So far, so Marxist. But where Bloch differed from other Marxists was in his insistence that it was not possible to simply dismiss religion as "the sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world" without recognising that the sigh contained the pre-illumination of a different and better world. The familiar reproach towards Marxism that it is simply a materialist version of religious belief was thus inverted by Bloch to state that, on the contrary, religious belief was always a form of social liberation which had misunderstood itself due to its historical untimeliness. Of course, the death of Marxism may partly explain the absence of Bloch's ideas from the philosophical scene, but that does not obviate the need to examine those ideas, not least because the demise of Marxism as a social alternative is arguably one of the factors which has contributed to the re-emergence of religion as a reaction to the new world order.
The resurrection of God presents a challenge to those such as Dawkins and Hitchens because they continue to perceive religion as an opiate which is handed out by states and their tame priests and mullahs in order to keep people quiet, rather than as a home-grown product consumed by people in order to dull the pain not only of global economic disadvantage but also of a deep, yet unidentifiable sense of loss. And again it is Bloch who gives us a clue as to where this sense of loss resides. In The Principle of Hope he states that what drives us forward is the paradoxical desire to find our way back to somewhere we have never been: home.
The desire to return to somewhere completely new but familiar is clearly a sense which underpins all religious, but also much secular thought. It takes many forms, but is undoubtedly a product of the historical shift from the primacy of politics in the 20th century, to the primacy of economics today. Where once social attempts to control the invisible hand of the market were given precedence, our age has seen growing social inequality and the privatisation of hope. It should be no surprise that fundamentalisms of all sorts have rushed in to fill that void. The difference between fundamentalism and progressive religious belief, however, is merely the difference between looking backward or looking forward in order to find the way home.
Enlightenment does not mean merely shining a light into the darker recesses of the world but must also mean a liberation of people out of darkness into the light. What progressive religious thought has to contribute to that process of liberation in an age of tumultuous social change is the preservation of human dignity against both reactionary religious obscurantism and value-free scientistic rationalism. To label all forms of religion as part of a general delusion, therefore, does a disservice to both progress and reason. Where we are offers us no home. That is why we constantly feel it is time to move on. As long as that is the case there will be the need for religion. The point, however, is to make it a religion which will be happily complicit in its own earthly fulfilment. And I say that as a good atheist.
· Peter Thompson is a lecturer in German politics at Sheffield University and director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies