February 22, 2012

Contraception and the Culture War

Peter Berger

For a week or so in early February religion was once again at the center of media attention (this time unrelated to the lingering issue of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism). Using powers given her by the “Obamacare” legislation, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human services, issued a regulation concerning the requirement that all employer-provided health insurance must include free coverage of contraception for women. The administration was aware of the fact that Catholics and perhaps other religious groups might have a problem with this. So churches, defined as institutions that provide religious services to their own members only, were exempt from the requirement—but not institutions which, though church-related, provide services to people irrespective of their faith, such as hospitals, schools or social agencies. There is a curious paradox here: In earlier cases the federal courts have decided that public funds could go to religious institutions if they provided useful services to the general public; now these very services are treated as if they constituted a flaw. The underlying assumption is that the proper function of religion is intramural worship—a strange endorsement of the sect as the only true religious institution. There is a further paradox: In a recent case, which involved the firing of a teacher at a Lutheran school, which regarded her as being religious personnel (which she denied), the Supreme Court sided with the school. The decision maintained that the state could not dictate to a church who is or is not performing religious duties; in the matter at issue now, the state asserts the right to tell a church that a service provided by it—such as care for the sick—is unrelated to its religious mission (a proposition which would have startled Mother Teresa and generations of nursing nuns).

Be this as it may, the administration was apparently surprised by the storm of protests unleashed by the HHS regulation. In the fore of the protests were the Catholic bishops and other Catholic leaders, but they were strongly supported by Evangelicals and some Orthodox Jews. As one would expect, some liberal Protestant voices were raised in support of HHS. All the Republican candidates for the presidency enthusiastically and noisily joined the protest.  The protesters insisted that the issue here is not women’s health (as HHS claimed), but religious freedom: Neither individuals nor institutions should be coerced by government to act in violation of their faith. This particular action of government must therefore be understood as a direct assault on the freedom of religion guaranteed by the first amendment to the constitution. And here is what, I think, is most interesting: The protesters include people who have long been opposed to contraception (such as Catholic bishops, though, as survey data show, not a majority of lay Catholics), and people who have not considered contraception as religiously or morally wrong (many if not most Evangelicals). That is something new, and worth paying attention to.

Facing the prospect of losing Catholic and other religiously conservative votes, the administration quickly retreated. President Obama himself, flanked by a visibly unhappy Secretary Sebelius, announced that the offending regulation is rescinded: Not only churches but church-affiliated institutions would not be required to offer insurance covering contraception, but women employees would be able to obtain the latter directly from insurance companies, without co-pay (I doubt if the insurance companies are thrilled by that provision). Needless to say, Obama presented the retreat as both a principled and pragmatic compromise (which, let us be fair, it really is). At the time of writing, it is not clear whether this will still the storm. The Republican candidates will probably be reluctant to drop an issue that must be an answer to their prayers (literally, if one is to believe what they say about their personal piety).

Before I proceed with any rigorously value-neutral commentary on this episode, let me offer a disclosure: I find the Catholic position on contraception thunderously unpersuasive. As to the two major religious communities involved, I am neither Catholic nor Evangelical—thus, as we say in Texas, I have no dog in this fight. (As I have avowed on this blog before, I am incurably Lutheran.) But I do agree very much with the protesters’ view that the Obama administration was about to violate constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom in a serious way. That is the issue here, and not women’s health—contraceptive devices are easily and inexpensively available in places other than Catholic hospitals. I also agree (though I am not a lawyer) that the administration’s action goes against a long tradition in American law of solicitude for the demands of conscience (religious or non-religious). The courts have protected the right of Quakers not to go to war, of Jehovah’s Witnesses not to take the oath of allegiance, of anyone who has reasons of conscience for affirming rather than swearing as a witness—or, for that matter, even burning the American flag. It seems to me that the same protection should cover a hospital run by Franciscans who don’t want to hand out condoms (never mind whether one agrees with their rather tortured reasoning on this matter).

