Why do many Western artists and philosophers reject or hate religion? This question touches on a very rich undercurrent in the intellectual and cultural history of the West—and much of the rest of the world.Many artists and philosophers occupied quite different points along this spectrum. Some, like Nietzsche, were genuinely hostile; others, like Albert Camus, inhabited a kind of tragic indifference; still others, like Rabindranath Tagore, sought to construct an alternative spirituality entirely outside the confines of formal religious institutions.What unites them is not, in the end, a hatred of the sacred, but a resistance to religion as an instrument of power, as dogma, and as a constraint upon human freedom—a critique which, with considerable irony, finds its echo within the mystical traditions of those very religions themselves.Let's explore its roots.
When John Lennon wrote the lines “and no religion too” in his song “Imagine” (1971), he was not simply voicing a personal eccentricity. He was giving melodic form to a current of thought that had been building in the Western intellectual tradition for at least three centuries—a current fed by reason, by rage, by sorrow, and, ultimately, by the unspeakable evidence of history itself. This article traces the current from its origins in the Enlightenment, through the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and into the generations of artists, philosophers, and ordinary people whose relationship with religion was altered, sometimes beyond repair, by what the twentieth century had shown them.
A note of analytical precision is warranted at the outset. “Religion” in this context refers almost exclusively to organised, institutional Christianity in its Western forms—principally Roman Catholicism and the mainline Protestant churches. This is not, as we shall see, because other religious traditions are beyond criticism, but because the tradition of secular critique examined here was born within Western civilisation and directed, with the intimacy of the insider, at the faith that had shaped it.The Long Reckoning Between Western Christianity and the Intellectual TraditionFrom the Enlightenment to the Holocaust and BeyondPart I: The Enlightenment and the Assault on Ecclesiastical Authority
1.1 — The Birth of Secular ReasonThe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe witnessed a transformation in the very grammar of intellectual authority. Where Scripture and the pronouncements of the Church had once served as the final court of appeal in matters of truth, a new tribunal was erected in their place: the tribunal of reason. This was not an overnight revolution but a gradual, often dangerous, process of repositioning — one in which philosophers, natural scientists, and men of letters risked social ostracism, imprisonment, and occasionally worse.René Descartes, though himself a Catholic, helped lay the groundwork by insisting that the only reliable starting point for knowledge was the thinking, doubting self — not tradition, not authority, not Scripture. Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by his own Jewish community and viewed with deep suspicion by Christian authorities, took the argument further: God and Nature were one and the same, and the Bible was a human document requiring interpretation like any other. These were not merely academic positions. They were acts of intellectual insurrection.It was the French philosophes of the eighteenth century who carried the assault most loudly into public life. Voltaire — françois-Marie Arouet — devoted much of his formidable satirical energy to the Roman Catholic Church, which he famously urged his correspondents to “écrasez l’infâme”: crush the infamous thing. For Voltaire, the Church was not an institution of moral uplift but of organised obscurantism, buttressed by the torture chambers of the Inquisition and the complacency of a clergy more interested in wealth and power than in truth or charity.David Hume, writing in Scotland, brought a colder and more systematic scepticism to bear. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (posthumously published in 1779) dismantled, with surgical patience, the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, through the Encyclopédie, sought to organise all human knowledge on rational principles, implicitly rendering revelation unnecessary. The project of the Enlightenment, in its most radical form, was to complete what it saw as the unfinished business of the Renaissance: to free the human mind from the tutelage of the Church.1.2 — The Church’s Record: Science, Power, and ViolenceThe Enlightenment critique was not purely philosophical. It was also historical, and the history the philosophes rehearsed was damning. The condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition in 1633 — for maintaining that the Earth moved around the Sun — became the defining symbol of the conflict between ecclesiastical authority and the empirical investigation of nature. That the Church eventually, and belatedly, acknowledged its error did little to erase the memory.The Inquisition itself, in its various national manifestations, cast a long shadow. The Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478, subjected thousands to interrogation, torture, and execution in the name of doctrinal purity. