The Gospel According to Terry
Eugene McCarraher ▪ Fall 2014
Culture and the Death of
God
by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2014, 248 pp.
by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2014, 248 pp.
God has been through a very rough patch over the last 500 years.
Once the Creator and Ruler of the universe, He fell into a long and precipitous
decline with the advent of modernity. Dethroned as Ruler in the North Atlantic
by religious tolerance and democracy, the Almighty watched helplessly as
science refuted His claim to be the Creator. Historians, archeologists, and
literary scholars broke the spell of His holy books, impugning their inerrancy
and exposing them as riven by myths, errors, and contradictions. Add popular
education, material prosperity, and longevity extended by better diet and
medicine, and God’s hold on the moral and metaphysical imagination grew ever
more attenuated.
Secular intellectuals have been of two minds about the Heavenly
Father’s demise. Hoping that the last king would be strangled with the entrails
of the last priest, Diderot mused that God had become “one of the most sublime
and useless truths.” Yet Voltaire—fearful that his own impiety would embolden
his servants to murder and larceny—maintained that if God did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent Him. Diderot’s antipathy morphed into the
revolutionary unbelief of Marx and Bakunin (as the latter snarled, if God did exist, it would be
necessary to abolish Him); reached its zenith in the exuberant blasphemies of
Nietzsche; and persists in brash but utterly derivative form in the “new
atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Yet despite His protracted dotage, God refuses to shuffle off into
oblivion. If He lingers as a metaphysical butt in seminar rooms and research
laboratories, He thrives in the sanctuaries of private belief, religious
communities, and seminaries, and abides (sometimes on sufferance) in theology
and religious studies departments. He flourishes in suburban evangelical
churches everywhere in North America; offers dignity and hope to the planet of
slums in Kinshasa, Jakarta, São Paulo, and Mumbai; inspires pacifists and
prophets for the poor as well as bombers of markets and abortion clinics. David
Brat claims Him for libertarian economics, while Pope Francis enlists Him to
scourge the demons of neoliberal capitalism. He’s even been seen making cameo
appearances in the books of left-wing intellectuals. “Religious belief,” Terry
Eagleton quips, “has rarely been so fashionable among rank unbelievers.”
As Eagleton contends in Culture and the Death of
God, the Almighty has proven more resilient than His celebrated
detractors and would-be assassins. God “has proved remarkably difficult to
dispose of”; indeed, atheism itself has proven to be “not as easy as it looks.”
Ever since the Enlightenment, “surrogate forms of transcendence” have scrambled
for the crown of the King of Kings—reason, science, literature, art, nationalism,
but especially “culture”—yet none have been up to the job.
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