Here’s the rest of what I said at Fuller Terrace. It’s the second half of the first post.
This is not a diatribe against atheism. I have not problem with atheism or atheist, or their promotion of their position. It’s when that becomes a basis for contempt that I have difficulty. I must say that what frustrates me most about the anti-religious diatribes I have read or heard is when they engage in gross misrepresentations, in creating “religion” in their own image or distorting what little knowledge they have and insist that their version is comprehensive. At times, the depictions of religion by its most ardent opponents bear no more resemblance to religions as they would be known by their adherents than Dr. Frankenstein’s Gothic lair does to a contemporary robotics lab.
As I survey popular culture and mainstream media, I also encounter other, perhaps more benign caricatures of religion in a few different guises. I’ll personify one as an elderly maiden aunt, slightly deaf and senile, harmless, and indulged when she gets a bit cranky, goofy or downright offensive, out of deference to the past, even nostalgia. This is religion as an anachronism, the archaic domain of naïve, flabby thinkers, something without merit or comprehension of reality, a quaint sideline. Something sweet, perhaps, but trivial, whose time has come and gone. Good for comedy, satire, and sentimental holiday specials.
A younger version is a person of mixed race, male or female or perhaps androgynous, beautiful in an exotic way, perhaps privy to esoteric secrets and magic, a foil for our heavily mechanistic and pragmatic society. A pleasant escape from reality. Good for romantic fantasy.
And then we have the bogeyman. He is a faded or exiled despot, perhaps with a personality disorder, who wants to snare us in traps of thought and behaviour from which we have only recently escaped. He has power in distant lands—or even just beyond the border or in the house of your neighbour—and his thirst for power and the crimes he has committed to get and keep it know no bounds. Vigilance is needed to guard against this handy villain. Good for melodrama.
Like all good caricatures, there is some correspondence to reality here, but it is greatly exaggerated, and much is left out. There have been some exceptions to these stock characters in the portrayal of religion, but they have a hard time getting into prime time. These three and their cousins are such an entertaining bunch that they are kept much busier in the mediated imagination. The caricature of people who are not religious by religious folk, of course, can be just as ridiculous and unhelpful. I’m merely calling attention to what may go unnoticed and asking for more authentic engagement with one another.
We can pride ourselves on our tolerance and agree to leave each other alone; we can amuse ourselves with caricatures as long as we don’t incite hatred; but both of these habits are a way to keep our distance from one another. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with either, this is not sufficient. Not in our time. Not in this world.
As populations move in unprecedented numbers, as our own country becomes more diverse, as we become aware of that our increasingly fragile planet is socially, economically, and ecologically interconnected, we need to understand one another on a more profound level. Despite the popularity of recent attacks on religion in Europe and North America, it is central in the lives of the majority of the world’s population. For them it frames how everything else is seen and understood. And as I will delve into shortly, it has much to contribute. That is not the only reason to take it seriously. There are less comfortable reasons as well. Religious conflicts do exist, and more prevalently, conflicts that make use of religious differences exist. Oppression of and by religion exists. We do not solve such problems by ignoring them or declaring religion out of bounds. Conflicts are heightened when people perceive that which they most value, that which gives meaning and depth to their lives, is threatened or held in contempt, or merely misunderstood. We urgently need to develop habits of public conversation that take religion seriously, that engage it rather than merely tolerate it, confine it, or isolate it. What I want to do here is proclaim that this is not only a necessary but a good thing, and that there are better ways than others to go about it.
The most common misconception I encounter about religion is that it is universally and fundamentally about belief, the assent to specific ideas about the existence, nature, and activity of a god. This concept of religion is profoundly shaped by Christianity and especially by the Protestant Reformation. The early Christians started it by composing a short précis of what they were taught by the earlier followers of Jesus, and making that part of their initiation ceremonies. After the conversion of Constantine, this was expanded in the context of a representative Council of elected bishops, to make sure everyone was on the same page. But things really got ramped up during the Reformation. Not only did people spend a great effort on writing out “confessions”, systematic summaries of what they believed, as a way of detailing their differences with one another, but one of the core Protestant tenets was that belief itself was the critical element in salvation.
