>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made some years ago on the side of a bus rolling through the streets of London, England.

A sign on the bus bore this phrase.

There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.

It was a little cheeky, perhaps, but to author and former atheist Francis Spufford, it was kind of appalling.

Spufford wrote a long screed against the atheist bus at the time, saying in part, quote, I'm sorry, enjoy your life.

I'm not making some kind of neo Puritan objection to enjoyment.

Enjoyment is lovely, enjoyment is great.

The more enjoyment the better.

But enjoyment is one emotion.

To say that life is to be enjoyed, just enjoyed is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all color should be purple, or that all plays should be Shakespeare.

This really is a bizarre category error, but not necessarily an innocent one.

Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm.

The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being worried by us believers and our hellfire preaching.

Take away the malignant threat of God talk and you would revert to continuous pleasure under cloudless skies.

End quote.

Now the new atheist movement fired back and that has been the routine over the years.

Spufford defends his faith, new atheists attack his writing.

Round and round we go.

But Spufford is more than a writer of his own religious ideas.

Yes, he is the author of Unapologetic why?

Despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.

He's also an award winning author of both fiction and nonfiction.

Professor at Goldsmiths College, where he teaches creative writing.

The themes of his book are fascinating and wide ranging and often wild and daring, and he is in Rochester for the Brockport Writers Forum, and he's going to be talking about the art of fact reading, among other ideas there.

But first, he is graciously decided to sit down with us for an hour.

Um, goodness knows why, but thank goodness for me.

Thank you for being here.

Francis Spufford.

It's great to have you.

>> Thank you for having me on the program.

>> And he was kind enough to remind me before the program began that Unapologetic was more than a decade ago.

We're not just going to pull from your years old texts, although I do want to kind of ply a little bit of the question of faith, if you don't mind.

Um, and, uh, and we'll also talk about some of your, your newer work here, but, um, I just want to ask briefly for those who might see you in Brockport, uh, what you might be presenting on as you talk about the art of fact reading.

>> I, I'll be, I'll be doing a kind of tour of how I turned from a nonfiction writer into a fiction writer, I think.

And, and also trying to explain why it is that the kind of books I want to write always seem to be on the line between genres with one foot on each side.

>> Why can you briefly, without giving too much away, can you give me a little bit more about that?

>> Um, I'm.

>> A kind of hybrid kind of guy.

The things I'm interested in are, are usually mixtures.

When I was a, when I was a nonfiction writer, I liked to smuggle in bits of bits of the technique of, of the novel.

I like to make nonfiction vivid by treating it as if it was fiction.

And now I'm almost completely a novelist.

I've still got the nonfiction writers pleasure in the kind of tough, resistant surfaces of the world I like, I like, I like facts, I like, I like stuff that's definitely there.

It seems to be necessary to get my imagination going.

Um, anyone who's heard your introduction will be going.

He likes facts and he's a he's a Christian.

Um, will be will be want to be wondering how I, how I manage this balancing act, but it doesn't seem very mysterious to me.

I have to say.

>> Well, I'm looking forward to talking about some of those themes as well.

Um, we're going to fit in some time before the end of the program.

Just to talk a little bit about some of the more recent works, including Light Perpetual.

I'd love to ask you about Cahokia Jazz and some others if we could, because for for those who haven't read your work, the themes are wildly imaginative.

I will say.

Um, and what was that little I you kind of gave a little reaction there.

>> I.

>> Who isn't pleased to be described as as as wildly imaginative.

Um, um, but also kind of what that also means is, is all over the map.

Francisw isn't that's kind of what you mean.

>> Yes, but, but, but always fascinating.

And don't worry, we'll argue.

I won't genuflect the whole hour.

We'll argue a little bit.

Cool.

I think it would be more interesting that way.

In fact, I want to I want to start by reading something that I read, um, from McKay Coppins and McKay.

Coppins is, uh, he is a Mormon writer, but he's more just a journalist.

He writes for, I say, just a journalist.

He writes about faith sometimes, but not exclusively.

He writes a number of, uh, a number of subjects for The Atlantic.

He writes on his own.

He wrote a book about Mitt Romney, and he recently wrote, it's increasingly evident that new atheism was a faddish intellectual trend that peaked in the late aughts, early 20 tens, and has been shedding adherents ever since.

As it's become more unfashionable.

And he cites some data about that.

I wonder if you think he's right.

>> I think he's absolutely right.

I think it was a it was a a cultural moment and only a moment really.

Um, and that that it had some it had some gifted people behind it.

And Richard Dawkins is a fabulously good science writer.