What is to be learned from this episode?  A number of things: The large expansion of federal power hidden in the innumerable pages of the legislation which established “Obamacare”. Obama’s captivity to his much-vaunted “base”, with its strongly secularist contingent (I have called it an American version of the Turkish ideology of Kemalism—religion is a virus to be kept out of public space, quarantined in religious reservations). The continuing political clout of religion in the United States (Kemalists are always surprised when they come across this—perhaps because they mostly talk to each other). And, contrary to a widespread opinion, the fact that the “culture war” between conservatives and progressives is by no means over—and continues to be politically significant. Each of these lessons would merit extensive discussion. However, I would like to comment here with a different focus—the deepening relationship of Catholics and Evangelicals.

This has been going on for some time in America. In a broader historical perspective, this is something new.

There has been a strongly anti-Catholic tradition among Evangelicals, and Catholics have tended to look on Evangelicalism as a specially unappealing version of Protestantism. The political rapprochement came about (mainly, I think) over the issue of abortion, with other issues being added on —the place of religion in public life, same-sex marriage, pornography—but contraception, important to the Catholic Church and rather marginal for Evangelicals, did not constitute a significant bond. It is generally true that religiously conservative people have more children—thus presumably use less birth control—but Evangelicals, though fertility-friendly, have hitherto not made an issue of this. Time will tell whether contraception in and of itself (that is, apart from the defense of religious freedom) will continue to be a bonding issue between the two communities.

I was an inadvertent participant at what turned out to be an important event in the budding relationship between Catholics and Evangelicals. One of the early items on the agenda of the research center at Boston University which I had founded in 1985 (and which I directed for most of the time since then) was the explosive growth of Pentecostalism in much of the developing world. The growth was very dramatic in Latin America. The Catholic Church was understandably disturbed by this. Some ugly statements about these “Protestant sects” were made by Catholic authorities and there were even some cases of violence against Pentecostals. I talked about this with my friend Richard John Neuhaus, who had recently become a Catholic (he had been a Lutheran when we first met) and who also had good connections with Evangelicals. We both deplored the antagonism between the two communities and thought that a more ecumenical dialogue was called for. We then decided to organize a conference to carry on such a dialogue. The conference met in September 1992 at the Union League Club in New York. I arranged for the British sociologist David Martin, of the London School of Economics, to lecture at the conference. Martin had conducted our research in Latin America; he subsequently extended the research to other parts of the world and became a prominent authority on the Pentecostal phenomenon. I was rather surprised that Neuhaus had invited a number of individuals, Catholics as well as Evangelicals, who had no interest whatever in religious conflict in Latin America. I became somewhat irritated when I realized that Neuhaus himself was not primarily interested in affairs south of the Rio Grande, or in Catholic/Pentecostal relations as such; he was interested in forging an alliance between Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States. (I did not really hold this against him; he meant well.)

I had nothing to do with a number of conversations about this, which Neuhaus had with influential individuals from both sides. Among those on the Catholic side were John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York who ordained Neuhaus to the Catholic priesthood, and the Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles. Neuhaus’ most important Evangelical interlocutor was Charles Colson, the former aide in the Nixon White House, who had gone to jail in the wake of the Watergate investigations, and who founded the Prison Fellowship, which has become a major advocate for reform of the criminal justice system. In 1994 Neuhaus and Colson collaborated to produce a document titled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together”. The document immediately attracted broad attention and it has been (correctly, I think) credited with having been an important step in the new inter-confessional relationship. Most of the document is theological, reflecting Neuhaus’ view (as he put it) that “the Protestant Reformation was a reform movement within the Western Church”—which supposedly is no longer necessary, and therefore no longer a valid reason of separation from Rome, because the desired reforms had been accomplished. Needless to say, the Evangelicals who came aboard did not agree with this Neuhausian re-interpretation of history (neither did I), but they did sign on to a long list of theological statements (all representative of a broadly orthodox Christianity, and critical of liberal deviations from such orthodoxy). I believe it is fair to say that Neuhaus’ concern here was as much political as it was theological (I don’t know about Colson’s—I was only casually acquainted with him). It is also fair to say that, Neuhaus’ foremost political concern was an adamant opposition to abortion. (It remained that until his death in 2009.) In the words of the document: “Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death”.

