Preface
Of all the essays on this website, this is the one that I am gladdest to have written. As is perhaps obvious, it is the product of years if not decades of thought.
For nearly all of my life, I have been of a religious disposition (in the essay I use the word “inclination”, but perhaps “disposition” is better.) At the same time, I have never been able to relinquish the faculties of rationalism and scepticism with which I find myself to have been equipped. And yet I have never felt the practice of a purely intransitive religion, in Erich Heller’s phrase, i.e. one that has no object of worship at all, to be intellectually or ontologically satisfactory. I believe that there is something out there, not nothing, and that the something is not merely a human construct. I am reluctant to go very much further than that, though I prefer to adhere to an established religion rather than to coin one of my own. Faute de mieux therefore, I pursue (with increasing difficulty in the contemporary world) a form of traditional Anglicanism that I first encountered aged 8 in the school chapel at Summer Fields, and which is still to be found in churches like St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield under the auspices of Fr Marcus Walker. I believe the Christian mythos to be true, not in the sense that it contains literal, exclusive verities which render all other religions false, but sufficiently to enable me to say the Nicene Creed in what feels to me to be good faith. On the other hand, I regret to say that have always been repelled by the simplistic certainties and ultimate intolerance of the evangelical wing of the Church of England, as practised at Holy Trinity Brompton and via the Alpha course. Whatever good works this sort of belief engenders, and whatever consolations this sort of faith brings to its adherents, it also has the effect of putting off many other people, and making Christianity look to them far more indefensible than it is. In that respect, contemporary evangelism seems to me to do as much harm as good.
I should mention two more immediate stimuli to the writing of this article. First, I used to argue about religion during long country walks with an old friend, who had an unremittingly dismissive and scornful approach to faith: he would say that he couldn’t believe that an intelligent person like me could hold such nonsensical views. I never felt that I did full justice to my position during these conversations, so the essay is in large part intended as a considered answer to him. Secondly, the essay addresses the $64,000 question that I wish priests would occasionally confront in sermons, rather than (as they tend to) either needlessly paraphrasing the Gospel reading just heard, complaining about climate change, or (an increasing tendency) talking about themselves.
Since the essay was published in 2018, it has given rise to much more correspondence than anything else I have written, perhaps unsurprisingly given its subject-matter. I have been surprised by favourable private comments from Richard Chartres, Tom Stoppard and AN Wilson among others. With difficulty, I will keep these to myself but cannot resist quoting the assessment of another hero of mine, Iain McGilchrist, who wrote that The Devout Sceptic was “one of the most thoughtful, subtle, truthful and believable pieces I have read on religion for some time”. The fact that McGilchrist cited my essay at various points in The sense of the sacred, the great culminating chapter of his book The Matter with Things (2021) was an undreamed-of privilege. This essential chapter in what is an absolutely essential book develops with great range and profundity some of the points I tried to make in the article, as well as many others. It is quite simply the best defence of the religious disposition I have ever encountered.