Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers – An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019) 262 pp.

We unbelievers are often mentioned in passing in histories of religion, but there are only a few works of history that focus on those of us who reject religion or who never held religious beliefs at all. This one is by a scholar who is a Christian, but one who strives to give a balanced and nuanced view of how various modern Western strains of unbelief arose and where they came from. Unusually, Ryrie focuses on the emotional rather than the rational roots of modern unbelief and the result is an interesting analysis that leads to some surprising people and insightful conclusions.

The general assumed historical narrative about the rise of Western unbelief is usually summarised more or less as follows. The Catholic Church repressed any dissent through the dim, dark ages of the Medieval Period until the Reformation broke its stranglehold on ideas. This led to the flowering of the Renaissance and then the coming of the Enlightenment, as well as the Scientific Revolution. So the great and sceptical thinkers of the Enlightenment questioned faith and undermined religion, while the advances of science made it clear rationalism made more sense than religion. As a result, more and more people abandoned religion, leading us to the situation today where substantial proportions of most western populations have no religion at all and are essentially unbelievers.

This is a story of top-down revolution, with great thinkers, writers, philosophers and scientists leading the way and the common people slowly catching up to their enlightened thinking. This is, unsurprisingly, the narrative favoured and assumed without question by prominent anti-theistic and anti-religious polemicists. Unsurprisingly, because these people – Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling and their imitators and successors – consider themselves to also be great thinkers, writers, philosophers and scientists and see it as their mission to enlighten the common people.

But Ryrie questions this “death [of God] by philosophy narrative”. In his Introduction he explains:

I wrote this book because I am not satisfied with that stereotypical account. The timescale, the suspects and the nature of the murder are all wrong. Telling the story a different way not only changes our sense of history; it casts our current moment of pell-mell secularisation in a different light.

(Ryrie, p. 3)

The “different story” Ryrie tells is one where reason is not the primary driver of doubt. Emotions are. His book’s epigraph is a quote from Julian Barnes’ novel A Sense of an Ending:

Most of us, I suspect … make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

Ryrie invokes a similar observation from Pascal: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. Ryrie traces a story of doubt and unbelief that explains why he does not accept the “death of God by philosophy narrative”. In it, he discusses evidence of doubters, unbelievers and atheists in substantial numbers centuries earlier than the common top-down narrative can explain. And he explains this by arguing doubt arose from substantially emotional reasons long before the great men of the Enlightenment and their successors came along and gave this emotionally-based doubt its post factum “infrastructure of reason”. The chicken of doubt came before the egg of reason. In Ryrie’s telling, the two key driving emotions behind these changes in attitude to belief were anger and anxiety.

Medieval Anger

A lot of popular conceptions about belief in the Middle Ages tend toward two cliched extremes: seeing the period either as an “Age of Faith” populated by credulous but devout believers or as one where a restless but oppressed majority are reluctantly browbeaten into a pretence of piety by a wicked and corrupt clergy. Neither is especially accurate. Religious faith was widespread, but – as the higher and more high-minded clergy often lamented – it was usually simple, theologically unsophisticated and often grossly misinformed doctrinally. Faith for many or even most provided practical benefits through prayer and the comfort of ritual and a yearly cycle of liturgy. Others, of course, were more engaged and more devout. And some were deeply so.

Outright atheists in any modern sense must have been vanishingly rare, given evidence for them is virtually non-existent. Despite this, there is evidence of various kinds of genuine religious doubt, as well as conceptions of doubt that are sometimes surprising. The learned and cosmopolitan Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was dubbed by some admiring contemporaries as Stupor Mundi (“the Wonder of the World”), also had many enemies and detractors, not least of whom was Pope Gregory IX, who accused him of heresy and a variety of scandalous religious doubts and denials. One rumour was that his chancellor and secretary, Pietro della Vigna, had written a book for Frederick called Of the Three Imposters. Allegedly, this book argued that there were three great imposters and deceivers in history: Moses, Muhammed and Jesus. This book never existed, but rumours of its existence persisted for centuries, until eventually some eighteenth century French atheists forged it. As Ryrie notes though “the result was an anticlimax.” (p. 14)

Ryrie argues that this book-that-never-really-was is not just an intriguing historical titbit, it is also emblematic:

If we want to understand unbelief in the Middle Ages, the supposed Age of Faith, ‘Of the Three Imposters’ is a good place to start. Like the book, medieval unbelief existed in the imagination rather than in any fully articulated form. It was a rumour; not a manifesto, an inarticulate suspicion, not a philosophical programme. Its vagueness was what made it powerful.

