Mansfield on Atheism

Here at First Things , we’ve managed, more or less, to avoid talking about the new atheism tracts that seem to have infected the blogs and the bestseller lists. Partly because they’re so bad. And partly because they’re so old-fashioned, as though their authors had rediscovered a yellowing broadside from Robert G. Ingersoll with "The Freethinker’s Bible!" screaming on its cover in 72-point type.

But mostly, I think, we’ve avoided talking about them because there seems so little to say. Sometimes, only song will do:

Christopher Hitchens

picks up the rice in a church

where a wedding has been.

Lives in a dream . . .

All the lonely doubters,

where do they all come from?

All the lonely doubters,

where do they all belong?

But when someone does actually find something interesting to say, it’s worth noting. Harvard University’s Harvey Mansfield, fresh from the Jefferson Lecture that First Things was privileged to print last month (subscription required), has a fascinating article in the new issue of the Weekly Standard .

Mansfield’s argument is that the new atheism is, in fact, new ¯or, at least substantially different from previous atheisms: the Enlightenment sneer of the French philosophes , for instance, or the wry retreat to pleasure of the ancient followers of Epicurus.

That first distinction, between religion’s old cultural despisers and its new, seems clear enough, in one sense. As Mansfield notes: "Atheism isn’t what it was in the eighteenth century. Now, the focus of the attack is not the Church, which is no longer dominant, but religion itself. The disdain one used to hear for ‘organized religion’ extends now to the individual believer’s faith . . . . To reduce the influence of religion, it is [now] politically necessary to attack it in the private sphere as well as in the public square."

In another sense, however, the crusading, proselytizing atheism of our recent writers is still in the line of Voltairean Enlightenment. It’s still convinced that some bar, some religious barrier, prevents human flourishing. The eighteenth-century freethinkers could aim their attack against the institutional churches and their cozy relations with aristocratic and monarchical regimes. But modern brights have no such luxury. The political power of the Church is mostly gone¯and still we haven’t achieved perfect happiness. The cause, thus, must lie in the sheer fact of the existence of believers, which "poisons everything," as Hitchens claims in the subtitle of his book. Or, as Mansfield notes, "because every believer’s private desires are given terrific force over others’ desires without their consent."

It’s when we ask the question of why religion is bad, however, that we find what distinguishes this whole line of atheism, in both its Enlightenment and recent forms, from the ancient atheism of the Epicureans. The key is the role of justice, the complaint that belief in God is somehow a reason we have failed to find perfect justice. As Mansfield writes:

There was an Epicurean atheism in the ancient world quite different from ours today. That atheism also uncovered tyranny behind the mask of religion, but it was content to point out the power of injustice. Injustice in this view was the way of the world, and there was no remedy for it. The only recourse for a reasonable person was to stay out of politics and live a life of pleasure, seeking calm, watching storms of the sea from ashore, and suppressing one’s indignation at injustice.

Today’s atheism rejects this serene attitude and goes on the attack. In its criticisms of God it claims to be more moral than religion.

The angry demand for justice, flung in the face of the apparently nonexistent God, is, in its way, a religious impulse. Which, of course, makes the militant atheists religious in their irreligious way.

But here Mansfield draws his final distinction:

It is not religion that makes men fanatics; it is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted. That fanatical desire can be found in both religion and atheism. In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together. The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism.

It’s a nice point: the two styles of atheism¯the angry and the wry¯like half-religions on either side of religion. Each getting only part of the human problem, each convinced in its partiality that it sees beyond religion.