And the late Christopher Hitchens was one of the world's best and in some ways most unscrupulous controversialists.

He can hear some slightly mixed opinion of him there on my part.

But, um, but they were, they were, they were really good.

And they also they broke with a kind of convention of politeness about religion, which at least in my country had been, had been holding up to them.

And I think for a lot of people, there was a feeling of liberation, of being able to just be out and out rude about, about faith.

But but once the kind of pleasurable shock waves from that had had had died down, I think, I think what was revealed was in some ways a slightly naive reverence for science as the as the only kind of organizing principle for the world.

We needed a sort of a kind of slightly too simple positivism, which said that that the world consists of facts and nothing else.

And we ought to be able to get all of the or all of the wonder, all of the reverence, all of the emotional sustenance we needed from from looking bravely at the the the grandeur, but essential meaninglessness of of the universe.

And they weren't very interested, um, in all of the complicated and rich ways in which religion has been involved in human history.

They talked about it as if it were simply a kind of misdescription of the world, a category, a category error.

Um, in which in which people had gone.

Um, this ought to mean something.

So we'll just make some stuff up about it.

Um, but actually religion, like any other central human activity, um, does lots of, of different things to say that religion is only a mistake is like saying that poetry is only a mistake or law is only is only a mistake.

There are lots of things which aren't science which human beings do compulsively, and you ought to be able to say that they come in kind of malignant versions, and in versions which which enrich the world.

And I think the new atheist stall was set out so, so simply and so starkly that they didn't really leave themselves room to, to talk in a more nuanced way about, about what humans do when they, when they, when they pray, when they worship, when they, when they become convinced.

There is a, there is a God.

Um, they treated everything as if it was a kind of pre-enlightenment mistake.

And I think that that showed, that showed its thinness fairly soon as a fabric.

I think people could, could see through it.

And I also think that the moment in which it seemed liberating to kind of blow a raspberry at religion, um, ended because other stuff happened, um, other stuff which has demonstrated, um, the terrible things religion can do, but also other stuff which has demonstrated, um, the ways in which, in which religious perceptions are at the very roots of some of our ethics and our politics and our, and our questions about the world and trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater didn't really allow us the vocabulary to talk about that stuff.

You can't just go, um, you can't just go church's child abuse.

Um, kind of a tyrants, um, and, and expect to still be able to have a kind of rich conversation about, about human life and human culture.

We need to be able to talk about it and trying to push it off the edge of the map didn't help with that.

>> Yeah.

Don't you wish Hitchens were here to argue with you about.

>> It though?

I really.

Really wish.

Yeah.

>> Um.

He was.

I would have loved to have a go at that.

Um, and I, I'm very well aware, as I say, that, that he might well have wiped the floor with me, but you know, it would in some ways have been a privilege to have to, to, to, to be, to be the wet rag with which Christopher Hitchens wiped, wiped the floor.

I've been, I'd have been, I'd have been there for that.

>> Well you, I think my read on some of your own writings and then some of what the new atheists had said in response over the years is that they felt a little bit threatened by you, probably in part because you had been a kind of fellow traveler until your mid 30s.

So I don't know that you were an atheist at the time when the new atheists were sort of, you know, ascendant in popularity.

Maybe you had already moved into faith direction by then.

>> I'd kind of got over it by by the time that they.

>> Got over it.

You talk about it like it's a cough or a cold.

>> I have a button here I can press if I cough, but I don't have a button here.

I can, I can, I can press.

If I suddenly feel a fit of religious enthusiasm.

Um, maybe, uh, no, I mean, actually, maybe not because.

Because I, I think the, the benefit of my 20 years as an atheist is that I retain the ability to respect atheism as, as a, as a, as a position that people can arrive at for a great many reasons that, that, that I admire.

There are, there are many versions of, of, of God.

You shouldn't believe in.

There are many versions of faith which are, which are incompatible with, with, with human dignity.

There are lots of reasons to say to hell with the, with the whole thing.

Um, and when I came to, to, to write about it, it wasn't that I was trying to make a, a symmetrical argument that, that, that religion was in fact true.

And that, that atheism wasn't, it was that I wanted to say religion is recognizable.

Religion is not this like optional extra of human culture that we could just decide to do without?

It's, it's, it answers basic human needs and maybe the answers it offers aren't the ones you want, but you ought to be able to say, ah, this is, this is human stuff.

This is, this is the kind of thing we do.

Um, and I tried very hard to, to, to not argue back in ways that disrespected my younger atheist self.

