fierce religion

I've been thinking about 'fierce religion' after reading an opinion piece by Pamela Bone in The Age (www.theage.com.au). Her basic argument is that good religion is the sort where the adherents 'politely ignore' the less palatable parts of their scriptures. Bad religion is the sort that has people passionately believing absurdities. She continues her argument with some statistics showing that formal adherence to religion seems to drop as prosperity and education increase, suggesting that improving all people's lives would put an end to religion altogether. She concludes that religion has its uses, but 'be grateful most people don't believe too fiercely'.

Today's letters page includes (of course) a couple of rejoinders - one of the 'I'm a passionate believer and I'm not a bad person' sort. This seems to me fairly unhelpful - none of us should be naive about the depths of our own propensity to violence, or the possibility that we will harness our own convictions to base causes. A couple of other responses occur to me.

Firstly, it is terribly sloppy thinking to equate fierce or passionate conviction with 'bad' religion. Without making grand statements about myself (who knows how I might use my convictions to damage others?) there are some useful historical contexts for considering this. Martin Gilbert's book The Righteous is a study of Europeans who protected Jews during the Holocaust. What is clear from his work is that Catholic teachings on the Jews contributed to popular anti-semitism and allowed a culture where the Holocaust could occur. Bad religion. What is also clear is that the majority of people who protected or saved Jews (at incredible risk to themselves and their families, usually with no desire for reward) did so out of religious conviction. Incredibly fierce conviction about the value of human life and the love of God for the persecuted sustained most of these'Righteous' Gentiles. Surely that's good religion.

I am reminded of the statement of a philosopher when she visited the site of Auschwitz. As she walked through those terrible gates she said 'I never want to be as certain of anything as the people were who built this place.' How inane. Only those who were that certain could possibly have confronted the powerful forces that built those gates. Only those who were that certain did. Of course religion is not the only possible source of such certainty. But I would argue that historically it very often has been.

Secondly, the suggestion that most believers cope with the uncomfortable parts of their scriptures by politely ignoring them suggests to me that Pamela Bone hasn't been in conversation with many believers lately. Thousands of years of thought, prayer, discussion and debate on such passages reduced to 'politely ignor[ing]' them. Sigh. It's hard not to find the underlying assumption that believers are mindless or heartless frustrating!

Thirdly, Bone's statement about secular societies obviously requires further investigation. The second response to her article published by The Age took issue with this statement by giving examples of 'secular' societies that were/are human rights disasters - the USSR, China etc. Again, this is not entirely convincing because these societies are not strictly secular - they are atheistic. If Bone is arguing that secular societies (ie. societies that protect the right to religious expression and practice but separate church and state) are 'best', she of course needs to explain what she means by 'best'. 'Happiness indicators' such as suicide statistics would not necessarily support her argument. Even assuming that she is right, however, she immediately finds herself in debt to those pesky 'fierce religionists' who passionately argued for the separation of church and state on the basis of religious conviction. All of this is of course discussed in the wide literature on the history of secularisation.

It would be encouraging to think that we could analyse and condemn the horrors of religious bigotry and violence without resorting to such sloppy distinctions between those who are serious (and therefore loonies) and those who are secular humanists who have adopted a bit of religion as a sentimental trimming. We Christians are, of course, capable of just such stereotyping!

snicker

Ship of Fools (www.shipoffools.com) has just closed its offensive religious humour competition. If you're into jokes about randy priests, you'll love it. I gave up after the first few, but salvaged this semi-precious gem:

A priest, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar.
The barman looks up and says "What is this? Some kind of joke?"

two good things

So far my blogging has been rather bleak. To balance that, here are two (completely unrelated) good things that I have encountered in the last 24 hours:

1) Today is Daffodil Day, so there are bright yellow clumps of daffodils (and daffodil-related paraphernalia) being sold all over the place. As I walked in the university gates this morning, there was a girl in front of me carrying a bunch of daffodils. She was being followed, at about head height, by an absolutely enormous bumble bee! It was just buzzing along cheerfully, presumably following the scent (sight? what kind of senses do bees have?) of the daffodils. Wonderful!

2) I have been reading Walter Brueggemann on the Psalms, in preparation for talks that I am giving in Brisbane next weekend. He has very good things to say. Here's one of them:

'I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God's 'loss of control'.'
(Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg: Minneapolis, 1984), 52)

Which is also wonderful, and leads me to sneak in a third good thing - yesterday I got the program for the conference I am presenting at in the States in November (the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, www.aarweb.org ). Walter Brueggemann (and Mark Noll, Miroslav Volf and Stanley Hauerwas) will also be speaking! I'm feeling much more enthusiastic about the conference as a result.

slavery and sympathy

After writing yesterday about the moral questions raised by 'I heart Huckabees', I sat down to read a number of journal articles about the eighteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery. The historical development these articles are concerned with is this:
'An unprecedented wave of humanitarian reform sentiment swept through the societies of Western Europe, England, and North America in the hundred years following 1750. Among the movements spawned by this new sensibility, the most spectacular was that to abolish slavery. Although its morality was often qustioned before 1750, slavery was routinely defended and hardly ever condemned outright, even by the most scrupulous moralists.' (Thomas Haskell, 'Capitalism and the Origin of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I', The American Historical Review Vol. 90, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), 339.)
There are two main questions that this development of 'sensibility' raises for me (and the authors of the articles I'm reading). Firstly, where did this new sensibility - in a sense, a new moral parameter - come from? Secondly, why was it so selective? That is, why did humanitarian reformers, for the most part, expend enormous amounts of energy on the abolition of slavery, the reform of prisons and asylums, the improved treatment of indigenous peoples, while largely ignoring (or even worsening) the situation of the working poor in Britain itself?

