Is religious faith a dangerous force? Does it bring intolerance? Do believers have a duller and narrower view of the world? Anyone who replies "yes" to these three questions is making a huge assumption: that he or she knows what "religious faith" is. Such confidence is misplaced, I suggest. Personally, I can think of nothing that is so complex as "religious faith". It is, to put it mildly, a diverse phenomenon. Is it not absurdly crass and clumsy to pass judgement on "religious faith" in general? To treat it as one, basic, dangerous thing is, frankly, thick.
Yet the habit is widespread, even among the finest minds. I am sorry to see that Martin Amis has been at it again. For, though he might have forgotten how to write a readable novel, I admire his prose. It is crafted, urgent and taut; he weighs his words with manic commitment. He called a collection of his essays The War Against Cliche, and in general he fights this good fight with Rumsfeldian vim.
Yet when it comes to religion he swaps his lean, alert, truth-thirsty brain for that of a shrill 15-year-old. The other week he wrote a long essay for the Observer about Islamic extremism. It is a fairly straightforward bit of anti-Islamism: Bernard Lewis retold in Amis prose. But he cannot resist the temptation to stray from his topic, and pronounce upon religion in general.
The article includes the following assertions:
Today, in the west, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses.
The opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an "ism". It is independence of mind - that's all.
Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too.
What is striking is that Amis uses the phrase "religious belief" with such little care, with such little "passion for the particular", in Marianne Moore's phrase. Once this imaginary enemy is in his sights he forgets his usual habits of meticulous attentiveness to detail, humility before the awesome complexity of the world. Basically, he loses it, he goes ape: a more primitive form of mind takes over.
It is a fascinating blind spot. For it exactly illustrates the very fault of which he accuses religious belief: that it kills nuance, difference, respect for the actual and particular. Five years back, after 9/11, he called religion "a massive agglutination of stock responses, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations". The Observer essay returns to the charge: religion is allergic to the particularity and honesty with which art is in love. That is his consistent line on religion. And it is wholly paradoxical. To articulate it he must become the thing that he hates, he must descend to the intellectual basement where fine distinctions are unknown, where the gloves of art are off, where nuance is for wimps. In his zeal to defend "art", and "independence of mind" he makes himself a mumbling philistine.
When the red mist of faith hate descends, he forgets to think with honesty and care. Is he seriously suggesting that religion is intrinsically conformist? Did St Paul stay within the realm of the conventional? Did Augustine's autobiography suffer from its faith-based perspective? Did Luther lack independence of mind? Did Milton, Locke, Swift and Johnson think and write badly because they believed?
But that was back then, Amis might reply, when there were "good excuses" for religious belief. But that won't do: some of the best writers and thinkers of the 20th century continued to believe in defiance of the secular spirit of the age. Are these people automatically morally, intellectually and spiritually inferior to him and Richard Dawkins? Or perhaps Amis thinks that it is only right now, in his own generation, that the complete rejection of religion has become fully and finally necessary. For someone like Betjeman or Greene it was excusable, and perhaps even admirable, but now it is not, for he and his friends Salman, Ian and Hitch have put the sky-fairy to bed for ever. If he thinks this, the arrogance is chilling.
The student of modern literature ought to know that religious faith is as diverse and surprising as its adherents. Believing artists are not stifled by their faith but inspired by it. It does not detract from their individuality, but moulds it, from Donne to Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, Waugh, RS Thomas and countless others. Such figures refute the equation of religious belief with conformity, surrender to cliche. Did faith limit these minds? Only an ideologue, who has declared war on particularity in order to defend a theory, would say yes.
Amis is an intellectual victim of Islamic extremism. The rise of religious terrorism has led him to narrow his sympathies, limit his imaginative reach. Islamism has convinced him that all religion is violent; it has infected him with a nasty habit of generalisation, a reluctance to open his mind to the complexity of religion. Ironically, this contravenes his cherished creed: the need to remain passionate for the particular.
