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The Difficulty of Being Religious

21/6/2017

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It’s difficult being religious today. It’s not just that religious persecution is worldwide – and perpetrated by religious people – but even in a secular society such as Britain some people don’t feel free to express their religious beliefs and practices. One instance in the news recently was the resignation of the leader of a political party who gave as the reason for his resignation the conflict between his religious and political convictions. It led me to wonder whether it’s possible for a religious person ever to be a politician or whether involvement in politics means setting aside one’s religious beliefs and keeping them firmly in the private domain.    

The person involved in this particular situation was Tim Farron. He had been harassed over whether he thought homosexual sex a sin, even though he had voted in favour of gay marriage. It was obvious that his views had not affected the way he voted. Was this a lack of integrity on his part?  Was it an intrusion of privacy for someone to pursue a public figure about their personal beliefs? Need an individual’s personal beliefs interfere in good governance? Why did people feel free to ask such a question rather than a question about how one would vote?  Was this, as Mr Farron  suggested, an intolerance of religion or did it betray a fear, not of the beliefs themselves but of the imposition of them on society at large. Do we carry in our DNA a memory of persecution of those who were different, of moral and religious stances being outlawed and leading to imprisonment and persecution? Is it possible to believe in one’s heart that something is wrong – doesn’t quite come up to the mark (which is one explanation of sin) - but that equality, justice, respect for different views, living together in a secular society could lead one to legislate for a more open approach and not demand that one’s own moral views become law.  Were his detractors worried about Tim Farron’s belief about God, an afterlife, salvation or any of the religious doctrines that religious people might espouse? Do these not matter because they make no impact on a person’s ability to legislate? Should the focus be on a person’s values rather than their particular moral stance? Is it a  fear of being dictated to that upsets people? 

This difficulty of being religious also came up in evidence given to the Scottish Parliament’s Equality and Human Rights Committee recently. It was given by the Scottish Churches Parliamentary Officer who suggested that for Catholics “a culture of fear prevents people from being open about their faith.” I must say this is not my experience but I have heard young people who are committed Christians saying that their friends and colleagues think they are rather odd and unusual being religious. It’s just not understood. However the Parliamentary Officer, Anthony Horan said “ my overriding concern is the culture of fear that runs right through society and which makes people feel at best uncomfortable and at worst totally frightened to be open about their faith”  In all my work in interfaith I have not encountered this though international tensions and terrorism mean that people who are ostensibly religious are often targeted. The hatred in this instance is perhaps because of religion’s association with violence. There is also in Scotland a violent and intolerant approach to religion because of the rivalry between two particular football teams but that’s more tribal than religious.  Mr Horan supported his claim by providing testimonies from a number of young people who had experienced anti-Catholic prejudice in their school, most of it relating to the Church’s teaching on abortion and marriage. Note that this prejudice took place within a Catholic school so presumably it came from other Catholics and shows there can be an intolerance of different views even within faith communities.

So what is at the heart of this intolerance? Is it fear of having a particular view and way of life imposed on us by others? Is it our inability to live with difference? Is it a refusal to believe that we are all struggling to find truth and might have different perspective on it?  Might it be that if we explored the reasons why we hold certain views we might find we are closer than we think?  Religion responds in different ways to this uncertainty, this sense of insecurity.  Some people will be committed to interreligious dialogue and working together, others will be inclined to fight those they see as imposing an alien way of life – and then impose their own way of life as ISIS seems to be doing, others will put up their defences and try to establish a strong identity - always in danger of being closed, setting people apart from others.  Others will just reject the whole idea of religion and either set it aside as irrelevant or work to keep it out of the public square. 
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We’re not very good at living with difference. In Europe, and certainly in Scotland, we acknowledge that we’re moving towards a secular society but we haven’t yet learned how to do this peacefully. We need to learn how to allow people to express their views honestly, to respect those who are different from us and to create a society in which people can witness to their faiths with confidence and respect. 