For one thing, I, I, I don't want to wipe the floor, even if I could with Christopher Hitchens as, um, as a person speaking up for enlightenment values to do with freedom and autonomy and, um, and, and human dignity and the individual conscience, what I wanted to do was to go look, actually those things come from from an enlightenment which happened inside Christianity in a way that you're not acknowledging, Christopher, that that a lot of the people who, who, who came up with those things in the 18th century were Scottish Presbyterians, and they had no sense that they were kicking God to the curb.

They thought that they were they were developing something which followed from religious principles, and that we ought to be able to talk about it like that.

>> So part of why I wanted to spend some time this hour talking about these subjects is I don't think intellectually I can hang enough to talk about your fiction.

I think it's a little beyond me.

And I find.

>> My fiction consists of consists of kind of vivid storytelling, which gives you a good time with imaginary people.

Are you sure that you would that you really want to talk about atheism instead?

>> Well, I've been kind of hungry for this conversation because even my own views have sort of evolved.

And looking at what people like McKay Coppins have said recently, and looking at some of the data of where Americans were, I've spent more of my time reading the research where they how they self, how we self-identify.

It is very interesting at this moment.

Um, given that probably 20, 25 years ago, it would have been a better bet that the Sam Harris's, the Richard Dawkins, the Christopher Hitchens would, would have left a more sort of rippling effect that that didn't sort of Peter out or I don't.

And they probably would argue that, of course it hasn't petered out, but to the extent that it has stalled, to the extent that faith in its many manifestations continues to endure, I find it really interesting.

And I think you, as someone who was 20 years an atheist and now, you know, several decades of writing about your faith in very open and interesting ways, I wanted to explore some of this because I find myself often agreeing with your writing and sometimes pulling my few remaining hairs out when I read your writing, and I thought it would be fun to explore and maybe find myself on the on the receiving end of some ideas that I hadn't considered.

So that's why we're going in this direction.

If you're okay with.

>> It, I am okay with it though.

I think we need to point out to to those who are listening to this on the radio that Evan and I have, well, he's probably got more hair than I do at this point.

A little.

Yeah.

Well, um, yeah, no, I'm very much I'm very much up for that conversation.

Um.

>> I don't think it's a zero sum game.

I think that, um that cultural changes and New Atheism Walz one don't simply produce winners and losers.

I think they shift the landscape.

It's more like kind of tides moving over a sandbank, which is a different shape when the water goes, goes away again.

Um, I think one of the unambiguously good things that New Atheism did was to, um, was to put religion on its mettle to explain itself and to justify itself.

Um, I think it's actually a good thing on religious grounds, if nothing else that, um, that religion shouldn't get to, to, to claim a status of unambiguous goodness, nobody should get to claim a status of, of unambiguous goodness because we aren't unambiguously good creatures and, and a public reputation for religion that makes it impossible to, to question the virtue of religious leaders was a bad thing.

And I'm very glad that that has kind of that has gone away.

Um, if what replaces it is a kind of exaggerated cynicism in which we assume that every Catholic priest is a, is a, is a child abuser, um, and that every televangelist is, is, has got some terrible secret.

Then, then I think we've, we've made an equal and opposite simplification of, of, of the world and we ought to be, we ought to be curious.

We ought to be, we ought to be curious about the nuances of, of what actually makes people.

>> So.

So let me return to the bus for just a brief moment, because that got a lot of attention.

This bus in London that has the phrase there probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.

>> I was really angry about that.

>> I know.

>> I could tell reading your writing, and so when I read your your remarks about the idea of just enjoy your life, I read that to be maybe a misunderstanding of what the sign even.

I'll tell you how the sign landed with me.

I thought the sign meant life is hard enough without the fear that if you don't conform to some ancient scripture that is not verifiable, that you're going to go to hell for eternity.

And the way to enjoy life is not simply to have a party and have fun all the time.

You enjoy life through learning, through caring for your parents, through a a well spent hour of reading or writing, learning a new language, perfecting an instrument, grinding on a project, taking care of your children.

Enjoyment is not just fun in the way of an immature fun.

It is, to say, a more unburdened sense of work and the burden that the sign on the bus indicates to me is this extra burden that atheists would say is unjustified.

That if you don't do right here, you know, get ready for endless suffering in the afterlife or you've disappointed God with your actions, or you had premarital sex or your you have a child who's gay and, and the scriptures are telling you or your your the vicar is telling you, someone is telling you that that's wrong, that that is to be hated, that that is to be that that is sinful.

The bus seemed to me simply saying is let that go and enjoy what this life that we know is, which is struggle, which is suffering, which is sadness, which is all of the things that that make it up.

That's more what I read.

