Christianity after the Death of God: Christian atheism and the materiality of absence

Abstract

Since the 1990s, an increasing amount of (post-)evangelical Christians in North America and Europe sought to form communities in creative and innovative ways. Disillusioned with capitalist economies, Enlightenment thinking and conservative trends within Evangelical culture, these Emerging Christians, as they came to be called, desired to engage Christianity anew from a postmodern context. One notable group associated with this Emerging Church Movement is called ‘Ikon’, a small collective of artists and disillusioned Christians, agnostics and atheists located in Belfast, Northern Ireland that was active from 2001 to 2013.

Critical of Christians and atheists alike, Ikon is situated on the boundaries of what is conventionally meant by terms such as ‘Christian’, ‘religious’, and ‘atheist’. Ikon embraces modern and postmodern atheist critiques of theism and religion while simultaneously rooting themselves in distinctively Christian traditions, practices, and objects. Indeed, Ikon takes its inspiration from the history of Christianity and atheism in order to live out a Christianity beyond theism. Because of this, research on communities such as Ikon provide promising pathways for the study of religion and non-religion, offering new insights on the dynamics and entanglements of religiosity, spiritual and everyday life in the twenty-first century.

This thesis explores the ways in which Ikon navigates between Christianity and atheism, religion and non-religion, and divine presence and absence. In particular, it asks how the death of God is conceptualized and mediated in Ikon’s performances which centre transformation and disruption. By employing a grounded philosophical approach, the chapters provide extensive reflections on the experience and materiality of absence both for communities such as Ikon and for the academic study of religion.