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What's It All About

11/6/2017

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I had a friend who used to ask the question: what’s it all about?  He was captivated by the mystery of life and would shake his head in wonder as he pondered the question. He’s since died so perhaps he now knows the answer. I find myself pondering a similar question but this one’s about religion. What’s it all about? It’s a strange phenomenon religion and it gets a very bad press. It’s easy to see why people reject it. There’s a catalogue of ills associated with it.
 
Just in this last week we have heard of and seen the consequences of attacks in Manchester and London carried out in the name of God, to say nothing of killings in Kabul and elsewhere. We have seen the effects in growing islamophobia which along with a growing anti-Semitism shows our ability to hate those who are different from us. This weekend there are anti-Muslim demonstrations in something like 20 American states, a result no doubt of policies that want to exclude Muslims from entering  the United States, hoping that somehow that will prevent terrorism.  Then there was the recovery of a miniscule manuscript of a diary of a 16th cy Spaniard, Luis de Carvajal who had emigrated to Mexico and was tortured along with his family for being Jewish. He came from a family of conversos ie Jews who had become Catholic but whose commitment to their chosen religion was doubted by the Catholic authorities. His diary details the terrible tortures afflicted on him and his family before they were burned at the stake. The Spanish colonisers had brought to Mexico the horrors of the Spanish inquisition – something we should never forget when pondering the atrocities of ISIS and the so called Islamic State.  Then there was a report from an international conference in Belgium about the persecution of Christian women in many parts of the world. Participants were able to give examples of women being abducted, raped, forced into marriage and to change their religion.
 
All of this in just one week – no wonder people are suspicious of religion. I’m religious and yet I can feel overwhelmed by it all.  What is it all about? I know some people want to say that the negativity, the conflict, the wars are not religion but a distortion or abuse of religion. I can’t go with that. The people perpetrating the atrocities call themselves religious, are and have been inspired by a religious vision, are and have been convinced of their own religious truth, that the only way of living is their way. They believe or have believed that violence is permissible in establishing their goal – sometimes claiming that God is on their side, that it’s better that people should die rather than lose their eternal souls through error. It’s as though suffering in this life is unimportant compared to eternal happiness. We certainly see it in suicide bombers but it’s a philosophy that has been present in most religions and underlies a belief in schools that focus on asceticism, denigrate the body and see pleasure as bad. Sometimes religion can be so heavenly minded that it’s no earthly good  
 
I do know that all this negativity is not the whole story and that instances such as those above can be counterbalanced by many, many examples of good religion.  But religion cannot turn its back on its dark side or try to suggest that it doesn’t have one. To do this is move closer to the dark side and give it power, I would suggest. There’s good religion and there’s bad religion and those of us who are involved in any way in teaching or preaching must acknowledge the bad and promote the good. So what is this good religion?
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I think of religion as a system, embedded in a human context and a human culture which contains a pearl of great price, a wisdom that can make life meaningful and purposeful for those who find it, can give dignity to the believer and to our fellow human beings, can show our interrelatedness to all beings including the world in which we live.  Different religions express this wisdom in different ways – according to their particular culture and the historical and cultural contexts in which the religion grew up. The trappings of religion – the doctrine, worship, community practices, moral codes – are only truly understood in the light of this pearl of great price and only useful in so far as they take us beyond themselves to the Reality that’s at the heart of religion. It’s the old adage of the finger pointing at the moon. Look too closely at the finger and you miss the moon. Most of the time religious conflicts focus on the trappings – which is the truer expression of Reality as they understand it and this can happen as much within religion as without. Interreligious dialogue which focuses on religious experience and the mystical side of religion often finds that religious believers can understand the core wisdom of another religion without understanding or agreeing with its expression. So often what people see in religion is the external framework which some believers take as sacrosanct and which can obscure the sacred reality, the good news as Christians would call it, more than they reveal it. The challenge today for religions is to find a way to express this core wisdom in a language which is meaningful to the modern age.

