How do the talking heads of the Christian Right personally experience God? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently, as the far-right movement in the UK, perhaps taking its lead from its counterpart in the United States, is increasingly proclaiming its desire for Britain to be governed theocratically, according solely to the laws of the Bible. Far-right leaders are upping their usage of Christian symbolism at rallies, particularly when such imagery relates to Crusader Christianity—cries of “Deus Vult,” banners depicting the Jerusalem cross—and more regularly couching their supposed fight for the soul of Britain in Manichean terms: the battle for Good against Evil. Sometimes “Evil” means immigrants, or it might mean Muslims, whether British-born or not, sometimes it’s gay and trans people, sometimes it’s anyone or anything deemed “woke.” In a speech at the Houses of Parliament before he defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK, the MP Danny Kruger, himself a conservative evangelical convert, suggested that two religions have moved into the space from which Christianity has been “ejected”: Islam and “wokeism,” which he defined as “a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities, and nations.” Often what constitutes the enemy is difficult to pin down, as is clear from Kruger’s “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” attempt at defining wokeism, but more often than not we find modernity pitted against tradition.

Though the banners they wave might suggest these nationalist movements subscribe to a coherent and all-encompassing form of religion, such groups tend to pick and choose those aspects of their faith which appeal to them. In an essay from 1999 examining how fundamentalists of all stripes evoke and appropriate religious scripture for various but often related nationalist goals, Pakistani academic Eqbal Ahmad stressed that “no religio-political movement or party has to my knowledge incorporated in a comprehensive fashion the values or traditions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism in their programmes and activities, nor have they set examples of lives lived, individually or collectively, in accordance with the cherished values of the belief system they invoke.” Such religio-political movements look to their religion’s sacred texts for statements which seem to bolster their pre-existing stances and tend to pass over teachings that might require them to be hospitable to strangers, say, or to give up their wealth, question earthly power, and contemplate the mystery of divinity.

This May, a key figure of Britain’s far-right movement, Tommy Robinson, converted to Christianity while in prison. Does Tommy Robinson contemplate the mystery of divinity? We cannot know what happened, or didn’t happen, between Tommy Robinson and God, but when you approach religious belief for the first time, when you attend holy houses alongside others who do have a relationship with God, you hear the stories from their holy texts of when man encounters God and his emissaries, and surely you must start to imagine what God might be like.

Once religious belief was a foreign cosmos to me. I understood as little about belief as outer space. But I knew what it was like to feel awe, and to feel wonder—I just didn’t know that another person with another lexicon and structure of meaning might call that a divine experience. Recently I read The Experience of God, by Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. It seemed to put into words so many things I have been struggling to articulate over the last few years of engaging with Christianity, to the extent I found myself almost vibrating with excitement while reading. Bentley Hart describes how both Plato and Aristotle believed that the beginning of all philosophy lay in the experience of wonder. This wonder, he goes on to say, is the “abiding amazement that lies just below the surface of conscious thought and that only in very rare instants breaks through into ordinary awareness.” You could call this abiding amazement, which shimmers beneath our days like an underground river, a glimpse of God. Bentley Hart is not necessarily thinking about the Christian God, though that is his tradition. He’s describing the ultimate creator found in all three Abrahamic religions, in Sufism as al-Haqq, ultimate reality, in Hinduism as Brahman who created all other gods. In a dialogue from the Mahabharata, one character declares, “the learned say that the bodies of men are like houses. In time these are destroyed. There is one Being, however, that is eternal.” Call it what you like, but so many religions (and late Hellenistic pagan belief systems, too) point—through their scripture and by the guidance of their theologians—toward an eternal being or reality outside of time and space, by which all mortal things were created, and on which all life depends.

While this God, or ultimate reality, necessarily exists beyond our finite comprehension, we can only approach the mystery of divinity through personal experience. To describe how such an experience might be conceptualised, Bentley Hart borrows three words from Sanskrit often applied to describe the experience of the ultimate, unchanging reality of Brahman: sat, meaning being; chit, meaning consciousness; and ananda, meaning bliss, with all three often elided together as satchidananda. “To say that God is being, consciousness, and bliss,” Bentley Hart explains, “is also to say that he is the one reality in which all our existence, knowledge and love subsist, from which they come and to which they go, and that therefore He is somehow present in even our simplest experience of the world, and is approachable by way of a contemplative and moral refinement of that experience.”

I like best, and maybe I understand most, his definition of ananda. Bentley Hart believes one encounters this eternal form of bliss “when an act of compassion strikes us with its beauty, or when our will to act morally in a certain situation allows us to see the true nature of that situation more clearly, or when we sense that the will to know the truth is also an ethical vocation of the mind.” In such moments we are briefly and temporarily awakened to what is real and meaningful, what lies beneath the detritus and noise cluttering up our lives. On the other hand, Bentley Hart writes, “no condition is more exhilaratingly liberating for all the most viciously despotic aspects of human character than an incapacity for astonishment or reverent incertitude before the mysteries of being.” Liberating seems like a strange choice of word. But I can imagine how exhausting it must be to make yourself so open to the world as to be moved by everything, like Voltaire’s Candide, or the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It can feel safer, sometimes, to refuse opportunities to be affected and so changed. I cannot know how people like Tommy Robinson experience God, obviously, nor how his personal relationship to the divine ultimately connects to the brand of politics and collective action for which he advocates. As far as I am aware, he has not articulated this to the public. But I conceive of religious nationalism as the precise inverse of ananda, revealing itself to be the antagonist of awe and the curiosity required to experience wonder.  