You read it as to say, well, as long as we get get religion out of here, it's good times for everybody.

And I didn't read it that way.

>> I know, um, all right.

I have two things to say to that.

The first one is that your account of the, the life of of, of, of strenuous enjoyment with, with, with the learning a language and loving your parents and things.

That's a description of the virtues.

Um, and yes, you can possess the virtues without, without religion, but, but where they come from has a, has a religious history too.

But the second and most important thing to say there is, is that I was being infuriated by the bus in London.

That is to say, in a society which is much less churchgoing than than the United States is even now with the rise of of, of, of the nones and where most British Christianity.

Is not is not signed up to the idea of hell and damnation at all.

I mean, I have I have never believed in hell, though I suppose it follows logically from human free will that you have to be able to say a definitive no to God.

But but one of the things that maddens me there is that I know that the atheist bus meant meant.

Surely you're terrified.

Terrified of hell.

We have.

We have excellent news.

There is no hell kind of.

Relax.

I know that's what they were, what they were trying to say, but the reason it landed so annoying, annoyingly with me is that.

Is that almost nobody who goes to church in my country believes in hell in the first place.

It's not a factor.

We don't do it because we're we're terrified of of hellfire.

So so it seemed like a, a kind of a naive attempt to free us from an imaginary problem.

>> Was it like trolling to you?

It was more trolling.

>> Absolutely.

Like, like, like, like.

>> It wasn't a substantive idea.

It was just poking at.

>> Quite.

Um, but no, it was, it was also a kind of sincerely well meant stupid idea.

I thought in, in our context because, because it and, and, and it was so keen to go, to go, you don't have to be terrified of, of hell.

That was like the one thing they knew about about religion, as if the entire ethical content of Christianity was going, was going, um, conform, obey or eternal torture.

Um.

>> Well, what about just judgment?

What about the idea of sin?

The idea that.

>> I wrote a.

>> Whole masturbation is sin.

Yeah.

That that same sex marriage is sin.

>> Yeah.

>> But that's not hellfire.

That's judgment.

>> It is.

But but judgment is a thing that human beings do all of us all the time.

It's rapists in.

Yes, it bloody is.

Um, is child abuse has said yes.

It really is.

Is um is is is is is corruption in office as sin.

Yeah, it really is.

So what we're arguing about is not whether there's a category of, of, of, of ethical evils.

We want to identify.

It's what belongs in it.

And I don't think that masturbation is a sin or that same sex marriage is a sin.

Um um, I think, I think the category of sin is too useful for us to do without it.

But as I spent, you know, a lot of, a lot of a book trying to explain a decade and more ago, we've got a problem with the word because the word sin has taken on these these overtones of kind of chocolate and red lingerie and, and whipped cream and kind of enjoyable, enjoyable transgressions.

The word sin, if you, for example, Frank Miller's comic book Sin City, which is, you know, it's a long time ago now, but Sin City is a place where the population is entirely given over to kind of like lap dancing and extreme violence.

And you read about it and you think, well, that's a bit nasty, but but it's kind of fun to fun to visit and all of this trivializes the word to the extent that, you know, only two options are left that you can use the word sin to threaten people with to go same sex marriage will send you to hell, or it just sounds like chocolate and red red lingerie.

So it's either terrible or trivial, which means it's no longer available as the kind of the common language for talking about the we do that we don't like.

Do we need to?

Sorry about that.

>> Um that's okay.

We'll bleep out.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Maybe not.

>> A necessary Christian.

Um sorry.

>> That's okay.

>> Um but we we kind of need it.

We need stuff which isn't law.

We need, we need to be able to talk about things which ought to be legal, but which are probably a bad thing for people to do anyway.

We need, we need to be able to do self-examination.

We need to be a bit pessimistic about human nature sometimes because things go really wrong when we are too rosy.

And too illusion filled about what human beings are like and.

And that's why I ended up not using the word sin when I was when I was writing about faith, because it was just too distracting.

>> I understand that, and I the reason I picked up the story of the busses, I read that as your frustration that for all of its understandable pull, the new atheism movement never really accounted for a lot more complexity that you see in Christianity or religion or faith.

>> And also didn't attend to the to the to the tragic, the tragic side of human life.

It wasn't pessimistic enough about the the inevitable role that, um, that, that, that sorrow and unhappiness plays in human lives.

Those are bad things.

Not in favor of sorrow and unhappiness, but but there is an irreducible amount of it around the place as one of the conditions of our life.

And we need to be able to talk about those things.

And I thought that that in their in their desire to free us from the fear of hell, which we weren't feeling anyway, um, they were, they were, they were accidentally kind of pushing us into, into, into, into unrealistic dreams of bliss.

