Social media outlets frequently carry forward the most important religious and philosophical lessons in ways that professors try to compete with in classroom settings, but as anyone who knows about the challenges of college teaching will testify, the abilities of technology and social media platforms will often reach younger generations in more effective ways. The pedagogy of yesteryear cannot easily compete with the lessons that are conveyed in popular culture and technology.
The story of the origin and development of modern atheism is often reserved exclusively for the narration of theologians, historians, and philosophers of religion (see, e.g., the memorable works of Michael Buckley, Conor Cunningham, Liam Jerrold Fraser, Gavin Hyman, and Alan Charles Kors), but in recent years several contributions to this exciting field of scholarship have demonstrated that there are other ways to understand and narrate the socio-religious landscape of western Europe and how it became secularized. The rise of unbelief is not a story reserved for academic theology; it can also be narrated with the help of literature and other popular cultural means.
Currently serving as an assistant professor of English at Texas State University, James Bryant Reeves has performed an excellent service for the study of modern atheism in Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism. I enthusiastically read the book with an interest to see how lessons from representative works of British literature (the chapters are dedicated to Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, William Cowper, and Percy Shelley) might coincide with or depart from the major contributions of fundamental theologians and historians of unbelief. Many Catholics and Christians should take a keen interest in Reeves’ book, knowing that “Literary representations of atheists reflected and informed a larger cultural concern with unbelief that took root near the turn of the eighteenth century” (2). Literary works often represent the popular level of thinking within a culture. In the case of Godless Fictions, Reeves shows how ubiquitous the possibility of atheism had become in eighteenth-century Britain.
Atheism did not formally appear in a sustained way in Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century, but in the next hundred years, unbelief became a focal point of interest among the masses. Considering this dramatic shift, the literature of the time was not written with apologetical intent but was instead used “to interrogate emerging discourses of selfhood, sociability, tolerance, and empire, and to push literary representation into hitherto uncharted territory. A focus on imaginative atheists can, therefore, help us understand the period's fascination with and understanding of real atheism … in ways unavailable to other studies of unbelief” (5). Godless Fictions therefore argues that the prevalence of atheism in British culture was highlighted in literature in negative ways to prevent additional forms of unbelief in the future. Rather than rationally arguing against atheism, the literature “rejects it out of pure disdain” (7). Atheists not only held to fallacious viewpoints about the demonstrability of the existence of God and the immorality of the human soul, but they were also seen as immoral citizens.
For all of this book's wonderful merits, theologians and religious studies professors should be careful in deciding whether to assign Godless Fictions to undergraduate students. When I critically reflect about my own training and scholarship in systematic theology, I can imagine this book being used as supplementary material in a doctoral seminar on the origins and history of modern atheism. Be that as it may, the book will prove invaluable for all serious scholars whose area of academic specialization is dedicated to the development of atheism in the modern West.
