Face to faith

Dogmatic assumptions underlie non-religious world-views too, says Nicholas Buxton
Post-Enlightenment critiques of religion have sought to reduce it to a tool of social oppression (Marxism), bad science (Darwinism) or neurosis (Freudianism). It is not so much my purpose here to refute these charges, nor to argue that religion is necessarily a "good thing", but to make sure that we're clear about what we're talking about when we talk about it in the first place.

A "religion" is a story we inhabit that makes sense of what would otherwise be nonsense. You don't have to be explicitly "religious" in order to do this (Marxists, Darwinists and Freudians are all in the same game). Whether religion is explained away as an evolutionary adaptation or is in fact a response to a transcendent divine reality makes no difference to this argument for its necessity. We are essentially religious animals. This is not to make the simplistic point that atheism is a religious belief (although it can function like one), but highlights the fact that dogmatic - taken-for-granted and unprovable - assumptions underlie non-religious world-views as well. Consequently, I am puzzled when people dismiss religion, yet blithely disavow the implicit faith commitments and foundational axioms of their own position.

Indeed, so-called liberals who aggressively promote secularism in the name of an objective truth or rationality routinely fail to realise that they have simply substituted one set of mythic narratives for another. Our widespread contemporary belief in "progress", for example, bears more than a passing resemblance to more ostensibly religious forms of eschatology. Yet why do we assume that a better future will necessarily follow from an increase in scientific knowledge, or that the spread of global capitalism will bring about universal salvation? Is it really true that competition - whether in evolution or economics - is more basic to human nature than, say, cooperation? What does it mean to talk about the "survival instinct" anyway? Are we saying that the essence of life is an irreducible "will to be"? This sounds more like theology than science. The truth is that the ideology of neoliberalism has become so all-pervasive that we are blind to its dogmatic grammar: hence the fundamental principles of the current consensus, such as "democracy" or "the market", are assumed to be natural and inevitable, even though when analysed they are revealed to be socially constructed.

"So what?" you may be thinking. Well, one outcome of this post-Enlightenment disenchantment is that the world, indeed life itself, has become a commodity subject to economic forces that we have as little control over as the weather. With God as capital, every aspect of life gets translated into the language of economic transactions: passengers become customers, patients become clients. Where once we were souls, we are now consumers. And the problem with this is that when everything has a price, nothing has any value; especially vague notions such as human rights and dignity. In the market state, greed is good and the maximisation of profit is the only viable ethic.

In the days of the Roman empire Christians were called atheists because they did not worship the gods of the state. We have come full circle: Christians are once again atheists and heretics because they do not worship the "gods" of today's orthodoxy. Now that atheism is the new "religion", religion is the new "atheism". To be a Christian in such circumstances is to be unconventional and nonconformist: it is to be something of a freethinker, espousing a radical vision of human flourishing that shows us how we can be more than what we are, rather than reducing us to less than what we should be.

· Nicholas Buxton is training to be a priest in the Church of England at St Stephen's House, Oxford