A Bad Book About "Religion"

Marcus Brigstocke does not believe in God. But he is not one of the aggressive Hitchens/Dawkins school. No, he is a Thoughtful, Reflective Agnostic Who, Like, Totally Understands Why Some People Need Faith.

That, at least, is how he presents himself – as a genuine seeker after truth, willing not only to listen to the claims of religion, but to think carefully about them and not simply reject them out of hand. After reading his book "God Collar", I remain sceptical about this self-description. My doubt on this score is only heightened by the fact that he has not, as far as I am aware, expressed any regret over his extraordinarily mean-spirited, ill-informed rant against the Abrahamic faiths during an episode of The Now Show several years ago.

Defenders of Brigstocke might counter that "God Collar" is an account of one man’s struggle, not a contribution to the heavily polarised atheist/theist debate, and indeed he freely admits to being a non-specialist who has not read especially widely in theology, ethics or comparative religion. It is certainly true that there is a personal and emotional core to this book, for it is the untimely death of a close friend and the joys and tribulations of parenthood that led Brigstocke to re-examine his conviction that there is no God. And he is honest about the fact that he does feel the impulse to believe, despite finding himself unable to do so.

But I’m not sure I really buy that. "God Collar" is not a personal memoir that just happens to occasionally touch on religious themes in a ruminative, exploratory way. It is, indubitably, a book about faith, with a polemical and hostile edge. It contains mean-spirited, and often ill-conceived, attacks on numerous aspects of religious belief. He cannot try the old comedian’s argument of pulling back when challenged, and just saying “oh, I didn’t really mean it, I’m just trying to make people laugh” or “I’m only a non-specialist”. By publishing this book, Brigstocke has entered the arena of public debate about faith. In that arena, bad and unfair arguments get challenged. And boy, are there some bad and unfair arguments here.

Brigstocke doggedly refuses to step outside the mindset of an early 21^st century middle-class left-liberal Englishman.  If you want to write insightfully about a worldview, you have to be able to inhabit that worldview, to understand what it is like to see the world as an adherent of that worldview sees the world. You need authentic conceptual empathy. That is one of the problems with non-believers writing about faith (and, it must be said, believers writing about atheism). A few writers do manage it, but not many. Brigstocke – who seems epistemically closed, unable to conceive of a God not made in his own image – certainly fails to do so, which is a fatal flaw in the whole project of the book.

This refusal to engage constructively with religious viewpoints is on show throughout. At one point, Brigstocke attempts a kind of cod-Freudian deconstruction of religious attitudes to sexual purity, making all sorts of strange, speculative claims about why religious people “really” hold the beliefs they do about such matters – while never discussing the actual reasons advanced in support of the doctrines by the faiths in question. You often see this in anti-religious polemic; the construction of a vast straw man, based on pop psychology, that purports to be a representation of the dark, hidden, ulterior motives of the subject (how many times does one encounter an argument along the lines of “Catholics aren’t prolife because they love babies, but because they hate women”?) The author expects plaudits for his courage and insight, when in fact he has done little but avoid the question. If you want to know the moral, metaphysical, and epistemic background for the Catholic Church’s teaching on an issue like abortion, it’s not some kind of esoteric mystery; it’s laid out in some detail in documents like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Evangelium Vitae, and if you can’t or won’t engage with that argument, then it might be better to avoid the subject altogether.

Then there is the part of the book where he lays out a schema of how nice he thinks Christians are. Roughly speaking, Brigstocke’s favourite Christians are the lukewarm Christmas and Easter hobbyists who don’t take their faith particularly seriously.  He can just about tolerate people who are a bit more engaged, as long as they ignore the bits of Christian dogma that he finds uncomfortable and engage in the right kind of social activism. Those who actually believe in the revealed truths of faith are, we learn, mostly unpleasant, small-minded, bigoted people using the faith as a justification for their prejudices, while the leaders are corrupt, hypocritical, wilfully ignorant or otherwise contemptible. It’s hard to see what Brigstocke was hoping to achieve in this passage. The absurdity of these generalisations is self-evident for anyone with the slightest knowledge of religious practice, belief, thought and institutions. Such assertions can only arise from either gross ignorance, or bad faith. Neither explanation inclines one to confidence in Brigstocke’s fair-mindedness, knowledge or desire to engage in honest debate. He talks about having friends who are Christians; odd, then, he writes about their experience and their worldview with so little sympathy or subtlety.