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 — carried out under a decree signed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and blessed by the Church — was among the largest forced displacements in medieval European history. The burning of heretics at the stake, the persecution of Protestants and Catholics in turn depending on who held power, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) which devastated Central Europe along confessional lines — all of this accumulated into an indictment that secular thinkers would cite for generations.What made the indictment particularly powerful was its ironic quality. Christianity proclaimed itself a religion of love, forgiveness, and brotherhood. Its institutional record suggested something rather different. For the philosophes, this gap between profession and practice was not an accident or a corruption of an otherwise pure ideal: it was evidence that the authority of the Church rested on foundations of coercion rather than truth.Part II: The Nineteenth Century — From Critique to Diagnosis2.1 — Marx: Religion as the Opium of the PeopleKarl Marx inherited the Enlightenment critique and radicalised it. For Marx, the question was not simply whether religion was true (it was not), but what social function it served. His answer, formulated most memorably in the introduction to his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was that religion functioned as “the opium of the people.” It was a painkiller for social misery — a fantastical compensation for a world in which the many were exploited by the few. In offering the labouring poor the consolation of heaven, religion made their earthly condition more bearable and, in doing so, made it more durable. It was, in this analysis, not merely false but actively complicit in oppression.This was a critique that went far beyond the Enlightenment’s concern with intellectual error. Marx was arguing that religion was a structural feature of class society, produced by misery and serving to perpetuate it. The solution was not better philosophy but social revolution. When the conditions that generated religion were abolished, religion itself would wither away. Marx had little interest in anti-clerical polemic for its own sake — what mattered was the transformation of the material conditions of human life.The Marxist critique proved extraordinarily influential, not only in revolutionary politics but in the cultural and intellectual life of the twentieth century. Its echoes can be heard in the scepticism of artists who saw organised religion as an instrument of the ruling class, a means of keeping the poor docile and the powerful unchallenged.2.2 — Nietzsche: The Death of God and the Slave MoralityFriedrich Nietzsche approached the question from an entirely different direction. Where Marx was primarily interested in religion’s social function, Nietzsche was concerned with its psychological and cultural consequences. His declaration, in The Gay Science (1882) and later works, that “God is dead” was not a triumphant atheist proclamation but a diagnosis of a cultural crisis. European civilisation had been sustained for centuries by a Christian moral framework. Now that framework was crumbling — not because of external attack but because of internal contradictions, and because the intellectual honesty that Christianity itself had cultivated had turned against Christianity’s own foundations.Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity was simultaneously more radical and more personal than Marx’s. In The Genealogy of Morality (1887) and The Antichrist (1895), he argued that Christian ethics represented what he called “slave morality” — a value system born of ressentiment, of the impotent revenge of the weak against the strong. Christian virtues — humility, meekness, compassion, self-denial — were, in his analysis, not genuine virtues at all but the sublimated envy of those too feeble to assert themselves. In teaching people to prize suffering and submission, Christianity had produced a civilisation characterised by what Nietzsche saw as a life-denying nihilism.Nietzsche did not offer Marx’s political solution. His response to the death of God was the vision of the “Übermensch” — the individual who creates his own values in the absence of divine sanction — and a thoroughgoing “revaluation of all values.” The influence of this vision on twentieth-century artists, writers, and intellectuals was immense, if often misunderstood. The existentialist tradition — from Sartre and Camus to the wider culture of post-war bohemianism — drew deeply from Nietzsche’s insistence that in a world without God, the individual must assume total responsibility for the meaning of his own existence.2.3 — Freud: Religion as Illusion and NeurosisSigmund Freud added a third dimension to the nineteenth-century critique of religion. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), he argued that religion was a product of the unconscious — specifically, a collective neurosis rooted in the helplessness of childhood and the terrifying contingency of adult life. The belief in a benevolent God was, in Freudian terms, the projection of the idealised father onto the cosmos: an infantile wish-fulfilment that civilised adults would, in time, be obliged to relinquish.Freud’s analysis was typically reductive — he had a genius for explaining away the transcendent — but it proved enormously influential in the cultural circles of the early twentieth century, particularly among artists and writers who were already inclined towards scepticism. If religion was a neurosis, then the task of the secular intellectual was therapeutic: to help humanity grow out of its dependence on comforting fictions and to face reality with adult courage.Part III: The Holocaust — The Wound That Would Not Heal
