Jonathan Meades, "Pedro and Ricky Come Again" (2021)

 

Jonathan Meades is a vastly more stylish writer than Richard Dawkins, but he is as one-dimensional as the geneticist in his atheistic hostility to religion. It is, for him, simply ‘the tyranny of mumbo jumbo’:

A secular cultist who was failing to attract adherents asked Talleyrand what he should do: ‘I would recommend you to be crucified and rise again the third day,’ replied that consummate opportunist. He was, of course, right. Religion is a matter of the survival of the fittest cult. And the fittest cults are those which have equipped themselves with the bulkiest apparatus of irreason — creation myth, miracles, incantations, liturgical quirks, eschatological fictions, sartorial disfigurements, silly hairdos, omniscient others, genital mutilations, dietary proscriptions, and populist iconography.

Jolly stuff, but under-thunk. Meades quotes Clement Attlee’s (as he styles it) ‘sane’ approach to the whole business: ‘believe in the ethics. Can’t accept the mumbo jumbo.’ But plenty of people take their faith along those lines; which is to say, not that they reject the miraculous side, but that they don’t fret or obsess over it. They believe the miraculous stuff not through perversity or contempt for common-sense but via a Newmanesque assent that is indeed a common-sense, with a particular and important emphasis precisely on the common. Attlee’s comment is on-target provided we take ‘ethics’ as more than just a moral code, and understand it more broadly as a community, a way of orienting oneself in life that transcends selfishness and brings meaningfulness— if we understand religious affiliation, in other words, not just as the falsifiable (as Dawkins might say) articles of belief but as the group you worship with, the school community to which your children belong, as involvement in setting up the church fete and running a stall at the jumble sale, as putting money aside for zakat or running a soup-kitchen for the homeless. As, in other words, the social- or communitarian-quotidian alongside the supernatural. Or more particularly, as the quotidian structured and informed — redeemed, to use the Christian term — by the supernatural.

And in fact, in a do-I-contradict-myself-very-well-I-contradict-myself move not untypical of him, Meades’s next paragraph shifts the line of his mockery to go after Anglicanism precisely because it doesn’t avail itself of all the laughable paraphernalia of irreason, although (given that Anglicanism is the third largest Christian global denomination, after Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox churches) this ought by Meade’s own logic to have doomed it to failure. ‘The shabby ineffectuality of Anglicanism,’ he snipes, ‘derives from having not demanded all that much belief of its congregation, thus containing the germ of its own secularisation. It is an add-on.’

Look: I myself am, as Meades is, an infidel. But there’s something about this kind of thing that strikes me as plain lazy, and worse. Most people alive are religious to one degree or another. It’s we atheists who are the minority. Snark and mockery of this kind is poor form: a betrayal of the common humanity that asks of us respect for others, not despite but because of their differences.

One needn’t be a believer to see that Credo quia absurdum is more than just a stupidity, or a contradiction in terms. It looks perverse, but its point is not its perversity. There’s a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron of the Devil, having taken the form of a man, deciding to snatch the soul of a certain small-time rural priest whom, he knows, is having doubts about his faith. He arranges for the priest to visit Rome: ‘for,’ the devil thinks, ‘when he sees all the vanity and venality, the corruption and impurity of what is supposed to be the very centre of Christianity he will tumble into atheism!’ The priest, excited to see the Holy City, accepts the offer. He travels, sees the city and returns, but with his faith restored. ‘Wait a minute,’ says the devil. ‘What about the wickedness! The nepotism and lustfulness, the corruption and gluttony!’ ‘It is true I saw all that,’ the priest confirms. ‘But it made me realise: for Christianity to be able to encompass the whole world, and be as widespread and powerful as it is, even upon such rotten foundations — why then Christ must be stronger and more certain than I ever realised before!’ The devil is thwarted.

As an outsider I can confirm: it’s easy to look at religion and see only money-grubbing evangelical preachers, paedophile priests and jihadist fanatics. But, as a plain observation about the world, religion is — almost if not quite entirely — not that. It is two billion Christians and a billion Muslims and a billion other believers living their lives, getting on with things, their being-in-the-world structured by their faith. If such credunt is predicated upon absurdity, then the functional efficacy of the belief invites us to reconsider the kind of the absurdity we’re talking about. Voltaire said: ‘certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste’, a sentence poorly translated by the common English version: ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ (rendre is not croire after all). The point is: most of the population of the globe believe in the absurdities of their faiths and almost none of them commit atrocities. Épater les bourgeois has its place, but épater les bulk-of-human-beings-alive veers towards the kind of intolerance that only edgelords and adolescents find beguiling. We should grow up. 1