Where do we find meaning? The authors of two new books on faith are searching for (and occasionally discovering) it in the midst of our turbulent present era. But the places where they seek their answers are often wildly dissimilar. The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age, the debut work of the science writer Abi Millar, is a personal, journalistic investigation into an eclectic range of spiritual practices which exist outside the domain of traditional religion: shamanism, tarot reading, even clubbing. In Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, Alister McGrath, a professor of science and religion at Oxford University, takes a more intellectual route, surveying scientific, philosophical and poetic literature in order to uncover what it is about humanity that means we continue so stubbornly to believe in the things – whether gods or concepts such as goodness, beauty and society – that we cannot prove with reference to facts alone. Both are written against the backdrop that Christianity is in decline in Britain: in 2021, the number of people in England and Wales identifying as Christian dropped to below 50 per cent of the population for the first time since the Dark Ages.
One interesting point of confluence between the two books is their reference to the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1978 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. Nagel uses the example of a bat to illustrate that there is something particular and irreducible about the consciousness of each living organism. This essence, Nagel says, can never be reached by an entirely objective approach: even to imagine what it is to be a bat is actually to imagine what it would be like for a human to be a bat. Millar’s Nagel epiphany comes during an ayahuasca ceremony. During her trip she hallucinates herself into the body of a chicken, or at least “in a state of bizarre hyper-empathy with a chicken”, which allows her to recognise that “each animal is its own locus of consciousness”. But we can never truly escape our own subjectivity in order to know the experience of another consciousness. McGrath, meanwhile, uses Nagel’s essay to highlight the chasm that frequently exists between atheists and religious believers (he is a Christian, and has authored several books responding critically to Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists): as we fail to imagine accurately what it is like to be a bat, so he suggests an atheist might struggle to comprehend what it would be like to believe in a god.
The central argument of McGrath’s Why We Believe is compelling: “To believe is to be human; it undergirds our ability to imagine, experiment, relate to others and the world.” The term “belief” here is not necessarily tethered to religion: we move through the world as believers in so many things that cannot be proved by invoking facts. Belief is the currency in our every human interaction.
Take love, which Iris Murdoch once defined as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”. It requires a species of faith to arrive at such a realisation. To demonstrate this hypothesis, McGrath begins with a thought experiment. He asks the reader to imagine a world in which we only accepted incontestable truths, such as two plus two equalling four. In this fictional world, we would have to reject widespread (though not universal) beliefs such as “all people are created equal” or “it is wrong to torture people”.
“Are human beings capable of meaningful existence within this imagined world of certainties?” McGrath asks. When I try to conceive of this shallow world of pure facts, it immediately falls apart in my mind. Surely, in a world built on rigid facts alone, we would not be human beings at all but reduced to mere automata? “Believing nothing,” McGrath declares, “is not a serious option”, for belief is “not only intellectually defensible but existentially necessary [McGrath’s emphasis]”.
This does not mean we can all just believe in whatever we like. Having established that all humans participate in the process of believing, he examines how we each choose a “big picture” belief. A word he uses repeatedly to determine whether a belief system might be worth our while is “flourish”: which beliefs will help us flourish in our lives? Over the course of the book, McGrath regularly reminds the reader that he was a Marxist before he was a Christian – a fact he deems so important it’s included in his author bio. For an atheist teenager in Northern Ireland during the 1960s, Marxism seemed like an inspiring “big picture approach”: not some distant scientific theory, but rather the “promise of participation in a new kind of existence”. And yet, McGrath soon discovered Marxism’s “alarming capacity to incite violence and intolerance”. At university, he switched allegiances from Marxism to Christianity, a belief “which proved much more resilient and engaging”.
It is, however, possible to be both a Marxist and a Christian, and McGrath’s binary approach here seems to contradict his own contention that we should “reject a single totalising map, and instead use a series of maps”, our beliefs operating as a set of lenses that we might apply in turn in order to see the world anew. It also leads to the erroneous impression that religions and social and economic theories are equivalent forms of “belief”.
One problem with the book is that it fails to establish any kind of classifying system for assessing and comparing the value of beliefs, beyond the suggestion that we must be attentive and self-critical in order to prevent ourselves from basing our identities on “something false”, such as a conspiracy theory that offers “simple explanations for complex phenomena” – a stance that feels now more important than ever, as well as endlessly challenging in practice.
As McGrath substituted Marxism for Christianity, so Millar is looking for something to replace the “spiritual gap” that had once been plugged by Christianity. She was brought up in a strict conservative Evangelical church, which “insisted on biblical literalism”, where occult practices such as tarot and astrology were banned. At 17 she abandoned her belief. Now, she allies herself to a class of people colloquially referred to as “nones”: those who declare themselves in answer to the question “What do you believe?” as unaffiliated with any religion. And yet, various more detailed religious surveys in Britain show that most “nones” are not straightforwardly secular. Many retain an appreciation of spirituality; they are sympathetic to other religions; most are uncertain if there is a God or not.
What Millar wants to know is where the “nones” are now turning to in order to find meaning – or a “big picture”, as McGrath would put it. She begins from a place of vulnerability, with her own crises of meaning, first as the result of her father’s death and then the birth of her daughter, after which, she writes, “the big existential questions became all I could think about”.