The problem is that using the idea of religion as belief as a template keeps us from seeing disparate religious traditions in their own dimensions, which far more prevalently emphasize how one acts and the transformation of consciousness rather than a codified set of assertions. But there is something I want to zero in on about how we regard such statements and particularly the writings that gave rise to them that is at the heart of my concern about taking religion seriously: I fear that whole ways of perception and thought are suffering some degree of atrophy in our general society, partly because we don’t even recognize their existence or difference.
I often ask students in an introductory course what questions they have about religion. One young woman startled me once with her question: why do people still believe in religion when science has proved it wrong? I must confess that at first I was baffled, since this was a course on Asian religions, something I didn’t think scientists were concerned with beyond measuring the brain waves of meditating monks. But you’ve probably already figured out that she was referring to that destructive argument between certain “believers in the Bible” and the advocates of evolution. Since that time, I look for any excuse to lay chapter one and the first verse and a half from chapter two of Genesis next to the rest of chapter two and have people compare the two pieces of writing. They soon discover many things, but the crucial insight is that there are two different stories. One starts with a wet world and the other with a dry one; one takes in the whole cosmos and the other is concerned with a small piece of ground; in one, humankind is created at the end of the story and in the other very near the beginning and the order in between is different. This part is easy. Everybody gets the picture. But when I ask them why they think the people who wrote these stories down on a single scroll put them together, one after the other, when there are such obvious contradictions between them, and what meaning this might have, things don’t go so well. The most common answer I get is that the writers didn’t know which story was right, so they put them both in. But what—I ask—if they thought both stories were “right”?
I usually can guide the discussion so that everyone realizes that the writers of the creation stories in Genesis were not attempting to do a primitive form of science. I may get as far as getting them to entertain the idea that they were trying to convey truths that have nothing to do with fact. But very seldom can people articulate what those truths might be for the writers of the text. They are left perplexed in front of words whose meanings they thought they knew, but are now opaque to them. Something is being lost. To be sure, it is a connection with the past and familiarity with an important cultural fountainhead, the distilled wisdom of the ancestors. Far more insidious, I think, is the incomprehension of a way of experiencing, of thinking, a way of being-in-the-world.
It is all too easy to dismiss and ridicule ways of thinking that don’t fit with our own, particularly with regard to suggestions of realities inaccessible to physical or logical proof, such as “God”. Now, “God” is not a concern for all religions, and even those who do worship a divine being or reality do not conceive it in the same way. But I want to address the question because the existence of God often becomes a major point of contention. Just because something isn’t amenable to demonstration by logic or measurement doesn’t mean that it is a non-existent delusion, or that such a reality is not accessible in some other way. It may well simply mean that our methods of physical or logical proof are limited. Rather than considering religion as irrational or non-rational, I think of it as hetero-rational, or if you prefer, queer-rational. To reduce a discourse as multifaceted as religion to a lame attempt at making factual argument is to miss what is going on, namely, grappling with the meaning and the mysteries of life and death on a whole different level. Or I should say, on many different levels at once. The image, the gesture, the ritual, the story all have multiple meanings communicated in a myriad of ways.
This is the realm of soul-talk. Of pregnant silences, whispers, chants, handclaps, and ring-shouts. Although not exclusively so, and despite its faults and failings, religion has been the major source of human aspiration toward the highest good, and of inspiration. In-spiration, a word meaning being breathed into by something or someone that is beyond oneself. However named and conceived, many religious folk respond to that Someone/Something as the ground of Being, the will toward justice, the deep well of mercy and compassion. Trust in the integrity of justice and compassion, and in the validity and power of their source, is what the biblical and Qur’anic traditions mean by “faith”. Such faith gives birth to hetero-rational/queer-rational, hope.
