There is an old-fashioned portentousness about discussions of the decline of religion and its allegedly awful implications. Catholic bishops and Anglican divines seem liberated from the constraints of common sense to conjure up concrete facts out of intimations of angst, and to weave causal links where there are little more than changing moods and presentiments.
From Kierkegaard to Muggeridge, the spectre of life without God is summoned with pontifical disregard for evidence, deliciously lampooned by Woody Allen in one of his wittier asides. Finding himself on a TV panel of American divines, he nodded with appropriate gravitas at the death-of-God lamentations of his colleagues, adding: "Not only that, but you can't get a dentist open on a Monday."
Such irreverence is not one's first reaction on opening A.N.Wilson's latest volume on the religious theme. Among the attractions of this prolific biographer, novelist and historian are his independence of thought and lucidity of expression. He states the aim of this book with helpful simplicity and clarity: it is to uncover the origins of secularisation and to explain how the sceptics of the eighteenth century brought about the death of God a century later. Thus we are invited to consider how the ideas of one generation transformed the practices of another - an unlikely, but interesting, proposition.
Who killed God? The reader's expectation is sustained through the first chapter where the author sets the problem in the context of a strange and marvellous poem by Thomas Hardy, from which Wilson takes his title. Hardy's macabre image of God's funeral cortege expresses his own personal journey from the allure of belief to his conviction of the futility of suffering and the cruelty of a God whom we project as reality's counterweight: ". . . in Time's stayless stealthy swing,/Uncompromising rude reality/Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,/Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be." At the end of the book, Wilson returns to the poem's uncompromising conclusion and Hardy's bitter recognition of his own disenchantment: "Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom/Mechanically I followed with the rest." For this poem alone the book is worth having. The problem is the stuff in between.
At best, this is a literary history of unbelief, a collection of ideas and vignettes of some 50-odd - some very odd - scribes of the eighteenth century whose struggles with theism are assumed, not only to be representative of the period, but causally related to the phenomenon of modern secularisation. We are told nothing about the criteria of selection and are left to assume that these random fellow-sufferers of Hardy are not merely the victims of the disenchantment of the world, but also its source. Almost 20 pages are given to Herbert Spencer, whom Wilson rightly classifies as a doddering polymath whose corpus of writings amounted to little more than a bundle of Victorian prejudices.
Most astonishing is the claim early in the book that the writings of Hume and Edward Gibbon constituted the principal influence in English on the undermining of religious belief. There is surely an important place for them in the history of ideas, but hardly so central a place in a book dedicated to uncovering the causes of secularisation. Wilson offers no defence of this assumption, and seems unaware of the rich literature of classical sociology which addresses precisely his problem of explaining the origin of unbelief. There is no mention, no reference, to the greatest authority of all - Max Weber.
Ideas don't cause anything. This is not the way the world works. The luxuriant cosmology of medieval religion began to crumble, not directly under the force of ideas or the influence of thinkers, but through the convergence of social and economic change with ideas. Medieval religion was not a structure built solely on ideas in the first place, but on the confluence of interests and their legitimation by theologians and philosophers. Its disintegration must, no less, be explained in social terms. No more than the end of the Cold War or the end of slavery, secularisation is not the consequence of thinking portentous or even radical thoughts.
For the rest, Wilson's book offers a cultured ramble through the literature of unbelief. This provides some interesting and amusing moments, but it is not what was promised. The death of God may not be the minor inconvenience of Woody Allen's wit, but it needs more than Wilson's eclectic approach to understand its roots. A bit of a muddle, really.
Bill McSweeney is Head of the International Peace Studies Programme at the Irish School of Ecumenics