I know the BBC is a complex organisation, and in recent times has been guilty of some offensive antisemitism, but I still hold it dear.
For years I’ve made a commitment to listen to
the Reith Lectures – four lectures given, every year, by leading figures in
their field.
This year by four different figures, taking
their cue from the four freedoms articulated by the then President of the
United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address; freedom
of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
The speaker addressing the freedom, in a
lecture given in their home-town of Swansea was the former Archbishop of
Canterbury, Rowan Williams.[1]
It was a remarkable talk – I recommend it. And
I want to share some of Archbishop’s ideas about the value of worship as a
follow up to the sermon I gave last week about the value of Judaism. And I
hope, next week, to share something on the value of prayer – the kind of Jewish
worship we engage in here, week after week, after week.
In the first part of the speech, the Archbishop
disdained to care very much about protecting freedom of religious conscious –
the right of a person to believe whatever they wanted to believe as a internal,
purely spiritualized faith commitment. He was interested in what he called
“manifested religion” – protections to do things because we believe in things.
If we say we are in favour of freedom of
religion and we only mean freedom to privately believe in anything anyone wants
to believe, we put religion in a category that doesn’t matter.
It is, Williams argued, “the kind of repressive
tolerance that some radical social theorists of the ’60s identified, a
tolerance that undermines what it purports to allow.” I think that’s exactly
right. Religion doesn’t want to be considered a private set of beliefs that
have no impact on the way we live our lives. Religion, if it means anything at
all, means that the beliefs we have must be manifested – must be lived out.
Belief drives action.
But also, he went on to say, freedom to worship
can’t be merely about protection of rights to do strange, ritualized things,
the rights of Jews to take time off work on Rosh Hashanah, or the right of Sikh
men to wear long hair, or Islamic women to cover their hair.
“Modern societies,” Williams argued, “have
settled for a kind of lukewarm tolerance, a recognition that within reasonable
limits of public order people may conduct whatever rituals they please because
none of this should impinge on the way they make significant decisions or order
their civic and personal lives. But this gives the unmistakable impression that
religious practice is essentially a sort of leisure activity, probably
harmless, but definitely marginal to the main business of society.”
You might want to swim, I might want to play football. You
might want to go to the theatre, I might want to hear jazz. You might want to
keep kosher and I might want to keep Halal.
So be it, and we can probably get on, more or
less, with most of that. But that, also, argues Williams, isn’t enough to justify
why it’s worth caring about relgion.
So what is really going on when we say that
religion matters?
What does it really mean to say that we want a
protected space for religion in the public sphere.
Religion starts, rather obviously, with God.
That is to say, not with humans. That means two things.
Religion is a counter to what Williams called the “double dangers of
modernity,” that on the one hand strength and might is the only true locus of
power – that, of course is the danger of fascism, and on the other that my own
internal compass should be the only locus of authority over me, a danger that
he calls vacuous.
I have to admit, a deep dislike of the sort of life-task
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt spent a life pursuing, “be true to yourself.” “Follow your
own truth.” It’s a kind of self-serving, self-aggrandizing way of seeing one’s
place in the Universe. The chances are that the Universe doesn’t really need us
to focus on our own self-satisfaction and our own pursuit of our own
self-interest. In fact for us to get on as a society we’re going to have to
peer outside the silo of our own self-interest and start working out how to
live in society.
And that leads us to how we make decisions as
societies. What happens on the other side of Rousseau’s social contract? Williams
argues that, were it not for religion, were it not for some ‘other’ centred
location of absolute importance in our world, the only other way societies work
out how to behave is by power; power expressed by authoritarian regimes, but
also by democratic regimes.
what’s at stake
in all this is the freedom to believe that certain human actions and policies
derive their goodness or rightness not from consensus or even legality but from
something more lasting, something about the way things are, and the freedom to
organise your actions, public and private on that basis. It’s the freedom to
see your human choices and habits as part of an attempt to discover some kind
of fit with a reality that is quite outside human control. It’s the ethics as
tied up with a process of discovering what is lastingly appropriate for the
kind of beings that human beings are in the kind of world that this world is.