Thus the recent introduction of contraception as a common issue for the Catholic/Evangelical alliance is a new thing, but the alliance has a considerable history behind it. Non-Catholics may have difficulty linking contraception with abortion, but it is noteworthy that one reason for Catholic opposition to the HHS regulation is that the required contraception includes the so-called “morning after pill”—which according to Catholic moral teaching constitutes abortion. But the protesters are empirically correct: This confrontation is not about contraception. It is about freedom of religion. That is a central item of the American political creed, and the Obama White House is right in not wanting to be seen as its adversary.

We know from a mass of survey data that religiously conservative people tend to be politically conservative as well, and therefore tending to vote Republican. This is not only true of conservative Protestants (mostly Evangelicals) and conservative Catholics, but also of Orthodox Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Mormons. What brings them together is not theology, but opposition to an aggressive secularism still powerful in elite culture and strongly represented in the “base” of the Democratic party. Catholics and Evangelicals together make up the largest numbers in this anti-secularist camp. The strengthening of the ties between them is an important political reality. It may be described as a redefinition of who is “we” and who is “them”—the secularists are the “them”. “We” may differ on a lot of things, but we know that we are not “them”. The enthusiastic response of many Evangelicals to the Catholic Rick Santorum may be a significant sign of this shift.

Posted in Christianity, Secularism | 4 Comments
February 15, 2012

Is Confucianism a Religion?

Peter Berger

On February 5, 2012, the New York Times carried a story about a Confucian academy in South Korea. It is one of some 150 such academies (seawon) in the country. Their main program consists of retreats, especially for schoolchildren. The program, apparently quite rigorous, is to provide training in moral behavior and etiquette (the two are closely related in Confucian thought). Park Seok-hong, head of a large academy originally founded in 1543, explained the basic assumption of these programs: “We may have built our economy, but our morality is on the verge of collapse.”

It is not a new lament. It recurs in many countries, including Western ones, wherever modernization has led to economic development, but also to a weakening of traditional patterns of belief and values. Recourse to Confucianism is not new either. The government of Singapore has been worried for a long time that the phenomenal economic success of the city state has left a moral vacuum. To deal with this problem, the government at one point launched a program of moral education in schools, based on the teachings of the major religious traditions present in the country—Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity—adding Confucianism to this ecumenical mix, under the assumption that it would appeal to the ethnic Chinese majority in the state. That turned out to be a mistake: Parents were free to choose the curriculum to which their children were assigned; most Chinese parents chose Christianity. During the Cultural Revolution in China, Confucianism had been savagely attacked as superstitious and reactionary (like all religion). In recent years the (still nominally Marxist) government has rehabilitated Confucius as a great teacher of social virtue. His birthplace has been promoted as a place for pilgrimage and tourism. And the centers for Chinese culture throughout the world were called Confucius Institutes. Like all traditions with a history of many centuries, Confucianism has emphasized different values at different times. Understandably, authoritarian governments like the values of respect for authority and social order (conveniently ignoring other Confucian values, such as the one saying that authority must earn respect by behaving in a just and humane manner).

There can be no doubt that Confucianism has been a powerful cultural influence throughout East Asia, providing social and political values not only in China, but in Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. As a social ethic, it has indeed emphasized discipline and loyalty, exercised within a hierarchical order of society. Under modern conditions, especially in the Chinese diaspora, it morphed into what Robert Bellah has called “bourgeois Confucianism”, evincing a curious similarity with the famous “Protestant ethic”.  The grueling Confucian examination system, which trained the ruling class in imperial China, has survived in the “examination hell” (a Japanese term) which characterizes schools in all the East Asian countries today. As a political ethic, both its proponents and its critics are justified in calling Confucianism a basically conservative ideology.

All these values are secular (Max Weber called them “inner-worldly”), in principle detachable from any religious beliefs or practices. Thus there has been the view of Confucianism as nothing but a secular, perhaps even a secularizing morality. There has also been the view that Confucianism, despite the overwhelmingly secular content of its teachings, is based on a worldview that is ultimately religious—indeed the view that Confucianism is a religion.

