The Religion Guy had planned an off-the-news story proposal appropriate for the reflective moods of the Lenten season, Good Friday, Passover and Islam’s holy month of Ramadan that soon follows.

At issue: why do people lack or lose faith?

As it happens, this now fits into the media’s necessary All-COVID-19-All-The-Time mode. 

Perspective. The worst-case coronavirus scenarios floated this week are trivial compared with the Black Death in the 14th Century, when sanitation and biological knowledge were primitive. These were mostly cases of bubonic plague with its wretched suffering. The World Health Organization says unstoppable disease killed off some 50 million victims in Europe alone (starting in Italy!) and within just a matter of years. By some accounts, a third of the world population perished, and it took two centuries for numbers to recover. 

Unimaginable. The spiritual angst must have been beyond belief, so to speak. Fears that this was somehow divine punishment led to extreme acts of penitence and fear-fed persecution under the Inquisitions. 

While people talk about turning to “foxhole faith” in times of trial, the opposite can also occur. Did the plague years underlie in some way the massive attack upon the old church in the 16thCentury Reformation, and then the religious skepticism of Europe’s “Enlightenment”?  Does that history tell us religious faith  could confront serious challenges following the current, vastly less devastating, outbreak?  

A prime thinker to ask is Britain’s Alec Ryrie, a Durham University historian who specializes in that era. His book “Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World” (Viking, Penguin paperback) was an ornament of the 500th anniversary observance of the Reformation. 

Ryrie’s recent “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt” (Harvard)  has direct bearing on our present moment. Publishers Weekly lauds this work as “entertaining,” “enlightening” and “masterly.” (The Guy has yet to read it and bases his story proposal mostly on book reviews, especially this pay-walled lead article in the Review section of the weekend Wall Street Journal  and a major National Review assessment.) 

The reviews indicate Ryrie does not emphasize the Black Death, but his over-all scenario is pertinent.  Atheists and observers of disbelief typically assume folks  shun faith due to rational arguments, as in the common claim that religion’s credibility was dethroned by findings of modern science. 

Not so, says Ryrie. 

History shows us belief and unbelief for most people is largely a matter of intuition which is then justified by rational arguments turned out by the elite. And what are the causes of anti-faith intuitions? Based on study of popular culture as opposed to the intellectual bubble, he proposes two of them: anger over the clergy for failure to guide, unify and reassure their flocks (no doubt worsened by outright corruption), and anxiety over the instability of what one can believe,   which was worsened by the Reformation schism. Faith was not shaken by refined philosophical arguments but emotional responses to sad developments within the church. 

Today, analysts might propose that religions’ standing has been weakened by the molestation scandals unearthed in Catholicism and, more recently, Protestantism, by western Christianity’s internal instability over sexual morals amid secular pressures, by the association of global Islam with cults that impose ruinous murder and mayhem in the name of God, and by nationalistic excesses in Asian Buddhism and Hinduism.

In addition to Ryrie, a Church of England believer, and others from the religion side, reporters might want to run his thesis past a distinguished atheistic philosopher, for example Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. On a more popular level, what do writers at anti-religious magazines like Free Inquiry or Skeptical Inquirer think of this?  

Contact info. For Ryrie,  alec.ryrie@durham.ac.uk or 44 (0) 191 33 43926. For Ryrie review copies publicity.hup@harvard.edu or 617-496-1340. For Dennett daniel.dennett@tufts.edu or 617-627-3297. For Free Inquiry info@secularhumanism.org or 716-636-7571. For Skeptical Inquirer info@secularinquirer.org or 716-636-1425.

Writers working on the topic might also be interested in this prior piece by The Guy.