New tones of unbelief

We no longer speak about "atheism" as often as we did twenty or more years ago: the preferred term is now "unbelief". This is because the typical tone has moved from a definite and sometimes militant denial of God to a more vague distance from religious faith. Some commentators describe this as the transition from the "modern" with its trust in reason and technology, to the "post-modern," with its scepticism about large human claims and its corresponding shyness over meanings and values. The new unbeliever is not the rationalist rejecter of God but rather the secularized and often unquestioning urbanite, comfortable within certain life structures that don't need God. Religious faith is not so much denied as sensed to be unreal.

Adapted from What are they saying about unbelief? (Paulist Press, Mahwah, 1995).

Cardinal Newman always insisted that unbelief arises not from the intellect but from the state of one's heart, and that the crucial battle zone for faith or unbelief lies in the imagination. So the crisis of faith locates itself less in questions of explicit belief than in the realm of sensibility. Besides, it is less a crisis of content than a crisis in the language or mediations of faith.

In this light much of unbelief today is less a chosen position than a by-product of the culture on this level of sensibility. The pressures of the dominant culture can leave people blocked in a kind of cultural desolation on the level of disposition or readiness for faith. How? Because it kidnaps their imagination in trivial ways and therefore leaves them unfree for Revelation - or more precisely, for the hearing from which faith comes (cf. Romans 10.17).

How can people rediscover their spiritual freedom? It will mean liberating levels of hearing and of desire that become stifled in the everyday culture. To be a Christian today means opting for a certain resistance movement, distancing oneself from the diminished life being promoted by the superficial images around. Before any fruitful communication of the Gospel, a prior challenge is to unblock the spiritual imagination that may be clogged against faith by the assumptions of the culture. In fact some main roads to God - freedom, transcendence, wonder, community, prayer, thinking with reverence - can be systematically ignored by the culture, not on the level of thought, but on the level of lived attitudes assimilated from the environment. Hence a first task is a ministry of disposition, an awakening of the hungers to which Christian truth may eventually be seen as a healing answer.

Adapted from Clashing Symbols: an introduction to faith-and-culture (Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1997 and Paulist Press, Mahwah, 1998).


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