THE GUARDIAN |
||
COMMENT |
Religion is a bloody
disgrace The Abrahamic family
of faiths is now frighteningly
dysfunctional Tony
Bayfield The
Guardian In 1982, I was down
at an interfaith centre in the
West Country. A friend, an
Anglican priest, suggested we
went to meet his bishop. Since
this particular bishop lived
in a proper palace, I was
really up for the visit and
spent a lot of time gawping at
the moat, crenellated walls
and power-portraits. The bishop was
charming but suggested, en
passant, that the massacres at
the Sabra and Shatilla refugee
camps did not represent
Judaism's finest hour. Being a
small but bolshy Jew, I
pointed out that the massacres
had been perpetrated by
Lebanese Christian militia and
what did he have to say about
that? He looked at me with
genuine bemusement and said:
"Obviously they weren't
Christians because Christians
don't do things like that. So
I suppose we say, 'the
blighters'." I didn't think it was
a terribly adequate response
but it was only a couple of
sentences in a long exchange
about the common problems
faced by Christianity and
Judaism in Britain. Even in the 1980s,
Matthew Arnold's 150-year-old
Dover Beach poem about the
tide of faith receding still
deafened us all. We worried
about the death of God, being
honest to God, and religion
evaporating into the secular
air. Perhaps that's why it
didn't seem to us to play a
significant part in most of
the troubles of the world -
with Belfast and Jerusalem as
only partial exceptions. I
remember giving sermons about
the derivation of the Hebrew
word for war - milchamah -
which is from the word lechem,
bread. The Marxists, I said,
had a point when they saw
economics as the basis for all
struggle. It's poverty, not
religion, that is the problem
"out there". But the
real problem, here where it
matters, is the receding tide
of faith. With hindsight, I can
see what a staggeringly
insular perspective it was.
Because faith is not on the
retreat from most of the
beaches of the world, only in
northern Europe; because
religion continues to be a
hugely significant factor in
global conflict. What is
happening today isn't new,
it's just that we faith
leaders in this country didn't
see it, didn't see what was
coming and didn't have a clue
as to our part in it all. Nineteen years later,
Tony Blair consulted 25 faith
leaders at Downing Street
shortly after September 11,
but before we went into
Afghanistan. It was a touch
harder to be blind to global
realities. Indeed, I did
wonder out loud why he was
wasting his time on religion,
which seems to me to have come
far too close to discrediting
itself for anyone's comfort,
let alone God's. We have singularly
failed to face up to the
inescapable truth that faiths
only exist relationally. That
is that they simply cannot
continue posturing as
monopolistic corporations,
smugly proclaiming themselves
as the finished article, the
last word and the ultimate
truth. They surely should have
discovered by now their own
provisionality, fragmentary
nature and deep flaws. It is bizarre that we
should still affirm a God who
would bestow the totality of
Her truth on any one group of
human beings, and still more
bizarre that we should believe
in groups of human beings as
being capable of grasping the
totality of God's truth. Yet
when my great friend Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks tried to say
this in a very, very mild and
cautious form the outcry
within a section of his own
constituency almost
overwhelmed him. We have made
desperately poor progress on
the practical agenda of
pooling what is best in our
respective traditions for the
good of humanity and the globe
because we cannot bring
ourselves to face up to the
theological disclosure
implicit in our diversity. In fact, though most
religious traditions are big
on humility in theory, we do
not seem to have a clue what
it means. I half-expect to be
invited to an international
conference on humility and
religion in which there are
endless papers seeking to
demonstrate in which faith the
concept of humility originated
and who should be awarded the
gold medal for being the most
humble. But clinging to old
imperialistic and triumphal
notions in the face of glaring
reality is not the only charge
against us. We have utterly
failed to stand up against the
fearful, exploitative and
reactionary forces - to be
labelled for shorthand and
convenience purposes only as
"fundamentalist" -
and allowed them to dominate
each of us and the world stage
perhaps as never before. I
hope it is sufficient to say
"settlers",
"far-right churches in
America", and
"Islamic extremists"
for us to be clear about whom
I am talking. The alibis and
excuses - they are not really
Christians or Muslims because
proper Christians or Muslims
do not believe/do those
things; you mustn't tar
everyone with the same brush,
some of them are nice,
sincere, peace-loving people;
people are entitled to their
beliefs, you should listen to
them; or, worst of all,
"What can we do?" -
simply underline our moral and
spiritual bankruptcy. Wimps,
the lot of us. In fact, the
situation is getting worse and
worse. Except in northern
Europe, both Christianity and
Islam are growing at a rate so
staggering that Matthew Arnold
must be spinning. What is
emerging is a phenomenon that
the Anglican theologian John
Bowden has described as
"terrifying", forms
of faith that are "very
hostile to other faiths and
driven by a sense of
malevolent activity by hostile
powers that have to be
combated". Religion which
is aggressive, triumphalist
and thrives on conflict. Even in Judaism,
which is far too small to
consider converting Africa or
the Far East, it is the
"born again"
proponents of inerrancy who
read the texts as divine
licence to advance and impose
their views by whatever means
are necessary. I look at Indonesia,
Chechnya, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Israel/Palestine,
Northern Ireland, the Balkans
and Sudan, and each instance
of bloody conflict has a
strong religious dimension.
The people involved are
Muslims, Christians and Jews,
however much they may be
behaving in a way that the
best or main thrust of their
respective traditions
contradicts. Lest you jump to the
conclusion that I am a naive
pacifist, I am not. My Jewish
experience tells me that
oppression and subjugation
don't go away if you
acquiesce. Nor am I a
self-hating anti-Zionist. I am
a Zionist who believes that
unless two, viable states are
established in
Israel/Palestine, the very
future of Judaism is
threatened and time is rapidly
running out. What I do argue is
that all faiths, particularly
the embarrassingly
dysfunctional Abrahamic
family, have to acknowledge
that no faith tradition is
supreme, that no one has a
monopoly on God or truth, and
that the reality of pluralism
discloses a theological
obligation to be humble and
self-critical, to pool
resources, to work together
for the good of humanity and
the globe rather than fuel its
blight and destruction. If only we were able
to assert a shared platform
that transcended the
platitudinous, to stand up to
those who pervert our
traditions, and to work
together for a justice that
involves compromise and
humility, we might even end up
stemming the decline of faith
in northern Europe. By
demonstrating that religion
still offers meaning, purpose
and human values, rather than
being at best an irrelevance
or at worst a bloody disgrace.
·
Rabbi Tony Bayfield is the
head of the Movement for
Reform Judaism |