“God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization”, by A. N. Wilson

512 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393047455

Remember the furor back in the 60s and 70s when several American theologians announced that God is dead? (their views were old-hat in Europe, particularly Germany, where Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God in the 1800s). Their fellow Americans were not amused, and they invariably led the Western world in a resounding “Yes!” when asked whether they believed in God (I remember seeing those bumper stickers: “Nietzsche is dead – God”). But these radicals were not the first to offer this proposition, as A. N. Wilson shows in his book God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, the subject of which is the loss of faith in 19^th Century Europe, especially in Britain. While most of the leading lights portrayed in this book are British, Wilson makes it clear that, aside from John Ruskin, his countrymen were rather shallow in this regard; Wilson, however, also treats his characters with a seriousness leavened by a certain playfulness.

Wilson, for all his very British wit, is in earnest about the intellectual battles between absolute faith and the forces of unbelief. He insists on taking the sowers of doubt seriously. He has no use for Karl Marx or his disciples, whom he sees as another manifestation of what Reinhold Niebuhr identified as foolish “children of light”, but he gives old Karl high marks for seeing that industrialism would produce “consumerism”, an inherently seductive enemy of Christianity. Wilson doesn’t like capitalism any more than he likes communism or any other “ism” that puts man, and not God, at the center of human existence. Indeed, at one point, he blurts out a sweeping generalization worthy of funny old Herbert Spencer: “Dethroning God, [Hardy’s] generation found it impossible to leave the sanctuary empty. They put man in His place, which had the paradoxical effect, not of elevating human nature but of demeaning it to depths of cruelty, depravity and stupidity unparalleled in human history”.

True? Maybe; after all, the numbers of wars and deaths brought on by secular, not religious, fanaticism, even in our century, implies that Wilson is on to something here: after all, the Nazi crusade against the Jews was not religiously inspired, and the Soviets and ChiComs murdered millions upon millions of their own citizens in the name of Man, and not God. Wilson is an honest man, even humble in his own way. He makes no attempt to define God or to offer any arguments why anyone should believe in God, or not. But at the end, he’s reduced to the rather limp confession that after giving the Big Question serious thought, he concludes vaguely that he agrees with Friedrich von Hügel: “Religion [is] the deepest kind of life”. I think most of Wilson’s subjects, religious or otherwise, would have come up with something better than that.