I am not a scholar of Chinese culture and religion, and therefore not competent to adjudicate between these two views. It seems to me that there are plausible arguments for each. As far as it goes, I am inclined toward the latter view, mainly due to the influence of Tu Weiming (of Harvard and Peking University), who has been a kind of missionary for an understanding of Confucianism as (at least potentially) a world religion for today. I am also indebted to conversations with two colleagues at Boston University, Robert Neville and John Berthrong, who have been associated with the somewhat nebulous group known as “Boston Confucians” (perhaps best understood as Protestant successors to Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary, who some 400 years ago maintained that Confucianism could be combined with Christianity).

Confucianism is a secular morality: Its teachings are almost exclusively concerned with behavior in the empirical world: ren—“altruism or “human-mindedness”; li—ritual and etiquette; xiao—“filial piety”. These are moral principles that are applied to the so-called “five bonds”—between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife; older and younger brother; friend and friend. The first four “bonds” are explicitly hierarchical; the fifth deals with relations between equals, but the assumption is that they are equal in status within the overall hierarchy. In traditional Confucianism, these were not virtues to which all could aspire; they were to be attained through education and self-cultivation (including music and calligraphy). The ideal was the Confucian gentleman, who looked down on the false comforts of religion and faced life with an attitude of stoicism. It is quite clear that these virtues (including the behaviors they promoted, as in ritual and etiquette) could be divorced from any specific religious beliefs. That conclusion was arrived at by Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the Jesuit missionary to China who believed that Confucian morality could be combined with Catholic faith. Ricci, who was fluent in Mandarin Chinese, dressed and acted like a Confucian gentleman. The Jesuits in China continued his approach for some decades, even arguing that ancestor worship was just an expression of “filial piety”, a secular virtue, which Chinese converts were free to practice. Dominicans and Franciscans also came to China, and they strongly disagreed with the Jesuits. The Pope ruled against the Jesuits and prohibited their more extreme chinoiseries (a term coined in France some years later, to make fun of a briefly fashionable imitation of all things Chinese). One may say that the Pope implicitly defined Confucianism as a religion.

Confucianism is a religion: I don’t think that the Papal ruling against the Jesuits was intended to be infallible, so even conservative Catholics may understand Confucianism as a secular morality. However, there is one classical and rather central Confucian belief that, I think, is unambiguously religious—that of tian, usually translated as “heaven”. It is not theistic, although gods are associated with it. Rather, it is a cosmic order, supernatural in that it transcends the empirical world, over which it presides and with which it interacts. It thus serves as the necessary, ipso facto religious foundation for all the secular virtues propagated by Confucian teachings. It seems to me that this religious character of tian is most clearly expressed in the notion of the “mandate of heaven”: A ruler has this “mandate”, the basis of his legitimacy, if he rules in accordance with the moral rules governing relations between him and his subjects. If he does not so rule, the “mandate of heaven” will be withdrawn, his rule becomes illegitimate and his subjects have a valid reason to disobey or even overthrow him. The distinctively Confucian institution resulting from this idea was that of the “imperial censors”—officials at court with the express duty to reprimand the emperor if he strayed from correct ritual and moral behavior. I take it that this did not happen very often: Emperors, in China or elsewhere, do not take kindly to being reprimanded.

However one comes out on the secular versus religious view of Confucianism, most people in East Asia (with the possible exception of truly self-cultivated gentlemen) have looked on Confucianism as a guide for social and political life—and not as an answer to the metaphysical questions with which religion has always dealt. Confucianism, be it in classical China or in the bustling cities of East Asia today, is not very helpful in the crises of personal life. Some of these crises are endemic to the human condition, notably those evoked by the Buddha’s Sorrowful Three Visions—old age, illness and death. In all East Asian societies traditions other than Confucianism have been available and indeed institutionalized to help people in such crises (as well as with the more mundane problems of ordinary life). In the countries of the region there are the temples and practitioners of folk religion—in China often associated with Daoism, in Japan with Shinto, in Korea with Shamanism. But above all there is Buddhism, with a rich variety of beliefs and practices, designed to meet the religious needs of both sophisticated and uneducated individuals. It is no accident that Buddhist monks have a virtual monopoly in the conducting of funerals: If someone you love has just died, you’d like to hear consoling Buddhist sutras, not Confucian prescriptions on proper relations between magistrates and petitioners.