Martin Luther King’s original title for the speech he delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a speech usually referred to as the “I Have a Dream” speech, is “A Stone of Hope”. The general consensus at that time was that the Civil Rights legislation then before the Congress would not pass in spite of the support of the Kennedys. King expressed his confidence that nevertheless, with faith we could “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” As David Chappell argues in his book A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Faith, Liberalism, and the Death of Jim Crow, this was not a liberal faith in the basic goodness of humankind, a conviction that reason would prevail. Who could retain hope in that, having withstood a history of enslavement, rape, and lynchings, and in the very midst of beatings, humiliations, imprisonment, and water hoses? No. It was faith in something beyond and more powerful than humankind, that could shift and shape the heart. Chappell refers to “liberal pulpit envy”. Of course philosophical liberals joined the southern Black leadership in alliance, but what sustained the movement—and wrought dramatic change—was faith in a liberating God who had created a universe whose arc was long, but bent toward justice. Religion gave the movement not only an organizational base but its language of love along with the language of rights, and the moral fortitude required by non-violence. Civil Rights marchers marched out of churches after hours of prayers and hymns, as did the East Germans in 1989 as they faced the army with their chant “Wir Sind das Volk” “We are the people”.
A popular canard has it that religion is responsible for most of the major conflicts of history. I beg to differ with that reading of history. In fact I’m quite suspicious of it as propaganda: whose interest does it serve? You will have to look hard, if you are honest, to find a greater force for peace. King took his non-violent philosophy from Mohandas K. Gandhi, who based it on religious as well as pragmatic grounds. Other notable religious leaders working ardently for peace with justice today are groups of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle East, and Buddhists Thich Hnat Hanh, the Myanmar monks, and the Dalai Lama.
I am not denying that there have been horrendous actions taken with religious justification—from the crusades and inquisitions to missionaries and residential schools. But let our view of history not be one-sided and amnesic. I’m convinced that our nervousness about religion leads us to mis-represent history to our children. I once suggested a student watch the movie Gandhi and at the next class I asked her what she thought of it. “Long” she said. “And was this a real guy?” Not what Einstein meant, I’m sure, when he said of Gandhi, “The future generations will scarcely believe that such a man in flesh and blood, had tread this earth.”
If our young people are not learning about Gandhi, are they at least learning about the religious role in our own history? Do they learn of the religious roots of the abolition movement? Do they learn about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and if so, what? Was it a repressive, puritanical group of meddling old hens who wanted to enact impractical measures to keep everyone from having a good time? Or was it a group of women who found their public voice promoting policies intended for the well-being of women and children, in the face of an epidemic of alcoholism? Out of this religiously-motivated public engagement of women came the Canadian movement for women’s suffrage, and it produced the first two women elected to public office in the British Commonwealth. And what about the “greatest Canadian”, Tommy Douglas? Do our children learn that he was an ordained Baptist preacher, and that his campaign to provide universal health care in Canada was initially organized in and relied on the participation of churches?
To mention religion in the same breath as politics brings up the last thirty years or so in the United States, when the liberating face of religion—that coalition of progressive Christians and Jews with other political liberals—gave way to the public campaigns of a form of reactionary Christianity—mis-named fundamentalism—in coalition with “true believers” in free-market fundamentalism and neocon militarism. I agree with Cornel West that the apex of this coalition’s power in the present Bush administration has been the nadir of American democracy.
The tide, however, is now turning. I think in the U.S. this turn effectively began shortly after the Presidential election in 2004. But this isn’t merely a pendulum swing in the same conservative-liberal arc, the same rut. And it is not a turn away from religion in American political life, although some would wish that. There is something new happening that hasn’t happened before: the conjunction of faith-based activism with interfaith dialogue, giving birth to new coalitions. I think the dialogue was always important, but it often raised the question of what its purpose was. The activism was important, but was fractured and ineffective in the midst of the 1990s culture wars.
