This started off as a comment to something that arbeyu wrote in thread downpage, but it wouldn’t post for complicated silly software reasons. In any case, arbeyu asked another commentator what was the role of religion in Riddley Walker:

I think RW is fascinating in that there seems to be no religion in Riddley’s world. There’s dualism expressed in the “goast of a batcherd” (ghost of a badger?) and in Lorna’s speech where she’s struggling to express a concept for which they no longer have words, and maybe a sense of a basic animism but there’s no god – no creator.

While I entirely agree that there is no creator figure in RW; and also with whoever said that the book is remarkable because it has a destruction myth instead of a creation story, I also think that it is saturated with religious questions and indeed religious answers.

I’m picking this up because I think there is a significant and illuminating difference between new and old atheists here. In general, and with varying degrees of self-awareness and deliberation, the New Atheists define religion as something like nineteenth century protestantism: they expect a proper religion to have scriptures, a priesthood, a doctrine of the after-life and a creation myth at the very least.

None of these things are present in the world of Riddley Walker. There is literacy, but there is no canon of scripture, and all the most important texts are passed down as fragments and folk songs. There are Christian artefacts: the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, a fragment of an account of the legend of St. Eustace, the name given to the chief mutant of “Ardship of Cambry” which is a smooshing together of “Archbishop of Canterbury” – but there is no sense at all of the stories in which these symbols were originally embedded; St. Eustace, for example, has been conflated with the promethean figure of Eusa (USA).

Nor is there any science. There is technology among the charcoal burners and there is the memory of wonders – ships in the air and pictures in the sky – but there is absolutely nothing that might be called the scientific method. When people plan, they “program” and when they reach conclusions, the “print out”, but when the Eusa folk, the mutant descendants of a scientific caste, get together, they do so in ecstatic and possibly orgiastic writhings while chanting nonsense they do not understand.

So here is a world completely outside the framework of post-enlightenment atheism, and without any trace of monotheism.

But I think it would be absurd to say that it is without religion. this is not just because it is a retelling in some sense of the myth of Prometheus. The plot is all about the acquisition, or rediscovery, of forbidden knowledge. It takes place in a world full of ritual and superstition, no matter how attenuated the ritual may be. The plot is also full of dreams, omens, coincidences, and telepathies. It is about fate and how little we can struggle against it; about justice and courage and the inadequacies of love. All of these things are apprehended through feelings and intuitions. Riddley never knows quite what he is doing, nor, often, what he was done until it is too late.

This is the world, and these are the struggles, which give life and strength to the religious impulse, and to religious understandings of the world. They are how we react, and how we reason about it – even when scientific rationality is an impossible dream or a corrupted memory.

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