What We’re Reading: Unbelievers

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt
By Alec Ryrie
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019

Doubt and faith. Belief and unbelief. Complete opposites? Or related concepts?

In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, Alec Ryrie argues that belief and unbelief go together hand-in-glove. Ryrie, professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, set out to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous observation that “God is dead . . . and we have killed him.” To do so, Ryrie asked, “who killed him, when, and how?” The result is a well-told story of four centuries of the relationship between belief and unbelief — a wonderful historical counterpart to the recent IACS publication, Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America, edited by Fr. James L. Heft and Professor Jan Stets.

According to Ryrie, the history of the unlikely relationship between belief and unbelief can be pictured as an hourglass. During the Middle Ages and in the early years of the Renaissance, the public expression and acceptance of faith took precedence in society — metaphorically filling the top of the hourglass. Unbelief was present but hidden. Since the 18th century, however, unbelief and faith have exchanged places. Unbelief emerged from the shadows, and broadened throughout society until it, so to speak, filled the bottom of the hourglass.

The symbolic center of the hourglass, Ryrie argues, is the Reformation and early Enlightenment in 16^th– and 17^th-century Europe — the critical period for the surfacing of unbelief. The story Ryrie tells, however, is not the familiar story of Enlightenment philosophers attacking Christian faith and faith crumbling, unable to withstand intellectual attack. Rather the story is one of belief suffering attack from within. During the 16^th-and 17^th-century religious conflicts, Christians on all sides accused one another of unbelief, atheism, and worse. Credulity over transubstantiation in the mass, the authority of scripture, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul were all fair game. Questions and even doubt about these issues were not new; what was new was that they were out in the open.  And so, in effect, the possibility of doubt and unbelief went public. It is, after all, easy to doubt privately, but before the 16^th– and 17^th centuries, the public rejection of belief could have dire consequences. Now, doubt could even be publicly embraced as part of faith.

The emotions in the story — anger and anxiety — also came together in a new way beginning with the Protestant Reformation. Again, neither anger nor anxiety in Christianity were new in the 16^th century. Anger, however, was now publicly unleashed: anger with priests and rulers and friends who became enemies and believers who became unbelievers. With the anger came a host of anxieties, both public and private, over assurance of salvation, the correct locus of authority, and the efficacy of sacraments — to name just a few.

Like so many, Ryrie is interested in the sources and causes of secularization in the West.  Consequently, his story of unbelief and belief is not a global story, but is a story unapologetically centered in western Europe, with key chapters located specifically in England.  (Indeed, Ryrie remarks that given the predominance of religion in the global south, the notion that the entire world may follow the secularization path taken by the west may be more “an expression of cultural imperialism” than an accurate prediction of the future.) What is the next chapter in the story of belief and unbelief in the West?  We can’t know, but volumes like Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt and Empty Churches: Non-Affiliation in America give us a better understanding of how we got where we are.