Reason, Faith, & Revolution came from the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton’s Terry Lectures at Yale University. He explores the deep connections between faith, culture, and ideology in the world today. Eagleton begins his inquiry with the Ditchkins phenomenon, ‘Ditchkins’ his coinage for Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose thoughts are representative of the so-called “New Atheism,” or as Dawkins himself would call it, militant atheism. It is an atheism which is tired and whose patience for absurd and infantile religion–all religion, in its eyes–has all but dried up. It is atheism on a crusade, a salvific holy war to purge humanity once and for all of its juvenile fantasy, to wake it from the long slumber of religion. One could do worse than to assume Promethean aspirations in this atheism. But the fact is this atheism is here, and like the rest of us, Eagleton is more than a little troubled, puzzled by it. Its causes and consequences after all, bear import on the unfolding history of man and religion.
Eagleton approaches his analysis of the New Atheist phenomenon in four parts. First, he takes a look at the scripture itself tries to rescue it from the bastardization of the pious and unpious alike. Dicthkins, he says, views religion as a sort of pseudo-science, and treats God as if he were the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. After all, Eagleton quotes Hitchens as writing, “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” (7). But this, says Eagleton, is an error of category. Religion at its best is not and never was meant to be a science or some competing theory. Says Eagleton, “It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov … Science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of thinks, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are.” (7-10). God is not some alternate theory to science, a mega-manufacturer, but an artist and an aesthete to boot, who created human beings, to be theologically precise, for the hell of it, says Eagleton. God is not a cosmic police officer as Ditchkins would suggest, nor morality his penal code. Morality, as much as existence, has no point, but is rather a way of living life most richly. If God is a law enforcer, he is certainly no good at it, for his essence is freedom. Indeed, among other things, the liberal doctrine of freedom, of which Ditchkins presumably represents, draws from the Christian notion of free will.
Liberalism and religion are not necessarily at odds, though Ditchkins might disagree. “It was Christianity, not the French Intelligentsia,” says Eagleton, “which invented the concept of everyday life … Jesus is a sick joke of a savior”(19) whose gospel was good news for the anawim, or as Eagleton calls them, the shit of the earth, the scum of mankind, for his gospels brought to them the water of life, whose body is the bread of their spirit. Not a gospel that would sit well with the modern tenor of Christianity, I suppose. Yet that is exactly what Eagleton is trying to salvage it from. He is after all a self-described Marxist, and for Eagleton, “All authentic theology is liberation theology,” which is similar to the case Cornel West would make in Democracy Matters: prophetic Christianity was hijacked and abused when it was incorporated into the Roman state with Constantine at Milan. Cornel West, another socialist, contends that since then, this contradiction has festered at the heart of Christianity–empire. But no such empire exists for these liberals. Or as someone like Noam Chomsky would say, America did it, so it did not happen in history. No, for the liberals like Ditchkens, “a spot of social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there” (35) and we’re on our inevitable march towards Progress, capital “p.” There is nothing to be redeemed from. Not even after Auswitz. Or Vietnam. Or Latin America. September 11, 1973: the United States deposed the democratically elected president of Chile and instated a despot who went on to kill thousands. For Eagleton, the capitalist system like the one we have today, is inherently atheistic, godless in its actual material practices, “a society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics” (39).
In another sense too, liberal Capitalism is atheistic, or at least agnostic, because “liberals do not so much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed to hold beliefs” (144). Liberal Rationalism got carried away with itself in its sanctification of the rationalism part of liberal rationalism, for Ditchkins is a perfect example of this hubristic rationalism, which sees itself as purely rational and anything unlike itself–faith, for example–as irrational. But this type of thinking makes a critical failure. Everyone has faith; it is a part of the human constitution. Reason alone just simply isn’t enough. Eagleton writes, and he gets it right, that reason is only the secondary outworking from a primary commitment or faith:
What moves people to have faith in, say, the possibility of a nonracist society, is a set of commitments, not in the first place a set of propositions. They must already have some allegiance to an idea of justice, and to the possibility of its realization, if they are to be stirred into action by the knowledge that men and women are being refused employment because of their skin color. The knowledge in itself is not enough to do it.
Yes, though he probably wouldn’t admit it, even secular rationalists like Ditchkins have faith. They have faith in the value of individual freedom, for example, which cannot be grounded scientifically. Faith is the primitive–and groundless; one could even say irrational–conviction of what we believe in relation to who we are. That is, to change these beliefs is to change some part of who we understand ourselves to be, which is why in the Christian tradition to change one’s faith would be a conversion. We are not human beings by virtue of how rational we are, but by virtue of what it is we believe, though we cannot in any sense rationally justify these self-evident articles of faith. Thus for a late-capitalist system in which “reason becomes too dominative, calculative, and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith.”
It is from this godless materialism and spiritual wasteland which New Ageism has created escape, and escape in the truest sense of the word. In its inability to deal with the harsh material realities of late capitalism, New Ageism offers a refuge from the world, not a mission to transform it. This kind of religion, Eagleton writes, is what Marx had in mind when he wrote that religion is the sigh of the oppressed, a rage of impotence. But there is an alternative to New Ageism which neither accepts material impotence nor shows any signs of it. Fundamentalism.