>> Okay.

And the idea though of suffering is, is an important one because, um, when it comes to the, I think simplistic but straightforward, compelling arguments that the new atheism movement has made to build adherence.

One of them sounds like this.

If we have an omnipotent and omniscient God, why do we have childhood cancer?

HMM.

What's the answer?

>> Um.

Christianity doesn't have an answer to that, or at least not one.

Which is?

Which is morally satisfying, but rather than a philosophical answer, a theodicy, to use the technical term, something that justifies the ways of God to man.

Christianity offers instead a a story of of God's solidarity with us as we suffer.

There's something that remains mysterious there.

I don't know why a good God's created world contains childhood cancer, but I do know that that the worse people's lives are, the less they worry about this.

It's only once we live in a world of of antibiotics and, and antiseptic surgery and vaccination that people start to find it outrageous that there should be any suffering remaining people historically who lived with more suffering didn't think it scored against God.

They were just glad to have God's love to to offset those things.

Um, I'm in favor of vaccination, antiseptic surgery and, and antibiotics and, you know, the use of the use of, of, of, of pain relief in childbirth and all of that stuff.

Those were human advances, but, but, but one of the perverse consequences of them is that they, they, they, they create the idea that any suffering at all is, is an outrage and that we ought to take our sense of outrage.

Direct it to the author of the universe and go, eh, eh?

Explain that.

Um, and I, I, I don't think God is in the explanation business, but I do think that he is in the solidarity with human suffering business.

The central story of Christianity is of God within creation as, as, as Christ sharing in, in human suffering.

Therefore, a God who knows from the inside what the experience of suffering is like, not a remote king or authority figure to whom we can address our complaints, but a kind of guide nailed to something.

>> The new atheists also didn't care very much for your explanation for why you have a sense of faith.

And I'm going to quote more of your writing on the subject here.

You say I am a fairly Orthodox Christian.

Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions no dancing about, no moving target, I promise.

But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer.

It is the feelings that are primary.

I assent to the ideas, because I have the feelings.

I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas, and I found that idea challenging, because my feelings tend to get stronger when I have better evidence that the feelings are justified or verifiable, and my feelings get weaker when I don't find evidence to support them.

Why is that not the case for you?

>> It is the case for me.

The the difference between us is what we would accept as, as, as the form of of of, of as a form of evidence for feeling that that seems to us compelling.

Um, um, the kind of the kind of feeling I'm talking about, after which the intellectual assent may follow is, is feelings to do with the, with the presence of God, feelings to do with, with the world being, despite all of its cruelty and imperfections, a gift for us.

Um, that it has to do with, um, the sense that there is, that there is more meaning than we produce ourselves and that that love, rather than simply being a category of the behavior of mammals such as we are the East African plains ape, rather than that, that, that the bits of love we manage to manifest ourselves ourselves are, are reflections and fragments of some of some bigger, purer, more absolute kind of love.

But it would be very difficult to adduce evidence in the empirical science sense that any of those were the case.

But it's also very difficult to to adduce evidence against them being the case.

And much of the new atheist argument for the improbability, if not the impossibility of faith, depended one stage back on on the framing of what counted as evidence or not.

Um, and I was not convinced by, by, by the kind of childhood cancer idea.

And I wasn't convinced either by the idea that, um, that if you can't hit it with the hammer of evidence, it's not really there.

Um, you say your feelings grow stronger if you can verify them, but, but are there not some things you believe in and regard as deeply, centrally important to you, which you can't prove?

The, the, the, the necessity of.

Do you not, for example, believe that that justice is an inherently good idea, that mercy is an inherently good idea?

Um, and Terry Pratchett, who was it was a good paid up British atheist, said you could grind the whole world to atoms and you wouldn't find a single atom of justice or mercy in the whole shebang.

>> Well, I don't agree.

I mean, I find that a silly rejoinder because I think more of this is where I think New atheist Sam Harris did pretty good work in his book The Moral Landscape, which is an argument for ethics or morality.

I always confuse the two there.

Francis.

Uh, in the absence of a faith structure, and he argues that there are certain themes that would exist outside of whether we ever had a faith structure.

And, you know, and this gets back to so this is something that Sam Harris has argued.

He said, look, if we were somehow able to eliminate all of our scientific knowledge, eliminate it, but the human species continues and we start fresh on trying to understand science, and we eliminate all of the religious teachings that there have ever been.

He thinks two things would happen in a thousand years.

All of the science that we have today would be replicated because we can study and find the answers, that we would have new religions that aren't anything like what we have today, perhaps like in some ways, but we wouldn't have the religions now because they're not inherently true.

