Debray begins his biography of God by visiting the social, environmental and linguistic conditions which underpinned the birth of monotheism. These are:

1. An arid ecosystem, and consequently the only economic life-form which can be sustained in such an environment, nomadic pastoralism. The reasons for this are twofold – firstly, the concept of one god, one moral order, one origin of everything, one explanation for everything, is a very abstract idea, and the sparseness and simplicity of such natural surroundings lend themselves to more abstract thinking. Even today, Debray observes, sociologists doing research on the population of the French Alps have concluded that there is a correlation between the altitude at which a person lives and the likelihood that they will be religious. In the case of the Hebrews, he claims, “this forbidding landscape was a springboard for the leap into the purely mental.” Secondly, nomadic pastoralism makes it necessary for everything in a culture to be portable. The concept of one abstract god, the only permitted representation of which is his name, a word, eliminates the need for statues and other impractical items of religious baggage. The anthropomorphism of polytheistic religions was simply not feasible in the desert.
2. Literacy, which greatly enhances human-beings’ capacity for abstraction, and thus not only their ability to conceive of abstract ideas, but to transport them over geographical and temporal space. Sacred texts travel with greater ease than sacred statues. The author claims that “access to transcendence lies, not in the immensity of things, but in their miniaturization.” Not only that, but it made the survival of the Jewish people’s group-identity possible, in spite of their geographical dispersal. It also made it possible for every disaster which befell the Jewish people to be transformed, via the text, into a strength, a reinforced group-consciousness. Compare the Jews’ awareness of the holocaust with that of the gypsies, an equally put-upon, but oral, culture. Debray observes that “it was writing alone which allowed the Hebrew people to be totally dispersed without losing its skin, memory and faith in the process.”
3. The phonetic alphabet, which, completely transcending the representational, necessitates greater powers of abstraction than pictographic or ideographic writing-systems. Such an alphabet also makes it much easier to learn to read, involving the memorization of a much smaller number of symbols. This democratization of literacy results in a democratization of intellectualism, or at least of certain intellectualisms – religions of the book and literacy are mutually reinforcing vectors. Debray returns to this point later. The advent of mass-literacy frees a text of the necessity of a speaker – it “decontextualizes” discourse. An act of speech is always uttered in a particular time and place, but a text expresses itself simultaneously in a thousand different social settings – for the first time, a universalized discourse is possible. Where reading aloud to a group is still considered appropriate, the existence of such an alphabet is still an advantage – more than any other writing system, it preserves the rhetorical power of spoken language. Finally, such an alphabet can be adapted for the use of other language-groups. For example, Vietnamese is written using the Roman alphabet – our one god, then, becomes, not only portable, but exportable, and possibly universal, which seems a logical ambition for a solitary deity to have.

From here, Debray moves on to the features of early Christianity which made it such a successful movement. For example, the many contradictory characterizations of Christ by the evangelists are a strength, not a weakness – they make for an exportable Christ, one who can be all things to all people. Also, early Christianity was an extremely innovative discourse. It transmitted its message through parables, not theoretical arguments. This tendency toward simplification, and the use of a visual logo such as the fish, made the message more rhetorically powerful, and were effective mnemonic techniques. For Debray, early Christianity is the original sound-bite, jingle, graffiti and advertisement all rolled into one.

Another competitive advantage was its radically new conception of orthodoxy – Christianity is, according to the author, “the inventor of the ego” in that it “individualized the relation to the divine”. Whereas Judaism, and Greek and Roman religions were aspects of an inherited civic duty, Christianity could only be adopted through a free choice, forming a purely intellectual identity. Christianity further popularized and democratized personal philosophical and spiritual conviction – another factor in Christianity’s universality was that anyone, regardless of previous religious background, nationality, gender or social class, could become a Christian. Later on, Debray expands this analysis to discuss the sacrament of baptism as an “adoption ritual.” He says:

“The children of hope are by nature more numerous than those of memory (in the year 2000, a billion Christians, thirteen million Jews)……Only one culture has subsequently surpassed it (jeunesse oblige) in plasticity: the American way of life, our new lumen gentium, which distributes images as the other distributes wafers. Elastic America (rubber is American) has that admirable suppleness of adaptation that Europe has lost. It can espouse, any foreigner; be espoused, at a distance, by any other. Not through indoctrination and lengthy catechesis. The holy communion is effected via film, advertisements, video clips and brand-names. They too are rituals of adoption, streamlined sacraments that are all the more charismatic in that they have no dogmatic apparatus at all.”

Here we get a taste of Debray’s talent for combining dry wit and x-ray-specs analysis. He writes well and writes badly in this book. When his use of rhetorical licence works, it results in some brilliantly insightful prose. When it doesn’t, it becomes barely readable sludge which makes you scream “Oh why, God, why do French philosophers insist on writing like this?” For all that, the unevenness of his writing style is worth it.

As Europe entered the middle ages, the gradual feminization of Christianity further added to its universal appeal – while Christianity was the least misogynistic of the three monotheisms, Catholicism further developed into a faith which sought to control societies of men through women. The Marian cult, and the re-emerging tendency to physically represent Christ and his mother, made the message further accessible to the illiterate. A contradiction with the birth of our one god, perhaps, but we notice that from here on in the story, our one god’s prevalence in the scheme of things goes into decline. Physical representations of God the Father have always been problematic. The logical conclusion of Christianity is the death of God the Father. Debray maintains that he has been in retirement since Constantine. What is retirement but social death? The common factor was, of course, the impulse toward an innovation which made the message easier to transport. As with every religion, every technology creates the social conditions which become the limitations its successor must break through. Literacy had been a necessary starting-point in the story of monotheism, but it too had to be transcended in order to make the message “lighter” – from statues to texts to pure images which have, formally, zero weight – just the same as the transition from barter to clay tablets to metal coins to paper money to plastic money to electronic money.