In the United States, it is Christian Fundamentalism, which is as fed up with godless materialism, spiritual impoverishment, and cultural hedonism as the New Agers, but the fundamentalists exact their fury outwardly, not inwardly. Fundamentalism finds itself in complicated cahoots with capitalism. At once, it opposes its moral relativism, spiritual impoverishment, and hedonism, but paradoxically, does it in a way that doesn’t escape the larger capitalist ideology. It “offers a cure which is probably even worse than the sickness.”
Consider why the most dangerous fundamentalists are profit-raking televangelists. Though, Eagleton doesn’t say as much, fundamentalism responds to capitalism with capitalism. It responds to commodified life with commodified religion. It responds to fetishized life with fetishized religion. But fundamentalism isn’t a uniquely Christian thing. Eagleton’s betrays his real insight here, in his analysis of the relationship between the two fundamentalisms, which he says are merely flip sides of the same coin:
As far as theology goes, Ditchkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion consists in; it is just that Ditchkins rejects it while Pat Robertson and his unctious crew grow fat on it. (51)
Both religious and atheistic fundamentalism alike, says Slavoj Zizek, confuse faith with facts. For fundamentalists, “faith in God means above all subscribing to the proposition that he exists” (50), and for both, the bible is simple: it says what it means and means what it says. It is Christianity itself, writes Eagleton, “which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics” (55). Christian fundamentalism does itself disservice in that it allows secular fundamentalism to buy its critique on the cheap. Ditchkins’ problem is that not all Christians are more appalled by the sight of the female breast than they are by the gross inequalities between rich and poor. Yet to admit that what he criticizes is the perverted fundamentalist version of a good thing is to admit some good in Christianity itself. And Ditchkin’s is not likely to do that. After all, it much easier to say all Christians are illiterate simpletons who think Darwin is the devil, and for whom morality is a matter of the bedroom rather than boardroom.
But if Christianity is a revolution betrayed, what of the Liberalism with which Ditchkins identifies? Eagleton points out that in an ironic way Dicthkins’ fundamentalism itself betrays liberal-rationalist tradition. While we have benefited greatly from liberalism, in its derivation of feminism, socialism, humanitarianism, many of our civil liberties, and much of our republican and democratic heritage, it has also given us the bloodiest episode of human history. But this is not in any way incidental. This vital contradiction, Eagleton writes, is inherent to capitalism itself, in the way a capitalism engendered by liberal-rationalism itself engenders illiberal-irrationalism. Its economic individualism is now an economic feudalism. The liberal state has become the surveillance state. Scientific inquiry is directed towards war and profit. It’s not wonder Karl Barth once called Capitalism “demonic.” This is the contradiction: at the height of his genius, Enlightened man finds himself “frighteningly alone in the universe” (82). Out of this fundamental loneliness, Englightened man created something like its own Nietzschean myth of self-creation, Prometheus unbound. For him, Progress is not only consistent with, but inevitably follows from man’s goodness. Eagleton quotes Hitchens as having written that we can “consciously look forward to the further evolutions of our poor brains, and to stupendous advances in medicine and life extension” (85). Nevermind that the twentieth century has been the bloodiest period in human memory. There is less sexism to be heard, right? And none of any progress mankind has achieved, according to Hitchens, is attributable to religion, but to secular humanism, which Eagleton quips, is “rather like arguing that any advances made by feminists are due entirely to the benign influence of their fathers” (97). For the Enlightened liberal-rationalists, the story is quite neat: there is barbarism, there is progress, and there is civilization (like us, they might add). It is in these terms one can understand what is happening in the Middle East. It is not hegemonic and colonial global capitalism which they give their attention to, but to the evils of radical Islam, those barbarians who hate our freedom. Nevermind American imperialism. Nevermind Indonesia in 1965, when the U.S.-supported Suharto dictatorship went on to kill half a million people. Nevermind that the Islamic faith forbids both suicide and the killing of civilians. They are barbarians who hate our freedom and are infected with the poison of religion. Eagleton makes it clear that he in no way seeks to justify terrorism of any kind, but rather, to understand it.
Eagleton begins with the puzzle, New Atheism, or atheist fundamentalism, and ends with capitalism. There is a reason he is a Marxist. One could do worse than suspect that the central theses of his work are that liberal capitalism is both fundamentally evil in its colonialism, its materialism and in its hyper-rationalism. This breeds religious fundamentalism, which in turn sets the stage for atheist fundamentalism, which asserts itself even more vehemently within the liberal capitalist system, continuing a vicious cycle of fundamentalism begetting fundamentalism at the price of all: neither liberal capitalism, atheism, nor religion escape from this process unmarred. They are all fundamentally disfigured by the process. Eagleton suggests the only way out of this cycle is something like the political love that Jesus had shown on the cross: forgiveness. Surely the vast majority of people, theist and atheist alike, are more profoundly decent than their fundamentalist cheerleaders will have us believe. Or so I believe. Eagleton invites the reader to consider too, what he or she may believe. This work is Eagleton at his best. As always, his versatile genius can be difficult to follow, but is ultimately rewarding. While other authors might point out what is obviously true of faith and reason, Eagleton digs much deeper. With wit and humor, gravity and moral urgency, and sublime genius, Eagleton, perhaps more than any other contemporary thinker, maps out the story of our time–God, atheists, Muslims, fundamentalists, Christians, wars, money–reason, faith, and revolution–in 169 pages.
Originally published in The Harvard Ichthus.
Essays 