It was Bartley’s nods to Hindu philosophy in The Experience of God that led me to the Mahabharata. I’d never read it before. I went straight to the eleventh book, the Stri Parva, the book of women, which takes places in the immediate aftermath of the Kurukshetra War, the central episode of the epic. I wanted to read the Stri Parva because it’s a book of mourning. I wanted to start at the point in the narrative when the protagonists who have survived all the bloodshed and destruction must reflect on what has gone so wrong with humanity that cousin had ended up fighting against cousin (the Kauravas and the Pandavas) for a kingdom. In Hindu cosmology, the world has four ages. The fourth is named the Kali Yuga, the age of sin, of conflict. Some traditions believe the Kurukshetra War marked the start of the Kali Yuga, an age in which we are still living, and which Hindu astronomers have predicted will end around 427,000 CE. So much for the end being nigh.

You could exclusively read the belligerent passages from the Mahabharata, or the Bible, or the Qur’an, or the Torah, quote them at your rallies, and then use those words to legitimize your desire to expel a religious minority from the country in which you live. But in doing so, you would be missing a fuller understanding of conflicts as they are presented in religious texts: the eighteen-day Kurukshetra War was a tragedy; it happened not because it was the ultimate creator’s wish but because man all too easily believes in his own authority. In his essay about religious fundamentalism, Eqbal Ahmad reminds us that “all religious systems are made up of discourses which are, more often than not, dialectically linked to each other as in light and darkness, peace and war, evil and goodness.” It is impossible to understand the meanings of religious texts if they are not read dialectically, one hemisphere against the other, because, like all the best literature, they are records of humanity’s mixed soul, our capacity to be generous and our capacity to be violent. Greed and wrath and fear get in the way of our ability to know ourselves, a figure named Vidura suggests in the Stri Parva. They get in the way of the ability to seek out love and beauty, and so find divinity on earth. He who “practices virtue in this unstable world of life and adheres to it from an early age,” Vidura declares, “attains to the highest end.” This, again, is ananda, I think. Bliss, not as in a private delight, but an ethical practice which tries to create rather than destroy, to love rather than hate. 

When I first started writing about Christianity, I kept searching through the two Testaments for answers to whom God might be. The trouble is He’s always behind a cloud, or heard only through the distorting voices of prophets. I was saying this to my friend recently, on a walk across Hampstead Heath, during which we were both sharing our present struggles with our writing. It was the start of autumn, but the trees were still ringed with bright sun, the light bouncing off the various ponds we passed. How are you meant to discover ultimate authority in religious texts, I was wondering. In response, my friend, who is Jewish, recommended I read a story about authority from the Talmud, the Rabbinic text which contains the primary teachings about Jewish religious law.

It’s called “The Oven of Akhnai,” which is a pleasingly mundane title for such an interesting story. One day a group of rabbis were arguing over an oven. Rabbi Eliezer was convinced that this particular oven was ritually clean, but the other rabbis disagreed. Even after Rabbi Eliezer offered all possible arguments in support of his judgment, the other Rabbis remained skeptical and so Eliezer tried another tack. “If the legal tradition agrees with me, then let this carob tree prove it,” he said. Instantly the carob tree uprooted itself and moved several metres away. Still the rabbis shook their heads. “No proof may be brought from a carob tree,” they said. “If I’m right,” Eliezer persisted, “let this stream of water prove it.” Instantly, the stream reversed its flow. But still the rabbis wouldn’t change their minds, because, they said, no proof may be brought from a stream. Finally, Eliezer pulled out the big guns. “If I’m right, let heaven confirm it!” he cried. At which point, a heavenly voice called down from the skies, “Why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer? The legal tradition accords with him on every point!”

But even this was not enough to change the other rabbis’ minds. Quoting from Deuteronomy, one of them declared, “the Torah is not in heaven.” And then he quoted from Exodus: “one must incline after the majority.” The argument was over. Eliezer had lost. And presumably the oven went unused.

To a conservative Christian, this story could be regarded as shocking, even blasphemous. We are meant to be transformed and altered by the sudden appearance of miracles, by divine interventions. Through these epiphanic experiences, we are meant to be shocked into correct belief, like Paul on the road to Damascus.

But in “The Oven of Akhnai,” one of the doubting rabbis declared that authority comes from the holy text, the Torah, and not from the sudden voice of God breaking into the present day. What are we supposed to make of this reading? That in the present day we can no longer expect to hear God’s voice, and so must rely instead on centuries-old scripture? That God has ceded His own authority to the written word? What does it mean for the possibility of ananda, for experiences of bliss and wonder as a gateway to God?

I’m not sure. But I like the literary critic Susan Handelman’s read on the story, that “revelation [is] ongoing and mediated by interpreters.” Revelation is ongoing. It can be discovered here on Earth by us, instilled in the holy texts, which we keep alive through constant interpretation. This is where ananda might come into “The Oven of Akhnai:” revelation as something experienced collectively, through working out together how we might behave ethically, out of love. The trouble is that we are impossibly fallible creatures, fated to misinterpret, again and again.

What you can discover through reading the Bible, the Torah, the Mahabharata, and all sacred texts, are narrativized examples of how human beings judder closer and further away from God or the ultimate Being. I remain uncertain whether to call those moments when I feel broken wide open, when I am momentarily able to see the empyrean beauty or bliss behind the cloud, an experience of God. But I don’t know what else to call them, either.