How To Be An Agnostic
Lost souls
Former church-goers, ex-believers, the sometimes religious often
become conscious of this loss. They miss the good things a com-
munity of faith can give them. One such good thing might be
belonging to a tradition, a body of insight, practice and thought
upon which they can draw. It’s found in texts, rituals and great
buildings, and its gift is that your own life might gain from
the many lives of others, the echoes of which can be heard in
the music or architecture. You yourself only have one life, and
there’s simply not enough time to ask and answer all the ques-
tions, to forge new patterns of life, to reinvent the stories. So
you had submitted to, and engaged with, the wisdom of the tra-
dition. Plus, there are some individuals – the moral heroes of
traditions, the theological virtuosi – who are inevitably going to
have much more profound perceptions than you or I could ever
have. To turn your back on that, as you feel you must because
you’ve lost confi dence in the church, can therefore not only be
felt as a liberation but also as a kind of waste. After the thrill of
rejecting has died, there may well be a sense of emptiness, and
exhaustion at the thought of having to go it alone.
Another way in which loss can be felt arises from the loss of
the community to whom you belonged and within which you
could address life’s problems, fi nd direction, and take yourself
seriously. Where else in the public square today are there spaces
to ask what is good, outside of religious buildings? Art galleries
and book shops offer a partial substitute, though the nature of
the relationship we have with them is shaped by the commer-
cial imperatives that keep them open: they are inevitably more
interested in attracting us as consumers of a product than par-
ticipants in life.
These losses are expressed in a common formula. Individuals
will describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. They’ve
given up on church membership – or going to the synagogue,
temple or mosque – which is what is meant by the ‘not reli-
gious’ bit. But they’ve not given up on wanting to pursue the