What is Slavoj Žižek’s Christian atheism?

Two opposed camps can only have a fruitful debate if they agree on what it is they disagree about. A militant atheist such as Richard Dawkins is right to call out scientific ignorance in some religious settings. But at a deeper level his argument fails, because the deity he rejects is a blown-up thing, not the Creator conceived in classical tradition.

Similar considerations apply to Slavoj Žižek’s Christian Atheism. When the claim that religion is no more than pious fantasy forms your starting point as well as your conclusion, then reason becomes the first casualty. This approach is as circular as beginning a book on socialism by asserting that all left-wing thought and endeavor are flawed by definition.  

If God is the ground of reality rather than the main figure in a field of material agents, how should the divine presence be modeled? A better analogy is supplied by light. The light in which we see is not itself one more element in a list of items on view. Light is “seen” only insofar as it is reflected off opaque objects. From a monotheistic standpoint, the same applies to the divine light. As the philosopher Denys Turner puts it: “The light which is God we can only see in the creatures that reflect it.”

This awareness is shared across much of the religious spectrum. Two crucial but overlooked features of Christianity distinguish it from the spiritual mainstream, however. One concerns how believers relate to God. Christians do not (or should not) hold that their earthly lives are an obstacle course set up by a celestial headteacher who will give a progress report at the journey’s end. The whole point of the doctrine of justification is that Christians repent because they are forgiven, not in order to obtain forgiveness. Secondly, Jesus’s followers do not hope to be counted good servants. Since the source of all is held to be an eternal exchange of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Trinitarian language opens up a far more intimate picture of divine-human relations. The New Testament speaks of the convert’s status as an adoptive daughter or son, not as a servant. Part of the rationale for belief in the Holy Spirit lies in convictions about a humble, hospitable God who not only removed his crown to share our flesh, but is also open to sharing his life. A figure such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali grasps this point. Before her recent conversion to Christianity, she once said that she wanted a God she could have a conversation with.  

Ground-clearing of this kind seems necessary to offer co-ordinates for assessing a book as baggy, quirky and dogmatic as Christian Atheism. Any work containing the word “Christian” in the title — especially one purporting to offer a radical reframing of church teaching — ought to rest on proper research into the relevant field. On the evidence of his latest publication, Žižek has done little or no homework. While modish topics feature heavily in the index (the author is a Marxist, Hegelian and Lacanian psychoanalyst as well as a self-styled rock-star philosopher), references to orthodox Christian thought are trifling. No one of Turner’s stature is seriously engaged with. The text as a whole is chronically under-edited.

Žižek has gleaned one idea from the gospels, and it serves as a leitmotif. Since the incarnation brings God down to Earth, he thinks, Christianity in effect overthrows religion from within. It undermines itself more comprehensively than secularism ever could. The committed atheist should thus invoke Jesus’s message as a staging post to liberation, given that some secularists fail to escape the religious paradigm fully enough. Casting off religious chains one moment, they duly fall prey to other external guarantors of meaning, including natural necessity and evolution.

Unlike Dawkins, then, Žižek values what he sees as Christianity’s dissident credentials. Yet his conclusion that only atheism offers an unshackled vision of reality rests on assumptions repeatedly challenged by Jesus. So much modern unbelief is premised on rebellion against the master-slave relationship supposedly embedded by faith. In that sense Christian Atheism is unoriginal as well as iconoclastic. Its subtitle appears equally stale. Holding the material world to be an emanation of its transcendent source, Christians can affirm as doggedly as anyone else that matter matters.

So does meaning. Žižek has missed a bigger opportunity, given the toxic split evident in western intellectual discourse. Scylla in the form of hardline empiricism claims that all truths are scientific truths. It thereby jettisons the normative character of ethics and aesthetics, as well as religion. The Charybdis of postmodernism holds truth as such to be a superstitious relic pressed into the service of power relations.

Christianity has navigated these and other intellectual storms. The Churches offer rich resources for taking us forward, socially as much as individually. For example, while Marxists have some plausible criticisms of late capitalism, a Christian can reply with justice that the promotion of “value” in economic relations must include a sense of spiritual value. The point is not lost on some other influential postmodern thinkers, notably Alain Badiou. Žižek prefers to ride old hobby horses. Ignoring a host of alternative perspectives, he hasn’t troubled himself even to describe — let alone evaluate — the Christian repertoire in other than characteristically cartoonish terms.

Can Richard Dawkins call himself a cultural Christian? Catch up on Spectator TV. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.