Atheism must advertise (Part 2)

(Read Part 1.)

We now turn to the final and most disappointing part of the whole bus advert soundbite: its complete lack of moral vision—‘Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.

We live in a society where quality of life is considered a credible argument for abortion and euthanasia—where people, by and large, find it hard to believe that someone would do something just because it is the right thing to do, with no sense of personal benefit—where public service is rarely held in honour. The contemporary liberal democratic state is, by and large, characterized by an enlightened selfishness: people do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else directly. As moral visions go, it is pretty minimalist. It’s only one rank above the code of the bandit gang (do whatever you want, even though it harms someone else) and only two ranks above the moral vision of organized crime or the serial killer (find one’s enjoyment from doing what harms someone else). It’s ‘good’ in the sense that there are even worse ethics out there, but it is hardly anything to write home about.

Some kind of genuine moral vision involves, well, some kind of morality—something (anything!) that displaces selfishness as the driving seat of one’s life and that doesn’t merely restrain it from those actions that will most egregiously damage others. A moral vision needs to set before people some sense that their lives should be oriented towards the good of other people as the primary driving force of one’s actions and ambitions. Such a vision is not necessarily Christian; one can find similar notes being played in Plato and Aristotle’s ethical teachings. There is no doubt in my mind that Christianity offers the best (and, taken as whole, only true) moral vision. But western culture has been witness to many morally serious views of life that have been put forward on a non-Christian basis. It’s not as though the resources weren’t there for the advert to draw upon—as though it were forced to choose between a moral vision and blatantly appealing to selfishness.

All this highlights that the advert has completely capitulated to contemporary society’s lack of moral vision. The advert works because, like any good piece of advertising, it tells people they can have what they want (i.e. a life of just focusing on their own pleasure) if they just buy the product—in this case, atheism. Everything for nothing: it’s offering a vision of how life is to be lived at credit-crunch recession prices.

It is not unreasonable to see this choice as reflecting something about the kind of atheism on offer. It would be unnecessarily uncharitable to imagine that the Humanist Association would be appealing to selfishness in a cynical ploy to get people moving in their direction, only to then unveil that atheism does entail high-minded moral commitments. No, they are appealing to what would motivate them—the chance to not have to worry about any future moral assessment of what they did with their lives, and so be free to focus on getting the most personal enjoyment out of life. In other words, it’s selfishness from start to finish, birth to death, freed from the shackles of moral accountability to any dispassionate adjudicator.

In offering such a moral vision, the ad is implicitly holding forth the idea that the best building block for human social life is for every member of society to focus on enjoying themselves. Again, it would be uncharitable to think that, in an effort to win people over, the Humanist Association is cynically offering a personal ethic that it considered unworkable as a foundation for human society. In presenting an ad like this, atheism is also putting forward what it has to offer humanity for the big task of promoting social life. Entailed in the slogan “stop worrying and enjoy your life” is the promotion of selfishness as the basis for community.

So think of your experiences of various kinds of community: the workplace, family, neighbourhood, social clubs of various kinds, politics at the local and national level. In your experience, is an enlightened selfishness really the best policy? Do those contexts flourish when everyone is out for what they can get while trying not to harm anyone else too much in the getting? Think about the hard edges of life—people in distress, people who are desperately ill or injured, people who are being dealt with by the police and the judiciary due to questions of criminality, or widescale problems such as entrenched poverty, corruption, natural disasters, famine or war. Is “stop worrying and enjoy your life” going to offer much more to such demanding problems than “glad that didn’t happen to me”? Even a fairly small and unremarkable thing (unremarkable because it is so basic to human life under normal circumstances) like having and raising children can’t be fuelled by an ethic of selfishness.

If that wasn’t enough, the advert manages to single-handedly undercut classic atheist apologetics. For centuries, Enlightenment-inspired atheism has argued (against the wisdom of pretty well all non-Enlightenment societies) that religious belief is not necessary for moral behaviour. Morality, so the argument went, is the purview of all right-thinking folk, and is quite capable of existing independently of religion: “Reason is sufficient grounds for a moral vision”. This was part of a larger argument that religion was an unnecessary frill for a religiously oriented subsection of society; it could be removed, and nothing important would change. (The rhetorically powerful “religion is irrelevant and powerless” argument is beginning to come undone in our post 9-11 world.) “Atheists can be moral too”, went the defence.

Against this came the fairly obvious criticism that atheism was drawing on the moral capital of what was left of Christendom for its moral vision. Atheism’s proponents were, by and large, people who had been exposed to Christian morality in a society still primarily based on a Judeo-Christian ethic. The number of atheists who boldly went where no-one had gone before in rigorously working out an ethic based on the predicate that there was no future divine moral judgement were incredibly small; Bentham and Nietzsche were notable exceptions to the general trend. Most atheists followed the example of their patron saint David Hume, and took Christian morality, then removed most of the demands that were too disruptive for the life of a cultured gentleman, and presented the results as ‘rational morality’.

Hence came the repeated critique that such a strategy could only work by being parasitic on Christianity. Atheists have resented such a charge (not surprisingly). They, in the main, have historically been fairly oblivious to how neatly their ‘rational’ morality fitted into the mores of the Christianized society of their day. (Apparently, like belief in the non-existence of God, ignorance really can be bliss.)

The point of all this digression has to do with a 19th-century atheist called Robert Ingersoll. In defending its “enjoy your life” slogan, the Humanist Association’s website appeals to Robert Ingersoll’s slogan, “Happiness is the only good … the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so”.

At once one can see that atheism has failed to maintain even Ingersoll’s middle-of-the-road moral vision for the fairly short time (as beliefs go) of little over a century. Ingersoll’s ‘happiness’, which meant something like “be a person who is well-developed morally, intellectually, and socially” has been reduced by 21st-century atheists to “enjoy your life”. And the actual moral bit of the vision—“the way to be happy is to make others so”—has dropped out completely.

From moral to selfish in one century: it’s not a record, but it goes a long way to show what has been argued for centuries now—that atheism does not have the resources to explain why people should do what they should do. Atheism is a moral vacuum, filled by whatever passes for morality in the society around it. Even the American banks have more credit to offer.

Taken as a whole, the Humanist Society’s bus advert is an impressive set of own goals—particularly as there was no opposing team on the field at the time. That’s not to say that I don’t think it isn’t going to get lots of positive responses; as Dan Brown showed, people are so keen to not believe in God, they are prepared to swallow truly ridiculous things so that they can relax and get on with the serious business of enjoying their lives.

But what an opportunity for Christians here in the UK, whether or not they bother to dignify this with their own set of public adverts in response. Certainly the Humanist Association cannot be faulted for doing its part to promote the cause of Christ Jesus. Rarely has the opposition gone out of its way to play Laurel to the gospel’s Hardy. They have effectively set things up for Christians to seize the opportunity to set out a comprehensive vision of the difference that God the Father, who sent his Son, makes to human life. Rarely have they so clearly shown that they have nothing to offer as an alternative.

I know we can’t do it, but that part of me who likes my irony in a heavy shade of black wonders if we could prod the Australian equivalents of the Humanist Association to take up the campaign. We could even whip the hat around to defray costs. This is one of the better pre-evangelistic opportunities we have seen for a long, long time. Pray that God will give Christians in the UK what we need to take it up in the situations we find ourselves in, and that he will bless our efforts over here.