Man kan behandle det som en vanlig livssyklus-svingning: når radikale sekularister blir gamle, blir de religiøse. De innstiller seg på utgangen. Eller? Er det så enkelt? Det er noe eget med 68′erne, de trodde de kunne fly høyt, trosse alle grenser og forbud, og gjorde det. De fikk faktisk hele samfunnet, i hvert fall den som tidligere ble omtalt som dannet, med på ferden, slik at store deler av kunst og kulturliv, barneoppdragelse, og undervisning, er basert på deres ideer.
Men de vant aldri helt over folket. Det dro seg unna, holdt på med sitt. Ble taust.
Christopher Hitchens er en kjent britisk-amerikansk intellektuell, som skriver ofte og skarpt om samfunn, religion og politikk. Han kan være nådeløs, ikke bare mot islam, men religion overhodet.
Christopher har en bror, Peter. Peter har skrevet en selvbiografi, der forholdet til broren tar stor plass. Christopher er hardbarket ateist, Peter er blitt troende. Peter føler behov for å fortelle om hva som har skjedd. Hvordan han havnet der han gjorde. Når man leser hans historie og er på samme alder, blir man rørt. Minner stiger frem.
Jeg innbiller meg at det skal bli mange slike bøker etterhvert, om 68′ere som ser seg tilbake. Det som avgjør om de er lesverdige er om forfatteren har holdt seg flytende, og fortsatt å utvikle seg. Det virker det som Peter har. Det virker som hans liv har vært en odysse som sier noe om tiden vi lever i: flere skal finne tilbake til kristendommen, men når man finner noe igjen blir det på en annen måte.
Peter og Christopher var barn av velstående foreldre. Faren hadde en høy posisjon i marinen. De hadde hus flere steder i England. Den beskrivelsen Peter gir av ett av dem, er av et England som er borte, og det er med vemod han erkjenner det.
The Britain that gave me this self-confidence was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me as a child. Of our many homes, I was fondest of a modest house in the village of Alverstoke, just across the crowded water from Portsmouth.
It is almost impossible now to express the ordered peace which lingered about the quiet shaded gardens and the roads without traffic, where my parents let me and my brother Christopher wander unsupervised.
Dark green buses with conductors wearing peaked caps would bear us past a favourite toyshop to the Gosport ferry, from which we could view the still substantial Navy in which my father had served.
Then we made our way to the department store where my mother took me and Christopher, neatly brushed and tamed, for tea, eclairs and cream horns served by frilly waitresses.
De som skulle bli revolusjonære tok denne tryggheten for gitt, de trodde den ville vare evig, at den nærmest var naturgitt, og uknuselig. At de kunne gjøre hva de ville, for sivilisasjonen var bunnsolid. Til tross for nazismen vokste man opp med å ta visse grunnleggende ting for selvfølgelige og innlysende, blant annet at religion var noe som historien hadde forbipassert.
We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the Welfare State, the United Nations and ‘ science’, which explained everything that needed to be explained.
Til tross for tredjeverden-sympatier og frigjøringskriger: generasjonen født i 50 og senere hadde en medfødt arroganse. De var sivilisasjonens mest bortskjemte, men trodde det ikke selv fordi de var maoister eller hippier.
Peter var blant dem som “tok den langt ut”:
I was engaged in a full, perfect and complete rebellion against everything I had been brought up to believe.
As I had been raised to be an English gentleman, this was quite an involved process. It included behaving like a juvenile delinquent, using as much foul language as I could find excuse for, mocking the weak (there was a wheelchair-bound boy in my year, who provided a specially shameful target for this impulse), insulting my elders, and eventually breaking the law.
The full details would be tedious for most people, and unwelcome to my family. Let us just say they include some political brawling with the police, some unhinged dabbling with illegal drugs, an arrest – richly merited by my past behaviour but actually wrongful – for having an offensive weapon and nearly killing someone, and incidentally myself, through criminal irresponsibility while riding a motorcycle.
There were also numberless acts of minor or major betrayal, ingratitude, disloyalty, dishonour, failure to keep promises and meet obligations, oath-breaking, cowardice, spite or pure selfishness. Nothing I could now do or say could possibly atone for them.
Mange har tilsvarende erfaringer, og de forsvinner ikke. Foraktelige handlinger blir værende i sinnet, de ligger og presser. Fortiden er aldri død.
