Explores the forces behind Western secularism.
With wit and remarkable breadth of learning, Ryrie addresses an issue that touches us all.
An elegant and canny book…It offers a salutary reminder that most of us adopt many beliefs out of intuition, habit, or deference to our social environment.
Ryrie wants to refocus our attention on the masses, on what ordinary, everyday people have thought and believed, and their own experiences of doubt and unbelief…Ryrie has done an impressive job of unearthing a wide range of primary and secondary sources that give us some fascinating glimpses into a hidden world…Genuinely innovative and casts new shafts of light on our understanding of the emergence of unbelief.
Journal of Church and State - Gavin Hyman
An informative, engaging, creative, and persuasive account of the origin of unbelief in western societies. The research is deep and the writing sprightly. Ryrie’s central argument is that unbelief existed as practice before it existed in theory, that moral intuitions counted much more heavily than philosophical arguments in the emergence of atheism, and that ‘an emotional history’ of anger at Christian authorities and anxiety arising from disputes internal to Christianity pointed the way to the rejection of traditional Christianity and open atheism of more recent centuries.
Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like the religious poet John Donne to grapple with church dogma. They did not always manage to hold on to their faith, and their probing undermined religion from within. The currents of atheism were stirred not by the levelheaded philosophers of a later era but by these seekers’ struggle, and occasional failure, to ‘doubt wisely.’
Most of us like to believe that we believe what we believe because rigorous reasoning and reliable evidence have led us there…In reality, as Alec Ryrie shows in this short but beautifully crafted history of early doubt, unbelief was (and is) chosen for ‘instinctive, inarticulate and intuitive’ reasons just as much as is belief…Unbelievers covers much ground in a short space with deep erudition and considerable wit.
Ryrie, who locates himself in the camp of the believers, offers a sensitive and sympathetic account of those on the other side. He wears his learning lightly, letting the actors speak for themselves. Unbelief, in his diverse range of subjects, is not unthinking or perverse, but the outcome of genuine and profound struggles of conscience. The book does a wonderful job of bringing these previously unheard voices to our attention, and in doing so adds a vital new dimension to our understanding of the origins of modern unbelief.
Los Angeles Review of Books
How has unbelief come to dominate so many Western societies? The usual account invokes the advance of science and rational knowledge. Ryrie’s alternative, in which emotions are the driving force, offers new and interesting insights into our past and present.
Well-researched and thought-provoking…Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.
Engaging…Ryrie is a careful observer of history and…a good explainer of complicated theology.
National Catholic Reporter - Bill Tammeus
The brilliance of this book lies in its reimagining of an old debate stirred by Lucien Febvre and his many critics. Ryrie takes us beyond the slightly stale polemic of the leading theological figures of the early modern world to let us hear the voices of men and women who lived through the torrid age of religious change. In Unbelievers we encounter heart-wrenching expressions of faith and its absence with nuanced attention to words and modulations of emotions. We find preachers, female writers, dramatists, poets, and essayists who struggled daily with a religion that demanded faith. Ryrie rejects easy connections between their world and ours while offering an arresting consideration of how their voices shaped what came after them. Deep insights are leavened with characteristic wit and humor, making this book a crucial read for anyone thinking about religion in our time.
Ryrie doesn’t debunk; he describes. He traffics in empathy, not criticism…For those looking to make sense of [atheism], Unbelievers will serve as an outstanding guide.
Gospel Coalition - Andrew Wilson
Ryrie challenges intellectual historians to work on genealogies that are not limited to ideas or disincarnate minds. We must engage with historical developments of persons as wholes. This means investigating the mirror of history and finding people. This should allow us to look at ourselves in a more comprehensive way…Reminds us that despite the various certainties of our time, anxiety and anger are presently destabilizing us and so opening new possibilities.
Genealogies of Modernity - Terence Sweeney
If unbelief needs the believer’s reflecting gaze to better understand itself, then in Ryrie atheism may have found its ideal expositor…A joy to read not just because it is beautifully written and smartly conceived, but also because of the exercise in intellectual generosity to which it invites the reader…Unbelievers is as much about the past as it is about the present—and perhaps about the future, too.
This is a fascinating book…A deeply researched historical study, wide-ranging and engagingly written.
European Legacy - Tim Harris
With wit and remarkable breadth of learning, Ryrie addresses an issue that touches us all.
09/02/2019
This brief, entertaining volume from Ryrie (Protestants ) explores the experience and practice of “unbelief” as it emerged in the modern Western cultures. He defines unbelief as a state of dissociation from or dissatisfaction with a dominant Christian religious narrative, and categorizes these responses as either an emotional story of anger or an anxiety that individuals put upon themselves. The former he considers a reaction against an overwhelmingly homogenous Christian society; the latter as the inability to keep one’s faith as sturdy as one feels it should be. Ryrie begins with a careful discussion of the history and changing definitions of atheist and unbeliever , and his reasons for using these particular terms. The bulk of the work concerns unbelief in Western Europe in the centuries around the Reformation, through the experiences of Protestants, Catholics, and various breakaway groups that sought to locate belief outside the organized church. Wrapping in and analyzing the writing of Machiavelli, Christopher Marlowe, and Walter Raleigh, as well as lesser-known figures such as Hannah Allen, Ludovic Muggleton, and Caspar Schwenkfield, Ryrie’s comprehensive research makes this a masterly piece of work. Ryrie’s deeply researched work is an enlightening ramble through intellectual history of opposition to Christian belief that will appeal to any reader interested in religious scholarship. (Nov.)
Well-researched and thought-provoking…Ryrie is definitely on to something right and important.
Christianity Today - Timothy Larsen
Ryrie, who locates himself in the camp of the believers, offers a sensitive and sympathetic account of those on the other side. He wears his learning lightly, letting the actors speak for themselves. Unbelief, in his diverse range of subjects, is not unthinking or perverse, but the outcome of genuine and profound struggles of conscience. The book does a wonderful job of bringing these previously unheard voices to our attention, and in doing so adds a vital new dimension to our understanding of the origins of modern unbelief.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Peter Harrison
An elegant and canny book…It offers a salutary reminder that most of us adopt many beliefs out of intuition, habit, or deference to our social environment. It is common nowadays to dismiss religious belief as conventional in this manner, but atheism itself is often just as surely produced by a lifeless and unreasoned conformity.
Wall Street Journal - Jeffrey Collins
Ryrie traces the root of religious skepticism to the anger, the anxiety, and the ‘desperate search for certainty’ that drove thinkers like the religious poet John Donne to grapple with church dogma. They did not always manage to hold on to their faith, and their probing undermined religion from within. The currents of atheism were stirred not by the levelheaded philosophers of a later era but by these seekers’ struggle, and occasional failure, to ‘doubt wisely.’
11/01/2019
Emotional histories of religion can be hard to find, but this latest book, after Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World , from Ryrie (Christianity, Durham Univ.) highlights the dynamic role that emotions have played in the very human tendency to disbelieve religious claims. Two emotions particularly run through the work like a guiding current: anxiety and anger. With these two currents, Ryrie has an explanatory tool to pry apart the historical narrative of the rise of atheism during the Enlightenment. In doing so, he finds that unbelief is much older and more nuanced than many historians have credited. This is a history of unbelief that carries readers from ancient to modern times. Ryrie does well to insist that unbelief can be found in the religiously motivated as well as in those who have no need for any notion of God or gods. The author does stick to what he knows best; that is, the book is written predominantly with Christianity in mind. VERDICT Those with an interest in the history of religion will be treated to a new perspective on the old opposition between believers and nonbelievers.—Denis Frias, Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont.
