Most Spectator readers have probably heard by now of Alain de Botton’s latest, Religion for Atheists, in which he argues that the benefits of religion are too great to be confined to believers — not least because he wrote the Diary column for this week’s magazine. And for those who haven’t yet read about the book, let alone read it, they need look no further than Terry Eagleton’s brilliant demolition of the argument in The Guardian. Mr de Botton is, he makes clear, in a very long and not entirely creditable line of those who find religion intolerable for themselves but useful for others, notably the servant classes: Matthew Arnold and Auguste Comte in particular. Indeed Mr de Botton himself acknowledges that his big idea is not new.
What is downright hubristic is his proposal, which has already found backers, for Temples to Atheism, or places for secular contemplation, the first of which would be a 46 metre high tower in the City of London, designed by Tom Greenall, in which people can go and sit to contemplate their own littleness in the great geological scheme of things. If the idea sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve been here already. Remember the Cult of Reason, established during the French Revolution, which saw the cathedral of Notre Dame converted into a Temple of Reason, with a liturgy specifically devised for a Feast of Reason? The ceremonies devised by Pierre Gaspard Chaumette would, perhaps be a little adversarial for Mr de Botton’s taste but the altar of Liberty, the inscription ‘To Philosophy’ and the portrayal of the Goddess of Reason as a real woman would, no doubt, fit in with his call for secularists to have their own feasts and communal rites.
It is certainly the case, as AN Wilson says in a Spectator review, that, until relatively recently, religious ritual did include unbelievers as a matter of course since those rites focused on participation rather than subscribing explicitly to a creed. But the ‘consoling subtle or just charming rituals’ of religion that Mr de Botton would like to co-opt for unbelievers are not, I’d say, detachable from the beliefs that inspired them. It’s a little like saying that the music and poetry of love are too charming, too consoling to be confined to those who love and should be extended to those who have never been in love or who find themselves incapable of it. The benefits of religion flow, I’d say, from the things believers believe.
Christians believe in the brotherhood of man, for instance, because we believe in the Fatherhood of God, or its feminist equivalent. Christians find more than picturesque appeal in the story of the Good Samaritan, precisely because we believe, as St John has it, that ‘God is Love’. The coming together of believers in religious ritual is not an exercise designed for reinforcing communitarian sentiment; rather the communitarian sentiment flows from the things they do together: prayer and worship. There are many unbelievers who take part in the pilgrimage to Santiago, for instance, but without a belief in the sanctity of St James, the benefits of the pilgrimage should as easily come from a bracing hike in the Lake District. Mr de Botton’s atheism was shaken by Bach’s cantatas; well they were written by a conventional, believing Protestant for whom the reality of the sacred texts was a matter-of-fact conviction and that’s why they have force. There’s a distinct relation between the fruits of religion and the tree.
So Mr de Botton is welcome to his Temple of Atheism. But I bet you anything, the smallest village church will have more in the way of calm and consolation than this contemporary Tower of Babel.
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