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Traditions of Unbelief in England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
One of the tasks of the Secretariat for Non-believers is to study the diverse forms of atheism. It has not been easy to do this in Britain for lack of studies which map out the field. Now with Varieties of Unbelief Dr. Susan Budd has filled the gap. A literate sociologist, she has put us all in her debt by examining the minute-books and records of the various secularist societies. Her work is another contribution to the ‘sociology of the past’ which is indispensable if we are to understand the present. It occupies, as she puts it, the wasteland ‘between the tilled and fertile plantations of the sociology of collective behaviour and the history of ideas’ (p. 1). Such is her almost superhuman objectivity that it is quite impossible to determine from the book where she stands: her story takes her down some fascinating by-ways of English eccentricity (thus Annie Besant managed to remain a secularist and a theoso-phist to the bafflement of everyone except herself), but she stays resolutely cool and tries to resist the temptations of irony. Though she is prepared gently to chide her secularists for their repeated attacks on citadels long abandoned by the religious, she clearly admires them for their independence of mind and rejection of compromise, and can speak of them as ‘heirs to a great tradition, to the continued vitality of a radical culture which exists outside established methods of thought’ (p.80). But her tone is so very different from the propagandists of secularism whose account of the ‘great tradition’ tends to enrol Erasmus (a Catholic) and Voltaire (a deist) and indeed anyone who has in any way contributed to human progress. To the secularist, the world is full of ‘anonymous secularists’ who would reveal themselves if only they knew better.
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- Copyright © 1977 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Varieties of Unbelief Atheists and Agnostics in English Scoiety 1850‐1960. Heinemaim, 1977. pp. 307, £9.50. Unfortunately Varieties of Unbelief also happens to be the title of a book by Martin E. Marty published in America by Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc. in 1964.
2 Funerals were especially important since Christian apologists exploited the trump card of death and recounted stories of horrible agonies and death‐bed conversions. To counter such propaganda, secularists made much of obituaries in which the unbeliever remained calm and unfaithful to the end.
3 The geographical qualification should be noted. In Latin America the distinction between religion and politics is being deliberately challenged. Dr. Budd's description of John Trevor's Labour Churches of the 1890s could be an account of liberation theology: ‘Previously, it seemed to him, God had worked through the Churches to do good in the world, but in the 1890s the only body which was trying to relieve misery and bring about the peaceable kingdom was the Labour movement’ (p. 73).
4 Cf. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, London, 1969. But if the ‘man of letters’ has disappeared, part of his role has been taken over by the TV‐pundit.
5 One can only speculate why Huxley wished to call this position religion. Dr. Budd's tart observation does not seem to apply here: ‘Religion was generally called for at points where something unpalatable had to be swallowed, or something desirable relinquished’ (p. 154). I suspect that Huxley associated the ‘religious’ with the ‘uplifting’.
6 The evidence for this is in a series of letters and reports in The Freethinker for the year 1962. Slender, no doubt, but not negligible.