One can agree with those who maintain that material prosperity does not provide answers to the deeper dilemmas of human life. Neither Marxism (which is pretty obsolete in the region) nor nationalism (which has been tried as a substitute ideology) can replace religion in crises such as bereavement—except, perhaps, when the object of grief has died on the barricades of revolution or on the battlefield. The new Confucianism has the same problem that this tradition has always had. The same alternatives are available today. Folk religion is robustly present. There have been strong Buddhist revival movements in much of the region. And there is one surprising phenomenon not mentioned in the Times story: the explosive growth of Christianity in China and the Chinese diaspora, and especially in South Korea.

Is Park Seok-hong right in his hope that Confucianism can fill the moral and spiritual vacuum that is felt by many people in South Korea and elsewhere in the contemporary world? Probably yes—in providing an eminently sensible (if unduly hierarchical) morality for social and political life. But to the extent that the vacuum has a spiritual dimension—probably not.

Posted in Christianity, Confucianism, Secularism | 16 Comments
February 8, 2012

Blasphemies

Peter Berger

In common usage blasphemy means words and actions which constitute an insult to God or other sacred entities. To the modern mind the term may seem obsolete, a leftover from primitive superstition. It is anything but obsolete to many people in the contemporary world.

Toward the end of January two stories involving the issue of blasphemy were widely carried in the media. They hardly merited first-page treatment. They nevertheless raised interesting issues.

The first story concerned the comedian Jay Leno. In his television show on January 19, he showed a photo of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. He joked that it was a summer home of Mitt Romney, whose wealth had just become a topic in the Republican primaries. This seemingly trivial event provoked a storm of fierce hostility by Sikhs in America and elsewhere, adding a presumably unwelcome dimension of religious hatred to Leno’s usually uncontroversial celebrity. A Dr. Randeep Dhillou, a denizen of California, sought to sue Leno for hate speech against a religion. Vayalar Ravi, the minister in the Indian government dealing with affairs of overseas (so-called “non-resident”) Indians, called the incident “quite unfortunate and quite objectionable”. Another Indian minister chimed in by saying that “freedom does not mean hurting the sentiments of others”.

The matter was apparently deemed sufficiently important to lead to an official pronouncement by Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson of the State Department: “His [Leno’s] comments are constitutionally protected in the United States under free speech and, frankly, they appeared to be satirical in nature.” (“Frankly”? Was there some discussion in Foggy Bottom as to whether Leno was not only a comedian but also a religious scholar?) She also pointed out that Barack Obama was the first president to celebrate, in the White House, the birthday of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. She gave no details of this celebration. She also said: “Our view is obviously that Sikh Americans have contributed greatly to the United States”. [“Obviously”? “Greatly”? But let’s not quibble. The State Department meant well.]

In the same month another celebrity, though perhaps a more upmarket one, also encountered a problem with blasphemy. For him, alas, it was not the first time. Salman Rushdie, author of the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, had been sentenced to death (fortunately in absentia) on grounds of blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini (the Iranian leader thus becoming what must be the author of the most negative book review in the history of literature). Rushdie went into hiding after that and thus avoided those eager to carry out the Ayatollah’s sentence, but other individuals associated with the novel became victims of violent assault). By the way, the title of Rushdie’s novel refers to an obscure legend, not mentioned in either the canonical Koran or any reliable tradition, that Satan led the Prophet to insert some subsequently revoked verses into the Koran which permitted prayers to pagan goddesses. Not having read the novel, I cannot say whether Rushdie’s use of this apocryphal story was also intended satirically.

