How do I love thee (autumn Meanjin)? Let me count the ways.

March 16 2010 — Guest Post by Jane Gleeson-White

The following is an online letter to the editor by writer and regular Meanjin contributor Jane Gleeson-White. Spike welcomes healthy feedback the latest Meanjin and the issues therein - we are, as always, keen to know your thoughts.

There are lots of things to like about the latest Meanjin (Vol 69/1) but I love it in three particular ways:

1. ‘Unholy Enthusiasm’ by Jeff Sparrow
2. ‘A Novel Approach to Religion’ by Paul Mitchell
3. ‘Heavens Below: The Religious Impulse in a Secular World’ by John Potts

As their titles suggest, these essays are all about religion. I’ve been obsessed by religion since my late twenties. That is, before 11 September 2001 blew a hole in our secular age. And I can’t remember the last time I found three such provocative essays on religion in one place.

Paul Mitchell’s ‘A Novel Approach to Religion’ looks at Australian fiction published since 9/11. Did our fiction, like the world, change on 11 September 2001? Mitchell’s answer seems to be yes, a little. Among other things, his essay explores the religious underpinnings of Tim Winton’s The Turning and Breath, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book. These books benefit from being read in a religious context – and Mitchell’s readings are illuminating. I’ll take his essay for its insights into the work of Tim Winton, especially its Christian reading of faith as a weapon in The Turning; its quote from Winton on That Eye, the Sky’s being a ‘skinny little novel about a 12-year-old Blake-in-the-making’; and its insights into the religious content of Dead Europe.

In ‘Heavens Below’ John Potts writes with insight and wit about how the religious impulse manifests in a secular world. Potts opens with a story about a frugal Marxist friend given to reading long passages of Marx to survive the contagions of a capitalist world: ‘I didn’t tell him what I was thinking: that in another age he would have made a first-rate monk.’ This is typical of Potts’s approach.

Four fragments follow. The first is on the secularisation of religious thought in the nineteenth century. The second traces the evolution of the early Christian church, especially its creation of an orthodoxy. The third reflects on the Christian stain in Western secular liberal middle-class guilt, such as in our assumption of guilt for global warming and the Christian flavour of our re-visioning of the Apocalypse as a global climate catastrophe. Potts concludes with a witty reconfiguring of ‘theory’ in religious terms: Lacan restyled as a French Catholic, Foucault as a Protestant, Derrida as a rabbi. Wherever he looks, Potts sees the trace of religion in our secular world.

I found his essay fascinating. We part company over his concluding remarks – ‘Where does our compassion for refugees or the underprivileged come from, for example, if not from the Judeo-Christian tradition?’ – but he made me think. His essay suggests to me that ultimately we all need something outside ourselves to give meaning to our actions, especially those actions economists would call ‘irrational’. Whether it’s Marx or Jesus, Derrida or Germaine Greer. Perhaps that’s what being human is about.

Jeff Sparrow’s essay on the New Atheism is the best thing I’ve read on the subject. His argument is complex (many-stranded), lucid and persuasive. He moves effortlessly from Christopher Hitchens wielding ‘dangerous ideas’ at the Sydney Opera House, to New Atheists as the New Inquisitors, to why the cold logic of atheism is a useless weapon against religious fundamentalism. ‘Back in the dungeons of the Inquisition, who would have imagined that one day men would be made to scream in the name not of God but of unbelief?’ This goes to the heart of Sparrow’s argument – and perfectly articulates my extreme discomfort with Christopher Hitchens and his band of vehement atheists, despite being an unbeliever myself.

Sparrow deflates any danger lurking in Hitchens’s atheism in one neat blow: with Joseph Symes, who brought an atheist polemic to Australia in 1884, when it was a dangerous idea. Symes was called ‘that leprous-tongued reptile’ and stoned in Woodend. Not toasted by the intelligentsia in the Opera House. Sparrow then moves on to the rise of atheism since 9/11; the USA polemicist Sam Harris; and the widespread use of ‘rational’ atheism to justify violence and war against ‘irrational’ Islam. ‘Here we were: sophisticated, democratic, secular; there they were: medieval, hierarchical, superstitious.’

Sparrow’s argument gains tragic focus when he writes about the death of fourteen-year-old Iraqi boy Arkan Daif in 2003. In their grief his family turned to religion. Naturally. As Sparrow says: ‘Under attack, with your house in ruins and your son casually slaughtered, it is not logic that you seek.’ Using Marx’s understanding of religion as the opium of the people – which he quotes in full, including ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.’ – Sparrow argues that religion is overcome not by ‘demonstrating the intellectual fallacies that underpin it, but by changing the conditions under which God seems necessary’. Yes, exactly.