(p. 14)

Ryrie explains this by comparing medieval doubters to modern flat-earthers. They were not motivated by any deep engagement with the relevant theology or supporting philosophy any more than flat-earthers have a profound grasp of cartography or astronomy. On the contrary, it is their very lack of this knowledge that makes their doubt both possible and also unassailable. It is motivated by suspicion: a sneaking sceptical feeling that everyone is somehow being duped. Given that stupid, hypocritical and corrupt clergy were a standard target of medieval satire, it was not hard for some of these folk-doubters to find a cause for this suspicion and so a target for one of Ryrie’s key motivating emotions: anger. Ryrie gives several examples of where this anger led to people denying key doctrines – mainly transubstantiation, but also religious rituals and the Bible – and argues this seems common enough for medieval heresy hunters to categorise it neatly as “Epicureanism”. But this was no coherent philosophy: it was a folk belief based on a suspicious hunch, a lot of resentment and, eventually, anger.

This anger was, as Ryrie details, one of the drivers of the Reformation. Rising lay piety and increasing engagement with Church activity and doctrine, ironically a result of reforms the Church itself had been pushing since at least the thirteenth century, gave this dissatisfaction with the institution’s shortcomings and hypocrisies increasing intensity and voice. And, increasingly, the Medieval period’s social and institutional pressure valves and outlets for this discontent failed to suffice. So things boiled over into conflict, fracture and schism. This in turn led to something that Western Christendom had not seen on a large scale before: a degree of pluralism in religious practice and belief. This in turn had significant consequences, Ryrie argues, on the history of doubt.

Reformer Anxiety

The fragmenting of communities and institutions of belief in the wake of the Protestant Reformation had a number of novel consequences. Now that everyone was a theologian, so long as they had a Bible to hand and some capacity to read it, ruling classes struggled to contain or control the wild variety of new sects and communities that arose. In one extreme case, the radical Anabaptists who took control of the city of Münster in 1534-35 created a chaotic and murderous eschatological regime led by the polygamous 25 year old tailor’s apprentice and self-proclaimed “prophet” John of Leiden. The Prophet was eventually torn to pieces with red-hot iron tongs when the city was recaptured by its ousted Prince-Bishop, but this was an alarming taste of things to come. Sects, both mild and radical, multiplied. In England, a degree of religious central control by the monarchy as head of the Church of England broke down in the English Civil Wars of 1642-51, which saw the rise of myriad “Dissenter” congregations. Ranters, Quakers, Diggers, Levellers, Muggletonians and many smaller groups proliferated. This variety of options and kaleidoscope of competing doctrines gave rise to Ryrie’s other driving emotion: anxiety.

After all, which sect was right? What doctrines were the true ones? And what if a believer chose wrongly and ended up burning in Hell? Overlaying these questions was an even more pressing one for many of these believers. Given many or even most of these sects were based on a Calvinist theology, the issue of Predestination added a heavy layer of anxiety. Under the Calvinist concept of infralapsarianism (also called postlapsarianism), God ordains who is to be saved and who is to be damned, via his omniscient foreknowledge, from the beginning of time. For many, anxiety about whether they were foreordained to be saved or to be burned was a genuine psychological torment on earth.