3.1 — The Theological Roots of European Antisemitism
To understand the relationship between the Holocaust and the subsequent crisis of religious faith in the West, one must begin with an uncomfortable historical truth: the antisemitism that the Nazi regime exploited and radicalised had deep roots in Christian theology. For nearly two millennia, the Church had taught that the Jewish people bore collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This charge of deicide — the killing of God — was used to justify discrimination, exclusion, forced conversion, and periodic episodes of mass violence against Jewish communities throughout Europe.The theological architecture of Christian anti-Judaism was elaborate. Jews were depicted as the children of the devil, as agents of Satan, as a people cursed by God for their rejection of the Messiah. These tropes permeated medieval iconography, sermons, mystery plays, and popular culture. They shaped legal structures that confined Jews to ghettos, prohibited them from owning land, and barred them from most professions. They underwrote the Crusader massacres of Rhineland Jewish communities in 1096, the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, and from dozens of other territories across the medieval period.Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, was a virulent antisemite. His 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies called for the burning of Jewish synagogues and schools, the confiscation of Jewish property, and the forced labour of Jewish people. Nazi propagandists would later cite Luther approvingly. The point is not that medieval Christian theology caused the Holocaust — the relationship is far more complex and contested than that — but that centuries of Church-sponsored anti-Jewish hatred had prepared the cultural soil in which Nazi racial ideology could take root and flourish.
3.2 — The Holocaust: Six Million, and the Silence of God
Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews — two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe. They were shot in mass executions by mobile killing units (the Einsatzgruppen) in the forests and ravines of Eastern Europe; they were gassed in extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, and Majdanek; they were starved, worked to death, subjected to grotesque medical experiments, and systematically dehumanised before they were killed.This was not a natural catastrophe. It was a human enterprise, carried out with industrial efficiency in the heart of Christian Europe, in a country that had produced Kant, Hegel, Beethoven, and Schiller — a country whose population was overwhelmingly Christian. The perpetrators were not pagans from the steppes but Germans: educated, culturally sophisticated, shaped by centuries of Christian civilisation. Many of them were baptised Christians. Some were regular churchgoers. A number of SS officers received the sacraments.For those who survived — and for those who came after and tried to make sense of what had happened — the theological questions were inescapable. Where had God been? How could an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God have permitted this? The Jewish tradition has a name for this problem: theodicy — the attempt to justify the ways of God to man in the face of radical evil. The Holocaust did not merely challenge theodicy; it seemed, to many, to make the exercise itself obscene.Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and went on to become perhaps the most important literary witness to the Holocaust, described in his memoir Night (1958) a scene of devastating symbolic power. Three prisoners — one of them a young boy — were hanged in front of the assembled camp. As the boy, too light to die quickly, hung strangling on the rope, a man behind Wiesel asked, “Where is God? Where is He?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him answer: “Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows.” This was not atheism but something worse — a faith that had survived by passing through the fire and emerged, barely recognisable, on the other side.3.3 — The Church’s Conduct During the Holocaust
The moral standing of the institutional churches during the Holocaust is a matter of historical record that admits of little comfortable interpretation. Pope Pius XII, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 until 1958, has been the subject of sustained historical controversy. The evidence indicates that he possessed detailed knowledge of the extermination of European Jews and chose, for reasons that historians continue to debate, not to issue an explicit public condemnation. His defenders argue that private diplomatic efforts saved lives; his critics contend that a direct and unambiguous papal denunciation — morally authoritative in a way that no other pronouncement could have been — might have given many Catholics pause before participation in atrocities, and might have saved lives that were lost in silence.At the local level, the record was mixed. There were priests, pastors, and ordinary Christians who risked their lives