For all his protestations of open-mindedness, it seems genuinely inconceivable to Brigstocke that he is wrong about any major moral issue. The problem with this attitude is that you will never even begin to understand Christianity unless you can at least consider the idea that your own desires, values and prejudices may be unreliable or even wrong, but there is no indication that he has considered, even for a moment, that the traditional Christian teaching on, say, abortion or homosexuality or marriage might be true (there is, it goes without saying, barely any critical scrutiny of the shortcomings of modern liberal or secular ethics). Like so many writers, he puts God – or his conception of God – in the dock with himself as prosecutor, judge and jury. But the whole point of Christianity is that the roles ought to be reversed.

Now the atheist response here is to say, not unjustly, that formulating the problem in that way begs the question. Surely before we can submit ourselves to God’s will, we must be certain that he exists, that his existence matters, and that any religion gives an accurate account of his nature and will. Or to put it another way, God must be put in the dock before he can sit in judgment at the bench. This is a reasonable position. However, the approach taken by Brigstocke and others seems to be founded on the premise that God can only ever be in the dock, and that the dock is the only reasonable place he can be; the very possibility of his being the judge and not the defendant is not considered. If you’re not willing, even hypothetically and temporarily, to put God on the bench and yourself and your values in the dock, then you’re not engaged in an open-minded investigation.   

Brigstocke makes clear early on that he intends to focus on the “Big Three” monotheistic faiths, without any real differentiation. This is a mistake, particularly for someone who – by his own admission – has little theological, philosophical or historical training. All religions are not the same. They have different ideas about God, ethics, society, culture, and history. Treating the “Abrahamic” faiths as more or less the same on the grounds that they have – supposedly – similar geographical and theological origins, is genuinely bizarre, and cuts off at the knees any hope that this book might make a useful contribution to any debate. A devastating argument against Sufi Islam might not be a devastating argument against Catholic Christianity, and vice versa. The claims made just by different Christian denominations are so radically different that they cannot be lumped together for the purposes of discussion and criticism. This applies even more strongly between religions.  

From the Christian perspective, most of the problems with this book can be traced to one simple source. Despite his protestations that he has done a considerable amount of research, Marcus Brigstocke just doesn’t know very much about Christianity. In fact, he knows embarrassingly little. He rehashes some tedious, false, and half-understood allegations against the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in particular, at one point repeating a medieval urban myth that even Wikipedia knows isn’t true. He doesn’t appear to understand that the Catholic Church, along with many other Christian churches, has never espoused young-earth creationism, and that it has never condemned evolution. He ignores a huge amount of evidence that would be inconvenient to his (false, glib and unoriginal) argument that Christianity is anti-science, and that science has “disproved” core Christian doctrines. He doesn’t mention, for instance, the Vatican Observatory. Given his entirely conventional and largely thought-free attack on the Catholic Church’s attitude to contraception, I would be extremely surprised if he were at all familiar with the current literature on best practice in AIDS prevention in Africa.

In suggesting that there will be few Asians and Chinese in heaven (i.e. that Christianity is a religion dominated by people of European descent), he once again shows his ignorance. There are now more practising Christians in China than card-carrying Communists. African Catholic seminaries are bursting at the seams and churches there are full. The Philippines is a majority Catholic country. The oldest Christian churches – many of whom worship in Aramaic, the language of Jesus – are (or were) in Syria and Armenia.  

Here’s my modest proposal to the next atheist who wants to write a book about faith. Sit down with a clever, well-informed Christian (preferably a Catholic) who is willing and able to explain and defend every part of their belief system. You tell them the difficulties and questions you have, and they do their honest best to answer you. If you find those answers unsatisfactory, then give the reasons why, and the dialogue can continue. It wouldn’t be comfortable, and it wouldn’t be neat. It might not even provide any opportunities to laugh at George W Bush. But it would be a damn sight more interesting and truthful than this book.