Two years ago, David Baddiel published an angry polemic, Jews Don’t Count, which set out to demonstrate “how identity politics failed one particular identity”. Since many on the left more or less consciously regard Jews as both privileged and “white”, he argued, they often fail to take antisemitism as seriously as other forms of racism. Despite a good deal of humour, the analysis is razor-sharp – and designed to persuade basically decent fellow progressives that they have something of a blind spot.
The God Desire presents itself as a similarly rigorous statement of the case for atheism. Yet it is actually a much more subtle and ambivalent book, at its most intriguing when it turns to Baddiel’s reservations about prominent fellow atheists and how his Jewish background colours his atheism.
The central argument is pretty straightforward. We are afraid of oblivion and it is therefore natural to want “an exit door – somewhere through which to escape constantly oncoming Death”. This is the very human desire satisfied by God. Yet a desire, however strong and understandable, “provides no frame for reality. The God Desire should not have to lead to the Delusion [that God exists].” Indeed, the very strength of our desire “for something to exist… that no one has, in concrete terms, experienced” suggests we are dealing with a fantasy that “we collectively will into being”.
This may make The God Desire sound like yet another, rather bloodless attack on religion. But despite his unflinching commitment to atheism, Baddiel makes a point of distancing himself from “something a little macho” in the writings of Bertrand Russell and the “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: “Some atheists divine – correctly – that what religion provides for human beings is comfort, and then, in a way that can feel a bit adolescent, they feel impelled to say, essentially, ‘Comfort? That’s for babies.’”
And while conceding that it is “completely illogical to be frightened of death, because, as I have often heard atheists say, you won’t know you’re dead”, Baddiel goes on to describe this point as “true, but not very human. Because we can only imagine death… from the point of view of being alive and, really, life seems a lot better.” Furthermore, with the kind of unsparing self-analysis familiar from his comedy routines, he can’t help wondering whether his “own sense of godlessness is not macho… but masochistic. After all, I find God’s non-existence deeply depressing.”
So where does Baddiel’s Jewish identity come in? None of the new atheists, he points out, “come from an ethnic minority background with a religious component”. Dawkins’s work sometimes seems to him like “an attempt to cough out any last shards of [his Christian] upbringing from his intellectual throat”. Yet “it is almost impossible to feel this urge,” he adds, “if, like me, you’re an atheist but also a member of a minority that is associated with religion”.
More specifically, Baddiel is “moved by Jewish survival” over the centuries and knows that earlier generations of Jews “survived because of their tenacity, their closed-community systems, their ability to move geographically when they needed to. But the expression of their survival was the religion… If I am moved by Jewish survival, I am moved by Judaism. There’s no getting round it.”
As a result, Baddiel well understands why an atheist friend who had lost a son should want to sing Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead. When he reads the text in English, he admits, he finds himself irritated by “the endless OCD-like repetition of praise [for God], the desperate hope that if you say something enough times, a fragment might get through the ether”. Yet he also responds deeply to the way that “those words, just the sound, the ancient music, the sonic pain of them, connects you, the atheist Jew praying, and the atheist Jew listening, with centuries of tradition and suffering and defiance”. As a result, he finds it problematic when gung-ho fellow atheists “don’t grasp how intertwined religion is with ethnicity, which is also a key component of many people’s identity, as well as their sense of vulnerability”.
All this leaves Baddiel in a curious position. He is happy to describe himself as “a fundamentalist atheist”, someone who “know[s God] doesn’t exist”, yet he refuses to be “dismissive of religion”. He will no doubt be abused on social media both by the faithful and the militantly faithless, but it seems like an interestingly complex place to be.
• The God Desire by David Baddiel is published by TLS/HarperCollins (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