The increasingly marginal position of God the Father in Christianity, and of Christianity’s place within western civilization, were further exacerbated during the twentieth century by a proliferation of techniques in visual reproduction (which obviously favour Christ and his mother), a generalized crisis in the institution of fatherhood, and a radical atomization of the lives of most people – the transport revolution made the local-parish structure of traditional Christianity entirely obsolete. What need do we have of a 'social glue’ when there is no society? Also, what does the future hold for religions of the book in an age of declining literacy? Liberal humanists can say what they like, but the decline in religion has very neatly correlated with a decline in literacy, in observance of the requirements of civil society, and in the overall standard of intellectual rigour in western discourse. For those of a spiritual persuasion, there is now a plethora of intellectually-bankrupt new-age crap on the supermarket shelf. For those not of a spiritual persuasion, there is postmodernism – a lazy-minded, decadent theory which makes it possible for café pseudo-intellectuals to seem all sophisticated and knowing – without actually requiring them to know anything. Who needs to bother analyzing a text line by line when that text’s meaning is no longer sacred? The death of God has resulted in the depoliticization of everything, and if there’s nothing any longer worth having a good argument about, then who needs to bother with the rules of argument? The French enlightenment shot itself in the foot. It overlooked the point that, even if I don’t believe in God (whatever that might mean), and you don’t believe in God, we are still intellectually indebted to people who did believe in God. Ingratitude inevitably results in waste. Being a soulless inhabitant of the twenty-first century, I may not share Aquinas’s major premises, but I still marvel at his argumentation, line by line – the clarity, the sheer exhilarating rigour…(I was once required to read parts of the Summa Theologica for a course on The Virtues – he’s one of the very few philosophers who’s also a consistently good writer.)

Then there is the culture’s broad expectation of hyper-security as an inalienable right, where we no longer have personal tragedies to make sense of on anything even approaching a regular basis. What use does a population have for God the Father when the state has become everyone’s mother? This is not to say that spiritualism, more broadly, is in decline. On the contrary, following that historical episode from the French Enlightenment (ironically enough, the legacies of which are most alive and well in the institutions of the French church) to the later twentieth century, Debray maintains that “the re-enchantment of the world is already well underway”, and that “the absence of religion has resulted, not in incredulity, but in superstition.” On this point, Debray is particularly scathing of what he sees as both the commodification and the orientalization of spiritualism in the west – he continues:

“Religions without God are the most detotalized, deconfessionalized, deregulated and, consequently, the most competitive. The spiritual no longer broadcasts on a frequency – or, rather, every denomination has its own, one among others, it being up to us to surf channels. From the Pope to the Dalai Lama, by way of His Beatitude and the self-appointed Patriarch. A veritable bouquet of grand sorcerers competing freely.

What emerges from all this, from the Eternal of old, is a new kind of governance. The pastor of his flock is now the CEO of a series of social-service industries (baptisms, marriages, burials). With a clientele to be seen to. What is a customer? A user who has a choice. Not a believer: a member. Of a club or an association, with a considerably expanded margin of freedom. Now, when it comes to the goods of salvation, a globalized customer has an embarras du choix with which to load his supermarket cart. A bit of Zen, a session of transcendental meditation, a dose of reincarnation, a touch of Talmud – not forgetting an emergency ration of the angelic, just in case. The most confident can round things off with the X-files or an extraterrestrial conspiracy. The result is: in the market of beliefs, as in that of votes and brands, the firms of the Lord are obliged to adapt to the desires of the customer-surfer-king. Such obligatory marketing is known euphemistically as 'the obligation to respond to the expectations of society’.”

Later on, in discussing the effect which this religious cocktail will have on globalized culture, and its role in cultural imperialism, Debray entertains the entirely plausible idea that multiculturalism is the window-dressing for the ultimate in cultural imperialism:

“That culminating point might almost be called an atheistic monotheism. It would be the mix of ingredients successively gathered in the course of its advance in order to correct one local accent by another. Yahweh would have supplied the basic foundations, with the dogma of the Law. Christ would have fulfilled them, sweetened them with the notion of the person and inner morality. Mohammed, observing Christianity abandoning its original project of radically reforming fundamentally unjust societies, would have added a strong dose of social equality (hence his contemporary success). And a Buddha, arriving in our latitudes out of curiosity, saddened to see how little place monotheisms give to living nature, would have poured into the mix a measure of compassion for all animate beings. Into the multicultural shaker, our agnostic piety, not wanting to be left out, spiced the mixture with the universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Geneva conventions, humanitarian interventions, a touch of spiritual tourism, and a pinch of astrology. By now there is something for every taste – or rather, as in the films and meals known in French as avionables, fit for aeroplanes, the brew would be sufficiently insipid not to upset any palate, and thus fit to be served to all passengers, of whatever origin, opinion or religion.”

When he hits his rhetorical stride, Debray’s mockery is delightful. The conclusion he finally arrives at is that every new conception of God, every new religion, distills from its predecessors what is most generalizable, what is least historically particular, what is most exportable. Judaism did precisely that at the very beginning of monotheistism’s story – it borrowed narratives from precursor traditions throughout the Mesopotamian world. Christianity evolved as a distillation of Judaism and Classical literature. Bourgeois liberalism evolved as a distillation of Christianity, etc, etc…

It’s still happening – in cultural evolution, just as for the newly-literate Bedouin of three millennia ago, rule number one is still to travel as light as possible.