Jonah, I read that post with interest, particularly the quote that Ross included from Terry Eagleton. Writing on Richard Dawkins, Eagleton says this:

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist.

I don’t think that’s right. If there is such a thing as a “typical English middle-class rationalist” (I’m not quite sure what Eagleton means by adding the word “liberal”), I doubt that he is “enraged” by belief in God. It’s much more likely that he will be pretty indifferent to the whole topic. Indeed, the more old-fashioned examples of this species may even consider themselves to be members of that hazy Church of England of the traditional imagination, a vague and benign presence of primarily architectural, cultural, and historical value (plus some good hymns) that implies little or nothing in the way of “spiritual” belief and whose “saints” are more domestic than foreign – a Nelson, say, or a Churchill, or a Shakespeare. In his fervor, Dawkins by contrast betrays an all too religious “enthusiasm,” a phenomenon long regarded with suspicion back in the old country. Writing in the Spectator a few years back, Matthew Parris (an altogether gentler atheist), gave an almost perfect example of this distate for enthusiasm a few years back:

That, right at the centre of our national life, should for so long have stood this great and lovely edifice of sort-of religion, adorned (through her buildings, her rituals, her art and her music) with so much beauty, so much grace and so much balm for troubled spirits, and served in her priesthood by so many luminously decent men, has surely for centuries helped confound atheism on the one hand, and serious religious enthusiasm on the other. Not so much religious belief as religious relief, this has calmed everybody down. ‘You really don’t need to decide’ has been Anglicanism’s refrain, ‘and besides, who knows?’ Jesus or Mohammed, who did know, would have raged against it. I cannot but think, therefore, that the slow collapse of the Church of England over the last half century and the strange recent twitchings of religious muscle in our country may be related. A writer, cricketer and friend, Ed Smith, has for years been telling me he thinks that in the history of European thought, and after a thousand years of tense and awkward co-existence, ours may be the epoch when Faith and Reason must agree to go their separate ways. In a million comfortable vacuities and by a million evasions, ducking every certainty, the Church of England has tried to postpone that irretrievable breakdown. The attempt has often been risible, but we may miss her when she’s gone, for Faith unchained is a horrid thing. Nobody asked me for an Easter message last week, but it would have been this: Unbelievers all, join your local Church of England! Good advice. It’s not as if you have to turn up or anything.