An Atheist’s History of Belief, Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention, Matthew Kneale
(author), Counterpoint (publisher), 2014, ISBN: 978-161902-235-5
Prominent Christian author David Bentley Hart published a book in 2009 titled Atheist Delusions: The
Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Entities. He complained afterward that he did not want this to
be the title of his book, which was about the modern development of Christianity, and secondarily about
the secular world’s efforts to replace Christian thinking and practice with Enlightenment principles and
behaviors. In particular, he didn’t think the book had much to do with atheism, but his publisher insisted
on a title that began with the word “Atheist.” Their logic was that atheism sells books these days, and
indeed Hart’s book with that title did reasonably well in the bookstores.
I was thinking about this story as I read through Matthew Kneale’s publication from 2014, An Atheist’s
History of Belief. I kept reading this book waiting for something specific about atheism to be mentioned,
but that never happened. The title is quite misleading if you are expecting a book that can be added to
your literature about atheism. It would be better to call this book a secular or non-religious interpretation
of the history of religion and belief in God, so that religious readers are not deceived into thinking Kneale
is going to interpret religious belief through a Christian lens.
In fact, since there is nothing particularly offensive to Christianity in this book, I do not know why it has a
titled that is guaranteed to turn off some Christian readers. Most Christians have no problem reading a
history of religion that is not devotional, and is strictly historical, which is what Kneale has done with this
book. They would also benefit from the fact that Kneale’s writing style is very accessible, and he has done
considerable research in putting this book together. Since there are many academic books available on
the history of religion and Christianity especially, Kneale has taken on the difficult task of reviewing the
history of religion and belief in God, and then presenting in a single volume a highly readable and nonacademic book that most people can follow easily and enjoy reading.
Kneale succeeds at this task largely because his writing style is always lucid and never condescending. The
other element of success is that he generally touches just the surface of religion and belief, a necessity
given that he is covering 3,000 years of human experience. Of the ten chapters in the book, Chapters 4
and 5 deal explicitly with Christianity, and then in the next chapter Kneale is on immediately to the
development of Islam. Because the basic theme of his book is religion and God-belief as human
inventions, created out of the necessity to deal with the fear and anxiety all humans feel in the face of a
hostile environment and the inevitability of death, Kneale focuses on what is innovative for its time, and
useful in dealing with the prevalent fears of the time. This might mean that the belief is new, or that the
religious rituals change (human sacrifice to appease the gods died out roughly around 2,000 BCE, for
example). Kneale wants to know why human sacrifice was tolerated, and why it fell out of favor. Similarly,
his focus when it comes to Christianity is St. Paul, the undoubted founder of the religion and its concern
with Christ as a blood sacrifice for mankind’s sins. To the extent Jesus added something to the religion, it
was his preaching through parables and his new interpretation of the ancient Hebrew scripture.
This obviously is not an in-depth view of Christianity or any other of the religions covered in this book, and
many a Christian reader will find this book boring when it comes to their own religion. But that will not
be the case when Kneale is talking about Judaism and the various pagan cults that pre-dated Christianity.
This will be new material for most Christians, and revelatory about the antecedents to Christianity. It is
also interesting to see how Christianity influenced the development of Islam, which borrowed heavily
from the Christian Bible. Jesus Christ is a revered prophet in Islam, and while the fact that he is not
considered in Islam as God or as the Lord and Savior, it says something that Islam places Jesus on a par
with the Prophet Mohammed. A good bit of the Holy Quran features Mary, the mother of Jesus. Kneale
explains what distinguishes Mohammed from Jesus – it was the willingness of Mohammed to take up the
sword, and to engage in secular, political battles of conquest which helped establish Islam throughout the
Arabic-speaking world. This active commingling of state and religion to this day makes it difficult for the
West to understand Islam as something quite different from Christianity, and certainly not as a religion
that would fit easily into a Jeffersonian prescription for the separation of church and state.
Kneale next takes a diversion from the West, to explore the rise of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism,
religions which contributed developments different from what had come before. Buddhism and Taoism,
along with Confucianism, became the official state religions of China, sponsored and protected by the
emperors. As these were not monotheistic religions, China had no difficulty in treating them as equally
important. No one was obliged to follow any religion, and to the extent any sect broke off from the official
state religions, it was tolerated as long as it did not cause unrest or challenge the government in any way.
The other important distinction these religions provided was a different interpretation of the afterlife.
Within Hinduism, the afterlife consisted of a succession of lives that the believer would be granted, and
promotion from a lower level of existence (as from an insect to a human), would necessarily become
progressively harder. Humans, because they have a consciousness, should aspire to a higher level of
understanding, so that ultimately they may be in the presence of Hinduism’s supreme god, Brahma, in the
afterlife. Not every human can be expected to succeed in this endeavor. Buddhism’s sense of the afterlife
was also something new. Buddhism taught the necessity of letting go of worldly possessions and
concerns, so that one could overcome the vicissitudes of life. This did not mean a Buddhist could avoid
pain or death, but through abnegation of pain, and a willingness to accept it as a part of the natural order,
the Buddhist could achieve oneness with the Buddha.
