Society without God

"Yes, the next three books I’ve chosen to talk about are all contemporary: one published just a few weeks ago, one last year, and one a few years before that. None of them are by philosophers. The first one, called Society Without God, is by a sociologist called Phil Zuckerman and is a study of a very particular phenomenon: religion in Scandinavia today. Now you might think, why bracket a sociologist with Spinoza and Hume? Well I wouldn’t on a philosophical reading list, but I think that if you’re interested in the relation between religion and secularism today, this book is essential. “There really weren’t any atheists to speak of until quite far into the 18th century.” It focuses on Denmark and Sweden, the two countries in which Zuckerman lived whilst working on the book. They are two of the healthiest and happiest societies in the world, in which most people simply do not give a fig about religion. It doesn’t play any meaningful role in their lives. Obviously there are some religious people there, but the proportion is much smaller than anywhere else. And this is a very interesting phenomenon, because throughout most of history, including the period in which Spinoza and Hume were writing, it was generally held, and is still held by a lot of religious people, especially Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, that a society of atheists must be an evil and unhappy place. For most of human history you didn’t even need to argue that. It was so obvious that atheists were evil. There really weren’t any atheists to speak of until quite far into the 18th century. And it was in fact just at the beginning of the 18th century when Pierre Bayle, a famous French Enlightenment thinker, wrote a book which was ostensibly about comets, but which was in fact about all sorts of things, especially this. He made the suggestion that if there ever were a society of atheists, there was no reason to assume that they should not be just as good as the rest of us. A deeply shocking idea. Not at all. Bayle was writing about comets in order to talk about superstition and the idea of divine portents. More than three hundred years later we do actually have the sort of society he hypothesised, at least in Scandinavia. What Zuckerman finds is that most of the people who live in these countries are not explicit campaigning atheists, and many of them may well say that they do sort of believe in some sort of God, somewhere, somehow. They tend to get married in churches and to have funerals in churches, and even have baptisms. But these are purely social rituals, thought of in purely cultural, historical, national terms. What is plain, what makes them so different, is that otherwise religion plays no part in their lives. They don’t think about an afterlife. They certainly don’t follow any traditional or orthodox religion. What Zuckerman found about the Scandinavians is not that they are atheists in the mould of Dawkins and Hitchens but that they just couldn’t care one way or another. Couldn’t even be bothered with that. The questions simply don’t arise. And yet here is the really striking thing. However you want to measure a society’s health—whether it is literal, physical health, social welfare, education, happiness, living standards, life expectancy—these countries are at the top. So here is very convincing proof that it is perfectly okay not to be a believer. Perhaps, but I think that has more to do with the long dark winters than the absence of religious devotion. And the suicide rate is certainly not high enough to dent the overall life expectancy of Scandinavians. No, given what Zuckerman has to say, I think it would be very useful for the American religious right—those who warn that society would collapse without religion—to consider how happy the Danes and Swedes seem to be. Yes, they can be more open, because they won’t be hanged for it."