as absolutely true. Believers can then feel entitled to impose God’s will upon others. Hitchens therefore sees an inherent tendency towards theocracy and regards religion as a potential “threat” to peaceful pluralistic society.

“they won’t be happy until you believe it too … because that’s what their holy books tell them … [religion] isn’t just a private belief. It is rather, and I think always has been … a threat to the idea of a peaceable community.” (Hitchens 2011b)

“the problem in the first place is the belief on the part of this church that it does possess a truth that we don’t have, a god given right, a warrant, a mandate of heaven, to tell people what to do, not just in their public but in their private lives … Until that is changed, until that fantastic and sinister and non-founded claim is changed, [the crimes of the catholic Church] will go on repeating themselves, being partially denied, partially admitted when it’s too late to do anything else and covered up.” (Hitchens 2009)

However, Rowan Williams’ procedural secularism offers a model which is not disguised authoritarianism. As does Taylor’s ‘open’ secularism. These explicitly concede that religion should be separated from control of the state. But they maintain that it ought be allowed free engagement with public culture. The argument is clever, because it appeals to what mainstream western culture, and indeed the new atheists themselves, claim to support. Namely, liberty, and in particular freedom of conscience, religion and expression. Religious expression and public engagement ought to be protected by these rights as much as any other sort of opinion.

Alister McGrath seems to imply Dawkins is veering onto the anti-liberty path, when he objects that Dawkins’ hostility towards religion can sound “uncomfortably like” Soviet anti-religious propaganda, suggesting that militant secularism risks becoming intolerant in precisely the way it accuses religion of being.

Evaluation defending Hitchens:

However, McGrath’s comparison overlooks the distinction between methods and goals.. Anti-theists do have the goal of religion eventually disappearing. But their method for achieving this is through means consistent with liberty: criticism, argument and persuasion within the marketplace of ideas, not state suppression. Wanting everyone freely to become atheist is no more authoritarian than an evangelist hoping everyone will freely become Christian. McGrath would never dream of calling evangelists soviet. Methodologically, anti-theism is therefore compatible with procedural secularism.

The deeper issue with the appeal to procedural secularism as a response to the accusation of crypto-authoritarianism, is that it overlooks the deeper tension between religion and a liberal order. This makes it hard for McGrath to easily argue that religion can simply and easily fit into the procedural secularism form he espouses. So his defense against Dawkins and Hitchens becomes strained.

One epistemological foundation of liberalism is human fallibility. None of us can be certain that our beliefs are correct. J. S. Mill argues that because of this, competing opinions must remain open to criticism and public debate. Politically, this encourages tolerance. It tries to drive a wedge between the human emotionality around strong moral views, and social/political coercion of others. Under liberalism, deeply held convictions are not meant to automatically justify control over others. Generally, your convictions are your own personal affair (aside from those related to human rights). So, you can see how liberalism attempts to provide a place for things like religion, as part of people’s private lives and potentially part of culture, though not directly related to political power or law.

The problem is that religion struggles to accept this kind of domestication. Religion also accepts Mill’s premise of human fallibility, but crucially, it also claims some truths have been guaranteed by divine revelation. This makes it hard for them to follow Mill’s route from fallibility to tolerance, and thus to fully embrace the liberal approach on its own terms. If God has objectively revealed a universal moral law, believers can struggle to accept its being subject to the liberal norms of public debate. They may ask why society should permit conduct that God has forbidden. A common phrase amongst traditional authoritarian minded believers is that it’s wrong to “put man’s law above God’s law”. Historically, religions have often thus connected revealed truth with political authority.

The religious politics surrounding abortion and Roe v. Wade illustrates the problem. If abortion is understood not merely as personally objectionable but as objectively prohibited by God, accepting that other citizens may legitimately choose it becomes much harder. Procedural secularism therefore asks religion to separate universal moral conviction from coercive political authority, even though religion’s own self-understanding can continually pull those things back together. This is why Williams and McGrath’s appeal to procedural secularism is weak. As an ideology it offers freedom of religion which they like, but it also requires freedom from religion. This requires religion to accept being treated as one worldview among many. And yet, that requirement is anathama to the self-understanding of historical religion, and to all but the most liberal or postmodern forms religion takes today.

This does not prove that religion must disappear. It can and has existed alongside free societies, even integrating well in many cases. But this critique suggests that there is a tension between religion and liberty, such that religion may never be completely “domesticated” by modernity. So long as religion believes in revelation and its own superiority in truth, the temptation will exist for that to turn into superiority in political power. This tendency of revealed religion will therefore continually tear at the social contract. Hitchens’ concern therefore appears well-founded, that even relegation to the private sphere may be insufficient as a safeguard.

