the holiday delusion

We went on a brief holiday to Pembrokeshire a couple of weeks ago - a week in a cottage that I see from this post we'd previously stayed in in May 2010, back in the glory glory days of NO KIDS. Ah, memories. No, obviously kids are great, and ours are particularly awesome, but it must be said that there's less chance of ending up in Haverfordwest A&E on a wet Wednesday morning with a 2-year-old with a chest infection if you've taken the precaution of not having any kids yet.

But you don't want to hear about that. What you'll want to hear about is my habit of trawling through the bookshelves in holiday cottages to see what books have been made available for the casual holiday reader. I theorise that there are two main categories of holiday cottage book collection: firstly just the books that happen to be in the house anyway, perhaps from when the owners use the place themselves in gaps in the booking schedule, and secondly a collection specifically tailored to offer something for the bored holidaymaker who hasn't brought enough reading matter with him and therefore needs something to divert him on a rainy day. So there'll be a smattering of Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, maybe a couple of Lee Childs or a Norah Roberts or two for the ladies.

Obviously I am not such a fucking idiot as to go on holiday and not take enough books. Nonetheless I find it interesting to snoop around the bookshelves to see what's there, particularly if I detect that we're dealing with Holiday Cottage Book Collection Type A, as I like to call it, i.e. the more organically-accumulated stuff that's just there and presented with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug as if to say: these are our books. Deal with it.

As it happens the book collection at this particular cottage contains quite an eclectic mix of stuff, but a theme does start to emerge on closer perusal of the shelves. The first thing that caught my eye was this:

I'm sure that, like me, your initial reaction is to scoff and assume this is another collection of complaints about people not being able to wear giant dangly crucifixes while dispensing foodstuffs and the like, but apparently it's a more respectable scholarly work than that and more concerned with actual oppression involving actual killing of Christians, which undoubtedly does happen and is profoundly to be criticised and resisted. Nonetheless its presence points to a general concern with Chistian matters. Here's what we find next:

We're in more niche territory here, in particular a concern with religious revivals including the two major Welsh ones in 1859 and 1904/5. That said, while the copies here appear fairly elderly, most of these books remain in print, or at least did until recently.

The whole topic of religious revivals such as these is a fascinating one, involving such interesting concepts as mass hysteria, but I'm afraid I didn't delve into any of the specifics, largely because it was obvious that all of these books took the more standard praise-the-lord angle rather than a sober anthropological examination. In any case I was distracted by the next two:

These two are more in the standard modern religious apologetics vein, it being pretty cool and groovy these days to admit the concept of "doubt", as long as (as I've said before) it's understood that this is merely a ruse to make your faith seem more complex and nuanced and provide the illusion that it's been subjected to some degree of critical thinking, rather than there being any possibility of your "doubt" leading you to say something like: whoa, hang on a minute, this is all ridiculous.

There is an absolutely astonishing amount of this sort of stuff out there; just follow, for instance, some of the "people who bought this bullshit also bought this other very similar bullshit" links from the Amazon page for the Andrew Wilson book. One of the things you will notice if you do that is that Wilson wrote another book called Deluded By Dawkins?, another tiresome addition to the long list of similarly-titled books written as a riposte to Dawkins' own The God Delusion, a list that also includes Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion, David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions, Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion and many more. I'm inclined to view these people as utterly mendacious scoundrels just out to make a quick buck, but of course they may be driven by a genuine zeal to (as they see it) refute the misguided arguments that Dawkins presents and save some of their co-religionists from being lured away from faith and possibly (depending on your particular set of beliefs) eventually consumed by the fiery fires of hell for all eternity. I mean, I doubt it, but then again that just reflects my inability to believe that these people actually believe what they claim to believe.

As an aside, it's not just religious apologists who have co-opted the "The [insert thing here] Delusion" thing as a striking title for a book. A quick trawl of Amazon reveals the following:

• The Talent Delusion
• The Disease Delusion
• The Diet Delusion
• The Liberal Delusion
• The Cameron Delusion
• The Free Will Delusion
• The Health Delusion
• The Net Delusion
• The Golf Delusion

- and many more. I don't think anyone's cashed in The Delusion Delusion yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time.

Anyway, moving on. Philip Yancey is quite a big deal in the world of evangelical Christian books, and Reaching For The Invisible God seems to be a sort of manual for those afflicted by doubt - a textbook example of what I was referring to above, in other words. So Christians who are afflicted by doubtful thoughts about God - because, hey, sometimes, it's like he's not there at all, right? - can read this and find some techniques for keeping faith and reality from coming into dangerously close proximity. Again, look at Yancey's list of publications and it's astonishing how much mileage (and, presumably, money) there is in this stuff. I suppose when you're writing about something about which no definitive claim can ever be made (because, to quote Gertrude Stein, there is no "there" there) there's pretty much no limit to the ways you can spin things.

Peel back the skin of a groovy 21st-century Christian apologist, though, and you quickly reveal the same old lizard underneath, however much hey, we're all sinners, right flannel you try to wrap it up in.

None of this means that you should avoid booking a holiday at this particular cottage (in fact you should, as it's very lovely) nor that the owners are lunatics (we met them and they seem very nice), nor even that if you do go you should avoid reading the books, if that's the kind of bag you're into.