This is Ryrie’s home turf as a historian and Chapters Four and Five of his book explore the anxiety of many often obscure and common people in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in some detail. In the 1640s the teenaged Hannah Allen was so wracked with anxiety about her sinful state that she tried to commit suicide and could not even look at a book because it reminded her of the Bible. Another anxiety-stricken devout teenager, Sarah Wright, was also driven to suicide attempts because she felt her spiritual agonies on earth were even worse than any hellfire. Others were driven further and contemplated simply giving up any attempt at a pious life and embracing pure hedonism. One “M.K.” imagined the Devil saying to her:

Why dost thou trouble thyself? Take thy pleasure, do what thou likest. Thou shalt never be called to an account for anything, for as the wise man dieth, so dieth the fool, and both rest in the grave together. There is no God to save thee or to punish thee, all things are made by nature, and when thou diest, there is an end of all thyy good and bad deeds.

(Ryrie, pp. 113-14)

Of course, these accounts are given in works that go on to describe how these women overcame this anxiety and found a way to live piously in the end. That polemical context should give us at least some reason, perhaps, to question how much their distress and the extent of their doubts are exaggerated for rhetorical effect. But Ryrie gives enough material like this to indicate that the examples are not isolated and to make a case that there were others who were driven to similar extremes, with not all coming to satisfactory terms with these issues as these people did. As he argues, “these tender souls were canaries in the mine” (p. 115).

A further group are also indicative of similar anxieties and precursors of later resolutions of them. The Seekers were more a general category rather than a distinct sect. These were people who had tried various sects and congregations and found none of them satisfactory. They arrived at a general rejection of ritual, creeds or prescriptive dogma and came together in meetings with like-minded others where all kept a respectful silence, looking for individual inspiration and guidance. They prefigured aspects of Quakerism, with its emphasis on religious tolerance and freedom. But their rejection of the strictures of ecclesiastical constraints means they also prefigured and paved the way for the Deism of the following centuries. Some pared their beliefs back so far that they were left with only something like Natural Law as a basis for living – as Ryrie paraphrases the conclusion of one Seeker, Clement Writer: “if all doctrine and authority is uncertain, the only certainly left was God’s law written onto every human heart.” (p. 169). This is getting remarkably close, in the 1640s no less, to something very like the view of a Voltaire or a Jefferson. Paradoxically, the great piety of these earnest sectarians and seekers led directly down the road to increasingly radical and pervasive doubt.

Literally Hitler

It is in Ryrie’s final chapter that we finally get to the Enlightenment writers and nineteenth century scientists and freethinkers that are supposedly the source of modern secularism, atheism and unbelief, according to the traditional top-down, “death of God by philosophy narrative” favoured by the current crop of anti-theists. Of course, not everyone is going to be convinced by Ryrie’s thesis that these people were simply building an after-the-fact “infrastructure of reason” for doubt arrived at for mostly emotional reason. Oxford’s Dimitri Levitin is sceptical about this, as he articulates in an appreciative if critical review – see “O Ye of Little Faith” (Literary Review, February, 2020). But Ryrie does seem to be onto something. By this final chapter, it is difficult to think of modern unbelief and atheism as suddenly leaping, fully formed, from the foreheads of Voltaire and Huxley. There was a centuries long process of conceptual foundation-laying, and much of it was, as Ryrie argues, at the very least driven as much by emotion as reason.

Ryrie’s book is short but his chapters are densely argued for all their relative brevity. This final one contains a succinct meditation on how we have got from a period in which unbelief was still very much the domain of oddities and village atheists to today: where large swathes of the population of most developed nations are at least non-religious if not outright unbelievers. In a well-argued few pages at the end of the book, Ryrie makes the case for this change being caused by a traumatic historical fracture point: Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust.

He notes Callum Brown’s book Becoming Atheist – Humanism and the Secular West (BLM Academic, 2017), in which Brown interviews eighty-five atheists across Europe and North America. One of his findings was a consistent ethical code that united his interviewees. This entailed the “Golden Rule” and “a linked set of principles about human equality and bodily and sexual autonomy.” What Brown found interesting is that his subjects “claimed, without exception, that they were ‘humanists’ before they discovered the term.” As Brown puts it:

Humanism was neither a philosophy nor an ideology that they had learned and read about and then adopted. There was no act of conversion, no training or induction … A humanist condition precedes being a self-conscious humanist.