This new interfaith engagement is taking many forms. One of the most interesting to me is the organization of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. The brainchild of Rabbi Michael Lerner, with co-leadership by Cornel West and Sister Joan Chittister, the Network reaches out from those Jewish and Christian origins. It includes Hindus, Buddhists, Bahai’s, Taoists, Muslims, neo-Pagans and members of other faiths, including a whole contingent who identify as “spiritual but not religious”. As a network, it connects not only individuals but organizations to one another. Their agenda is ambitious. It is to shift cultural norms as much as it is to advocate for concrete political policies. Their four basic tenets (from their website www.spritualprogressives.org) are
· Foster a New Bottom Line of love, generosity & ecological sensitivity in our economy, education, media, & government.
· Foster a new global consciousness and solidarity.
· Promote awe, radical amazement, gratitude & developing an inner spiritual life.
· Challenge the misuse of God & religion by the Religious Right and religio-phobia on the Left.
Let me pick up on the first part of that last one, to challenge the misuse of God & religion by the Religious Right. I want to hone in on that because I don’t want anyone here to think that by taking religion seriously I mean that religions and their representatives ought not be challenged. They can and should. That is part of what I mean by taking religion seriously. But it is simply the case that immanent criticism of religion, an approach that takes religious commitments and worldviews seriously and credits adherents with good faith, is the most effective. The Network of Spiritual Progressives, and the other organizations that are connected to the Network, such as Sojourners, are not alone in this approach or this new wave of pluralist spiritual/religious political engagement. And there are signs it may be working.
In the Presidential election of 2004, much was made of what were identified by the Religious Right as the “moral issues”: opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. This year, those issues have practically fallen off the table. In the present moment, when the economic crisis precipitated by the credit meltdown in the U.S. and instability of oil prices make those issues of this campaign urgent and stark, it might be easy to overlook that the agenda had shifted even before these recent dramatic events. And that shift has been accomplished, in no small part, by the intervening years’ conversations in churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples, in kitchens and coffee shops, via email, blogs, and phones, conversations that insisted that war is a moral issue, torture is a moral issue, health care is a moral issue, poverty is a moral issue, climate change is a moral issue, clean water is a moral issue, racism is a moral issue. It is in the context of this fertile ground that we have witnessed the spectacular rise of Barack Obama, the gifted junior Senator from Illinois, with his refrain of hope and biblical call to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers and to repair this world—in Hebrew, tikkun olam.
Is the coincidence of Obama’s life trajectory and the dawn of a pluralist, progressive religious politics a sign that there really is such a thing as Providence? Far too much political hay has been made over Obama’s church and pastor and over the enthusiasm, near mania, of some of his followers for me to take on that question. But I do want to close with a story from the campaign.
Susan had not been involved in politics before, certainly never at the primary stage, where the nominee was determined. She voted, but like most of her generation, hadn’t felt that it made any real difference. She was alienated from the whole process, and just as alienated from what she knew of traditional religions. Like most people, she was fully occupied keeping up with the demands of everyday life. So she was finding it very difficult to explain to her husband, family, and friends exactly why she was passionate enough about the Obama campaign to have taken leave from her job and comfortable middle-class life to become part of the mobile backbone of Obama’s ground crew. When I met her, she was the administrative head of a field office in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania was a tough, uphill campaign in the primary, nasty and racist at times, and in absolute numbers, a certain defeat. In one of the infrequent lulls in activity, she took me aside and tried to convey what this experience meant for her. But she had little language for it. Finally, frustrated, she gestured, waving her hand through the space between us. “What is this?” she asked. I offered, “Space?” She shook her head. No. “It’s not empty space; it just looks that way. We share something. The air you breathe out I breathe in and vice versa.” And this was the heart of it: “Through this campaign I’ve discovered that we’re all connected, we’re all part of one another!” Indeed we are. And in that moment, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Gandhi—they were smiling.
