Without God, without creed: the origins of unbelief in America.

Without God, without Creed:

The Origins of Unbelief in America

by JamesTurner (Johns Hopkins, 316 pp., $26.50)

"FOR OVER A thousand years Europeanshad assumed the existence of God. Their faith might be orthodox or heretical, simple or complex, easy or troubled. . . . Yet failing to believe somehow in some sort of deity was not merely rare; it was a bizarre aberations,' writes James Turner, a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Today, this "bizarre aberration' is the dominant outlook in influential sectors of our society. From the organs of news gathering and reporting, to prime-time sitcoms, to university campuses and art galleries, to the halls of Congress and the chambers of our courts, principled unbelief is the lens through which our world and the events in it are seen and interpreted.

Such a massive shift in thinkinghas had profound consequences for our public life. "Most Americans . . .' Professor Turner says, "continue to believe in God; for these individuals belief can matter a great deal. But for the common life of our culture, it matters very much less. The option of not believing has eradicated God as a shared basis of thought and experience and retired Him to a private or at best subcultural role. The bulk of modern thought has simply dispensed with God.' In this book, Professor Turner sets out to answer the question, "Why did it become possible not to believe in God?'

Histories of the West since theFrench Enlightenment commonly portray the rise of unbelief as a major victory in the war between the forces of light and reason and the minions of obscurantism and priestly superstition. Religious faith is presented as oppressive, a lower form of knowledge that must inevitably give way before the triumphal advance of unfettered human reason. And yet, according to Professor Turner, the rise of unbelief was not at all inevitable. Admittedly, the breakup of church authority during the Protestant Reformation, the explosion of knowledge in the realm of the physical sciences after the Enlightenment, and the socioeconomic dislocations of the Industrial Revolution all brought tremendous pressures to bear on religious belief. But religion had weathered similar storms in the past and remained a vital force in the public life of societies. Something else is needed to explain the sudden rise to intellectual respectability of religious unbelief, and Professor Turner finds it in--the church. It is the contention of this book that "unbelief was not something that "happened to' religion. . . . On the contrary, religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him.'

By insisting on the ultimate reasonablenessof religion, by identifying the workings of God with the laws of nature as they were discovered in the physical sciences, and by making morality, rather than communion with a transcendent God, the essence of religious belief, these progressive churchmen were attempting "to defuse modern threats to the traditional bases of belief by bringing God into line with modernity.' Over a period of three centuries, their efforts succeeded. Unfortunately, it was a pyrrhic victory: God the Ruler of Nature "was abstracted into natural scientific explanations' that "yielded no longer evidence of God but simply evidence of nature.' God the Moral Governor "was identified with purely human activities and aspirations,' which opened the way for secular humanitarianism and the doctrine of Progress. God the mysterious Lord of Heaven "was much diminished as believers shifted the main focus of their concern from God's transcendence of earthly things to His compatibility with humanity, its wants, its aspirations.' If God is only Man writ large, then Man is God, and service to Man becomes Man's main priority. The well-meaning churchmen of a century and more ago forgot that there is more to religion than morality and good works.

The persistent tug of unbelief hasoccupied men for countless ages. Many have succumbed to it with varying degrees of regret, but it is only in our time that unbelief has become acceptable. In this reviewer's opinion, Professor Turner lays too much responsibility for this situation at the door of the church, while underestimating the propensity to unbelief that is in each of us. However, the rise of modern unbelief, and the church's role in it, was a revolution of the first magnitude, the effects of which we are only now beginning to digest. With it, "the traditional linchpin' of our society was removed, with the result that "our culture . . . now lacks a center.' In addition, this revolution in thought sowed the seeds of our "distinctively modern Angst,' since, "if Divine purpose does not inhere in the cosmos, then human beings must define the meaning of their own brief lives amid a pointless vastness.'

Professor Turner has written an enormouslyinteresting and provocative book, which should be read by serious believers of every persuasion, lest we continue to reduce God to the sum of our own hopes and aspirations, thereby preparing the way for a greater increase of unbelief and even more bizarre --and terrible--aberrations.