Without saints

When I was fourteen, I asked a girl I knew ‘do you really believe all that stuff?’ about, in essence, the whole of Christianity. I’m just one person, and not a particularly important one, but perhaps this incident contains something of interest when trying to understand secularisation in our era.

When I asked the girl if she really believed in ‘all that stuff’, it wasn’t an attack; and she didn’t seem to take it as one. She didn’t become defensive. Instead, she very simply, but with a hint of pride, answered ‘yes’. This didn’t lead to any great theological debate. I took her at her word.

Don’t be too fast to understand this incident. I wasn’t angry at Christianity, and I wasn’t exactly outside it either. Like the girl, I was raised Catholic. I went to Mass every week. I went to Catholic schools. I took the sacraments. I knew priests and respected them. I had no inkling of the abuse scandals that would come to light in the following years. Everyone in my family was Catholic; and, as far as I know, it had been that way since Western Europe was first converted.

Despite all this, I was somehow puzzled by faith. I asked the girl if she really believed ‘that stuff’ because she was both visibly pious and very smart, and it was strange to me that someone so clever could have Christian faith. My puzzlement raises a question: not ‘how could a fourteen year old raised in a consistently Catholic milieu lose his faith?’ but, much more radically, ‘how could a fourteen year old raised in a consistently Catholic milieu fail to even comprehend how an intelligent person could have faith?’

Any complete answer to this question would include some account of my own particular eccentricities and failings, but I am not really seeking a complete answer. Instead, I am trying use my particular case to interrogate the more general one. I think this is justified. Most of my school contemporaries have lapsed to one degree or another, and even that girl who seemed so pious at fourteen now only attends church at Christmas and Easter. My loss of faith has been widely shared, so perhaps my inability to comprehend faith was also shared.

When thinking about secularisation, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is hard to avoid, and some of the ideas it contains can help to explain my puzzlement. I think, though, that my experience may also indicate that secularisation has reached a more radical stage than it accounts for.

Taylor frames secularisation as ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’. The book is a philosophical and historical examination of how this came to be. He describes a historical ‘nova effect’ in which an ‘ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options’ makes Christian faith merely one option among many.

I don’t necessarily want to argue with Taylor’s historical story here, but I think something else was also occurring by the time I was a teenager. His account of the nova effect is at odds with my experience as a fourteen year old. I didn’t find the girl’s faith puzzling because it seemed to be an unusual choice from a nova of spiritual and philosophical options. I was aware of other religions and beliefs, but I didn’t consider them to be live options for either her or me. When my peers rebelled, it was with illicit alcohol, underage sex, and weed. Experimentation with public atheism, Buddhism, or even Protestantism was not on the menu. My puzzlement did not reflect a nova of possible ways of living opening up. It reflected the opposite, a closing down. Catholicism did not seem like a comprehensible option, but neither did anything else.

One possible reply to this difference between Taylor’s account and my experience is to stress that he is focused on the underlying conditions of belief more than the particular beliefs that any one person might have. On this version of the story, I had, even as a Catholic teenager, internalised the dominant ethos of our time: an individualistic centring of all value in the self that Taylor call ‘the ethics of authenticity’. If this is true, then Catholicism made no sense to me because it makes no sense as a choice made by free individual who creates personal values by affirming them. In other words, I was not evaluating Catholicism from nowhere but from within an incompatible matrix of assumptions that were as invisible to me as water is to a fish.

I don’t buy this story. It suffers from a narrowness that is common to elite analysis, but which Taylor himself usually manages to dodge. It has no awareness of how different the moralities of the different classes in a society can be. Something like the ethics of authenticity does exists and it really is dominant in the social circles that academic philosophers move in. It was not hegemonic among Catholic families in urban Yorkshire in the aftermath of the miner’s strike. If, back then, the idea that I was the author of my own values was put to me, I would have found it laughable. The ethics of authenticity were no more open to me than Christianity. Decades later, I spent some time in the universities, and I suffered a mild culture shock when I realised the extent to which our middle classes live by such an ethos. I had not realised that other classes were so alien. The idea that the ethics of authenticity had somehow displaced my Catholicism makes a similar oversight in the opposite direction.

In other words, Christian faith was not a live option for me, but neither was another faith or the sort of ‘secularity’ or ‘liberalism’ that philosophers such as Macintyre worry about, the sort that forms an alternative doctrinal whole. What was going on?

