In this extract from Slavoj Žižek’s new book, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist, Žižek argues that the true formula of atheism requires destroying the very fiction of god from within rather than merely denying his existence.

Slavoj Žižek will be debating Peter Singer and Nancy Sherman at the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in Hay, Wales, on May 24th-27^th, 2024. Check out the incredible line-up of speakers and festival programme here.

What one should advocate is thus the materialist procedure of the immanent self-undermining of a religious edifice – the claim that god is evil or stupid is not only much more unsettling than Peter Singer’s claim that ordinary people are evil, it is also much more unsettling than the claim that there is no god since it destroys from within the very notion of divinity.

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Demonstrating how its God is evil/stupid is much more effective than a direct atheist critique.

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To make this procedure clear, let’s take an example from a different domain. The song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (best known version by Joan Baez) is a first-person narrative relating the economic and social distress experienced by the protagonist, a poor white Southerner, during the last year of the American Civil War; it does not glorify slavery, the Confederacy or Robert E. Lee, it rather tells the story of a poor, non-slave-holding Southerner who tries to make sense of the loss of his brother and his livelihood. As such – as an attempt to render the experience of a poor white man sympathetic to the Southern cause but dismayed at the horror of his suffering for the interests of the rich slave owners – it is much more effective in dismantling this cause than a direct abolitionist critique, in exactly the same way as endorsing a religion but then demonstrating how its God is evil/stupid is much more effective than a direct atheist critique.

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The true formula of atheism is not “god doesn’t exist” but “god not only doesn’t exist, he is also stupid, indifferent, and maybe outright evil”

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In The Rapture (1991, written and directed by Michael Tolkin), Mimi Rogers superbly plays Sharon, a young LA woman who works during the day as a phone operator endlessly repeating the same questions in a small cubicle among dozens of others, while in the evenings she engages in swinging orgies. Bored and dissatisfied at leading such an empty life, Sharon becomes a member of a sect which preaches that the end of times and the Rapture are imminent; turning into a passionate believer, she begins to practice a new, pious lifestyle, gets married to Randy, one of her previous swinging partners, and has a daughter Mary with him. Six years later, when Randy, now also a devoted Christian, is shot to death by a madman, this senseless catastrophe makes her and her daughter even more convinced that the Rapture is soon approaching.

Sharon believes god told her to go with Mary to a nearby desert camping place and wait there until the two are taken into heaven where they will be united with Randy. Foster, a well-meaning, nonbelieving patrol officer, takes care of them there during their long wait when they run out of food. Mary gets impatient and proposes to her mother that they simply kill themselves in order to go to heaven and join Randy immediately. After a couple of weeks, Sharon also loses patience, decides to do the unspeakable and follows Mary’s advice to stop her suffering; however, after shooting Mary, she is unable to take her own life afterwards, knowing that suicides are not allowed into heaven. She confesses her act to Foster who arrests her and takes her to a local jail . . .

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Till this point, the story moves along “realist” lines, and one can easily imagine a possible “atheist” ending: bitter and alone, deprived of her faith, Sharon realizes the horror of what she had committed, and is maybe saved by the good policeman. Here, however, events take a totally unexpected turn: in the jail cell, Rapture happens, literally, in all naivety, including bad special effects. First, deep in the night, Mary appears with two angels, and then, early in the morning, while Sharon sits in her cell, a loud trumpet blast is heard all around and announces a series of supranatural events – prison bars fall down, concrete walls fall apart, etc. Escaping from the jail, Sharon and Foster drive out into the desert, where signs of Rapture multiply, from dust storms up to the horsemen of the apocalypse running after and around the car. Next, Sharon and Foster are both “raptured,” transported to a purgatory-like landscape where Mary approaches them from heaven and pleads with Sharon to accept god, to declare that she loves god – by just doing this she will be able to join Mary and Randy in heaven. Foster, although till now an atheist, quickly seizes the opportunity, says that he loves god and is allowed entrance to heaven, but Sharon refuses, saying that she cannot declare her love for a god who acted so cruelly towards her family for no reason at all. When Mary asks her if she knows for how long she will be confined to the purgatory, condemned to be there alone, Sharon replies: “Forever.”

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Sharon’s resistance to God, her refusal to declare her love for him, is thus an authentic ethical act. It would be totally wrong to say that she rejects the false god and that, in an authentically Christian version of the film, the true Christ should appear at the end, proclaim her a true believer precisely because she refused to declare that she loves the false god. The true temptation to be resisted is thus to declare our love for a god who doesn’t deserve it even if he is real. For a vulgar materialist, all this cannot but appear as an empty mental experiment; however, for a true materialist, it is only in this way that we really renounce god – by way of renouncing him not only insofar as he doesn’t really exist, but even if he is real. In short, the true formula of atheism is not “god doesn’t exist” but “god not only doesn’t exist, he is also stupid, indifferent, and maybe outright evil” – if we do not destroy the very fiction of god from within, it is easy for this fiction to prolong its hold over us in the form of disavowal (“I know there is no god, but he is nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion”). Lacan’s programmatic claim, in Seminar X, that “the atheist, as combatant, as revolutionary, is not one who denies God in his function of omnipotence, but one who affirms oneself as not serving any God”44 fits perfects this final gesture of the heroine in Rapture: even when she directly confronts the divine dimension, she refuses to serve him. If, in the film’s final moment, Sharon were to turn around, she would have seen Christ at her side.

This is an edited extract from Slavoj Žižek’s Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Academic), which published 4^th April. A 25% discount for all editions of Christian Atheism, is available for IAI readers. Use code: ZIZEK25 at the check-out on the Bloomsbury website to claim. Expires midnight 4^th May.

Slavoj Žižek will be debating Peter Singer and Nancy Sherman at the upcoming HowThelightGetsIn Festival in Hay, Wales, on May 24th-27^th, 2024. Check out the incredible line-up of speakers and festival programme here.