Williams’ point is that, if you make room for
religion, you make room at the table for a view of how the world should work
that isn’t just about the numbers or feelings of people sharing those views
right now. He makes a point that at every point in history large numbers of
people have held beliefs that are, when viewed from some other place, palpably
wrong – slavery being perhaps the best example.
The point of religion is that it comes at the
comforts of our contemporary moment from the outside.
While is might be true that there have been
religious moral failures, religious people who have tried to give religious
justifications for the unjustifiable. From where else have we or do we learn to
see society from outside the prism of number and power?
There’s a wonderful rabbinic commentary on the
moment when Moses and Aharon appear before Pharoah.[2]
And Moses and
Aaron came [before Pharaoh] (Exodus 5:1)
Rabbi Hiyya son
of Abba said, ‘This was coronation day, when all the Kings came to crown
Pharaoh because he was the Emperor. While they were placing crowns on Pharaoh’s
head, Moses and Aaron stood at the entrance to the hallway.
Pharaoh’s
guards told him, ‘Two elders are standing at the doorway’
Pharaoh asked
‘Have they got a crown?’
The guard
replied ‘no.’
‘Then let them
enter last.’
When Moses and
Aaron finally stood before Pharaoh he said, ‘What do you want?’ Moses replied ‘The
God of the Hebrews has sent be to you to say, “Let my people go so they will
serve me.”’ (Ex 7:16).
Pharaoh replied
angrily, ‘Who is this GOD that I should listen to His voice. Doesn’t He know
enough to send me a crown, rather you come with words.’
Rabbi Levi said,
‘Pharaoh then took the list of gods and began to read, ‘The god of Edom, the
god of Moab, the god of Sidon, yada yada yada,’ and he said to them, ‘There, I
have finished all my records and your god’s not on the list.’
So Moses and
Aaron said to Pharaoh, ‘Fool, the gods you mentioned are all dead. But the LORD
is a living God, Ruler of the Universe.’
Pharaoh asked,
‘Is he young or old? How many cities has he captured? How many states has he
humbled? How long has he been in power?
They replied,
the strength and power of our God fills the world. God was before the world was
created and God will be at the end of the worlds. He fashioned you and placed
within you the breath of life.’
What else has
he done? Pharaoh asked.
It’s an argument between someone, Pharaoh, who
believes in the world as it is as determining what is and what should be done.
And someone, Moses, who are trying to make a space for an understanding of the
world that comes from outside Pharoah’s experience. It’s an argument about the
value of religion. It’s an argument that goes to the heart of what it means to
be a human and to hunger for freedom and morality.
Religion doesn’t always get it right, but if
religion is going to be given the grief for its errors, then it deserves its
plaudits and protections for being the force behind every liberation movement
in Western Civilization since the original Exodus.
And what of those errors – the errors of
religion to back things that are simply wrong, or immoral? Williams argues that
it’s true but also unsurprising. It’s a hard business, attempting to look at
the Universe from the outside, and that’s why, at least for me, religion is at
its best in humility. When the notion of there being a power outside of the
world that is greater than me, and everything in this world imbues in my a
humility, a lack of confidence in the absolute rightness of my own position.
The knowledge that I am not God, and that there
is a force outside of all humanity that I have to live before should help me
find points of meeting even with those with whom I disagree.
As Williams puts it
[The] main
thing is that the presence within a society of people with strong commitments
about what is due to human dignity puts a certain kind of pressure on the whole
social environment, a pressure to argue for and justify what society licences
or defends in terms that go beyond popular consensus alone. In other words, it
helps to guarantee that argument about issues from environmental responsibility
to sexual politics will have an element of real moral debate, debate about the
kind of beings human beings are.
Religion isn’t the guarantor of getting these
arguments right, but it is, I think, absolutely vital
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