Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

By Alec Ryrie

Why have Western societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? Looking to the feelings and faith of ordinary people, the award-winning author of Protestants Alec Ryrie offers a bold new history of atheism.

We think we know the history of faith: how the ratio of Christian believers has declined and a secular age dawned. In this startlingly original history, Alex Ryrie puts faith in the dock to explore how religious belief didn’t just fade away. Rather, atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right.

Unbelievers looks back to the middle ages when it seemed impossible not to subscribe to Christianity, through the crisis of the Reformation and to the powerful, challenging cultural currents of the centuries since. As this history shows, the religious journey of the Western world was lived and steered not just by published philosophy and the celebrated thinkers of the day – the Machiavellis and Michel de Montaignes – but by men and women at every level of society. Their voices and feelings permeate this book in the form of diaries, letters and court records.

Tracing the roots of atheism, Ryrie shows that our emotional responses to the times can lead faith to wax and wane: anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment spark religious doubt as powerfully as any intellectual revolution. With Christianity under contest and ethical redefinitions becoming more and more significant, Unbelievers shows that to understand how something as intuitive as belief is shaped over time, we must look to an emotional history – one with potent lessons for our still angry and anxious age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780008299835

Alec Ryrie

Alec Ryrie FBA is Professor of History in the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, and co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. His recent publications include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019), Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World (William Collins, 2017), and the prize-winning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (OUP, 2013).

Reviews for Unbelievers

[pedrbran · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed reading the book for its historical content and anecdotes. The author is engaging and writes well. But it was not what I thought it would be. I kept asking myself, when is the author going to make his point?
In the introduction, the author asks: What if people stopped believing and found that they needed arguments to justify their unbelief?

The author also states in the introduction that it is not only religious belief which is chosen for instinctive, inarticulate, intuitive reasons. So is unbelief.
He says that the crucial juncture in the history of atheism is the period before the philosophers made it intellectually respectable. I.e., there is pre-Enlightenment atheism and post-Enlightenment atheism. Those who came before the Enlightenment were atheists for emotional reasons. This history continued through the Enlightenment but became hidden because philosophers gave unbelievers sophisticated rationalizations to hide the emotional non-rational reasons for their unbelief.

The author mines the pre-Enlightenment past to find the real emotional reasons for disbelief before Westerners became tainted by philosophers’ high-minded justifications for disbelief which masked their true reasons.
The author provides a series of descriptions of seventeenth century unbelievers in the Christian god in an attempt to show that that most people who were unbelievers did so for emotional rather than rational reasons. He doesn't establish his thesis in my opinion.

There are a lot of problems with his thesis. Two that stand out for me are the confusion of some with all and the confusion of cause and effect.
It is easy to find examples of people who believe all sorts of things for emotional reasons. There are also examples of people who believe or disbelieve many things for rational reasons as well. Some is not all.
Some people report seeing their deceased loved one after death. Margaret Thatcher is one of them. It doesn’t mean a person actually came back from the dead. For emotional reasons, some believe that they did. Others know that this is impossible and that they were hallucinating. They disbelieve for rational reasons.

The examples the author uses to illustrate disbelief based on emotion actually seemed to me to be very good reasons for not believing rather than ad hoc confabulations used to justify unbelief. He reports one person as saying that he had never seen a person come back from the dead. Others were angry at the corruption of the clergy. You have to remember that Christianity is the only religion that claims that once you become a believer, God himself through the Holy Spirit indwells you and helps you overcome your fallen nature through a process of sanctification. Seeing the corruption of the clergy would seem to me to be a very good refutation of that idea and would tend to make one an unbeliever.

Not everyone is a philosopher or reads philosophy, but that does not mean that they don’t have very good rational reasons for disbelief. The brute facticity and immense weight of a mundane godless world constantly confronts every human being. It can be a slow grinding process. The world not making sense is a very good reason for not believing. Because it is not articulated through a sophisticated philosophy and eventually expresses itself through an emotion does not mean that it is non-rational. It is a very rational conclusion. It is believers who make the ad hoc rationalizations. Oh, it is god’s will. It is part of his plan. There’s a higher purpose. His ways are unknowable…on and on until belief falls before a thousand cuts…cause and effect.

In the final chapter, the author jumps from the seventeenth century to today and wonders why the world is giving up on Christianity.
Gee...maybe it's that people no longer interpret the world through a magical lens. It is like the old-hag beautiful-woman optical illusion. We have flipped from viewing the world magically to viewing it through a secular-scientific lens. Seeing a thunderbolt hit the ground near you is not viewed as a sign from god as Martin Luther viewed it. We look at people who have 'messages from god' as mentally ill and not as prophets. If you take evolution seriously, you think that humans evolved and were not created in god's image. Science has demystified and disenchanted the world. Why is this so hard to get?

Humans may need religion. We may need a larger story to give our lives meaning. For most, science doesn’t provide that. But it doesn’t mean we need a religion like Christianity based on magic and miracles and a historical narrative that has been largely falsified (see The Historical Jesus Question: The Challenge of History to Religious Authority (2001) by Gregory W. Dawes).

The larger subtext of the book seems to be the claim that we hold our ultimate beliefs for non-rational reasons. This is a common theme among modern Christian thinkers trying to rationally justify their adherence to Christianity. In their opinion, since all ultimate commitments are held for non-rational reasons, they are immunized from refutation since they are not doing anything that everyone else is doing (tu quoque). Being a Christian is no more or less rational than being an unbeliever. However, unless our ultimate commitments are open to revision, then we are being dogmatic and one has to give up the claim to being rational. A book that makes this point explicitly using Protestantism as an example of a rational belief system that degenerated into an ideology is Retreat to Commitment, by W.W. Bartley. Another is Hans Albert's book Treatise on Critical Reason.

We’ve seen the atrocities that belief can produce. Maybe it’s time to give disbelief a chance.