There are a number of reductionistic answers to these questions. The hagiography that developed around the humanitarian reformers portrayed them as moral giants who were motivated by a new vision of compassion that came entirely from some source external to their historical context - either a new understanding of the gospel (for the evangelical reformers) or their own moral character (for the utilitarians and others). This hagiography failed to explain the selective nature of the reformers' compassion and was thoroughly attacked in the revisionist accounts of Marxists and others. In many of the revisionist accounts, the reformers acted primarily as agents for social control. As members of the growing middle class, they used the moral authority gained through the reform movements to establish social and cultural hegemony. Simultaneously, they supported the establishment of ever-tighter legal and social restrictions on the working poor. (Foucault, of course, argues that the humanitarian reform movements themselves acted to create these restrictions). In such accounts the reformers are either profoundly hypocritical or entirely self-deceived as to their own motives.

The articles that I am reading attempt to provide more balanced explanations of the reform movements that take both the economic, social and cultural context and the compassionate urges of the reformers seriously. This makes for better history than either the hagiographical or revisionist extremes. But it doesn't make for simple explanations! How easy to 'do good' within the parameters of our own understanding. How difficult to see the motives that drive us or the consequences that ensue.

I heart Huckabees!

I really do! After standing in the video shop for half an hour, feeling mounting frustration over the endless amounts of pointless rubbish that Hollywood churns out, it was a delight to watch a film that is actually about something. The quality is not entirely consistent, but at least they tried! The central idea - of 'existential detectives' who can be hired to spy on their client so as to discover the meaning behind his or her life - is gold. The efforts of the two American detectives (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to help their clients find meaning are constantly threatened by their French counterpart (Isabelle Huppert), who is devoted to guiding her clients into the truth that life is cruel and meaningless. It's a philosophical morality play!

The scene that has really lingered in my mind, however, is the one in which two main characters - Tommy and Albert - have dinner with a middle-class Christian family. Tommy is a disillusioned firefighter, obsessed with the 'petroleum problem', while Albert is an idealistic greenie and dreadful poet. They are invited to dinner with the Christian family because of their interest in a Sudanese orphan the family is fostering. The family is carefully and caustically portrayed - secure in their self-righteousness as 'good people' (they've adopted an orphan from Africa, after all!), convinced that the American way of life is inherently good, immediately threatened by any suggestion that they have contributed to the broader problems of the world. When Tommy suggests that suburban sprawl and thoughtless consumption of petrol has contributed to the kind of war and violence that left the Sudanese boy orphaned, the teenage daughter announces with great anxiety that 'Jesus isn't angry with us if we accept him in our hearts'. Tommy responds: 'Yes he is, I'm sorry, yes he really is'.

A neat portrayal of the moral dead-end of much of modern evangelicalism. Not, of course, fair to the many western Christians (including evangelicals) who have a broader perspective. But the temptation to bolster our own righteousness by doing sentimental good on a small scale while developing theological justifications for ignoring the broader forces of evil at work - so recognisable! Have mercy on us, O Lord.

AZADI

Most Thursday mornings for the past two years I have been in detention. With a couple of friends I've made my way past the high fences, barbed wire and security guards outside Maribyrnong Detention Centre. We've sat in the gloomy visitors' room with a series of confused, angry and desperate people who have been locked up without a trial and without sentence being passed. We've heard stories about torture and fear, about separation from loved ones, about night journeys over mountains and across the ocean. We've learned about food and customs and languages and religions. We've laughed a lot at the detention centre and cried occasionally at home.

This Thursday was different. This Thursday, a man who had been in detention for four and a half years - the friend who we've been visiting for the longest - came to visit us. He got out of detention two weeks ago and today we showed him around the university. He was walking around the streets of Melbourne with us! We had breakfast in a funky little Carlton cafe, and we explored the nooks and crannies of this campus together. Things I'd never noticed: Across the court from the library, the garden beds are full of papyrus. One of the doors to the university carpark was moved here from a street in Dublin, Eire. There is a chunk of stone from the gates of the Port Arthur settlement in the middle of one of the university gardens.

Throughout the morning, I kept wanting to stop and grab his arm and say 'You got out! You're free! You're here with us!' I was overwhelmed by the experience of walking through the streets with him, finally away from that terrible place of guards and high gates. But what would he have said to me, if I had expressed my joy? At lunch we toasted 'Azadi' - 'freedom'. Freedom for him is a life without his daughter, a life of depression medication and chain smoking, a life without work or self-respect. A ruined and precarious life. My government did this, and while I am so glad my friend is free, I am deeply ashamed of what we have done to him. Will there be justice for him?

photo

I'm experimenting with uploading photos. This is me at a recent conference.. presenting a poster on 'Singing about Smallpox'. 'Eh?' you may understandably ask.

First Blog

I mainly created this blog because I thought the name was so cool. Why has no other Jo (or Joe) Blogger used it? Perhaps because it's not as amusing as I thought...