You wouldn't just know them.

And largely we'd have an ethical sense of morality, of right and wrong, that murder is wrong, that that theft is wrong, that respect is a good idea, that in general, there are human themes that are absent religious framework that would come if we could eliminate all of these things, and in a thousand years we could see what would flower.

I don't think you agree with that.

>> I don't agree with that.

Um um, because I think for one thing, the history of science is also partly contingent, that is to say, driven by a series of, of, of, of accidents and contexts and, and, and the course of human history and the order in which we find things out was itself culturally influenced.

Um, I also think that the, that the development of religion is not as arbitrary as that, that seems to me to be like a kind of version spread over time of the, of the, of the same new atheist argument that goes, there are lots of different religions.

So that means that none of them can possibly be true.

Because if they were, you know, you'd have agreement.. >> The argument that says there's 3000 religions and you believe in one.

So you're an atheist on 202,999.

>> I'm only suggesting you should be an atheist in the 3,000th one.

>> You've heard that many times.

>> I have heard that many times.

Of course, I. Where was I?

Um, I was, I was, I was fighting a religious battle on the airwaves.

That's what I was doing.

Um, um.

>> Let me get.

>> You know, hang on a minute, please, just hang on a second.

Evans.

This is, this is kind of important.

All right.

So I would want to complicate Sam Harris's picture.

Okay.

Um, because, um, in fact, much of the ethical or possibly moral because I'm not entirely sure about the distinction there either.

Um, um, much of the deposit of what he thinks of as, as, as self-evident and therefore the things we'd have anyway are actually highly historically specific.

Um, if you look at the culture of the classical world, Greco-Roman culture, um, what you see is not and those were very civilized and sophisticated people.

They didn't have the scientific revolution, but they had an awful lot of the rest of, of, of what we think of as a kind of developed culture.

And, and they also took it for granted that, um, that human societies are completely hierarchical, that everyone who can own slaves will own slaves, that your slaves, your property, that you can do whatever the hell you like to them.

Um, and, and that there is no such thing as self-evident respect in that world for everyone as people, just because they're people, that the value of human beings is relative and depends entirely on status, um, beauty, wealth, being free or not free.

And it took a very specific intellectual revolution, which had quite a lot to do with Christianity for us to get to the state in which, in which human beings seemed valuable and equal as ends in themselves, people were equal in the sight of God before they became equal in terms of civil rights and the way our societies run.

We had to get to, to, to know kings via no king but King Jesus.

You can't run historical experiments in a lab.

You can't go kind of, I'm going to do the last 2000 years again and we'll see if it comes out the same because we, you know, not equipped to do that.

Um, but in the, the one run of history that we've, we've actually got an awful lot of Sam Harris's self-evident ethics are in fact Christian ethics with the label snipped off.

>> He certainly wouldn't agree with that.

But I find it very interesting analysis there.

I'm looking at my notes, realizing we're not going to get through half of what I wanted.

So to respect Francis, here's what we're going to do.

We got to take our only break of the hour.

When we come back.

Don, I can take your phone call and I would like to to hit a couple of the themes that Francis is going to talk about tonight.

If you're just joining us, Francis Spufford, my guest, is a decorated author, not just on this subject.

He is really gracious to roll with this subject, and I'm having a good time here.

But he's a decorated writer in fiction and nonfiction.

He teaches creative writing, and he is in Brockport for the Brockport Writers Forum.

Tonight, 730 event tonight.

They would love to see you there.

And they're going to live stream that on their YouTube page as well.

So you can watch.

If you can't get out there live to meet Francis Spufford, you can check it out on the YouTube page there.

Um, as they do that live tonight, but he's going to be talking about the art of fact reading and we're going to, he's going to talk about, I think, some of his works that I want to ask him about.

So let's take this only break.

We'll get a little bit of feedback and then we'll talk about what he's got going on tonight.

>> Coming up in our second hour, what kinds of buildings do we build and who are we building for?

Who are we leaving out?

In the newest episode from WXXI Move to Include podcast, host Noel Evans sits down with a self-advocate who explains the moment for him that everything changed when he thought about how we are building spaces for society for everyone or not.

That's next.

Our.

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>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

All right, briefly, before I get Dan's phone call here, I don't have time to play the soundbite that we had pulled, but there is a candidate for U.S.

Senate in Texas named James Talarico, and he is quite a. Oh, you got.

I just got a thumbs up from you on James Talarico.

He is certainly a Christian believer.

He talks openly about his faith.

