Dancing with Mortality: Reflections of a Lapsed Atheist by Bert Clough. clough self publishing (2020). Pbk. 120 pages. £9.
This little book is a series of brief reflections on themes previously addressed in sermons by Bert Clough, a Unitarian lay preacher. They range from philosophical and theological 'big questions' – the nature of God, nothingness and meaningfulness – to biographical sketches, including Albert Schweitzer, Simone Weil, and two victims of the Nazis, the German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Czech Unitarian Norbert Capek. But it has to be said that each chapter really is very brief, leaving little room for any deep or complex consideration of these themes and lives.
The SOF Network, and Don Cupitt's 1980s TV series, are mentioned, and Clough suggests that SOF is 'congruent with mainstream Unitarian thought' – a judgement which many Unitarian SOF members would probably endorse. But having said that, I don't think Clough has grasped what Cupitt and SOF are about. He doesn't engage at all with non-realism. He seems to regard the whole SOF enterprise as 'Christianity without dogma', based on the notion that 'religious faith is merely a human construct'. That reductive word 'merely' betrays him. In my view, SOF's understanding of religion as a human creation is inseparable from its understanding of religion as a central, crucial, transformative fact of human life. Religion's human roots are the source of its value. There's nothing 'merely' about it.
The book's title refers to Clough as a 'lapsed atheist', and I would like to have learned more about the roots of his former atheism, and the circumstances which led him to lapse. In fact, this is what I was looking forward to when I picked up the book. I regard myself as a post-atheist, a recovering atheist, occupying a space to which the old binaries of belief/unbelief don't apply. So I was hoping that Clough might find himself in a similar space, and might have something to say about it, but I was disappointed. He does make clear, however, that he was deeply unhappy in his former atheism; he describes it as 'unthinking' and links it to an oppressive 'existentialist torpor'. And he makes it equally clear that he has found joy, friendship and a warm welcome in Unitarianism.
Unitarianism has always been marked by its liberalism and rationalism, and Clough exemplifies this. He declares at the outset that it is not his intention to offer any unique insights into Unitarianism but insights nevertheless occur. He is clearly a decent and tolerant man, and these are the qualities he values in Unitarianism, in respect of both religious belief and social justice. He is, in fact, a Unitarian loyalist, more than happy to go head to head with rival churches on issues such as gay marriage or the right to die.
But although Clough is happy to claim the moral high ground on these issues, he doesn't argue them through in any detail. Nor does he argue through any of the 'big' philosophical and theological questions which he addresses. He touches on the nature of God, but only by throwing out possible lines of approach, not by making a considered case. He suggests that we may approach God through absence and silence, by paying attention to what God is not; or through the principle of reverence for life; or by identifying God with moral value. Each of these is an important perspective, and I would have liked to see at least one of them explored at greater length.
As for his approach to Jesus Christ, here I think the limits of Clough's liberal rationalism are exposed. Like many before him, and despite warnings from the likes of Albert Schweitzer, he wants to 'understand the authentic Jesus', and he suggests that the way to do so is by ending the Christian 'obsession' with crucifixion and atonement, so as to leave the field clear to focus on Jesus's message of love. But the crucifixion and resurrection, and the figures of suffering Christ and risen Christ, are not simply embarrassing hangovers which get in the way of a neatly rational morality; they constitute the beating, mythic, symbolic, existential heart of Christian faith. I am no Christian but I am alive to their power and appeal, their redefinition of the terms of life and death. To suggest that all of this can or should simply be put aside; and that if it were, an as-yet-undiscovered 'authentic Jesus' would be revealed, is surely to misunderstand religion as such.
But, as ever, the test of a book is not whether we agree with it, but whether it makes us think. For all my disagreements and even disappointments – because of my disagreements and disappointments – Bert Clough's book made me think. Get yourself a copy and see if it makes you think too.
Martin Spence is Chair of SOF trustees.