Some religious people are fictionalists.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now, and a very interesting recent blog post by Quaker theologian Rhiannon Grant has given me a nudge. Not that I’m going to respond directly to what Rhiannon has said; instead, I’m going to follow my own path across similar territory.
“Religion is all made up. It’s all a story. And God is just a character in the story." These sound like the sorts of thing that an atheist might say. But imagine someone who says all of this, and yet is an active and engaged member of a religious community, reading its scriptures, taking part in its liturgy, and speaking its language. That is what I mean by a fictionalist. Fictionalists can be contrasted with realists, who think that God has some sort of existence or reality beyond the story.
Lots of religious people are fictionalist about some parts of their religion and realist about others. Christians might be fictionalist about Genesis but realist about the Gospels. Or they might be fictionalist about the infancy narratives in the Gospels, but realist about the Resurrection. In this post, I’m interested in the people who are fictionalist through and through, which is why I focus on the question of God. If you are a religious person who is fictionalist about God then, to echo Oklahoma, “You’ve gone about as far as you can go”.
If all this sounds strange or puzzling, an analogy might help. Prompted again by some of Rhiannon’s work, I’m going to talk a bit about fandom and fanfic, as a model for religious fictionalism.
Devotees of a particular fictional universe may see themselves as part of a “fandom”, and as part of this they will sometimes write their own stories (or “fanfic”) set in that universe. For instance, there is a vast amount of Harry Potter fanfic. A key concept for fanfic is the idea of “canon”, meaning the authoritative public sources for their fictional universe: for Harry Potter fanfic, the books by J.K Rowling (and perhaps the films also - though this might be controversial) are canon. Fanfic always negotiates a complex relationship with canon. Sometimes fanfic remains entirely within the borders of the canon, but elaborates upon it interstitially. Sometimes fanfic is revisionist: for instance, Hermione marries Harry rather than Ron. And sometimes fanfic engages in a kind of syncretism between different fictional universes: Harry and Hermione might find themselves transported to Mordor in order to help Frodo and Sam destroy the Ring.
For fictionalist believers, the stories of their religious tradition are likewise treated as canonical - not because they are seen as historically or metaphysically true, but because the stories are what gives the religion its shape. And religious practice, whether shared or individual, then becomes a kind of fanfic, a personal or communal response to the canonical story. Like the writer of fanfic, sometimes the fictionalist might choose to revise part of the canonical story (for instance, by reworking some of its sexual taboos). And there can be syncretism here too; for instance, the fictionalist might weave together Christian and Buddhist stories to form a sort of composite canon.
I find the idea of fictionalism strange and surprising, but also intriguing in some ways. I can think of two previous occasions when I’ve tried to engage with it; so for me this post is a third bite of the cherry.
The first was in my mid-twenties. I had stopped being a practising Catholic and I was trying to work out what happened next. Three books made a strong impression on me. One was Iris Murdoch’s novel “The Good Apprentice”, which featured a character who was trying to live a religious life without any reference at all to the concept of God. The second was John Robinson’s “Honest to God”, which puzzled me in many ways, but did at least teach me that God could mean different things to different people. And the third was Don Cupitt’s “Taking Leave of God”, which introduced me to fictionalism. I was very much struck by the clarity and earnestness and passion of Cupitt’s book (none of his later writing ever impressed me in quite the same way); but any tentative attempt I made to adopt the fictionalist point of view myself went nowhere. It was the mental or spiritual equivalent of trying to force myself into an impossible yoga position. Engaging in public worship while doing the enormous feat of translation that Cupitt’s approach seemed to require turned out, in practice, to be exhausting rather than inspiring. And fictionalist prayer defeated me altogether.
My second encounter with fictionalism came more than twenty years later, prompted by a Twitter exchange with someone who said that he believed in God “but made no ontological claims”. This seemed to me to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other; I didn’t know whether he was a fictionalist or not. I suggested to him that he believed in God rather in the sense in which an adult might believe in Santa Claus; he thought this unfair. I wrote up the Santa Claus analogy in a short article that was subsequently published in the journal “Think”. It was rather unsympathetic to believers who made no ontological claims, or “NOC-believers” (which was my rather clunking term for fictionalists). This is how the article ended:
[V]ery often religious people think that what they do is of supreme importance. Bringing up children in their faith is a moral imperative, and for a child to leave the faith would be viewed as a disaster. Converting others is also often an imperative, one that may sometimes involve leaving everything familiar and travelling to a dangerous and hostile place. And giving up one’s own faith is the worse thing of all: to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of one’s own life.
But if what is at stake in religion is engaging in a set of social practices, while making no claims about the world, then it remains deeply perplexing why religious faith, or the lack of it, should characteristically be thought by its adherents to be so toweringly important.
Was this too dismissive? I think so. I don’t think I gave enough weight to the power and normative force of stories.
From our very first breath, we are immersed in a whole set of stories. There are the family’s stories, about unjust wills and disastrous marriages and embarrassing relatives and rich benevolent uncles. There are the country’s stories, about invading or being invaded, or about the heroic time when it stood alone against all the forces of evil in the world. And there are society’s stories, about what sort of life is worth leading and what kinds of people are worth emulating. And unless we are on our guard, all these stories determine the shape of our lives, without our ever being entirely aware of what is going on.
In a society where religion is dominant, fictionalism can be a kind of benevolent compromise for the sceptic, enabling her to join in the rites and rituals of the community with good humour. Fictionalism enables the sceptic to negotiate her own relationship with the dominant story without breaking with it altogether. But in a society where religion is a minority pursuit, the choice to form and shape your life by reference to a religious story can feel like an act of resistance, a kind of self-inoculation: instead of being half-consciously determined by a lot of implicit stories, you decide consciously and deliberately to pattern yourself on a particular, explicit story. Whether fictionalism is understood as being conformist or counter-cultural, people can plausibly choose to adopt it because of the sort of life that it enables or helps them to live. Fandom is a hobby, but fictionalist religion can be a programme for life.
Could you really live and die for a fiction? A lot of people will cheerfully live for money or die for their countries, and in both cases they are engaging with a sort of social fiction: so perhaps the idea of a fictionalist religious martyr is not as implausible as it might at first seem.
For all that, I’m still not a fictionalist. What Quakerism calls “the promptings of love and truth in the heart” seem to me as real as anything else in my life, although often obscured by all sorts of clutter and noise: this is why the deep listening of the Quaker meeting for worship matters so much. And for me “God” is, at the very least, a useful label for whatever mystery reality is ultimately at work in all of this. Rather than being a fictionalist, I’m a kind of agnostic realist: not really knowing what God is, but at the same time not wanting to confine God within the boundaries of a set of stories about God.
But nevertheless, if anyone wants to take one of the world’s great religious traditions, treat it as a normative fiction, and shape their lives accordingly, then I’m not inclined to be dismissive. On the contrary: I’m curious and intrigued to see where this takes them.
(If you are interested in the resemblance between fandom or fanfic and religion, then you might like to look at “The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom”, a collection of essays published by McFarland. I very much enjoyed Rhiannon Grant’s contribution.)