But one of the things he spends a lot of time doing is talking about his distinction between Christianity and Christian nationalism in this country.

His view that Christianity is used as a cudgel to attain and hold power.

And he talks about the way that he sees the president's followers sort of waving away when the president makes an image of himself as Christ, and now the president says, oh, I didn't mean to make myself Christ.

I mean, I don't think anybody believes the president's explanation there or the way that some of Trump's followers will create images of Trump and Jesus walking together arm in arm.

And I can see you rolling your eyes so hard, they almost went back all the way around there.

Oh, yeah.

But Talarico says that the historical Jesus that we know doesn't look a lot like modern Christians, that he really was, whether you believe he was the Son of God or not, he he really embraced people in poverty.

He really sent a message of love for the stranger, not just not just the neighbor next door, not just someone who's a fellow traveler of your beliefs or your social class that the historical Jesus isn't the kind of person we see in a lot of modern Christians, Talarico says.

Do you agree?

>> I do, for one thing, Jesus is a very inconvenient Messiah.

He.

He is a moral absolutist about a whole bunch of things that, that, that, that get in the way of the, the smooth functioning of our of our self-interest.

He, he thinks that you should, um, you should feed the hungry, visit the sick.

Um, show, show compassion to the stranger.

Um, and that these things are non-negotiable.

They are, they are absolutes.

They are not limited for, for Jesus by, by, by the limits of human, of human capacity.

We have an obligation which does not stop at the boundaries of family, of tribe, of, of liking, of our partisan politics.

You're supposed to love your enemies, for heaven's sake.

Yeah, that's not easy to do.

And, and Jesus is in the business of laying some impossible commandments on us, which we're all going to fail at.

Um, but there is a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood available among those of us who fail at trying to do the impossible stuff that that Christ asked for.

>> Are you familiar with the writer and scholar Bart Ehrman?

>> No.

>> So Bart Ehrman is a biblical scholar, and he was just on Ross Douthat's podcast producer, Megan Mack.

He's coming on connection, so he's sending his newest book, his newest book.

He is a former Baptist pastor who is now an atheist.

He is an a scholar on the historical Jesus.

And he wrote a book.

His newest book is On the Wonderful Values of Christianity has brought the Modern World.

Yeah, even as an atheist, he said, there are certain things that the teachings of Christ have done to change the world for the better.

And I would love some.

The next time we talk, I want to know what you think about this book.

It's a beautiful idea of someone who says, I may be an atheist, but I can honor that Jesus was a historical person.

And whether you think he was divine or not, he brought some values that if we all grabbed on to them, the world would be a more beautiful place right now.

>> I, I honor that too, but I think you have to acknowledge that that that the historical Jesus and the Jesus of, of, of Christian tradition doesn't stop there.

He's not just a purveyor of, of, of, of a set of, of ethical principles.

We can all get behind.

Um, they are, they are framed as part of, of a kind of impossible generosity by God towards the world that we're supposed to do our best in our miniature ways to kind of to, to enact ourselves.

They are not very self-protecting because they depend on a kind of on a, on a, on a whole cosmology.

Um, without which they're kind of slightly mad to be honest.

So I think there is a danger or at least a kind of conceptual difficulty in going, we'd like the social consequences without, without the reason behind them.

Um, because without the reason behind them, the social consequences can, you know, be unsupported and even look a bit crazy because, you know, self-interest comes naturally to us.

That's the kind of, of, of, of, of, of ape we are, but, um, but, but Christianity is calling us to be more than self-interested apes, even if it inconveniences, it inconveniences us, even if it makes life more complicated, even if it kills us.

Ultimately, Jesus is is a bit of a fanatic about this.

>> All right.

Briefly, Don in East Rochester.

Go ahead, Don, keep it tight.

>> Um, good afternoon.

Thank you for taking my call.

Um, I'm an old atheist and not a new atheist, but whether I'm an atheist or a believer or whether you're an atheist or believer is beside the point.

The point is, is that the two, the separation of church and state must be enforced.

It must be fought for.

Um, uh, a, a people in organized religion have no business forcing their beliefs on the rest of us, and definitely not using the power of the government to force their beliefs on the rest of us.

As a member of the LGBT community, um, the Christian nationalism is an existential threat to my community because they want to use the power of the government to force, say, anti-sodomy laws or force their beliefs on other people.

And I refuse to accept that.

And that must be fought against.

>> Don.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

>> Um, Don, I'm not an American, so I come from a society which doesn't have the separation of, of, of church and state and, and I absolutely agree with you that nobody should be using the, the authority of government to, um, to, to force their religious rules on you.