(In Ryrie, p. 201)

Despite Dawkins and Co. assuming they and their predecessors were creating unbelievers by reason and argument, Brown’s findings indicated most people find their way to this thinking themselves and put a label on it later.

So where did this ethic and its associated ideas and values come from, Ryrie asks. His answer is: Hitler. His judgement of his own faith – Ryrie is a Christian and lay minister in the Church of England – is a harsh one: Christianity’s traditional accepted raison d’être had been to define morality and in the Second World War it failed:

It failed not only in the sense that many churches and Christians were to a degree complicit with the Nazis and fascism, but in the wider sense that the global crisis revealed that Christianity’s moral priorities were wrong. It now seemed plain that cruelty, discrimination and murder were evil in a way that fornication, blasphemy and impiety were not.

(p. 202)

So, he argues, the Second World War became the Western world’s new foundation myth. Correspondingly, where previously the most potent moral figure in Western culture had been Jesus, now it was Hitler. He is the fixed point by which we define evil and use as contrast with all that is good. The common and seemingly almost instinctive ethic that Brown identified in his interviewees has this as its origin: an inversion of Hitler. This is the reason Godwin’s Law is a key rule of the internet and “Nazi!” is the almost inevitable end point of so many social media arguments.

Ryrie is far from the first person to observe this. Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Little,Brown, 2019) makes much the same argument, at least about Hitler’s status as the touchstone of evil and anti-Humanistic impulse. Holland’s book is not cited in Ryrie’s endnotes, but Holland makes a useful contrast between Hitler and Tolkien in his nineteenth chapter. Ryrie also notes how The Lord of the Rings, which he calls one of “the modern age’s most popular myths” (p. 203), was clearly influenced by the time in which Tolkien wrote it and the new, significant status that Hitler and Nazism were already taking in Western culture:

Western culture had been breeding new Saurons ever since. The figure of the Dark Lord has stalked through the most persistent and popular mythologies of the post-war era, from Star Wars’ Darth Vader to Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort. …. These are the myths on which generations of children in the post-Christian West have been raised, transposing the brutal lesson of the Second World Warn into timeless morality tales. …. And while the Christian ethical sensibility which Tolkien embodied still underpins these myths, they have, like the culture in which they have thrived, left that original taproot behind them.

(p. 204)

Ryrie is dismissive of Dawkins-style New Atheism, seeing it as little more than reverse apologetics and so “much better at cheering up atheists than at persuading believers.” (p. 199) He also gets in a richly deserved swipe at some of anti-theism’s sillier excursions, with the tedious fringe theory of Jesus Mythicism also getting a passing whack (pp. 196-7). So it is not surprising that his book has not been appreciated by the few anti-theists who have noticed it: New Humanist gave it a brief, dismissive and rather dull-witted review that indicates the reviewer did not actually understand Ryrie much at all (see “Book Review: Unbelievers”, New Humanist, 17th August 2020).

But the history of unbelief needs more insightful books by good scholars and the professional polemicists of anti-theism are definitely not capable or even very interested in writing them. If some are going to be written by believers, it is good when they are authored by believers like Ryrie – ones who can be careful and fairly objective.

He ends by warning his fellow Christians that “Western Christendom is not about to snap back into place” and that contemporary Humanism is “not a blip or an anomaly, but a continuation of moral forces that have been at work within the Christian world for centuries”. He fears believers are fooling themselves about this and that many are in “danger of being tempted by the authoritarian nationalist voices that want to unlearn the Second World War’s moral lessons.” This, he warns, reduces the word “Christian” to mere tribal identity which is ultimately “self-defeating”.

Similarly, he warns we unbelievers that “the humanist surge is not a stable new reality … our culture’s moral frameworks have shifted before and they will do so again”, concluding sagely “believers and unbelievers alike share an interest in where that story goes next.” (p. 206)

Regardless of whether you agree with all his points or find all his arguments convincing, this is a succinct and insightful work of history and so well worth both believers and unbelievers’ time.