Tina Beattie on "The New Athiests"

Cultural Sadomasochism and Religion in Britain: A Review of Tina Beattie’s The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason & and the War on Religion

There is always a danger in making a book review blatantly autobiographical, as I am going to do here. But since I am writing purely for enjoyment and only to explore my own thoughts about Tina Beattie’s book The New Atheists: the Twilight of Reason & and the War on Religion, I am not only going to dispense with this common wisdom but go against it zestily. I discovered Beattie’s book only some two days ago and read it cover to cover over a period of 24 hours. As an American living in England working on a post graduate degree in Religious History over the past six months, and having been an English teacher in Saudi Arabia and having thought a lot about Islam during that time before coming to England, I found Beattie’s spoke to my experience of the religious scene in Britain on a number of levels. I admit to not having read Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ scathing discussions of religion, which along with Sam Harris and some of the recent apologists for religion in the wake of Hitchens and Dawkins are the focus of Beattie’s book. But we hear so much about them here in Britain (I have in fact seen Harris lecture on cable television in the U.S.) and Beattie gives ample illustration of their discussions in the book, that it is not necessary—the need always to read an author in their own words notwithstanding.

Before talking about how it speaks to my perception of the religious mood of Britain at the present time, let me state what I believe Beattie is aiming to do. Here she aims to show: 1) how the new atheism is situated culturally and historically, and 2) how the new atheism and its rhetorical strategies, especially with regard to Dawkins, shows a basic disregard for civility and intolerance for rational debate at a time when they are desperately needed. These two themes are interrelated. For example, Beattie shows that the new atheists’ proclivity for finding a single rationality to which all of western civilization and beyond should ascribe, one which can only operate fully if the “superstitions” of religion are sloughed off, is similar to colonialist, imperialist and male-dominated types of thinking seen in the 18th and 19th century. There “men of science” attempted to rationalize colonial rule in Africa and Asia and clear it of any local and unincorporated conceptual and political impediments, as Beattie shows in some detail in the first few chapters.

There are other types of basic brush clearing done in the early chapter and where Beattie goes through typical assertions made by the new atheists in order to nuance the debate and bring civility to it. I particularly liked chapter 4 in which Beattie countered the notion found in new atheist writing that religion is a predominant cause of war throughout history. She shows that in the last 3000 years of history religion has been a cause in relatively few wars; the First and Second World War had nothing to do with religion; and if anything Nazism and the Cold War had much to do with Germany and Russia’s having broken away from their cultures’ Christian past. Beattie also shows that witch hunts of 17th century Europe had as much to do with the rise of scientific thinking and the desire to root out “superstition” and control women’s bodies and female subjectivity as it did with religion. The Spanish Inquisition was also counseled against by religious authority (124).

But more interesting for me is how Beattie speaks to what I am now sensing in my six-month-long stay in England with regards to how religion is regarded society-wide in Britain. Generalizing grossly about British views on religion (never a good thing to do), I believe it is fair to say that British society exhibits a set of tensions around religion which is as follows. On the one hand, there is a declining resonance between the British public and The Church of England, occurring for a number of reasons, one of which it its perceived attachment to colonialism and its being the established church. On the other hand we find an anti-Muslim sentiment population-wide, or at least an ambiguity toward Islam because of 9/11 and 7/7 fueled by strife within the British Muslim immigrant community. These frictions are fueled also by the perception that Britain was dragged foolishly into war in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States, a country whose Christianity is seen as part of the problem, which positions me in interesting ways as part of the landscape being described here. The way to deal with these interrelated problems in British society, it appears to many, is to slough off any attachment to religion, Christian or Muslim or other, a notion found not only among the new atheists.

While the above is my take on the issue, Beattie does not deny these tensions either. She shows us furthermore how these tensions are fed by secular impulses in British society which were rejected in the 7/7 attacks. I would add that there are some conversions to Islam among the British population, some 30,000 or so, who I would argue have been led to Islam because it is seen, at least partly, as way of being countercultural and counter-hegemonic, also part of the rejection of British secularism seen among British Muslisms of Islamic heritage. Conversion to Islam in Britain is also part of the declining numbers in Church of England attendance because of its perceived lack of cultural relevance, which is again part of an impulse which feeds and has been fed by the new atheism and its counterpart in the new fundamentalism in its Christian guises (see 137). Teenage pregnancy, Beattie points out, is among the highest in Europe (146). This and the Freudian influenced sexuality-expressed-will-make-you-free secularism has also contributed to conversions to Islam and to its militancy, or at least its stridency, among the British Islamic community, the female among whom are much more zealous in wearing the hijab in public as a statement of their rejection of this secularism than they were in years past.

Whether or not we need to remedy the current situation depends on where you stand. But that the social landscape sketched about is not civil and is tense on the ground here is beyond question. While I have taken my discussion in a direction different form the main direction charted by Beattie, these concerns are not absent in Beattie’s treatment. Nor do we differ on how they might be treated. Beattie does not use the term “cultural sadomasochism” as I do (to define a strain within the new atheism and paradoxically another strand of society thinking that Islam is counter cultural and anti-imperial) but she does, for example, discuss the way in which Christian roots can be pointed to for European modernity and scientific reason and the placing of the individual at the center of history, therefore suggesting that ignoring these roots is tantamount to cultural masochism. Beattie also mentions thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre who advocate a return to the Aristotelian and Christian views of rationality of the Middle Ages (144). This could not only be a way of forming common ground with Muslims and Jews, both of whom share in the Medieval Aristotelian heritage which the West inherited from the Levant (116), but also a way of finding common ground between religion and science. On this score as well, Beattie has a fascinating discussion of the new physics how it might relate to this medieval and sacramental view of the world. She also mentions how the Protestant Reformers, having come to see human nature as corrupted and grace being divorced from nature, also played a role in the overly narrow version of rationality and the science and theology split we find in the new atheism (58).

Beattie’s final salvo in my view begins with a discussion of Nietzsche and his thoughts on language and power (150). This is made part of an argument suggesting that if the language of or about God is to once again speak to contemporary Westerners it must be part of a renewed campaign for civility, one not afraid to campaign against church abuses as well (such as the Vatican’s failure to prosecute its own with links to Nazism). Nietzsche and the Postmoderns have shown us that language is part of its context: if this God language will once again have meaning, we must be once again good to one another. Literature, Narrative Theology and Holocaust thinkers such as Eli Weisel also show us how to move “beyond thinking of God as a philosophical conundrum” as is the case in the new atheism (152).
Beattie shows us in the last two chapters of the book how the relationship between God, humanity and contemporary history itself seemingly can be thought of as a literary character that stands free from the mind of its author as it speaks its truth and comes to life. This section stands as a dénouement to a postcolonial feminist Catholic analysis that may or not be able to stem the tide of cultural sadomasochism I see in Britain as it moves further away form the Christian tradition that partly built Europe and it. But if the heart of the Christian message is one of civility and integrative complexity, one where science and religion are allowed to inform one another and become subsumed within a rationality which allows for dialogue and organic growth among the social body where it is found, then the cultural sadomasochism that I see in contemporary British liberalism as well as Western liberalism as a whole might be able to be addressed, and addressed by some of the ideas found in this book. The ideas about Narrative Theology found here as well as those about the New Physics resonate with the Emerging Church movement, now worldwide, and with the Sojourners magazine inspired Social Gospel Christianity stemming from the United States.