Um, on the other hand, religion is not something that can just exist in, in, in private lives.

Um, it follows naturally from, from, from belief that it has kind of outworkings in the way we're supposed to live together.

And it seems to me that that a civilized society is one in which, in which competing visions of the public good kind of get to engage with each other in the public space without anyone getting a monopoly about, about about who's right.

So I agree with you about about authority, but I don't agree with you that that faith should stay quietly at home.. >> Tonight at the Brockport Writers Forum.

It's the downtown Rochester downtown Brockport campus.

Uh, is is where it's happening.

And that's at 161 Chestnut Street, the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center.

The r e o c starting at 730.

Francis Spufford is going to be there for a presentation that will last about 90 minutes.

And it's going to be live streamed on their YouTube page.

Now, your work as Brockport tells their possible audience tonight, we've been talking very narrowly this actually not that narrowly, but narrowly.

>> Religion is quite large.

>> It is quite large, but Francis's work, especially fiction, includes a novelistic history of the Soviet economy and read plenty.

A historical novel about colonial New York and Golden Hill, a hardboiled detective novel set in an alternative version of 1920s Saint Louis in which Native Americans hold political power.

That book is Cahokia Jazz, that one more than any other.

I want to know what happened in your life that you said this is the novel I need to write.

>> Um, I wrote that one during during Covid, so I was locked down in England at the time.

I couldn't do any real world traveling, so I found myself doing a lot more mental traveling than I even than I would, than I would usually do.

And I had read about the, the Cahokia archeological site, um, on the opposite side of the Mississippi from, from Saint Louis.

Um, it astonishes me that more Americans don't know about it since it's like having the pyramids in your, in your country.

It's, it's astonishing.

And I wanted to and I like writing books about cities.

It's what seems to get me going as a, as a, as a novelist.

But I like to do it with a twist.

And I wanted to think about one of the weird silences in in American history, which is the the absence of Native Americans from from most of the story.

If you read American history as it's conventionally written, as as there's the westward expansion of the United States, there is usually a brief bit when, when, when, when there is an Indian war, and then they kind of disappear from the story.

They kind of conveniently go off into, into, into, into reservations.

And this is not the general experience in the Americas.

If you look at, if you look at Mexico, for example, although the, the, the collision with Europe was really destructive and painful and complicated.

There.

You now have a society in which most people have got some kind of indigenous roots, and I thought it would be an interesting thought experiment to go, what if the European diseases that hit North America had been had been kind of less virulent and different, so that the United States, too, had had to cope with really large populations of Native American maize farmers, which is what De Soto saw when he traveled to the Mississippi in the 1520s.

And 30s.

It wasn't kind of, um, it wasn't, uh, scattered hunter gatherers.

It was big towns of maize growing farmers up, up the river.

And by the time anyone from Europe was back there to look, they'd all gone.

Not because, um, they just decided to give up maize farming, but because smallpox and the other cocktail of European diseases had had created a kind of silent holocaust of those people.

And I thought, I thought, what if one wrote a noir crime novel set in prohibition America, but with just a different population?

Um, what if you had a 1920s city with streetcars and jazz and gangsters, but one in which we had this, this different history and this this different set of, of human beings to fill the various roles of kind of cop and gangster and femme fatale.

Um, I was very aware that I was an English guy writing it from far, far away.

So I did my best to do what writers do, which is to which is to use the things you do know in order to write about the things you, you, you don't know.

Um, and on the whole, I mean, on the whole, I think it kind of worked out, but I was very conscious of the fact that I'm not a Native American or an African American or a European American either.

I'm not any kind of American.

So what I hoped was that was that the distance I was working from would let me see a few unusual things that maybe those of you who are closer to the story don't see because you take them for granted.

I thought there might be an advantage in being able to step out of the history, because it wasn't my history.

>> So that's Cahokia Jazz.

And as the music plays, as we have to bid adieu to Francis Spufford.

I will say a whole separate conversation that I would love to have with you is on how you teach creative writing to not only I mean, I loved hearing about your process, but how you talk to students in the age of AI when the idea of outsourcing creativity is so tempting, um.

>> To be continued, to be continued, you need to have me back.

>> Well, listen, if you'd come back, you're welcome.

Anytime.

Thank you.

And I hope I haven't wasted your time.

Thank you very much for being here.

It's a pleasure.

Francis Spufford, a decorated writer of fiction and nonfiction.

And tonight, the Brockport Writers Forum welcomes Francis Spufford to the downtown.

The Rochester downtown campus at the Rock, the Rochester Education Opportunity Center at 730.

More Connections coming up in just a moment.

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