S.T. Joshi: The Downfall of God

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/12/08

S.T. Joshi (b. 1958) is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He has edited corrected editions of the works of Lovecraft, several annotated editions of Bierce and Mencken, and has written such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). His award-winning biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), has already become a collector’s item. An expanded and updated version, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, was published in 2 volumes in 2010.

But critical, biographical, and editorial work on weird fiction is only one aspect of Joshi’s multifaceted output. A prominent atheist, Joshi has published the anthology Atheism: A Reader (2000) and the anti-religious polemic, God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003). He has also compiled an important anthology on race relations, Documents of American Prejudice (1999).

Joshi discusses The Downfall of God: A History of Atheism in the West, which examines the decline of religion from classical antiquity to the present day, driven by science, secularism, and cultural changes. He explains that despite recent efforts by figures like Justice Samuel Alito to reverse secular trends, religion’s influence continues to wane. Joshi humorously critiques religion’s inconsistencies, stating it’s no longer credible, and highlights the importance of defending secular gains.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with S.T. Joshi. First things first, and most importantly, we are going to plug a particularly significant book that will be part of a series, The Downfall of God: A History of Atheism in the West. The first question that comes to mind is, why write an entire history of atheism in the West? Second, why focus only on the West? Those are two distinct questions, and both deserve answers.

S.T. Joshi: First of all, I have been studying atheism for most of my life. Curiously enough, I became a more or less dedicated atheist probably in the 1970s when I was a teenager, reading the work—not the fiction, but the essays and letters—of H. P. Lovecraft, the great American horror writer. He wrote thousands of letters, and he was himself a vigorous atheist, defending that position in his correspondence. I was not raised in any religious tradition, thankfully, not even my own native tradition of Hinduism. My father told my mother, “Let our children decide for themselves what they want to believe in if they want to believe in anything, including religion.”

We were not discouraged from believing in anything, but we were allowed to figure it out for ourselves. Ultimately, I became convinced of the atheistic point of view, starting with Lovecraft and later with other writers like Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche. Over time, I began compiling collections of writings on atheism starting in the early 21st century, but I realized that there was no comprehensive history of the subject. I interpret atheism not only as the specific advocacy of disbelief in gods—which is still relatively rare in the West and elsewhere—but also as the general decline of religion’s influence on society, government, law, culture, literature, and music. This is why the book, which will be in two volumes, covers antiquity up to 1600 in the first volume.

The reason this book is so large is that tracking the advance of secularism and the decline of religion is an enormous and highly complex subject. I had to study many different aspects of culture. As for why I focused only on the West, the simple answer is that it reflects my background, despite being from the East, so to speak—I am South Asian, but I am more familiar with European languages. I don’t know Chinese, Japanese, or other Asian languages, and it would have been logistically difficult and incredibly time-consuming to write a world history of atheism, which was my original intention. So, I decided to focus on the West because there is so much to cover, and I felt I could do that well, given my background and expertise. That’s why the book is the way it is.

Jacobsen: Another quick question about the book: What were your major thematic findings when looking at history through the lens of atheism in the West? That’s a fascinating subject—it’s a vast one.

Joshi: Indeed it is. I began with classical antiquity, though I actually started with the Neolithic period, examining how anthropologists and others believe religion was “invented,” if you will, in primitive times. However, my primary focus was on Greek and Roman antiquity, a field I studied extensively at Brown University and Princeton.

So I had a good background there. But moving on from late antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that was a field I had not studied as ardently or in as much detail as I probably should have. I had to do a lot of background research to understand the culture of those eras. I found that even when Christianity, in particular, was dominant throughout the medieval age, cracks appeared. There were schisms and disagreements, even among Christian philosophers and theologians, that set the stage for things like the Renaissance, which began the process of secularization in the West and has continued on to the present day.

Jacobsen: Now, let’s talk about the purpose of this. It’s fascinating. I appreciate it, and we’ll make sure to hyperlink that particular book. Is it on Amazon, or is it available through a publisher?

Joshi: It is available on Amazon. It’s published by Pitchstone Publishing. You can also order it through their website. Technically, it’s not going to be released until November 12th. This will probably be published around that time, so the timing is perfect.

Jacobsen: So, Justice Samuel Alito—he has had a strong alignment with conservative Christian views, which has influenced his judicial decisions. He’s faced criticism, including for flying an upside-down American flag, which was seen as a signal during Joe Biden’s election. What are you seeing in this presentation from Justice Alito, with these flags flown upside down, this “Appeal to Heaven” flag, and various other signifiers of dissent from the political rulership of an elected democratic leader, along with apparent appeals to Christian nationalism?

Joshi: Alito represents a fairly substantial number of Christians, I believe, who feel besieged by people like us. Why do they feel that way? Who knows? Perhaps because they recognize—as I have chronicled in painful detail in my book—that Christianity is, in fact, on the wane. Religion, in general, is on the decline, and they don’t like that.

And so, they are using every possible method within their power—and they still have considerable levers of power—to reverse that trend. But quite frankly, it’s like King Canute trying to command the waves. It’s futile and useless. That’s why I don’t even take Alito’s stance seriously. I poke fun at it because I find that ridicule is a good weapon against religion in general and people like Alito in particular.

Jacobsen: How do you make the distinction, comedically, between making a joke and making a joke with a substantiated point?

Joshi: I like to think that I always make a joke with a substantiated point. What I argue is that Alito is not merely expressing an opinion—he is obviously entitled to his opinion, as everyone is—but he is using that opinion to, shall we say, tip the scales toward his side. In my judgment, he is doing so illegitimately because it defies many centuries of American jurisprudence regarding the separation of church and state. But as I say, even he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court can only do so much in that regard. I am not concerned about the emergence of a theocracy in this country.

