First published in the Sunday Independent on December 21st. It was cut a little for length so I’m throwing up the full version here…
We may, as is often claimed by pompous commentators, live in a post-religious western world, though the extent of that transformation is open to debate. At Christmas, however, it’s a whole other story.
The season to be jolly is also the season to be holy – kind of. Whether believer or not, most people still engage with the religious side of Christianity’s second-most important festival, to some degree anyway, both during the “twelve days of Christmas” themselves and in the weeks-long lead-up.
Singing carols. Midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Visiting the crib in your local church. Putting up your own crib in, well, your own crib. Placing an angel on top of the tree. Religious-themed Christmas cards. Choral services. Saying grace before “the big meal”. Lighting candles for good intentions. Advent calendars (edible or otherwise). Seasonal charitable endeavours.
The whole ambience of kindness and altruism and communal goodwill that suffuses society for a few weeks, and which is deeply influenced by Jesus’ principal tenet of “love thy neighbour as thyself”.
So even if you don’t consider yourself Christian, you will assuredly be celebrating a Christian festival through the expression of many Christian traditions and conventions.
I don’t consider myself Christian either, as it happens, at least not in the sense of believing in God (in a broader sociocultural sense, absolutely, my ethnic identity would be “Irish Catholic”). I definitively do not have any religious faith.
I did once, after a fashion. As a kid in the late 1980s, when Ireland had 90% mass attendance and everyone believed in God (or claimed to), I was only going under grumpy protest and seeking evermore inventive ways to skip it – or, if not possible, endure it by surreptitiously eating sweets – without my parents finding out.
But here’s a strange thing: now that Catholicism is on the wane in this country (though not everywhere) – indeed despised and almost proscribed by the moral arbiters of modern Ireland – I find myself more engaged than ever with the religion; more, probably, than most believers. This is despite not having faith in God for over 30 years.
My family joke about me being a practising non-believer. Maybe I’m just a born contrarian. Or maybe, in fairness, it’s complex.
I was raised Catholic, obviously, and believed in it all just fine throughout childhood. Prayed at bedtime, monthly confession, attended Novenas, did my stint as altar-boy. One of my earliest memories is seeing the Pope in Limerick: rising at dawn, a long walk carrying a folding stool, a quick glimpse through this funny periscope-shaped distance-viewer someone had given me; the vaguest awareness of what we were doing and why we were doing it.
That probably expresses my depth of engagement in general. I did believe in Jesus, Mary and the saints, but how sincerely, or completely, I don’t know; it was fairly vague. You sort of believed because you’d been raised to do it.
By my late teens I didn’t have faith anymore. I was never atheist, more agnostic. Atheism always seemed too close to a belief-system in itself. There was too much off-putting “I know this to be true!” surety, without the balancing comforts of feeling there’s a benevolent deity watching over you – worst of both worlds.
My Catholicism lapsing wasn’t some big drama; it just happened, over a few years. Later, for reasons now forgotten, I attended a meeting of some atheist/agnostic society where we “shared our stories” of leaving religion behind (Catholicism mostly).
I was amazed that all these people claimed to have a clear moment of what we might call anti-revelation. Really? How narrative-convenient. For me it was far more gradual: water trickling from a tipped-over vessel. Eventually, the last few drops fell, then there was no more.
Once, I believed. Then, and still today, I didn’t and don’t. There was no seismic “that was the day I knew God didn’t exist…” That seems stupid and arrogant to me. How can I know if God exists? I don’t personally believe it to be true, but by definition, can’t know.
I’m open-minded about virtually anything, unless proved one way or the other, and you can’t prove God. That’s one thing I find bemusing about religious people: when they logically argue their faith. There is no argument, for or against. God is beyond words. Faith is like coolness: you have it or you don’t, and that’s fine. (Funnily enough, I have lots of the latter and none of the former.)
Similarly, I don’t believe in telepathy or aliens among us – but who knows? There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in Horatio’s, or anyone else’s, philosophy.
The universe is incredibly weird and incomprehensible. Quantum mechanics, for instance – very real, proven repeatedly for over a century, used daily in all sorts of practical ways – is a whirl of phenomena and behaviours a thousand times more strange, counterintuitive and mind-meltingly unfathomable than the concept of a supernatural entity standing outside time and space.
Being agnostic, I keep my options open. And I’ll always identify as Catholic, ethnically. For one thing, in an increasingly homogenised world and multicultural Ireland, it’s part of who I am, for good or bad; I have the right and obligation to preserve that.
And you’re always a part of that global community, the big old club. You never really lose the lingering desire to see into the heart of the Vatican, or that little flicker of communality or familiarity when someone else turns out to be Catholic too. I once interviewed Frieda Pinto, for example, upper-middle-class Indian movie star, and it was there: she was raised Catholic as well.
I’ve always appreciated the good things about Catholicism/Christianity: sense of community and belonging, comfort in the face of death, moral guidance, structures for ordering and making sense of life. More-or-less all the human rights we now know and cherish have Christian roots.
In particular, I love church architecture, art, literature and, most of all, music. They’ve hugely enriched human life for centuries. Any trip to a new city or country, it’s straight to the churches and cathedrals. I once queued for an hour in broiling heat to visit Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: it was worth the near-heatstroke.
This is one area where Catholicism soars above rival creeds; no other comes close to the magnificent breadth of art. People always claim theirs as the one true faith; I don’t know about any of that, but I do know Catholicism, not the Devil, has the best tunes (and pictures, buildings etc.). Aesthetic beauty, man-made or natural, is a core part of its tradition. Aquinas wrote of “wholeness, harmony and splendour” combining to create something which is pleasing to the senses but also conveys a deep truth; Goethe wrote of God “implanting the sense of the beautiful in the human soul”.