There’s a prescriptive formula to her chapters, each of which considers a distinct spiritual practice: Millar tries out reiki, mindfulness, and manifesting, then supplements these encounters through interviews with academics and practitioners working within that arena. Her journalistic style is comic, self-deprecating and self-aware; she is keen to throw herself into every experience but also questions the practitioners as well as the authenticity of their practice. Sometimes she returns from these forays genuinely transformed, surfacing from her ayahuasca-induced trip as a chicken to become a diehard vegan, and finding the ritual of yoga so therapeutic and restorative that she goes on to train as a yoga teacher.
One intriguing chapter focuses on “atheist churches”. Sunday Assembly is a non-religious gathering which was established in 2013 by a pair of ex-Christian comedians who missed the communal aspects of churchgoing and wanted to see what would happen if they took the rituals of a church service but emptied them of all religious content: replacing sermons with talks on various subjects (when Millar attended, the subject was whether aliens are real), replacing hymns and prayers with pop songs (that service, to fit the theme, they all sang Elton John’s “Rocket Man”). The first Sunday, 200 people turned up to their gathering at a deconsecrated church in north London. After nine months of Sunday Assembly, they were getting 600 attendees every week and had to move to a larger building. These days the numbers have dwindled to 70 or so.
Where Sunday Assembly succeeded was in offering a genuine alternative to what a church community can provide: often those who came had just moved to the city and were looking for somewhere welcoming to build friendships with like-minded people. Usually, new arrivals came only for a few years “before finding a friendship group and moving on,” Millar is told. She admits herself that, while she appreciated the idea of Sunday Assembly, it didn’t prove persuasive enough to disrupt her routine of Sunday mornings at home watching Netflix with her family.
Can one find a “big picture” at an atheist church? I’m not sure, but I have certainly found that equivalent non-religious rituals set up by my friends – regular reading groups, informal lectures – make my life feel more vivid and consequential, and which often seem to demand that I engage more deeply with the world around me. I have even found this on nights out with those I love. (Millar has a chapter on rave, borrowing Émile Durkheim’s term “collective effervescence” to describe how when we are sweating shoulder-to-shoulder in the club we experience intense feelings of mutual belonging.)
The drawback to Millar’s approach of offering generous paragraph space to every expert or enthusiast she interviews is that The Spiritual Gap starts to feel like a market square in which all kinds of dubious characters are trying to hawk their wares. A “reiki master healer” on Harley Street tells her: “I came from a fashion background, and I knew how to create a desirable brand for a certain kind of woman.” She meets a “Law of Attraction” coach who, for £350, can offer you a Zoom course titled “Four weeks to the best version of you”. It appears that those who benefit most from the “spirituality gap” are not the seekers but those savvy enough to profit off them. As one woman quoted in the book says: “Capitalism exploits everything – there are no exceptions.”
Millar’s investigation into spirituality could be seen as the practical counterpart to McGrath’s theoretical claims about our human need to believe in things greater and more profound than what we see before us. I was convinced and comforted by McGrath’s claim that belief is an existentially necessary feature of human life, as well as his stated preference for ambiguity over certainty and complexity over simplification. Equally however, I found myself frustrated by his blind spots and frequent narrow-mindedness.
At one point, he manages to dismiss almost an entire generation of young people in one fell swoop. “Research points to the emergence of ‘Young Illiberal Progressives’” who “have very little tolerance for people with beliefs that they disagree with”, he writes. “Their exposure to short-form content (such as online videos) and ideological online echo chambers seems to create an incapacity for critical reflection and unwillingness even to consider, let alone to discuss, ideas that they find challenging.” His footnote references a press release from Channel 4 about a survey it conducted with a sample group of Gen Z-ers. A quarter of those asked professed they had “very little tolerance for people with beliefs that they disagree with”. The majority did not feel that way, but perhaps this conflicts with McGrath’s beliefs about young people and their “incapacity for critical reflection”.
I have spent the last four years interviewing young people in Britain who describe themselves as Christian, particularly focusing on those who have converted to the religion as adults, usually from a position of former agnosticism. While there is no single unifying trait I could offer to collectively define the young people I encountered – who have grown up in a society more pluralistic and diverse than this country has ever had before – what I discovered again and again among my interviewees was a marked and emphatic open-mindedness towards all kinds of religious beliefs, not just the one to which they are personally drawn. I’ve met so many young people engaged in exploring world religions that I question the very existence of the “spirituality gap”, or if such a term is not simply a useful marketing tool used within the newly emerging spirituality industry.
McGrath’s dogmatic, cynical stance about young people made me want to return to Nagel’s question: what is it like to be a bat? We may not be able to imagine ourselves into literally knowing what it is like to be another person, but the more we attend to one another, the closer we will get to such a recognition. This is how we might meaningfully flourish in this world: by listening to and learning from those of every generation, background and belief system, even when it seems to contradict our own. That’s what I believe, anyway.
The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age
Abi Millar
Duckworth, 304pp, £14.99
Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times
Alister McGrath
Oneworld, 272pp, £18.99
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[See also: Sam Fender’s politicised rock]
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World