McGrath’s Soviet comparison may itself betray this tension. Given what we’ve outlined about the clear distinction between the New Atheist liberal method and the soviet coersive method, we might well ask the following question: Why was Dawkins’ liberal critique of religion heard by McGrath as reminiscient of a totalitarian threat of persecution? We might offer the following surmise. A worldview historically accustomed to cultural and political privilege can experience loss of that privilege as an attack upon its supposedly rightful place in society. So McGrath’s overextension in his defence of religion’s compatibility with liberty may be revealing the very illiberal attitude for which Hitchens was critiquing religion in the first place.

Faith schools (ꜛ)

The debate over faith schools reflects the wider disagreement about the place of Christianity in modern Britain. Historically, churches played a major role in providing education before the development of a comprehensive state system. Many schools were founded by the Church of England or Roman Catholic Church during the nineteenth century and were later incorporated into state education. This relationship was formalised by the 1944 Education Act, which allowed church schools to receive state funding provided that they met national educational requirements. Today, over a third of primary schools and just under a fifth of secondary schools retain a Christian affiliation. Faith schools therefore show how Christianity remains institutionally embedded in British society even though religious identification and church attendance have declined.

Supporters argue that faith schools can offer distinctive educational advantages. They often claim to provide not only strong academic standards, but also an emphasis on moral formation, discipline and community. Rather than treating education as purely academic, a Christian school may understand its purpose as developing virtues such as compassion, responsibility and service to others.

Faith schools can also be defended by appealing to parental freedom. Some parents want their children to be educated within the religious worldview practised at home. Popular faith schools are frequently oversubscribed, and their attraction is not limited to committed believers. Some non-religious parents also apply because they associate faith schools with good behaviour, strong pastoral care or a coherent and valuable ethos.

Defenders further argue that in a way, removing faith schools would not make education more diverse. Britain is now religiously plural, and the system includes Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu schools as well as Christian ones. Faith schools can therefore be presented as one way different communities can express their identities within a multicultural society.

However, critics question over how well faith schools can prepare students for living with those of other faiths. Disputes have also arisen over the teaching of sensitive issues such as LGBT+ inclusion.

Faith schools & science (ꜛ)

Dawkins argues that faith schools undermine scientific thinking by teaching children that important beliefs depend on authority, not critical thinking. He points out one of the ways Children have evolved to depend upon adults is for information. This is normally useful, but Dawkins thinks religion exploits this by encouraging children to accept claims about God, creation or the afterlife on the basis of faith and authority rather than evidence. This is arguably the reason religions put so much effort into getting their message to children, of which faith schools are a quintessential case. They want to instill religious beliefs before children have developed their critical faculties; before they are old enough to judge for themselves.

Dawkins is particularly critical of the way hell is used here. It is essentially a threat that the child behave and believe as their religious authority figures tell them, “or else”. Young children lack the intellectual and emotional maturity to shield themselves from this kind of attack. Dawkins therefore worries that religious education can produce a more generally unscientific mindset, in which important claims are protected from questioning rather than tested through evidence and investigation.

Dawkins illustrates this with his visit to a faith school where he was told that all the pupils there rejected evolution. He was challenged by a pupil, who asked him, if humans came from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist? Dawkins cleverly put that question to the science teacher of this faith school. She was not able to answer. For Dawkins, this demonstrates how prior religious commitments, if allowed to interfere in schooling, can interfere with the scientific knowledge and critical reasoning of children.

McGrath counters that Dawkins greatly overstates this criticism. He insists that Christian beliefs should themselves be open to rational examination. He rejects the premise that Christian belief requires blind faith or hostility towards science. McGrath agrees Dawkins has a legitimate concern about indoctrination, but argues that is a case of badly done, poor religious education. Yet Dawkins obscures this good point with what McGrath calls the “noise of the hyped-up rhetoric”, particularly Dawkins’ description of religious upbringing as “child abuse”. A properly run faith school could instead teach pupils to examine Christianity critically, encounter objections to it and distinguish faith from unquestioning acceptance.

McGrath is essentially framing Dawkins’ evidence as pertaining to bad faith schools, so he can argue that there’s no problem with good faith schools. This framing makes the issue a matter of improving the bad ones, rather than eliminating the whole category.