to shelter Jewish families and individuals — the Righteous Among the Nations recognised by Yad Vashem include thousands of Christians. But there were also clergy who blessed Nazi soldiers, who preached indifference or worse from their pulpits, and who participated in the betrayal of their Jewish neighbours. The German Protestant churches, with honourable exceptions — most notably the Confessing Church and figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer — largely accommodated themselves to the Nazi regime.The institutional failure was not merely moral but theological. Christianity had proclaimed, for two thousand years, that it was the custodian of universal human dignity and the voice of the divine conscience in history. When the greatest crime in recorded history was being committed in its midst, that voice was, at best, muffled. The gap between Christianity’s self-understanding and its actual conduct in the face of evil was, for many observers, simply too large to bridge.3.4 — Post-War Theology: Attempting the Impossible
The theological community was not blind to the enormity of what had occurred. In the decades following the war, Jewish and Christian theologians alike struggled to respond. Jewish thinkers such as Emil Fackenheim argued that after Auschwitz, Jews were under a moral obligation to survive and to refuse to grant Hitler posthumous victories, even the victory of their abandonment of faith. Others, such as Richard Rubenstein, concluded that the traditional God of history — the God who acts in time, who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked — was simply incompatible with the reality of the death camps. In his After Auschwitz (1966), Rubenstein argued that the Holocaust had made classical theism untenable and that Jewish identity would have to be reconstructed on different foundations.Christian theologians, for their part, were compelled to reckon with their own tradition’s complicity in the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) produced the declaration Nostra Aetate, which formally repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion — a theological position that had been sustaining anti-Jewish hatred for nineteen centuries. It was a significant, if belated, act of self-correction. It could not undo the centuries; it could not restore the dead.
Part IV: The Artistic and Cultural Inheritance
4.1 — Existentialism and the Post-War Generation
The philosophical response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century — the First World War, the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb — was existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, writing in the shadow of the German occupation of France and the revelations of the death camps, articulated a vision of the human condition in which there was no God, no inherent meaning in the universe, and no guarantee that history moved in any direction other than the one that human beings, by their choices, imposed upon it.For Sartre, existence preceded essence: human beings were not created for any purpose, were not stamped with a divine image, and were therefore terrifyingly free. For Camus, the central problem of philosophy was the absurd — the collision between the human longing for meaning and the universe’s utter indifference to that longing. Camus was not a militant atheist; he was something more melancholy — a man who could not believe in God but who felt the absence as a wound. His essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) proposed that the only honest response to the absurd was to revolt against it — to insist on living fully in the face of meaninglessness.This existentialist sensibility saturated the culture of the 1950s and 1960s — in literature, in cinema, in the emerging world of rock and roll. The Beat Generation in America — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs — absorbed it and transmuted it into a specifically American idiom of rebellion against conformity, consumerism, and the spiritual emptiness of post-war prosperity. The counterculture of the 1960s, in which John Lennon and the Beatles were central figures, was the popular expression of this deeper intellectual current.4.2 — John Lennon and “Imagine”: A Cultural Synthesis
John Lennon was born in Liverpool in 1940, the year after the outbreak of the Second World War, and grew up in a Britain scarred by bombing, rationing, and the long psychic aftermath of a conflict that had shaken every certainty. He came of age in the 1950s in a country that was simultaneously rebuilding itself and losing its empire — a country whose confidence in its institutions, including its churches, had been quietly eroded by what the war had revealed about the limits of civilisation.The Beatles, as they rose to global prominence in the early 1960s, were not an explicitly political or philosophical band — but they were keenly sensitive to the cultural atmosphere. Lennon’s famous remark in 1966, in an interview with the journalist Maureen Cleave, that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” caused an international furore — particularly in the American South, where records were publicly burnt and radio stations banned their music. Yet the remark, stripped of its provocative framing, was an observation about the declining authority of institutional religion in modern Western life, particularly among the young.By the time Lennon