Ken Myers on James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America:
This detailed and wide-ranging exercise in intellectual history is concerned with a single question regarding Western cultural life: “How did the practically universal assumption of God disappear?” How—within a very short period of time in the mid-nineteenth century—did atheism become plausible in Western culture?
In Turner’s study, the answer is that many well-intentioned Christians—motivated by a version of the “all things to all men” strategy—embraced a modern “cast of mind,” thereby enabling Christians and their message to seem more “relevant.” The mental sensibility Turner has in view is the habit of mind that gave rise to modern science and technology, a mentality “more insistent on the regularity and orderliness of phenomena; more comfortable with tangible, measurable realities than with the unseen and mysterious; more dubious about traditional explanations and more inclined to experiment with new ones.”
As various Church leaders and theologians tried to repackage Christian thought in a form that was more resonant with this new mental world, they thus signed their own death warrant—and God’s:
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. If anyone is to be arraigned for deicide, it is not Charles Darwin but his adversary Samuel Wilberforce, not the godless Robert Ingersoll but the godly Beecher family.
Motivated by the best intentions, the Church nonetheless “played a major role in softening up belief.” Turner concludes that atheism became plausible because of
the decisions that influential church leaders—lay writers, theologians, ministers—made about how to confront the modern pressures upon religious belief. . . . And the choices, taken together, boiled down to a decision to deal with modernity by embracing it—to defuse modern threats to the traditional bases of belief by bringing God into line with modernity.
Myers concludes:
Turner’s compilation of evidence for these charges is thorough, compelling, and sobering. Like all the books I’ve discussed in this column, this one should be required reading by every pastor and seminary student. Without God, Without Creed presents a valuable case study of how forms of cultural adaptation that are well-intentioned and within the bounds of bare moral permissibility nonetheless can fall short of being constructive or beneficial.
The destructive effects may not be immediately obvious, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t foreseeable. The story Turner tells here should be read as a paradigmatic warning to all efforts of Christians who are eager to address their cultural situation with wisdom and compassion, who want to know when to be like the Gentiles and when not to, who are willing to be against the world for the world.
You can read his whole article in the latest issue of Touchstone here.
