A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway – review

Those who write about religion tend to have an axe to grind. Believers strain credulity to prove that gods exist, or at least their version of them. Meanwhile the violently anti-religious burn an equivalent amount of energy in seeking to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that such claims are plain bunkum – and damaging, cruel, sometimes murderous bunkum at that.

Thank God, then – if I can use that phrase in a neutral way – for Richard Holloway and his carefully weighted, beautifully written and strangely compelling brief history of world religions. For he takes no sides but instead manages to be fair to all in his wise judgments, while instinctively understanding both the appeal of faith and its pitfalls.

As well he might, for Holloway is famously a bishop who stopped believing in God. A former head of the Anglican (Episcopal) Church in Scotland, he has spoken since his resignation in 2000 of a lifelong struggle to believe. Today a popular broadcaster and prolific writer, he is an agnostic, but bears no grudge against the religious calling that took up so much of his adult life.

What threads the book together as it travels around the globe and through millennia, charting the growth and (sometimes) the decline of religions, is Holloway’s parallel search for what it is in the human situation and psyche that has made us hanker after religion in the first place. He puts it down to us still wanting to know where we come from as a species, what our place is in the universe, and most of all a fear of being alone. In the simplest of terms, religion feeds our appetite for hope – whether it be building communities around shared rituals and beliefs, creating an ultimate dispenser of justice, or just imagining life after life.

Holloway tells his story in more or less chronological order from 130,000BC – the era when evidence of religious belief in the way our ancestors buried their dead first emerged – right through to today’s Scientologists, secular humanists and scary fundamentalists. Most writers who attempt such a sweep end up giving the religions they know best – by upbringing, culture or preference – too great a prominence. Not Holloway, though: he shows no favouritism to the various branches of the Christian family and is just as authoritative on Islam as he is on Anglicanism.

And as clear-sighted. In the current, polarised climate in the Middle East, it is often deemed politic to avoid pointing out how derivative much of Muhammad’s message was when he started to preach it in 613, or indeed the large debt that Islam owes to Judaism. Holloway, though, has no time for such fudging. “There was,” he states plainly, “nothing original about his message and Muhammad never claimed there was. It was a reminder [to his hearers, the first Muslims] of what they had forgotten. It was the message of the prophet Abraham; idols were dupes and there was no God but God.”

He is just as blunt about anyone who claims to have a brand new insight into the divine mind and sets up his own religion (and they are almost entirely men). “Religions are a dime a dozen,” he writes, as ever giving the overview, even in the midst of an avalanche of detail. “And there’s always room for another in the spiritual marketplace. The game changes when the new creed starts threatening the profits and privileges of the established set-up.” That, he points out, is what happened with Jesus in first-century Jerusalem, just as surely as it did with Muhammad in seventh-century Mecca.

Which brings us neatly to the question of religious violence. It is a commonplace in the west today that religion is the cause of all the violence in the world. Some experts, though, have argued persuasively against this view, among them the eminent religious historian Karen Armstrong – another person formerly of faith (she was a Catholic nun) who now stands back and takes a dispassionate view. Violence purportedly carried out in the name of God, she holds, is nearly always in reality caused by other factors – political, social, racial and economic.

Holloway half accepts Armstrong’s point, but is less inclined to absolve religion itself. It has still caused, he insists, some of the worst violence in history. “So if we mean by God the loving creator of the universe,” he writes, “then either he doesn’t exist or religion has got him wrong.”

There are, inevitably, drawbacks in trying to cram 130,000 years of history, and the theology that underpins it, into fewer than 260 pages. Methodists and Baptists, for example, might feel slighted at being entirely overlooked when Quakers, much smaller in number, get a whole chapter to themselves.

Equally, compressing the essence of elaborate systems of belief, which have evolved over thousands of years, into pithy and transparent sentences can cause corners to be cut. Next year sees the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther “starting” the Reformation by nailing his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, in Germany. Most historians now accept that he never brandished his hammer, but Holloway includes the detail anyway, with no disclaimer. Religions, after all, like their myths and legends.

But these are venial rather than mortal sins. If the book has a message for our times, it comes when Holloway notes the fact that religion has an extraordinary instinct for survival. It is, he writes, “the anvil that has worn out many hammers”.

Since, on such a basis, it is here to stay for the foreseeable future, there can be no better place to learn more about it than in the pages of this enlightening book.

A Little History of Religion is published by Yale University Press (£14.99). Click here to order it for £12.29

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