recorded “Imagine” in 1971, he had passed through the counterculture’s fascination with Eastern spirituality (his study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968), through the political radicalism of the late 1960s, and through the dissolution of the Beatles. The song was, as he himself acknowledged, essentially a sugar-coated version of the Communist Manifesto — a utopian vision of a world without the three great sources of human division as he understood them: nations, private property, and religion.The line “and no religion too” has often been misread as simple atheism. It is more accurately understood as anti-institutionalism. Lennon was not a thoroughgoing atheist; under the influence of Yoko Ono, he remained drawn to forms of Eastern spirituality that resisted doctrinal definition. What he opposed was organised religion as a machine for division — for sorting humanity into competing confessional identities prepared to fight and die in defence of their particular version of the sacred. In this, he was the inheritor of a tradition that ran from Voltaire through Marx, through the existentialists, through the traumatic lessons of the Holocaust.4.3 — The Broader Artistic Tradition
Lennon was, of course, only one figure in a vast artistic tradition of religious scepticism and anti-clericalism. In literature, the lineage runs through Shelley — who was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on the necessity of atheism — through Thomas Hardy, whose novels are saturated with a sense of cosmic indifference, through D.H. Lawrence, who sought to replace the Christian God with the vital energies of nature and sexuality, through James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a sustained reckoning with the psychological damage inflicted by a Catholic education.In France, the tradition of anti-clericalism was woven into the very fabric of republican political culture. The separation of Church and State in France (laïcité), formalised in the law of 1905, was not merely a political arrangement but an expression of a deep cultural conviction that institutional religion was incompatible with human freedom and rational governance. This tradition produced writers such as Anatole France, whose ironic fictions deflated religious pretension with relentless wit, and later Albert Camus, whose novels explored the human condition without recourse to divine consolation.In music, the tradition of challenging religious authority stretches from the folk traditions of protest song through the blues (with its roots in a Black American experience of suffering that was too raw to be contained within the pieties of official Christianity) to the rock and roll revolution of the 1950s and its successors. The very performance of rock and roll was, for many conservative Christians, an act of religious transgression — a bodily, sexual, Dionysian assault on the Apollonian restraint that Protestant Christianity had long demanded of its adherents.Part V: The Legacy and the Continuing Conversation
5.1 — The New Atheism and Its Discontents
The tradition examined in this article found a new and particularly strident expression in the early twenty-first century, in the movement that came to be known as the New Atheism. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett — the so-called four horsemen — brought the secular critique of religion to mass audiences through a series of bestselling books that combined scientific argumentation with a polemical vigour reminiscent of the Enlightenment philosophes.Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) was the most historically-minded of these works, drawing on the full range of religious atrocities from the Crusades to the modern religious violence of the Middle East to argue that faith, as such, was not a benign or neutral phenomenon but an active cause of human suffering. Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) approached the question from evolutionary biology, arguing that belief in God was an illusion explicable by the mechanisms of natural selection, and that it was time for the world to grow out of it.These works provoked fierce responses from religious thinkers, philosophers of religion, and even from secular intellectuals who found the New Atheism philosophically crude and culturally tone-deaf. Critics such as Terry Eagleton argued that Dawkins and Hitchens fundamentally misunderstood what religion was and what it did — that they were attacking a caricature of belief rather than its most sophisticated forms. The debate continues, and it is a debate that shows no sign of reaching a resolution.5.2 — The Question of the Non-Western Other