While I said earlier that human sacrifice died out within religion about 2,000 BCE, that should only apply
to Western religion in Europe. The Spaniards were horrified to discover the prevalence – indeed the deep
dependence – on the practice in the New World among the Aztecs and Incas (and before them, the
Mayans). At this historical stage, the Europeans felt themselves morally superior to the Aztecs and Incas
for practicing something as primitive as human sacrifice, even though Europe practiced burning at the
stake for heretics and was not entirely a morally superior culture. The Spaniards stamped out human
sacrifice very quickly.
Kneale returns next to the practice of punishment by burning at the stake in Western culture. He focuses
an entire chapter on witchcraft, and the burning to death, and occasional hanging, of 50,000 women over
many decades when Europe became obsessed with witches. This chapter seems unnecessary in the book
– Kneale could have easily covered the subject in a few paragraphs. But his writing style is accessible
because Kneale tells stories, and what more grotesque story is there to tell than the 17 th century
fascination with and fear of witches?
Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the final one, in which Kneale summarizes certain modern
religious offshoots from mainstream beliefs. He explores Mormonism and Joseph Smith, who Kneale
believes was successful because The Book of Mormon, which Smith authored, is a much more coherent
and entertaining story than can be found in The Bible. Smith described himself as a prophet; he was, in
Kneale’s phrase, “America’s first prophet,” and the advantage to Smith was that a prophet can be spurned
and rejected by outer society, but his word is taken as sacrosanct by his followers, making it very easy for
Smith to control his group. Of course, this control was fleeting, as Smith was murdered early in his career,
and the success of Mormonism afterward was based on the personality and drive of Brigham Young.
Another religious cult Kneale looks at is Scientology, founded by L. Ron Hubbard. Kneale investigates the
modernistic and quasi-scientific premises underlying Scientology, which explains part of its success. As
with Mormonism, in a secular and capitalist society, the promise of wealth and material success and
happiness is another key component to the spread of Scientology. The religion deliberately seeks out
celebrities whose star power can help attract new recruits. I would have liked to see Kneale explore a
similar cult, the Unification Church founded by Sun-Myung Moon. This is an Asian religion which believes
that wealth and power, which were certainly achieved by Moon, who died a billionaire, should not be
eschewed by its followers, but instead embraced. Moon did not limit his appeal to that of a prophet.
Within the cult, it was known that Moon was the true Messiah, sent by God to fulfill Jesus’ mission.
Wealth, or the fair distribution of wealth, was the preoccupation of Karl Marx. Kneale is not the first to
characterize Marxism and Communism as a religion, and there are certain parallels, since the Soviet Union
treated the writings of Marx as a sacred text, and built up a cult around him. Nonetheless, this is quite a
stretch, to compare Marxism to Christianity or Islam, and Kneale does not make a convincing case that
Communism belongs in his book.
He includes one other religious figure in this chapter: Sayyid Qutb. This important individual was executed
by the Egyptian government in 1966 for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He left behind a
short book, Milestones, which has become a philosophical blueprint for radical Islam. Qutb claimed that
all governments, in the West as well as throughout the Islamic world, were idolatrous and heretical in
terms of their failure to adhere to the true principles laid down by Muhammed. Qutb urged those with
this insight to form sleeper cells that would work overtime to overthrow all governments and establish
something like a caliphate, where sharia law would replace Western or secular law. Milestones is not
necessarily the holy scripture cited by radical groups like the Taliban or ISIS, but Qutb’s principles clearly
are consistent with these radical movements, and are part of a philosophy that expresses disgust not only
at how Islam has been perverted, but how there is no form of government or society today that is worthy
of the term righteous.
With this, Kneale returns to one of his basic themes, which is that religion and belief in God are motivated
principally by fear, and are looked to as solutions for mankind’s anxieties over natural dangers and
manmade evil. His last two paragraphs summarize this view:
Throughout this book I have argued that people adopt intense beliefs from a hunger for
reassurance, to ease their insecurities. These insecurities, naturally, have changed a good deal
since the days of hunter-gatherers, who feared bad weather, disease, and failure to find animals
to hunt. Insecurities, though, remain very much with us, and will doubtless continue to do so
in the future. So I suspect there will be a few more invented worldviews. What fears will they
answer? This will depend on us. It will depend on how safe our world feels.
And that, needless to say, is anybody’s guess.
If you want a quick, readable interpretation of the development of religion across the globe and over the
history of modern man, An Atheist’s History of Belief will do well. This is not a scholarly book, so a great
amount of detail is not to be found here, but the topic requires a very broad scope and a consistent return
to basic underlying themes. Matthew Kneale reminds us throughout the book that religion and God-belief
are manmade inventions, which is probably the only significant atheistic premise in this book. But he also
correctly ties in these beliefs to a need for any human society to deal with and overcome existential fear,
whether it is derived from the fear of death, the necessity to accept the vicissitudes of nature, or the
requirement that mankind overcome a propensity for one man to perpetrate evil on others. In that
respect, Kneale has succeeded in laying a firm ground for his arguments regarding each of the religions
and cults he reviews in his book.
Garrett Glass
jehoshuathebook.com