Who Cares Where the Holidays Come From, If the God They Celebrate is Dead?
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Click on the tweet above to read an endless thread debunking the idea that Christmas is a reappropriation of pagan or Roman holidays. What’s funny is that Tim O’Neill complains of those arguments as a kind of ritual of the holiday season, but seems entirely unaware that he’s engaged in a ritual too - the ritual of debunking that claim. It’s become inescapable in the last several years. I see it more often than I see the claims about Christmas really being Saturnalia or similar themselves. People saying historically incorrect things deserve correction, but let’s not pretend that the debunking isn’t a ritual too. For the record, I think O’Neill is right on the history. But who cares? A pagan druid worships animal spirits that are not there, and Christians honor the birth of a man who was just a man and who cannot cleanse us of our sins. It’s very unfashionable, to consider the actual question at the root of all of it - whether a supernatural deity exists who has dominion over the universe and determines moral law and meaning - but I find I keep trying to steer people back to it.
This disdain for arguments about the pagan roots of Christian religious practice is a prototypical example of the current turn in atheism: where once atheists competed to be the most disrespectful towards believers, now they compete to be the most respectful. Where once atheist online spaces were filled with sneering and contempt, now they are filled with men (almost exclusively men) who cannot wait to tell the world how much they respect religion and the religious, that they recognize how valuable the community and ceremony of religion are, that they aren’t one of those atheists…. They’re guilty, in other words, of what I’ve accused Jonathan Haidt of, worshipping other people’s worship, believing in other people’s belief. As I wrote,
belief in belief is belief in delusion - worse, in other people's delusion. It is one thing to argue that religion is true or is not true. It is another to say "it isn't, incidentally, but go on pretending, it's good for you." In the inherent condescension of that attitude I see something worse than Christopher Hitchens ever unleashed against the faithful. Whatever Christianity is, it is not worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Judaism is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Islam is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. And in fact if you take the precepts of those religions at all seriously, you can see praying to the God-shaped hole for what it is: idolatry.
With so much honoring and respecting and genuflecting to the benefits of religion, the essential tasks 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 - lie fallow. Those tasks are apparently much less important than the only task people really devote a lot of energy to online, which is ensuring that they appear to be the right kind of person. And out there in this country of ours, 90% of people surveyed believe in some sort of supernatural force, and half believe that what happens to them on a day-to-day basis is determined by God. These beliefs have consequences. Mostly bad ones. But most of the atheists I see online now are so dedicated to appearing equanimous and respectful that I hardly hear anything about the evils religion has done anymore.
How did we get here? I wrote a long piece on atheism awhile back, and I encourage you to read my gloss on our history. The short version is, simply, that the New Atheists became very unpopular, for understandable reasons, and then became politically right-coded, and suddenly a generation of atheists was scrambling to disavow them. 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? I’ll say again that, while I personally detest the style of Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, at least they’ve said that religious people are wrong; Jonathan Haidt and the other New New atheists say religious people are not even wrong. For myself, I would much prefer it if someone who disagreed with one of my core beliefs, my stance on perhaps the most important question in human life, would not pretend to “honor” the very thing they reject. I’m a grownup, I can take it. And so can they.
The point of this post is not to disparage the religious, much less the holidays. The point is that we have to take religion seriously on its own terms, to respect its truth claims by evaluating them.
I think I sort of fall into the view you are criticizing here. I've been an atheist and/or agnostic since I was a kid, and my first foyer into arguing on the internet c. 2000 was strongly focused on arguing the atheist position. At the same time, I've generally appreciated the right kind of church, to the point of attending a UCC church for a few years c. 2005. I probably would do so now, if it wouldn't freak out my wife.
I tend to agree with Haidt that, even if religion has problems, many of which the Religious Right likes to highlight, it has benefits too, and we've sort of thrown the baby out with the bathwater with a plan to replace those benefits.
For me, it's less of a "god-shaped hole" and more of a "Sunday morning-shaped hole." Church service the purpose of providing semi-mandatory social mixing of members of the community (although obviously not all) who otherwise wouldn't interact with each other. When we got rid of it, we didn't really replace it with anything (the closest comparison I've seen is children's birthday parties, where you are forced to socialize with the parents of whomever else happens to be in your kids class). I tend to think that the loss of this sort of socializing has contributed to both the loneliness epidemic/bowling alone, as many people now lack a way to meet people with whom to make friends. I also think that it has contributed to polarization, as without this sort of social mixing, you are less likely to wind up being friends with people who different life experiences than you. Lamenting this loss of community building isn't "praying to the god shaped hole."
I also think that there is some merit to the "god-shaped hole" argument, although in a slightly different way that you describe. I don't think everyone has a "god-shaped hole," I am pretty sure I don't. However, it does appear that there are a lot of people who do. This takes the form of both needing some sort of meaning for life, the universe and everything and wanting some sort of righteous cause to follow. As people have given up traditional religions, I think you've seen them take up replacements. Some of this is taking up non-traditional spirituality, e.g. wicca. Some of it is buying into grand conspiracies, e.g. QAnon, and some of it is going hard into new moral systems, e.g. "Woke" politics. This, however, is more of an observation than a lament. I don't think that we need to worry about filling the god-shaped hole, because I think people who need to, will find a way to do it. At most, you have to be concerned about what they are filling it with, and, while I'd prefer people get into a main-line Christianity than QAnon, I don't know that, on average, people are filling their god-shaped hole with something worse than they once were.