Faithlessness and its Antidote

On the radio yesterday I listened to Ron Regan interview a researcher from Trinity College who recently issued a report finding that the number of "nones," those who report they belong to no religion, has increased by 10 percentage points since 1990.

Trinity sampled "more than fifty thousand Americans last year finding that seventy-six percent identified as Christians. That's a ten point decrease since 1990. The number claiming no religion has grown to fifteen percent of the population, behind only Catholics and Baptists." I heard on the radio that most "nones" are former Catholics. Not all become atheists, but all non-identify with the Catholic faith, the faith they grew up in or formerly espoused.

I think of lack of faith and despair as linked. Faith essentially believes in something "super" natural, i.e., that all does not end in natural death. Not to have faith is to believe that natural death ends everything, which is a form of despair (cutting off the air of hope).

Why this creeping fall of faith? I assume Rieff would have found it understandable given his view that a vanguard of nihilists are mounting a pressing attack on Judeo-Christian culture (the second culture he calls it), and its belief in a sacred self, "that identity which is to each his own, never having been before and never again to be. . ." Rieff (p. 102 of My Life Among the Deathworks). The sacred self has an identity only in relation to God (Not I/ I), for we are constituted in our identity (our "I") by our acceptance of responsibility to obey an Authority above us (a "Not I"), and by the guilt arising in the relation when we fail so to obey. Obedience to ourselves alone is untethered to Authority and takes us around in a circle of solipsism, going nowhere.

This attack on the sacred self has been proceeding apace for a century and more . and is becoming more vocal and trenchant. (Ron Regan is a confessed atheist himself and obviously wants to "spread the good news" about his anti-faith in discussing the growing faithlessness.)

How does one counter-attack? Interestingly enough, Rieff (p. 103 of My Life Among the Deathworks quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins (who faced the same "shatterings" of attacks in his lifetime, as the 20th Century loomed (1888)):

"Whatever the shatterings Hopkins felt threatened his and other sacred selves, perhaps precisely because of that threat, he composed the greatest passage on the God-relation of identity since Galatians 2:20. Despair shatters itself against the hard truth of Hopkins's sense of identity.

'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This, Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.'" From Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.")

"Whatever the Jack, joke, mortal trash of our lives may be, our predicative relational identity, Not I/I supplies the resistant hardness of sacred self Hopkins blazons in every one's honor, each Not I/I an "immortal diamond." When I read Hopkins, as when I hear a Bach Mass, I am an honorary Christian."

As I read Rieff, and Hopkins, only Christ has broken the yoke of death, and so only Christ provides the antidote to the death rattle emitted by our cultural "betters." Only "in" Christ do we see in our matchwood and potsherd, the "immortal diamond" that "in truth" we are, the antidote to faithlessness and despair.

But who is voicing this loud and clear? Well, I know Rieff is, a Jew, and an honored "honorary Christian."