The solace of belief

I came eventually to atheism after a long period of wishy-washy agnosticism, but I have studied religion long enough to see its advantages

I have been chatting with the mighty Ciaran Martin, former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, and one of the wisest voices on Northern Ireland, not just as ex-constitution director in the Cabinet Office but as a native of Omagh in County Tyrone, in the west of Northern Ireland. I will come back to the politics of Northern Ireland again in a while after a recent tentative essay on the subject; but it started me thinking about faith, as any discussion of Northern Ireland can easily do, a thought process encouraged by watching a few clips of Fleabag.

I don’t think I’ve ever really believed in any proper sense. I wasn’t brought up in any faith or tradition, though aware of my parents’ west-of-Scotland suspicion of Catholics and vaguely inculcated with an extremely mild cultural Judaism (I have a mezuzah and I make feeble efforts to mark the major holidays: my old university flatmate used to hold a regular Pesach seder in Glasgow which I would shlepp to but sometimes he served oysters, so, you know. Elijah never showed up.

As I’ve said elsewhere, as a good public schoolboy I had a very fuzzy Anglican framework to my schooling. I started studying history with a very Catholic bent as a sixth-former—my almost-complete doctoral thesis is on Tudor monasteries—and I have enough Catholic friends to know my way round the Church of Rome: its ceremony and antiquity attract me, and I love Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, but I have no belief, so crossing the Tiber is an unlikely eventuality.

As I say, though, I have very good friends for whom their faith (mainly Catholics) is an absolutely integral part of their life. They have never tried to convert me but I find their belief fascinating, as it seems to bring them great joy. And I think religious conviction does bring some people great happiness. Not that I dislike my atheism; since I accepted it wholeheartedly, it has been a liberation in a lot of ways. Knowing that life is our only turn on the stage, that this is not a rehearsal or, even less, a vale of tears before some greater existence beyond the grave, makes me content in a profound way I find hard to explain, but it’s a sentiment I know I share with my great friend Alex Matchett. Seize the day, never pass opportunities up, and know, as I have come to know, that you will regret not doing things far more, in general, that you will regret doing things.

It hasn’t made the death of loved ones more difficult either. Both my parents are dead now, and I am quite satisfied that they are, corporeally and spiritually gone. The time I had with them was hugely precious, and I am lucky—where many, I know, are not—that I had the opportunity to see them both before their deaths; indeed, I was present when each left us, and I was alone with Ma at the last breath. Neither believed in an afterlife, and I have no wish to imagine that they have some kind of enduring spirit with which I could try to commune. They exist in memories and stories and shared experiences, and that is a great, great thing.

All of that said, I am a person who, sometimes, likes rules and order and structure. In that sense, I see how comforting religion must be in a way. You can buy in to a whole world view, and it will shape your whole life. Of course you may have doubts, and there may be dogma which you find hard to accept, or want to argue against. But there is still that paradigm, that identity, that structure. The exceptionally clever Phoebe Waller-Bridge, though writing comedy, captured it well when her Fleabag sat in the confessional and wept her unhappiness to Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest, and it’s worth quoting at length.

No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to... tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it.You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.

I think all of those instructions must be especially comforting at times of emotional crisis. Trying to react to blows is a lonely business at times, wondering not only how you should behave, but how it will seem to other people, and how it all fits together in a coherent whole. A religion, or a church, will gather you in its arms, provide answers which have coddled and comforted generations, and if you rail against some of them, well, having something to rail against can be a comfort in itself.

Christopher Hitchens was a sort of hero to me. I disagreed with huge portions of what he said and believed but I thought he made the world a better, more sceptical and intelligence place; and I think his bravery in speaking out against some of the evils which religion has wrought was necessary and telling. But his anger at the obedience some people owe to God, to unthinking adherence to a deity whom he did not see as universally benign, was too far for me. “I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away,” he said, eloquently but not, to me, persuasively.

I don’t think that my religious friends live in fear of their God. I see how and why Hitchens could make that debating point, take the powerful image of mankind on its knees, desperately trying to redeem a sacrifice God had made, unasked, on their behalf: but I have seen, too, the joy and transcendent happiness which they derive from their belief.

This may sound odd, but, when I try to imagine being religious, I don’t know if I would actually expect the Almighty to be wholly benevolent, kind, forgiving. Maybe it’s some tiny sparks of inherited Judaism, where the one whose name we do not say has, shall we say at least, his tempers and his extreme reactions; after all, when God was displeased by humanity in the Book of Genesis, his solution was wipe it out and start again from the few refugees whom he ordered Noah to collect together in the Ark. A superficial reading of the Old Testament can concentrate too easily on Noah and his family, but each of the people who died in the great inundation which cleansed the world was a human being, a creation of God, a full person with hopes and dreams and a rounded existence. There is, I cannot help think, a touch of the savage words supposedly spoken at the siege of Béziers in 1209: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.” “Kill them all: God will know His own.” True, perhaps, but a brutal approach to mending humanity’s ways.

If there is a higher being, however, it seems to me not unreasonable to bend the knee to it. I certainly see no shame in that approach, nothing to apologise for in deference to the Lord. But then I fit quite easily into hierarchies, and am comfortable with a world order which owes respect upwards and care and consideration downwards. It seems, to me, no argument against a faith.