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Catholic Spain

1/6/2017

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I have just returned from some time in Spain. It’s not a country that I know well but I was there to do some teaching and then had some time in Madrid. It was hot, busy and teaming with life. It was easy to imagine a little of what it would have been like to live in Christendom. There were Churches on every corner and nearly all the street names were called after saints. It felt religious in a way though the Churches weren’t teaming with people. The real busyness was in the shops and the tourist attractions – all signs of the secularisation of European society.
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Often religious people decry the growing materialism of the secular age but there’s a lot to be said for a secular society and I don’t think I would like to live in a religious society.  I would find it rather constricting I think. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want society to be more religious in the sense of expressing religious values of respect and concern for others but I wouldn’t want one religion to be so intertwined with the state that it was difficult to disentangle one’s religious and civic identity, as happened in the early days of the Roman Empire and still continues in many ways into our own time. It’s not so long ago since I stood beside a Jewish friend of mine at a Christian service for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and the congregation was asked to proclaim its faith ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty…’ This was a religious service because the Queen of England is a committed Christian but it was also a civic service because it was honouring her service to her country. The organisers had gone to great lengths to include in the opening procession representatives from all sectors of society, including the religious leaders of Scotland. There they were standing at the front of the Cathedral, being asked to say the Christian creed and there was I beside my Jewish friend very aware of the awkwardness of this. What did it say about her identity as a citizen?

There are some religious people who would happily live in a society governed by their faith. I know some Jewish friends who love to go to Israel and would perhaps like to live there permanently because it’s the only place in the world where they can be openly Jewish and feel totally at home in a society organised around Jewish customs and practices. Many Muslims would see a Muslim society as the ideal one to live in though often the reality is that they can live out their faith better in a non-Muslim society than a Muslim one. Living as a minority in society has been a question recently debated within Islam. In any society, dominated by a particular religion or philosophy the question needs to be asked about those who don’t fit in, those who are different, those with other beliefs and practices. As Jonathan Sacks says in his book ‘The Dignity of Difference’  

“We need to search…. for a way of living with, and acknowledging the integrity of those who are not of our faith.  Can we make space for difference?   Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a sensibility, a culture not our own?   Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger?” 

These are great questions and important ones if we are to live peacefully together. According to some historians there was a time in Spain when Jews and Christians not only lived together in a Spain which was under Muslim rule but contributed to the flourishing of literature, poetry, philosophy and other aspects of culture. Some historians are a bit skeptical about calling this a Golden Age and even those who do acknowledge that while their religions were respected and there was freedom to practise their religion, Jews and Christians were not give full citizenship rights. They lived under what was called dhimmitude ie they were regarded as second class subjects. They had to pay a special tax, certain occupations were closed to them, they could not publicly display their faith, build places of worship, marry Muslim women or exercise authority over Muslims – many of the restrictions which had been imposed by the early Church on the Jewish community. Unfortunately the Christian reconquest of Spain and its unification under Isabelle and Ferdinand did not have this level of tolerance and Jews and Muslims were expelled and even persecuted as were many Christians under the Inquisition which originated as a civil court to ensure unity rather than orthodoxy.  This was the worst of religion at the service of the State. No wonder there was a desire and movement for the separation of Church and State which probably had its culmination in the French Revolution.

Spain is full of all these memories I think- its glorious conquests, its art and philosophy, its heritage of tolerance and acceptance of the other, its intolerance and hatred of the other, particularly the Jews.  They are memories not to be forgotten but to be honoured and internalized and used as we in Europe seek for new ways of living with and acknowledging the integrity of those not of our faith.  Can we indeed “make space for difference?  Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a sensibility, a culture not our own?   Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger?”  Our destiny could depend on our answers.

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    I am  a Catholic nun, involved in interfaith relations for many decades.  For me this has been an exciting and sacred journey which I would like to share with others.

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