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Heavens Below: The Religious Impulse in a Secular World

John Potts April 27

In Australia, the notion of secularist thought is often held up with pride. We have tried – at least on the surface – to eradicate strong declarations of faith from our politics and our mainstream culture. Yet how far removed really are religious practices from our day-to-day behaviour? In the March issue of Meanjin, John Potts finds shades of piety and punishment everywhere, from the hallowed circles of intellectualism to the middle-class suburbs of Sydney, and argues that religious impulses may in fact influence us more deeply than we care to admit. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.



One of the benefits of receiving a religious upbringing is that the recipient is left with a heightened sensitivity to religious behaviour in others. Those others include the professedly secular, rationalist and anti-religious, who would reject any suggestion that their behaviour or ideas proceed along pathways laid down by religion.

In the 1990s I had a regular acquaintance pleased to describe himself as a Marxist. He dressed plainly and cheaply; he lived frugally; he was ‘so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit’, as Robert Lowell described a ‘fly-weight pacifist’ of the 1950s.[1] My modern-day Marxist railed against the vulgar seductions of consumer culture; he rebuked all bourgeois ideology, including that of the family. He opposed all forms of intellectual and political compromise. His favoured form of ‘praxis’ was meeting with six or seven like-minded intellectuals as a cell, to discuss matters of theoretical importance.

One night we saw a big-budget Hollywood action movie, which to me was disappointingly generic but otherwise unremarkable. My Marxist friend later informed me that the film had made him feel so tawdry, so polluted, that he sat up late that night reading long passages of Marx. It was as if this corruption of the righteous self, this stain of the commodity spectacle, could only be erased by recourse to the sanctified text.

I didn’t tell him what I was thinking: that in another age he would have made a first-rate monk. Or if not a monk, then an early Protestant of puritanical bent, such as the Pietists, who valued good works and Bible study in small groups. Like these devout individuals, my friend was disciplined, high-minded, austere. He was perpetually on guard against the mortal world’s contaminations. He had ascetic rigour. If he sensed the encroachment of the fallen world, he knew how to protect himself: through the healing truth of the pure text. If I had told him any of this, he would have been indignant, even hostile. His particular mission had no role for the opiate of the people.

Like many other atheists, my friend was perplexed that religious belief has persisted in the West, more than two centuries after the Enlightenment. Despite the triumph of science, despite the rationalism built into industrial modernity, despite general acceptance of the theory of evolution, and despite the best efforts of evangelists of atheism such as Richard Dawkins, religious faith has endured. In recent years, neuroscientists have posited an innate neurological basis for religious belief, finding an answer in ‘theobiology’ for the question of ‘why God won’t go away’.[2] However, I am less interested in this ‘neuropsychological’ pursuit of the God impulse than in the cultural circuits forged by religious thought. It is through these circuits that much secular intellectual and political activity continues to operate.


Notes
1. Robert Lowell, ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, Selected Poems, Faber, London 1965, p. 51. Back to article

2. Two examples of this scholarship are: Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Ballantine, New York, 2001; and Jensine Andresen, Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Rituals and Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. Back to article


 

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