The Experience of Unbelief

While unbelief has always been a feature of the modern world, the number of people who actively hold to no faith at all has risen dramatically in the last generation, especially among those who influence Western culture. Christians have responded to this rise in unbelief and the concomitant loss of a shared moral framework in a number of ways, spawning a burgeoning market for apologetics, podcasts that at turns critique or attempt to redeem the culture, and endless ministry newsletters, mass marketed products that attempt to enrich our consumption of God in a godless world. An implicit assumption of these approaches, which concede a great deal to the epistemological framework of New Atheism, is that unbelief is simply a matter of ideas. Many adopt the current culture war framework and employ a strategy where certain Christian-inspired propositions are repeated as self-evident, as if most of the problems in American life would dissipate if we would just pound the table a little harder. I have come to believe that if these strategies were based in reality—if the vitality of the church was conditioned on the proliferation of Christian arguments—they would have worked already.

If ideas are not the primary driver of unbelief, then what is? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Lexham Press, 2023), Joseph Minich argues that the current widespread sense of divine absence driving modern unbelief is not a necessary state of affairs but a historically contingent outcome. By comparing the material conditions which shape the modern world with those of the pre-modern, Minich argues that specific shifts in work and family, which began in the industrial revolution and have accelerated in the modern age, have led to the widespread loss of belief in God by changing the very notion of what we think counts as real and plausible.

An edited version of his doctoral dissertation, Minich’s argument is rich and detailed, drawing on extensive scholarship across several major disciplines (and therefore is not a light read). It builds on Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), a project that is difficult to summarize but can be roughly expressed as an attempt to detail how it is the West went from a medieval world in which God’s existence was not just thought to be true in an intellectual sense, but felt to be obvious in an almost visceral way, to a world in which even Christians admit to feeling as if daily existence is so often without divine presence or purpose. In other words, Taylor’s account tries to show that while we can still believe in the same Christianity as of the past, that belief will not be felt or experienced in the same way.

Central to his argument, Minich coins what he calls technoculture—the concrete historical and cultural usage of technology that shapes a human being and his or her relationships with the self, others, and the world. Minich argues that unbelief, particularly a sense of divine absence, arose alongside the profound shifts in work and family that attended industrialization. These first affected the urban working class around the 1860s, where unbelief held equally alongside belief in general society, eventually spreading to the suburban working classes in the 1960s, after which unbelief skyrocketed and shifted in nature:

The sense in which I seek to offer an interpretation [of human behavior], then, is in trying to creatively imagine and articulate a theoretical and phenomenological account of “what it is like” to be otherwise, and (most importantly) how it is that the lived world(s) that we are analyzing gives rise to one or the other…

Much of nineteenth-century unbelief was consciously motivated by moral revulsion to Christianity or to the church. But the plausibility of atheism in relation to such moral critique could be suspended atop an already experienced world where God’s being was felt to be a necessary ineradicable feature. To dispense with God, then, God has to seem dispensable as a theoretical and practical concept in the first place. And it is a shift in the latter structure that I seek to illuminate.^[1]

Minich claims the most important contributions to these shifts are our general alienation from labor and the evaporation of thick community and family relationships that used to make reality feel as if it contained other agents that we could not avoid and had to deal with directly. For example, in the medieval era, people were bound together in thick, extended family structures because such was life in an agrarian world in which cooperation and trust between tight knit groups were necessary for farms to function. Solitary life was not only dangerous, but often impossible.

In contrast, the modern world is arranged such that our most important dietary and health needs are met by large, highly impersonal interactions governed by megacorporations. Groceries arrive in supermarkets at the end of complex technological processes and logistical chains that no one person fully understands or has control over. In the social arena, friendships are formed on the basis of shared work or entertainment, increasingly in digital spaces where other people are reduced to emails and chat boxes. These “friendships” are easily ended when they become inconvenient or even at the first sign of friction. Outside of these shallow relationships, all our material goods are thought to be delivered by technology imposed on formless, manipulable matter. In other words, Minich argues our lived experience of the modern world is of a universe without agency or purpose.

Minich argues that God has allowed the church to enter a time of testing and growth analogous to other periods of divine silence in the history of ancient Israel, calling it to endure through an age in which divine absence is the default experience of most humans. This has a clarifying effect, eradicating nominal belief and forming mature believers. Instead of retreating from this discipline, Minich suggests a posture of remembrance, a set of practices that can reorient our experience of the world to one in which God is felt.

Minich’s thesis has a great deal of explanatory power. Older models of Western Evangelism were built on the assumption that most people believed in God and that they were, in perhaps a limited or unclear sense, sinners in need of grace. On this model, evangelism was just a matter of connecting these premises, sometimes literally, with tracts depicting a cross covering a chasm between our sinfulness and God’s holiness. But this model of evangelism is now viewed with the same sense of mild irritation that arises whenever suit-and-tie Mormons show up at my door in the middle of the workday, selling me beliefs I treat as fundamentally implausible and functionally useless.

If Minich’s thesis is correct, it is no longer sufficient to treat faith formation or evangelism as primarily arguing for or against certain propositions. We might deploy all sorts of arguments in defense of God, Christ, and the general reliability of God’s Word. And these arguments are often right. (I don’t know of an intellectual defeater to the classical ontological argument or good arguments against evidentiary or historical defenses of the Resurrection grounded in works by N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, or Gary Habermas.) But as anyone who has used these arguments with unbelievers knows, they do not generally lead to conversions. Even many Christians who hold these arguments as true eventually fall away, not because their intellectual positions were refuted by ideas but because the only difference between their experience of the local church and the modern world is that the former demands you forfeit your Sundays for an hour long sermon sitting next to people you have nothing in common with. And so they turn to sins that promise a sense of community, meaning, and fulfillment (or at least a dulling of pain), that are otherwise absent in our disconnected world of mass production and rampant loneliness.

One of Minich’s acts of remembrance is hospitality. This has always been a major feature of Christian living; after all, it is commanded for the laity and clergy alike (Romans 12:13, 1 Timothy 3:2). In a world in which both matter and people are made of the same disposable stuff and relationships are formed according to convenience and ended at the first sign of friction, Christians can attest to another view of the universe, one built on the mutual, self-giving love of the Trinity. But this cannot happen without a radical hospitality that persists through inconvenience and creates spaces for the thick communities that powerfully suggest to a world without meaning that perhaps there is something more to it.

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

- John 20:27-28

Footnotes