The best part of a press trip to Israel in 2016 was going to many of the seminal, historic creation-sites of Christianity: Jaffa, Capernaum, Sea of Galilee, and especially, the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, with Jesus’ tomb and the Hill of Golgotha. Places so profoundly embedded from an Irish Catholic childhood, and you’re physically standing there: it felt mind-blowing, something otherworldly made three-dimensional reality. (I also made sure to bring home many bottles of water and oil from the Holy Land.)
I also don’t care that much about bad stuff from the past. Whatever awful thing religious people did would almost certainly have been done anyway if religion didn’t exist; that’s human nature, unfortunately. People are wicked sometimes, they don’t need God to encourage them.
“But what about the Inquisition!?” hardliner anti-deists will screech. What about it? No different to torture and murder in concentration camps and gulags, and those monsters hated religion. These were all dismal people, wallowing in the weakest, most warped part of themselves.
All that said, I don’t believe in God, Christian or otherwise, and don’t feel I ever will. But I’m not closed to the possibility; should I be struck by some Road to Damascus-style moment of revelation, seeing the face of God in a burning bush or whatever, I won’t run screaming from it. In fact, all things considered, I think I’d be quite pleased.
Faith seems to make people happier and more content, stronger and more resolute. It gives a deeper sense of who they are and where they fit in in the world. It affords greater perspective on life, the universe and everything. It comforts them when trudging through this vale of tears and amplifies the good times, making them feel blessed, in every sense of the word.
And it’s a way into something above the mundanity of life and self. There’s a sense of the mysterious and transcendent, something divine and unknowable. Yet, at the same time, the individual is a central part of this grand symphony. Faith, in short, can give meaning and purpose to existence.
I envy people their faith, and really envied it during the lockdown lunacy. When you feel like one of the last sane people in a world gone mad and bad, it’s tough without the solace that God, at least, has your back.
Two online voices of sanity during that surreal, awful time – both American guys, Catholic and Jewish – have particularly stuck with me. Belief in, and surrendering to, God gave them such strength, courage and defiance: the “armour of God”, as per Ephesians. And an abiding calm: they were impervious to everything, all the stupidity and viciousness and mindlessness. They had faith and the “still, small voice of conscience”, which was all they needed.
I envied that, and wished I had it too. Unfortunately, you can’t make yourself believe, no matter how hard you try; if anything, that would be inauthentic, an impersonation of faith.
In the meantime, I am that lesser-sighted species, the practising non-believer. Our children are being raised Catholic: baptism, communion, confirmation, the whole bit. Their full names include one of the seven archangels; they go to mass every week and I tag along every other week, either because their mother (a practising Catholic) might be away or to show a good example – and, by the by, enjoy being part of the community and sit in healthy contemplation, forcing the mind to shut the hell up for 45 minutes.
I’m often in church for various other things: candlelight vigils, marriage-blessing ceremonies, Christmas hymns, Easter ceremonies (I love the Passion with, well, a passion). We had our house blessed when we moved in. When asked to do godfather for my nephew, I took seriously what this duty entailed, secular and sacred.
We visited Knock this summer – some beautiful art and architecture that was surprisingly moving, even inspirational, to this man of no faith – and climbed Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday, one of the most fantastic things I’ve done all year. The craic, buzz, sincerity, authenticity…the sheer joy of it.
And the mad variety of pilgrims: folks we knew from home, buff young American guys doing it barefoot, Franciscan monks in robes, groups of East Asians taking countless photos, Travellers in full make-up, ould boys in semi-formal Sunday clothes, Brazilians saying the rosary in Portuguese, young lads who looked like they were still up from the previous night’s drinking and not a bother on them because they’re young. Can’t wait to do it again.
I permanently wear a rosary-bead bracelet received as a gift. A cross pendant hangs from my man-bag. There’s a serenity prayer on the desk (the single best, most practical piece of advice anyone has ever devised) and a beautiful Orthodox-style icon of Virgin and Child on the shelf. I use a magnetic St Anthony bookmark, and a St Michael blessing card as an improvised bookmark. I even have a holographic Jesus mousepad. (Very trippy if you move it around in front of your face for long enough.)
I bless myself if I get a bad feeling while driving and light candles for good intentions. It must be St Anthony if in a church – accept no substitutes. At home I’ve got great use out of this massive candle I bought in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière in Lyon in 2023.
And I know my theology, scripture, catechism etc., if not quite backwards, fairly well; you really don’t ever forget this stuff drummed into your head in childhood. (I invariably get annoyed every Easter when they omit, for some reason, these lines from the denouement of the Passion: “Into your hands I commend my spirit” and “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” This stuff is gold!)
I can quote the Bible and other Christian prayers and aphorisms to beat the band; the full King James is on my list of “books you have to complete if you’re a serious reader”. Part of Paradise Lost – “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light” – was my WhatsApp sign-off during the nightmare of lockdown.
So, in all these ways, I’m more of a Catholic than, I would suspect, most actual Catholics – certainly in self-conscious, insecure, infantile modern Ireland, where people don’t know who they are and seem petrified of appearing traditional or old-fashioned or not “progressive”, whatever that even means anymore.
Yet I don’t believe in God. Will I again, some day? I have no idea. As I say, I’m keeping my options open. I don’t think God will mind, anyway, if he does exist. I think he’d be patient and understand the complexities of our hearts and thoughts.
For now, I suppose, being a practising non-believer is good enough – and it is pretty good.
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 
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