Introduction

Abstract

Observing modern secularism’s debt to theological values, O’Connor’s assessment illuminates the dynamics of contemporary culture and the only superficially polarized debate about the nature and value of religion. On the surface of things our secular humanist culture, from which the New Atheists¹ have emerged, might seem to consign religion to the scrapheap with satisfying certainty. But though ‘moth-eaten’, in Larkin’s memorable phrase (190), religion is also too vast a brocade to be easily dismissed. Produced in response to Religious Right evangelicalism, New Atheist rhetoric quickly unravels to reveal its mimicry of the strategies of Christian proselytization.² There are Christian and New Atheist societies, advertising campaigns, church services and, with the publication of A. C. Grayling’s The Good Book: A Secular Bible, even authoritative texts. But as John Gray argues so cogently, while Grayling and other secular humanists dispense with God and the idea of providence, they continue to put faith in humanity, in teleological history and the possibility of progress - a possibility shattered in Gray’s lucid critique of liberal humanism. In this time of evangelical atheism and secular Christianity, Gray (2007) intervenes by directing us back to Nietzsche³ to show how liberalism has developed from Christianity, its faith in democratic reform and the free market an updated version of religious redemption. ‘The modern conception of progress’, he writes, ‘is only one symptom of the hubristic humanism that is the real religion of our age’ (2009: 329). Religion, then, takes many forms and this study pulls at the threads still visible in contemporary Northern Irish poetry and literary criticism to reveal its importance for a number of textual and interpretative practices.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the west; we are bound to it by ties which may often be invisible, but which are there nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism.

Flannery O’Connor

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Oscar Wilde