Peters vei tilbake til, eller gjenfinning av troen var en lang prosess. De historiske bygningene betydde mye: de storslagne katedralene. Og kunsten, spesielt møtet med ett bilde av Rogier van der Weydens Dommedag.
My own, slow return to faith began when I was 30, in 1981. By this time, I was doing well in my chosen trade, journalism. I could afford pleasant holidays with my girlfriend, whom I should nowadays call my ‘partner’ since we were not then married, on the European continent.
I no longer avoided churches. I recognised in the great English cathedrals, and in many small parish churches, the old unsettling messages.
One was the inevitability of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius, a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it.
No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion, specifically a painting: Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th Century Last Judgement, which I saw in Burgundy while on holiday.
I had scoffed at its mention in the guidebook, but now I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open, at the naked figures fleeing towards the pit of Hell.
These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions.
On the contrary, their hair and the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me, and people I knew.
Det snakkes om religiøs sans og evne, men man kunne like gjerne snakke om følelse av og for historie. De to ligger ganske nær hverandre. For mange er historien noe nært, noe som binder, og med årene taler bygninger og kunst til en mer og mer.
Slik ser det ut til at Peter Hitchens har hatt det: historien snakker høyere og høyere og man forstår at man skylder den meget.
I had a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. My large catalogue of misdeeds replayed themselves rapidly in my head.
I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death.
At around the same time I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen.
I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, although I was unwilling to admit it. I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.
Men Peter kunne ikke snakke med venner og kolleger om sin gryende religiøsitet. Sekularismen og ateismen har tiltatt, ikke den sekularismen som innkalkulerer religion, men den som er fiendtlig til spesielt kristendommen. Det er det merkelige: kristendommen er blitt jaget ut, samtidig som man er svært så tolerante overfor en ny religion som er langt mer intolerant.
Peter reagerte kraftig på denne anti-kristne holdning hos den britiske eliten. Den er også høyst følbar i Norge. Man har kastet kristendommen, trosforestillinger og verdier ut, gjort dem passe, og vil heller ikke høre om dem. Man har rett og slett kuttet over noen av de sterkeste båndene til fortiden.
I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so.
It is a strange and welcome side effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now overcome this.
Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.
Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.
The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.
Mens Christopher var anti-religion, mente Peter at religion ikke er religion. Kristendommen har bidratt til en humanisering av samfunnet, og gir lover og moral en ekstra dimensjon. Samvittigheten trenger noen andre referanser enn bare hva tiden sier. Noe er større enn mennesket, om ikke annet er det samtalen generasjonene mellom.
Når bryter slike følelser gjennom? Peter Hitchens sier religion er beslektet med musikk og poesi. De overrumpler deg når du minst venter det. De angriper deg på en måte du ikke kan bruke intellektet mot.
For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.
Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.
The huge differences which can be observed between Christian societies and all others, even in the twilit afterglow of Christianity, originate in this specific injunction.
It is striking that in his dismissal of a need for absolute theistic morality, Christopher says in his book that ‘the order to “love thy neighbour as thyself” is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed’. Humans, he says, are not so constituted as to care for others as much as themselves.
This is demonstrably untrue, and can be shown to be untrue, through the unshakable devotion of mothers to their children; in the uncounted cases of husbands caring for sick, incontinent and demented wives (and vice versa) at their lives’ ends; through the heartrending deeds of courage on the battlefield.
Hvor kommer denne kjærligheten fra? Den er et stort mysterium.
Hvis religionen kan være farlig, hva skjedde ikke i de samfunn hvor en forsøkte å utrydde kristendommen, som i Sovjet og Nazi-Tyskland.
I am also baffled and frustrated by the strange insistence of my anti-theist brother that the cruelty of Communist anti-theist regimes does not reflect badly on his case and on his cause. It unquestionably does.
Soviet Communism is organically linked to atheism, materialist rationalism and most of the other causes the new atheists support. It used the same language, treasured the same hopes and appealed to the same constituency as atheism does today.
When its crimes were still unknown, or concealed, it attracted the support of the liberal intelligentsia who were then, and are even more now, opposed to religion.
Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.
This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.
Det synes som om Peter Hitchens bok er et varsel om at noen av rebellene fra 60-tallet har begynt på den lange marsjen tilbake til religion og tradisjon.
The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens is published by Continuum Books on Monday 15 March