Evaluation criticising faith schools:

In the face of McGrath’s points, Dawkins might appear to have overgeneralised. Or at least, it might appear that he hasn’t been fair enough in considering whether some or even many faith schools might not cause the problems he identifies. Nevertheless, Dawkins’ underlying argument is stronger than his rhetoric. Fear of hell can cause genuine psychological distress, and some former believers do have to seek therapy to overcome it. So when trauma can result from threats of hell, the term ‘child abuse’, even if it needs careful framing, is unfortunately not empty rhetoric.

A deeper point we can make to justify Dawkins’ stance follows from the fact that religious belief appears to strongly corrolate with social transmission. Studies suggest that around 80% of religious people share the religion of at least one parent. Of course, not all of these would have been indoctrinated. But this figure is much higher than we would expect, if religious belief were really reached through critical thinking. There are so many religions in the world, and yet the overwhelming majority of believers believe the particular faith of their parents. This is very good evidence that religious belief is usually caused by being raised in faith. Although rational arguments for religion certainly exist, most believers appear to encounter a particular faith first through family and community. It’s fair to say this is at least a soft form of indoctrination.

So, Dawkins appears correct that faith is too often transmitted to children in a negative way which can threaten their scientific and critical thinking. We ought not to grant this negative power, which parents already clearly significantly exercise on their own, the further backing of institutional reinforcement by faith schools.

So it’s all very well for McGrath to say that a ‘good’ kind faith school is possible, which inspires critical thinking etc. The reality appears to be that religion is usually transferred to children uncritically, in that vulnerable phase before their critical faculties have even had a chance to develop.

Mill makes this connection between critical thinking, human falibility, the importance of liberal debate and education, and the fact of religious affiliation being a matter of geographical accident and parental transmission:

“Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable … for in proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of ‘the world’ in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society … Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet it is as evident in itself as any amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.” (Mill 1859)

Faith schools & democracy (ꜛ)

The debate over faith schools reflects a wider question about the purpose of education in a democracy. The philosopher John Dewey argued that we first need an analysis of what a democracy needs to flourish, and from there figure out how schooling can help by preparing children according to those needs. Dewey characterised democracy as a “mode of associated living”. This means it’s not only a system of elections and political institutions. A healthy democracy depends upon citizens being able to communicate, cooperate and reason with people whose beliefs and backgrounds differ from their own. Education therefore has a civic role and responsibility. Schools should develop the critical thinking, independence and social understanding required for autonomous citizenship.

This has clear implications for faith schools, especially in a multi-faith society. Competing religious and non-religious worldviews are part of the fabric of our society. Democracy depends on their communication and negotiation. And of course, pupils will encounter these worldviews different to their own throughout their lives. So, education should equip them to compare these critically rather than simply inherit one as authoritative. Joel Feinberg’s idea of a child’s “right to an open future” furthers this argument. Parents legitimately make many decisions for children, but their authority should not unnecessarily restrict the range of meaningful choices available when the child becomes an autonomous adult. A school organised around forming pupils within one religion may therefore conflict with the democratic purpose of education.

However, liberal democracy also protects religious freedom and pluralism. This defense claims that the freedom to choose a faith school is just an extension of religious freedom. So that valuing one entails, or at least supports, valuing the other. Religious liberty is also a vital aspect of democracy. If the state prohibited faith schools, that might imply that only secular frameworks are legitimate.

Faith schools can be regulated, so that they still have to instill democratic values in children. This might be the ideal liberal balance of rights between freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

Evaluation criticising faith schools:

This defense is weak, because religious freedom does not necessarily entail a right to faith schools. Individuals could remain completely free to believe, worship and teach their religion within families and religious communities even if schools themselves were non-confessional.

Dawkins argues that describing somebody as a “Christian child” should be seen as equally inappropriate to describing them as a “Conservative child” or “Communist child”. This point cleverly shows how we easily see the problem with influencing children politically. The question provoked is whether there’s a principled reason for religion seeming different.

We can extend Dawkins’ point. The idea of a school explicitly organised to influence children as Conservatives or Communists would normally be rejected as inappropriate. So why are faith schools not seen as equally inappropriate? The similarities are clear. Both politics and religon involve the instilling of a worldview in a child, before that child has had the chance to think it through for themselves. Faith schools may only seem different because they are historically familiar, rather than because there is really a principled distinction.

The approach best consistent with the needs of democracy is therefore to ban faith schools. Religious freedom is not infringed one iota by this, any more than political freedom is infringed by preventing political schools. This would best protect children’s developing autonomy and prepare them to participate in a society containing deep disagreement.

Some might reply that this betrays a pretense of secular liberal democracy to be neutral, when it isn’t. But we need not take that view of liberalism. It may be best viewed as a worldview which privileges autonomy, critical inquiry and democratic values. The point here is that faith schools conflict with those values.

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