Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment

Over the past decade, Jonathan Israel has been remapping the Enlightenment in a massive trilogy of books published by OUP: Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and finally Democratic Enlightenment (2011). Together they amount to 2500 pages, and take us from Spinoza to the French Revolution, from the Americas to Greece and Eastern Europe, with fascinating chapters on European perceptions of China and India.

Reviewers have consistently praised Israel's extraordinary energy and resourcefulness, his facility in a variety of languages and his researches in dozens of archives. Yet many have also expressed serious misgivings about his vision of the Enlightenment. He discerns a three way struggle in the eighteenth-century between a materialist Radical Enlightenment, a compromised Moderate Enlightenment, and a traditionalist Counter-Enlightenment. Israel's sympathies lie wholeheartedly with the Radical version, and he aims to uncover the Enlightenment foundations of modern secularism and liberalism. But numerous reviewers have suggested that the analysis is far too schematic. Thinkers are assigned to ideological blocs, and each bloc is associated with a package of ideas or values. But on closer inspection, ideologies and alignments prove to be more complex, and Radical Enlightenment does not have all the best tunes.

The dispute is perhaps best followed through Israel's exchange with Samuel Moyn, following the latter's highly critical review in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/article/mind-enlightenment
http://hnn.us/articles/128361.html

The current debate over the Enlightenment illustrates Croce's point that 'All history is contemporary history'. The issues debated in the eighteenth century have risen to the surface once again, above all the place of religion in public life. For all its faults, Israel's project does help us to understand how the Enlightenment has always been contested. Despite his affinity with the new atheists, his work reveals the persistent power of religion in Enlightenment Europe. He admits that secular materialists were only a radical fringe, nearly always outflanked and outnumbered by advocates of Christian Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment. These unresolved controversies of the eighteenth-century are being played out in the twenty-first.

Difficult Atheism, or Beyond the New Atheism

As many have pointed out, the New Atheism is remarkably old-fashioned. It shares the touching faith of 19thC 'infidels' that secular intellectuals can make a clean break with the religious past, erecting a new philosophy that owes nothing to faith and everything to Reason.

The New Atheists have made plenty of converts among the general reading public, but they are failing to convince secular intellectuals. We are seeing the emergence of more conflicted styles of atheism that frankly acknowledge the religious roots of modern thought. Examples abound. Germany's leading philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, has argued that many of the values of European liberal democracy have Christian sources. The English philosophers, John Gray and Simon Critchley, maintain that post-Enlightenment political ideals owe much to Christian doctrines like original sin, millennialism, providence. Within contemporary French philosophy, as Chris Watkins shows in his book, Difficult Atheism (2011), there is an ongoing debate about what a genuinely post-theological atheism would look like, or whether it's even possible. The literary critic, James Wood (who was raised among Anglican charismatics in Oxford) has written in the New Yorker that ‘What is needed is a theologically engaged atheism, that resembles disappointed belief.’ At a more populist level, writers like Alain de Botton are thinking about how to create Religion for Atheists (2012).

What separates these writers from the New Atheists is a strong sense of history - an appreciation that religion is a constitutive element of human cultures across history, and that it has continued to flow into the values of a 'secular' age. When atheists get history, they get religion.

Reflections on the Dark Side of Christian History

CHF's recent day conference on the "The Dark Side of Christian History," was attended by over 80 participants. The conference was organised by Stephen Tuck (Pembroke College, Oxford), and here he offers his own review and reflections on the problem of evil in the history of the church.

I once spent an unsettling evening with a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. The meeting was part of my research for a book on the American civil rights movement - a subject that I'd chosen
to study, I now realise, because it was full of Christian heroes of social justice. What was unsettling about that evening was not so much meeting the Klansman (I was prepared for that), but the discovery that he had been a deacon of his local Baptist church at the time.

For Christopher Hitchens in his influential recent book, God is Not Great, such Christian villains throughout history are proof positive that Christianity is not only wrong, it is dangerous. (If you haven't read the book, the subtitle, How religion poisons everything, gives the gist). Hitchens trots through history, in characteristically entertaining fashion, lambasting Christian atrocity after atrocity. It's a deeply flawed book, rehashing an old argument. Some of the history is bogus, and many of the extrapolations are tenuous. Every Christian hero in Hitchens' telling is really a humanist (even Rev. Martin Luther King); every atheist villain is really religious (even
Stalin). Hitchens' main section on the civil rights movement fails to mention the prayer meetings, the (sadly, belated) condemnation of segregation by the mainstream churches, or the fact that if anybody switched sides because of their Christian faith, it was segregationists who moved to support civil rights, rather than vice versa.

But - and it's a big but - there were also plenty of racists who remained convinced that God was on their side. The Klan donated embossed bibles to local churches. And across history, there has been a dark side of Christian activity: missionaries spreading the gospel of empire, evangelical factions killing Catholics, 'Amazing Grace' composer John Newton continuing as a slave trader post-conversion. One could go on. Or as a colleague said to me, 'just a day conference?'

So how to respond?

One way is to 'reach for Wilberforce,' and list the positive influence of remarkable Christians. Or we can do a reverse Hitchens - any good done in the past is true Christianity, any evil done is because people didn't live Christianly enough. There is truth in both approaches. But on their own they ignore a very real question that some have, and a gospel-blocking presumption that most have. They also pass up a chance to learn lessons as believers, and build bridges with sceptics.

At the recent Christianity and History forum, we tried to consider the darker side of the Christian past openly and honestly. For precedent, we have the bible, which does not exactly shy away from the failings of God's people. Christian historians spoke on the subjects of Early Modern violence, the Holocaust, Apartheid, and the roots of past complaints about Christian (mis)behaviour.

The forum brought to light Christians who failed (or were late) to stand for what's good, or
sometimes advocated what's evil; through fear, neglect, apathy, wrong theology, or simply failing to let biblical standards challenge society's norms. Oh that they had lived differently, so that their good works then might earn more of a hearing for the gospel now. (And oh that we might today...)

Clearly, then, there is much to confess. Quite what that might mean in practice is a harder question, not least for church leaders. But for individuals, a starting point is to admit this past
in conversation - and, we will find, it opens up conversation. Having done so, we can begin to set the record straight. Hitchens' book carries power because so many already believe what it says about Christian atrocity after atrocity -- but such beliefs are propaganda rather than fact. We can go on about the dark side of Christian history, but not on and on.

Moreover, recognising the dark side of Christian history reminds us of the dark side of all history. The church should have done far more to oppose the holocaust and apartheid. But so should everyone. People may find solace in films like Schindler's List and heroes like Nelson Mandela. But we forget that many of Hitler's executioners were everyday folk seeking a pay increase, and many of apartheid's supporters were mothers who just wanted better opportunities for their children. People like us. What's striking is how often those who have
condemned Christianity loudest in the past have done so by showing how far it falls short of Christian ideals, rather than by appealing to other codes of behaviour. (Often, it seems, such critics have felt let down personally). What's striking, too, is that Christian wrongdoing has so often been corrected by reformers from within the Church, rather than critics from outside. In other words, we need God's standards to understand evil, and God's teaching to correct it. In sum, we need a God who is good - who won't tolerate the dark side of Christian action. We can startle people that there is One who hates the evil done in His name far more than Hitchens' does. And we need a God who is merciful - all people, not least Christians, need forgiveness. In other words, reflecting on the past, on human behaviour, should take us to the Creator and the Cross.