It will not happen because the great majority of Americans do not want it to happen, and they will make sure it does not. But in a sense, do we as humanists or secular humanists make a logistical error—or even, I don’t know, a marketing error—when we create this fear around Christian nationalism if it’s not something that will necessarily come true? Are we tallying up fears over a fantasy? One should always be vigilant in these matters, as a series of accidents could result in certain bad things happening from our perspective.

So yes, one should always defend one’s position. The problem with secularists, in general, is that we do not organize well. It’s like herding cats—because we think.

Jacobsen: The perennial comparison.

Joshi: It is. I love cats. I’m a cat devotee. In fact, I’m a proud, childless cat gentleman, if I may say so. So, defending our position and not retreating from the gains we have made over centuries is certainly important.

But I don’t believe we need to become hysterical in this fight. I remember reading a book by Rod Dreher some years ago called The Benedict Option, which came out around 2016. He’s a conservative Christian, and he basically argued that Christians are so besieged by us horrible secularists that all they can do is retreat into their little communities and wait out the storm while the barbarians—and he specifically calls us that, barbarians—do their thing and eventually die out, apparently.

And then, perhaps after centuries, Christians can come out of their little enclaves and reclaim the earth. Well, if he thinks that way, good luck to him. The problem with this general attitude is that Christians in general, and indeed religious people in general—at least those who are not fanatics—do not live their religion, and they haven’t for centuries. I don’t say that they are hypocrites for doing so. I don’t say, “Oh, you profess belief in God, but you don’t act on it.”

It is difficult to act on a belief in a benevolent God, especially in our society. There are so many other distractions that can take one’s attention away. The fact of the matter is that the great majority of religious people, especially in the West, attend church for one hour a week. For the other 167 hours, they act as if there is no God. That’s fine—that’s just the way things are. That’s why I don’t believe there’s any monumental concern that we’re going to lapse into a theocracy.

Jacobsen: What about situations where we see an apparent religious motivation for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has been a large concern for a lot of feminist women and progressive political figures? How does that fit into this narrative?

Joshi: In my most cynical moments, when the legality of Roe v. Wade was being decided in 2022, I came close to uttering a prayer—the closest I could ever come to doing so.

I said, “Supreme Court, please, please, please overturn Roe v. Wade.” Why? Because the backlash that I knew would happen did happen, and it is still happening. In that sense, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is the gift that keeps on giving, and it has damaged the reputation of the Supreme Court. It has energized the political and non-religious left and even the religious left in some regards, and it is certainly fueling a large part of our current Democratic presidential campaign.

So what is there not to like? It is unfortunate that there are certain states where abortion is either illegal or difficult, but that will change over time. I would be surprised if, in a relatively short period, abortion becomes legal again across this country. 

Jacobsen: So, a filmmaker, Lauren Windsor, approached Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts to argue for a return to godliness in the country. Roberts was noncommittal, but Alito agreed. How did that play into this?

Joshi: She was deliberately trying to elicit those opinions to paint both justices as religious fanatics. She succeeded in snagging Alito, while Roberts wisely stayed noncommittal.

Jacobsen: Mindful of time, here’s one quick question: What do we get wrong about Alito? Are there any myths that we, as secularists, hold about him?

Joshi: I don’t know him personally, obviously. I don’t know much about him. But it’s clear that he, along with others on the Court, particularly Justice Thomas and perhaps Amy Coney Barrett, believe that their religion is under threat, and they feel obliged to stand up for it.

Now, they are free to stand up for it in terms of advocacy, or however they choose to go about it. They are not free to twist our laws to give their religion a boost. Their exalted position does not, and should not, allow them to do that, and they have been rightly criticized for it. Let me be blunt—they will pay the penalty for it, not in any overt violence or anything like that; nobody wants that. However, many of their decisions will be overturned once the Supreme Court becomes a saner institution, and I am confident that will happen someday.

Jacobsen: Do you think the Supreme Court’s current position, being out of lockstep with much of American public opinion, especially regarding polls, is a major driver in the decline of religiosity in the United States? So people who identify with specific tenets, who identify with the label Christian, Muslim, etc., and with the fervency with which people believe, with metrics like how often they attend or how long they attend—what about them? Is the Supreme Court a major driver in that general attitude?

Joshi: I don’t know if the Supreme Court is a major driver of that general attitude. If you read the second volume of my history of atheism, which won’t come out until at least next year, you will see that the decline of religion has been fairly steady since the 16th century for a whole lot of reasons—science, the criticism of the Bible, and just the general advance of secular civilization in so many different aspects, including literature, the arts, culture, and music.

So, putting that in a broad perspective, what is happening in the Supreme Court is just a little blip in the grand scale of things. I do not see how it is possible to reverse the tide of secularism because, quite frankly, religion is simply not credible anymore, and it hasn’t been for several centuries. There is no need to resort to religion to explain any phenomena of the universe. Even people who are not well-educated in literature and the sciences understand that because they don’t see how religion is doing anything.

It always amuses me when Christians refer to their God as a benevolent God and then turn around and say that certain bad events, like hurricanes and tornadoes, are “acts of God,” which would suggest, quite frankly, that God is a malevolent creature—or at least inexplicable to our understanding. This unwittingly turns most Christians into agnostics. If you believe in a God but have no understanding of what that God is like, you are basically an agnostic. So there it is. It is simply impossible to take religion seriously anymore, which is not to say that religion won’t be a nuisance for quite a bit longer. We should always be careful and vigilant in pointing out these nuisances whenever we can.

Jacobsen: Mr. Joshi, thank you. Nice to meet you, and thank you so much for your time today.

Joshi: I appreciate it. Sure thing.

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