In anthropological terms, it is easy to understand the emergence and development of religion and the belief in a higher power (or powers). People have a profound and instinctive wish to make sense of the world around them, and it not hard to see how that formed early ideas of divinity. The Greeks, for example, saw natural occurrences like storms, tidal waves, earthquakes and other natural disasters as the furious acts of their gods: why would one not think that a shipwreck had been caused by Poseidon, master of the sea, and if that was so then it was only logical that man must have angered him.

Nor is this an approach limited to the ancients: when James VI of Scotland waited for his bride Anne, to whom he had been married by proxy in her Danish homeland, and her ship, making the sea voyage in 1589, was struck by bad weather and contrary winds, it was no great intellectual leap for the king to imagine that these conditions were provoked by witchcraft, which was then thought to be rife in southern Scotland. Months later there were extensive with trials in North Berwick, lasting for two years and indicting hundreds of women and men. Why would it be hard to believe that these sorcerers, or people like them, had been responsible for the queen’s hazardous sea voyage?

That mental world, wrapped up in religion and belief in the Christian God, provided answers which were not easy but which were satisfying. It eliminated mystery and doubt, and supplied an explanation for almost anything in life. And, while the early modern mind may have been terrified by the forces of the Devil and by witches under his control—and it was: witchcraft was a very real and potent thing, not a front for socio-economic undercurrents—then that terror, with the remedies available under the law, was infinitely less frightening that simple, blank, ignorance. We diminish and master our fears by naming and delineating them. It is a very human impulse.

I have, in jest, said again and again that I am writing a book, about oratory in the House of Commons. But, as some of my friends will know, I write fiction too (please buy this collection of short stories published by the writing group I belong to, which features a piece by m’good self), and am currently wrestling with The Novel, a sprawling and messy thing at the moment but some kind of coming-of-age story the protagonist of which is deeply religious. I am enjoying my endeavours to present her personality correctly, because she is clever and human and fallible and sinning, but motivated by a faith which is not deep but absolute. I have had to try to climb inside a mind unlike my own, but I hope I am doing so with sympathy and with an approach which will resonate with believers and non-believers. (No publication date, dear attentive readers.)

Religion is, in its own way, a philosophy, a way of looking at the world. My mother, as I described recently, had been brought up with a cultural distrust of Catholicism—she knew without hesitation that when the chips were down she was a Protestant Jew, not a Catholic Jew—and she thought, if she were forced to think about it at all, that religion was stupid, cowardly, a failure of critical thought and unquestioning acceptable of ideas that made no sense to her. In that regard, she had no feeling for the mysterious or the weird or the divine.

I don’t share that view. I’m an atheist, but I would never be militant, and I generally regard those with faith as blessed in some ways, certainly often comforted, and I leave them to work out the knots in their own minds. I think there is no God, no afterlife, no spiritual existence; but I am also quite happy to accept—especially as I have no real knowledge of science and the physical aspects of the universe—that there is a huge amount I do not know, may never know and, indeed, perhaps cannot know. That is absolutely not to say I am agnostic: I have reached the firmest conclusion I have, and find no persuasive argument that the divine exists. But I don’t for a second think I have all the answers. Some things are, and that is all I can be sure of. If others choose to fill that doubt with faith, then that is a matter for them and all power to them.

Of course I know the harm religion can do. We come back to Northern Ireland, where an area I have come to love a great deal, and a people—from both traditions and none—for whom I have a real sympathy and affection, have had their lives scarred, limited, compromised and sometimes ended by a conflict which was born in part from sectarianism. That is a great tragedy, and I cannot put myself in the place of those for whom religion, or religious differences, can dehumanise to such an extent that the taking of life becomes something to compass and carry out. I have my ideological sympathies when it comes to Northern Ireland, but I look at the photographs of the innocent victims on both sides, and I weep in horror and incomprehension.

But I know its historical roots. I know about the Battle of the Boyne, about the Siege of Derry, the devastation at Drogheda and the campaign against the Gaelic Irish under Elizabeth I. I see, as an historian, how these things come about, and, as a student of Mary I, I can see the ways in which people thought about religion as so grave, so overwhelming a matter that life and death ceased to be the most important factor. Wars of religion can be picked apart and analysed without accepting their logic.

I come back, I suppose, to comfort. We all seek it, the reassurance which comes from knowing how the world works, believing that the events which confront us every day come to be and how they are managed and resolved. There are few things which frighten us more than not knowing: as a trivial example, think how much more sinister and terrifying in film or literature are dangers hinted at or unseen as opposed to be out in the open, visible and understood. Seeing and identifying those dangers makes them every so slightly more human in scale, and it brings us some tiny morsel of comfort.

So I see why those who believe, whatever faith they hold, to whatever church or tradition they belong, can be soothed by what they hold dear. They know what to do, they understand that, while they may individually be small and insignificant, they have a place in a cosmology and there are remedies and protections and solutions. To know and understand, whether you are right or wrong, is to have guidance towards the light, through the dangers of life. I get it. I can’t manufacture it in myself, but I do not disdain it or hold it in contempt. We all, in our own ways, do what we can and have to in order to get through each day and close our eyes at the end of the night. Even if that is our last, that faith carries some through. That is something to respect and envy, even if some of us find ourselves on a harder, more challenging path. We are all, I think, trying to do the same thing and moving in the same direction.