The current event also involves India, one of the countries which has banned Rushdie’s novel. He was supposed to appear at several events on the program of a literary festival held at Jaipur. When warned by the local police that he would be in danger of assassination, Rushdie decided not to attend. Instead he was supposed to attend via video. That participation was cancelled by the organizers of the festival, also under pressure from the police. Sanjoy Roy, the producer of the festival, said: “Once again we are being bullied and we are having to step down.” Rushdie commented: “That’s what we call tyranny. It’s much worse than censorship, because it comes with the threat of violence.” A number of prominent Indian intellectuals criticized the double cancellation of Rushdie’s appearance. I have not come across any comments from Indian government officials. It is unclear how imminent the threat of assassination was; Rushdie expressed some doubt. There can be no doubt about the fierceness of the Muslim reaction. An influential Muslim scholar said that Rushdie should be barred from India: “He has hurt our religious sentiments”. [Again this business of “sentiments”!]  The actual situation in Jaipur was indeed ominous. A crowd of Muslim activists had assembled at the site of the festival. One of them said to a journalist: “Rivers of blood will flow here if they show Rushdie.”

There is a larger context for both stories—calls, mostly from Muslim-majority states and Muslim organizations, for laws against blasphemy. Though penalties for blasphemy are not mentioned either in the Koran or in recognized tradition (hadith), Islamic law recognizes the offence and the death penalty for offenders. There have been resolutions in the General Assembly of the United Nations calling for the prohibition of blasphemy in international law, with no support from Western democracies. It has rightly been pointed out that there is a long tradition of anti-blasphemy laws in Judaism and Christianity. The last execution for blasphemy in Britain took place in 1697, when one Thomas Aikenhead suffered the death penalty for denying the veracity of the Old Testament and the miracles of Jesus. There were such laws in the American colonies, notably in Massachusetts, but of course they were all declared by the federal courts to be unconstitutional in violation of the first amendment. Pennsylvania enacted an anti-blasphemy law as recently as 1977. When a state district attorney (whose training in first-amendment law clearly left something to be desired) decided to prosecute under this law, the action was promptly and predictably stopped by a federal court.

It seems to me that there are four interesting issues raised by the two stories. The first issue, of course, is legal. In the United States the basic situation is clear: Barring an onset of collective amnesia in the Supreme Court, there is no chance of overt anti-blasphemy legislation. But it is important to point out that the concept of so-called “hate speech” offers a usable substitute, and it has achieved considerable judicial approval both in this country and in Europe. Here the insult is not deemed to be against God, but against the presumably tender “sentiments” of some believers. As far as I know, this concept has not played itself out in the federal courts.

There is a second issue, not domestically but for US foreign policy: How to deal with countries who do not share the American understanding of the separation of church and state, and who consequently have various degrees of legal establishment of this or that religion. In the case of India, the tendency of government to clamp down on any departure from interfaith politeness is understandable: There is a collective memory of the horrendous violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs at the birth of independence, and of the continuing eruptions of similar violence since then. India defines itself as a secular republic, but no doctrine of secularism is deemed worth the risk of offending religious “sentiments” with the result of renewed violence. The issue is much sharper when the United States must deal with a country like Saudi Arabia, where the notion of blasphemy is anything but obsolete. Diplomats, whose profession demands that they have polite relations with fanatics of all sorts, probably prefer not to have to worry about religious practices that could not pass scrutiny in American courts. Congress won’t let them alone. It has not only forced the State Department to submit an annual report on the condition of human rights in every country in the world (the entry on Switzerland is very brief), but to issue a separate report on international religious freedom. This one has a lot in it about people being persecuted for alleged blasphemy. The issue is the degree to which the consideration of such matters can be allowed to interfere with hard strategic or economic interests.

The other two issues are less legal or political. There is the interfaith etiquette of civility, which is necessary to avoid conflict in a modern pluralist society. It is not only religious fundamentalists whose “sentiments” must be treated gingerly. And then there is what could be called the ethics of satire: Are there topics or persons that should be immune from being satirized? This is not an easy question to be answered. Karl Kraus was a superb satirist of Austrian society from the beginning of the twentieth century to his death in 1936. His masterpiece was a gigantic play (he said that it would be performed on Mars after the destruction of the earth), The Last Days of Humanity, which ferociously criticized the cruelties, stupidities and corruption of the First World War. An admirer of this work was once asked what Kraus really believed in. He answered: You must look for what he did not satirize. I don’t think that I can pursue these last two issues here.

