Last week Tom Holland, author and host of the Rest is History podcast, and Nick Cave, musician and frontman of eponymous Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, packed out Emmanuel Hall in Westminster, London.
The event was titled In Search of Wild Gods and it was, predictably, about how both men came to find and cherish faith. Cave traces his relationship with God to the tragic death of his young son, Arthur. Holland, through his book Dominion, is a champion of cultural Christianity and civic religion; the idea that all of the values held dear in the West are nothing if not Christian in their true nature.
Meanwhile, at the end of February in Austin, Texas, another event: Does the West need a religious revival? Among the roster of speakers is Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times columnist, American Catholic, and author of (among several other titles) Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Once devout atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali will be there too; she announced her Christian conversion in an essay towards the end of 2023.
Something is happening across the intellectual West. When searching for a source for all the maladies plaguing liberal democracies in the 2020s – declining birth rates, destructive woke pieties, celebrity worship and extreme political polarisation – so many have cohered around a singular explanatory principle.
Could religion be the antidote to declining birth rates, celebrity worship and political polarisation?
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Religion, through its traditional values structure, could solve the birth rates; with a god to worship, the celebrities abate in importance; and piety is better laundered in a church than in a political arena. The intellectual theist argues all of this, and more.
As society has grown more secular, a whole host of host of unintended consequences have revealed themselves. And now perhaps, the argument goes, it is time for a course correction. Religion is not just a function of true belief, an expression of an interior spiritual world, it is actually very helpful.
It has been a slow pendulum swing away from the arrogance of the New Atheist movement (which holds Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins among its standard bearers). From around 2004, these men argued that religion was violent and irrational, that science was the only reasonable and trustworthy guide through the world.
At its most extreme, New Atheism saw people of faith as little more than credulous oiks, mistaking a fake and made-up god for true enlightenment. As a movement it mistook bitter cynicism for moral seriousness. In the circles occupied by the Douthats and Hollands, it is an artefact of a recent past, to be probed and studied, not a live creed.
I have been thinking about this spiritual shift recently, and how it might apply to Ireland. But first, an important distinction: the late 2010s and early 2020s saw the emergence of a kind of aesthetic Christianity – the Met Gala in 2018 was called Heavenly Bodies and celebrated Christianity’s contribution to fashion (Rihanna came dressed as a non-specific Pope, Ariana Grande had a Sistine Chapel printed dress); meanwhile in New York’s Lower East Side young women in particular began wearing rosary beads and attending Mass. This was more than anything else an agnostic trend that sought some kind of transgressive kudos.
The rise of the intellectual theists is very different in tenor. But will it ever get a foothold in Ireland? I think, for now, it is very unlikely.
If this new religiosity is a backlash to the atheism of the early 21st century, to the hyper-secularisation of Britain and America (between 1999 and 2020, the number of Americans who said they belonged to “a house of worship” plummeted from 70 to 47 per cent, for example) then Ireland simply does not have the right conditions for the movement to grow.
The country was too recently religious, has been much slower to secularise, and is still one of the more Christian countries in Europe. For the pendulum to swing away from atheism back to this new strain of religiosity, there has to be enough atheism in the first place. For a revival, religious society needs to be seen almost as a distant memory.
The problem, however, is that in spite of holding on to some religiosity, Ireland is not immune to all of these phenomena which are seen as strange byproducts of contemporary liberal society: the declining birth rates, the polarisation, the susceptibility to malign actors over social media, the hero-worship of the celebrity and the politician in place of a god.
If the new theists are right – and it may be a stretch – that an injection of a kind of intellectualised religious current can operate as a salve to these problems, then Ireland could be a country with all of the symptoms, but immune to the cure.
I think the new theists are on to something, but it is a significant leap to think that a religious revival would be a silver bullet to the entire malaise.
Still, there’s something worth reflecting on here. Ireland careered through a decade of rapid liberalisation throughout the 2010s, with the 2018 abortion referendum the ultimate capstone. It seemed that this process would continue apace, that Ireland had infinite capacity for liberalising referendum upon liberalising referendum.
The world seven years on has changed and Ireland has noticed that perhaps there were moments of quite severe overreach (finally concluding with the failed referendums last year). A religious revival is a long way off. It’s just another way that Ireland proves itself to still be a rather different place to its close friends and neighbours.