Friday 16 December 2022

Why Be Religious - Archbishop Rowan Williams' Reith Lecture




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

 



[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fw1l

[2] Midrash Tanhumah, V’era 5

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