Please can we have our Enlightenment back?

It must be odd being God these days. Revealed religion generally — and the Christian God in particular — are often in the dock, screamed at by literary types with a name to make or a reputation to uphold. Christopher Hitchens, in the latest of a series of pamphlets presented in book form, thunders in his title that God Is Not Great. For Richard Dawkins, rather famously, He is delusional. While A.C. Grayling ventures in What Is Good? that ‘religious morality is . . . anti-moral’ as well as being, apparently, ‘inimical to modern interpersonal relations’.

The modern apostles of ‘reason’ constitute a thriving business, and it’s the war on terror that gave them a chance, with its talk of fanaticism that has to be extirpated. The creation of a literary sub-genre of confessional polemic — ‘Why I Hate God’ — may not have been top of the list of White House war aims during recent years, but irony is one of history’s best tricks: American evangelicalism in its political guise has created the conditions in which evangelical secularists can earn some decent royalties.

This is an episode in the history of the English intelligentsia — which need not mean that it’s particularly intelligent. It’s just terribly well packaged as, enchanted by themselves, the authors castigate the irrational past. For Grayling, in his A-level General Studies kind of way, the middle ages were just terrible — a ‘thousand years of religious hegemony over thought’. But deliverance was at hand as soon as the representative scribblers of the Enlightenment arrived to switch on the 18th-century lights. Once that had happened, ‘it was impossible for their opponents — chiefly the forces of reaction in Church and State — to hide in the shadows’. Collapse therefore of thinkers in black hats and soutanes, as the white-hatted good guys arrive to lift the intolerable burden of ignorance off our shoulders.