But I do want to conclude with the one episode when I thought for a few moments that I would witness an execution for blasphemy. In 1993 I attended the conference commemorating the anniversary of the 1893 Chicago World Parliament of Religions, an important event which, among other things, drew American public attention to the great religious traditions of Asia. I have not seen a program of the earlier event. In 1993 the program strongly emphasized non-Christian religions. There were exhibits of every conceivable tradition, except Christianity. I only noticed one exhibit put up by a Methodist publishing house, empty of visitors and staffed by a depressed-looking young man. Walking around the hotel where the conference was held I happened into a session on Sikhism. As best as I now remember, the following happened: The session was very sparsely attended, by a handful of people who did not seem to be Sikhs. But a group of some twenty people stood together in the back of the room, led by an impressive old man dressed in traditional Sikh dress. He sported a large white beard, and he was very angry. So, it seems, was his cohort of younger men. At the front stood the chairman of the session and the speaker. Both were clearly nervous. The chairman had just introduced the speaker, in English, when the bearded old man shouted out something in a language I did not understand. The chairman explained to the equally nervous audience that the group in the back was protesting something the speaker had written about the Guru Granth, the holy book of Sikhism. He had referred to it as a holy book, while orthodox Sikhs spoke of it as the holy book. The protesters considered this to be blasphemous. As the chairman was explaining all this, the protesting group began slowly to move forward. Then the speaker intervened. He assured them (in English) that he fully accepted the Guru Granth as the sole sacred scripture of the Sikh religion. He apologized if his choice of language had given the contrary impression. Apparently the apology was accepted. The old man said something that sounded conciliatory and the Sikh contingent sat down. The speaker, clearly relieved, proceeded to give his lecture. Most of the audience, including myself, rather hurriedly departed.

Posted in Islam, Religion, Sikhism | 8 Comments
February 1, 2012

Evangelical Democrats?

Peter Berger

As the absurd theater of the Republican primaries continues its itinerary from state to state, it at least serves one useful purpose: It puts to rest the notion that religion no longer matters in American politics. Actually the GOP is now dominated by two varieties of fundamentalism—the religious one, focused single-mindedly on matters south of the navel—and the economic one, which affirms the dogma that all taxes are the work of the devil. The latter belief system does not concern me here. But the former also indicates that the American culture war between traditionalists and progressives is by no means over, and that it continues to define the public image of the two major parties. Religious conservatives, notably Evangelicals, continue to gravitate toward the Republican party. Secularists continue to feel more at home in the Democratic party. This division, of course, is not absolute, and there have been some efforts to poach on the other’s ideological territory. But the bifurcation persists. Is it irreversible? The question is important: If the answer is no, this would be a bit of good news if one hopes for an end to the paralyzing polarization that now characterizes the political scene.

As one ponders this question, one may turn to a useful article in Society magazine, “The Evangelical Left and the Future of Social Conservatism”, by David Swartz (a historian on the faculty of Asbury University).  Swartz does not argue that the affinity between Evangelicals and the Republican party is about to end, but he suggests that this situation is more complicated and more changeable than it seems. Specifically, there is a growing generational difference in the Evangelical community. Younger Evangelicals increasingly resemble their peers in the larger society. The larger picture is described by Swartz as follows: “On the one hand, younger Americans are more pro-life on abortion, one of the typical measures of social conservatism. On the other hand, younger Americans increasingly support gay marriage and seem to be elevating economics above traditional morality. The old categories… do not seem to hold.” Or at least they are being reshuffled. Younger Evangelicals are part of the reshuffling.