Throughout this article, the focus has remained firmly on the Western, primarily Christian, context. This is historically justified — the tradition of secular critique examined here is a Western tradition directed at Western religion. But it is important, in conclusion, to register the limitations of this perspective.The assumption, common among certain Western secularists, that the critique of institutional Christianity can be extended without modification to all religious traditions, is both intellectually lazy and culturally imperialist. Other religious traditions have their own internal critical and reformist movements, their own reckoning with the relationship between spiritual authority and political power, their own theodicies. The Islamic tradition of criticism of corrupt ulema (scholars), the Hindu reformism of Rammohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda, the Buddhist movements for social engagement associated with figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh — all of these represent sophisticated internal conversations that do not map neatly onto the Western narrative of religion versus reason.Moreover, the romantic idealisation of Eastern spirituality by Western intellectuals and artists — from Schopenhauer’s fascination with the Upanishads to Lennon’s sojourn in India — is itself a form of Orientalism: a projection onto the exotic Other of qualities that the Western tradition could not find at home. Eastern religions, viewed from a sufficient distance, appeared to offer wisdom without institution, spirituality without dogma, transcendence without guilt. These appearances, needless to say, are largely illusory.5.3 — Where We Stand
The twenty-first century has not resolved the tensions mapped in this article. Western societies have, in varying degrees, become more secular — church attendance has declined precipitously across Northern and Western Europe, and the proportion of people identifying as having no religious affiliation has grown substantially in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States. And yet religious belief has not disappeared. It has diversified, fragmented, and in many parts of the world — particularly in the Global South — grown vigorously.The intellectual tradition of scepticism and anti-clericalism has not triumphed; it has, rather, contributed to a cultural landscape of plurality and uncertainty in which no single account of the sacred — or of its absence — commands universal assent. The questions raised by Voltaire, by Marx, by Nietzsche, by Freud, by the Holocaust, by Lennon, and by all the others examined in this article remain open. They are, perhaps, constitutively open: questions that the human condition poses, to which it is not clear that a final answer is either possible or, perhaps, desirable.What is clear is that the sceptical tradition examined here was not born of frivolity or fashion. It was born of a genuine and often anguished encounter with the gap between what religion professed and what it did — between the God of love proclaimed from pulpits and the inquisitors, the ghettos, the silence over Auschwitz, the wars waged in His name. To take that tradition seriously is not necessarily to endorse it in its entirety, but it is to understand that the question it raises is one of the most serious questions that human beings can ask.Select BibliographyThe following works have informed the arguments and historical claims of this article. Readers wishing to pursue any of these themes further are directed to these texts as primary points of departure.
On the Enlightenment and the Origins of Secular Thought
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966–1969.Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. London: 1779 (posthumous). [Modern ed.: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.]Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary. Geneva: 1764. [Modern ed.: London: Penguin Books, 1972.]
On Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927. [Modern ed.: New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.]Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844.Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1887. [Modern ed.: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.]Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1895. [Modern ed.: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.]
On Christian Antisemitism and Its History
Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews — A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.Flannery, Edward H. The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism. New York: Macmillan, 1965. [Rev. ed.: New York: Paulist Press, 1985.]Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. New York: Seabury Press, 1974.
On the Holocaust and Its Theological Aftermath
Fackenheim, Emil L. God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York: New York University Press, 1970.Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961. [Rev. ed.: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.]Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.Wiesel, Elie. Night. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1958. [English ed.: New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.]
On Existentialism and Post-War Thought
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. [English ed.: London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955.]Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. [English ed.: London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953.]Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is a Humanism. Paris: Nagel, 1946. [English ed.: New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.]
On Religion, Secularism, and the Arts
Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books, 2007.Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
On John Lennon and the Cultural Context
Coleman, Ray. Lennon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.Norman, Philip. John Lennon: The Life. London: HarperCollins, 2008.Turner, Steve. The Gospel According to the Beatles. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.
