And Is It True?

For if it is...

Every now and then, around this time of year, you get that article. That one single, perfect specimen of odiousness that everyone can gather round and passionately hate together, irrespective of their other differences. This year, it’s this article by British journalist Polly Toynbee, on why as a cultural Christian, she’s fine with going through the motions of Christmas, but as a humanist, she’s glad nobody believes they mean anything anymore.

I mean this thing really is the full bingo card. Weak “superstition” contrasted with heroic atheists “looking life and death in the eye”: check. Nose-wrinkling over the veneration of that “barbaric symbol of torture,” the cross: check. Nun-dissing: check. Pause for historical detour about Christians smashing classical statues in the Dark Ages: check. Complaining about Christian schools today where children study “misogynist, homophobic and abusive texts”: check. Oddly intense vitriol towards pro-life Christians: check. Polly ends with this bit, grinding her teeth over the “religious” members of both Houses who “fight every time” when “death with dignity” comes up on the menu. It’s good to pay attention to how people end these things, generally a good clue to their replacement religion.

Despite all this, Polly still rather likes the notion of light in darkness, rebirth in short days, the poor inheriting the earth, and so on and so forth, etc., etc. She gets warm fuzzies at the thought of miserly Scrooge chastened, good-hearted George Bailey vindicated. She can even get in the mood to sing Christmas carols, provided she doesn’t let herself think too much about all the offensive theology. It’s just that if you ask her to say something nice about that theology, or the people who take it seriously, she’s just not going to. Why should she?

Polly seems to me to be hitting some similar beats to Freddie deBoer, who earlier this month gave us a December 2022 variation on an essay he’s written a few times now. A sample:

If Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were now understood by all right-thinking people to be closed-minded bigots, then the New New Atheists would be endlessly patient and friendly towards religion. They would look for ways to praise religious practice and excuses to justify the costs of worship. They would speak respectfully, even reverently, about beliefs that their thinking minds knew to be based in unreality. This is the way of all culture, the circle of life; each successive movement reacts to the excesses of the one that preceded it by embracing excesses of their own. But I’m still allowed to find it immensely tiresome, this scenario where among other atheists, I’m compelled to be showily respectful of religion for fear of appearing to be one of those awful New Atheists. Which, for the record, I never was. I have no interest at all in telling anyone else not to believe in God, only in resisting the destructive consequences that emerge from religious belief.

We come to atheism in sorrow. The lack of a god destroys the possibility of transcendent meaning. But we also come to it with clear eyes. And saying that the thousands of people who pack megachurches to worship a Jesus who hates gay people and give money they can’t spare to charlatans are engaging in necessary practices of ritual and community does harm to the world. Religion still kills.

Ultimately, this is a classic example of an essential question: which is worse, insult or condescension? To be challenged on the level of ideas by someone who takes your claims seriously, or to be patronized by someone who doesn’t?

Just quickly aside, I have to wonder how much Freddie knows about today’s average megachurch, where the average pastor is more likely to fall over his Converse shoelaces in desperate haste to escape plain questions about the sin of homosexual acts. But anyway. I’ll admit, I’ve always sort of liked this particular Freddie essay. Some part of me will always sort of like the guy who just stands up and shouts, “Hey! Hi! I’m an asshole! Fight me!” Because on some level, he’s right. And because I am one of those weirdos who still happens to think, inconveniently, that Jesus came all the way down to earth so he could die for assholes too.

Freddie may be an asshole, but at least he understands what all is at stake here. And what all is at stake here is not less than everything. It’s the answer to the poet John Betjeman’s urgently repeated question: “And is it true? And is it true?”

Douglas Murray called back to this poem, among others, in a somewhat awkward three-way conversation with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau a few months ago. It seemed that whenever Douglas would raise a pointed question, it wasn’t answered in the way he was really looking for. Pageau was eager to lay out his particular Eastern Orthodox frame for belief, which affirms Christian doctrines while still insisting the gospel accounts are shrouded in “mystery.” This only created fog at moments when Douglas urgently sought clarity, pressing the necessity of “getting down to brass tacks, here.” With admirable candor, Douglas confesses that he would personally prefer to dodge the whole question himself. But he knows that he can’t, because like Freddie, he knows what hangs in the balance of that “Yes,” or that “No.” Though, unlike Freddie, he retains his sense of reverence, perhaps sensing there may still be something beyond his understanding to revere.

A friend of mine was struck by a reference Douglas made to Hegel in the course of the dialogue, when he said the question of the hour is whether Christianity is now “an exhausted force.” This prompted my friend to dig back into some Hegel scholarship, where he unearthed this absolute gem of a quote from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze:

It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but reacts to the forces that dominate it. Only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.

In many places, tragically, that is precisely what Christianity has now become. Though still not quite exhausted enough for Polly in England, apparently. But she can still be content that she’s mostly got her wish. Meanwhile, Freddie in America knows that the atheist who still wants to get down to the real vital work of atheism—“arguing for the non-existence of a supernatural deity, impressing on people that they must treat this life as the only one they have, and attempting to limit the destructive power of religion”—still has some work cut out for him.

On both sides of the pond, though, I think Polly and Freddie sense that work will never be done. That for all the night of lost faith grows cold, there will always be a spark. There will always be a remnant. Maddeningly, for Polly, the same remnant that is even now realizing her noble humanist visions of feeding the hungry, warming the cold, and comforting the destitute—including those destitute who, in her boundless compassion, she has judged better off dead.

And so it’s Christmas, and here we are. Here you are. Here I am. And here’s John Betjeman:

And is it true? And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare—

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.