A possible answer lies in another part of A Secular Age: the concept of ‘exclusive humanism’. This is a broad philosophical concept, wider than ‘the ethics of authenticity’ or even ‘liberalism’. It refers to any philosophical position that excludes sources of value that are not purely human. This is not the same as a distinction between materialism and spiritual belief. A deep ecologist who affirms that all living things have value might be a materialist, but they are not an exclusive humanist. Similarly, someone who believes God is so distant that we should only worry about human flourishing is not a materialist, but they are an exclusive humanist.

It may seems strange to invoke exclusive humanism to explain what was going on in a Catholic milieu. The church does not teach that humanity is the source of all value in the world. When it comes to the kind of broad habits of being that I am considering here, though, a child learns more by example than by doctrine.

I do not want to be misunderstood. My family, church, and school were good. I saw many examples of kindness and of faith. My failings are mine, not theirs. In trying to understand, though, how faith could become incomprehensible to me, I have come to circle a negative space: something that was not done; or, perhaps, not done in ways that a child could see. This gap becomes visible when I try to think of a clear example of behaviour in which faith in something beyond the human overrode common sense ideas about human flourishing. I cannot find one. Nor can I think of an example of it being taught as a theoretical possibility. On the contrary, the Catholic penances that might point to values beyond the merely human, such as abstaining from meat on Friday and fasting during Lent, were often reframed in human terms, usually in terms of self-discipline. In these circumstances, in which faith motivates nothing that cannot be motivated by exclusive humanism, it is easy to see why faith itself might become puzzling. My incomprehension could be summed up as a question: ‘what does all of this even do?’

Being good is hard, being good in a way that transcends mere humaneness is harder, and being good in a way that transcends mere humaneness in a world that denies such good exists is harder still. I can’t criticise the adults in my life for failing to exemplify the hardest of virtues in ways that a child could grasp. It is not difficult, though, to think of examples of Catholic traditions that do draw the attention away from the merely human. I have mentioned the penances such as Lent; but some forms of prayer, such as the Rosary, serve the same purpose. When I think of these devotions, it strikes me that they were common in my grandparent’s generation but almost absent in my parent’s. Prayers of intercession to the saints followed the same pattern. Broadly, my immigrant grandparents and their peers practised a wide set of devotions, my parent’s generation attended Mass and took the sacraments, and my own generation fell away from the church.

The loss of the saints was, I suspect, central. When I think back to my Catholic education, I didn’t learn much about them. When I was very little, there were stories of Saint Francis preaching to the birds, but by the time I was a teenager there was nothing at all. If children learn more by example than by doctrine, this matters. It is hard to be good in a way that transcends mere humaneness, so few of us will know someone who can serve as a clear example. The saints close this gap. The stories of their lives are stories of ordinary people who were extraordinary in their response to something beyond the merely human. Maybe I was puzzled that a smart girl would believe ‘all that stuff’ because I didn’t know those stories and had nothing else that could bridge the gap between doctrine and a person like me.

Perhaps this is just the story of one person’s oddity, perhaps it is not. If it is not, then maybe it explains a little bit about the current stages of secularisation in the West. On this account, it is not the sheer range of options or the overwhelming force of secular ideology that is leading people away from the churches. Instead, the churches have failed to give clear examples of people placing God before humanity. If true, that might have implications for Christians seeking to preserve the faith in the West; but that is not my battle, so I cannot say more.

I have told this little tale in terms of Catholicism because that was the world of my early life. I don’t think, though, that it is primarily a tale about Catholicism. It seems to me that my experience of options being erased could have occurred in any milieu. If so, then it is not only Catholics who need saints, but anyone who believes in values beyond the merely human.

Finally, although I needed saints and did not find them, this is not a tragedy. Other options were closed, but exclusive humanism was never open to me; and so it sows the seeds of its own defeat. A power that uproots people without making a new home for them will sooner or later provoke the dispossessed to do something extraordinary. I cannot see them from here, but I’m sure there will be saints in the future.

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Image: Miniature of Cuthbert praying to God to change the winds beside the river Tyne; miniature of two monks at the monastery of Tynemouth praying for the safety of those blown away in a gale, from Chapter 3 of Bede's prose Life of St Cuthbert. Copyright: The British Library.