The present political frequency distribution of Godders and non-Godders is relatively new. There has been an Evangelical Left in the Democratic party at least as early as William Jennings Bryan, who combined progressive views as then understood with a fierce belief in Biblical inerrancy (which Clarence Darrow successfully ridiculed in the famous Dayton “monkey trial”). It is also worth recalling that the resurgent conservative movement burst onto the political scene with the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, who had little interest in traditional morality. It was only in the 1970s that religious conservatives moved into the Republican party in large numbers. This move included religiously conservative Catholics and Jews, but Evangelicals were an important segment of what became an important Republican demographic. A pivotal moment in this development was the 1980 White House Conference on the Family, then very significantly renamed White House Conference on Families. The renaming of course was a concession to feminists, who effectively took over the event.  Conservatives walked out of the conference. It is important that the idea of the conference was first proposed by Jimmy Carter during his presidential campaign and realized when he was still in the White House. Religious conservatives had invested high hopes in the election of this born-again Baptist. One of them, a good friend of mine, had said that “the election of Jimmy Carter marks the end of the secular Enlightenment”. Alas, it meant nothing of the sort. Carter’s capitulation at the White House conference was the culmination of a mounting disappointment in him on the part of Evangelicals who had thought of him as one of them. The disappointment extended to the Democratic party as a whole. What followed was the rise of the Christian Right, closely identified with the Republican party and marching under the banner of “family values”—which meant, and still means, values opposed to those of radical feminists and other sexual liberation movements.

The leadership of the Democratic party was understandably unhappy about this exodus of many who had been part of its core constituency in the past. While having to keep the adherence of secular progressives, Democratic leaders have also tried to woo the Godders, and especially Evangelicals. In the 2008 election both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appointed very visible Evangelicals to their staffs. An interesting figure is Joshua DuBois—born as recently as 1982, an African-American Pentecostal minister, with an M.A. in public affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. After serving on Obama’s campaign staff, he is now head of the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the White House. Obama has made much of his Christian faith, and this effort has survived his disastrous choice of a church affiliation in Chicago. I know of no comparable efforts by Republicans to woo secular progressives (though I suppose that so-called “Massachusetts moderates” have engaged, albeit mutedly, in such a project).

Swartz cites recent findings from surveys of the Pew Research Center: Since 2005 young white Evangelicals’ identification with the Republican party has dropped by 15%, but identification with the Democratic party has only risen by 5%. Presumably disenchanted Evangelicals have joined the large group of independents, whose number has jumped by 10%. Swartz believes that an important factor in the future will be the Democratic handling of pro-life Evangelicals (as well, of course, of pro-life Catholics).

The political profile of Evangelicals seems to be tripartite. There continues to be a strong segment of Evangelicals who will be an important Republican constituency. There is also a vocal but still relatively small Evangelical Left, visibly represented by Jim Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, supposedly a “spiritual advisor” to President Obama (if so, certainly an improvement on Jeremiah Wright!). Wallis disavows the “Left” label, but he has been associated with progressive causes, most recently with the Occupy Wall Street movement. At the same time, he is staunchly traditional on abortion and same-sex marriage. The third component in this profile is the most interesting. Variously called “freestyle Evangelicals” or “cosmopolitan Evangelicals”, they strongly reject identification with either political party, affirming that the core of the Gospel is beyond politics. They adhere to traditional moral values, but seek to balance them with various social causes (such as combating hunger, or AIDS, or sex trafficking). In terms of politics, their stance is best described as one of mediation. This is most clearly the case with their most visible representative—Rick Warren, pastor of the huge Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and author of the astronomically successful bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. In 2008 Warren staged the strictly nonpartisan Civil Forum on the Presidency, where he separately interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain on national television. Like Wallis, Warren holds traditional moral values, but he does not put them at the center of his public ministry. Unlike Wallis, he keeps a distance from the Democratic party, although he agreed to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. If I were Jimmy the Greek, I would bet that the “freestyle Evangelicals” are most likely to be prominent, and possibly dominant, in the future.

There is nothing intrinsically secular in the Democratic party, nor intrinsically religious in the GOP. The bifurcated situation is the result of a series of historical accidents, but once established, it is not easy to change. The hardliners are always crucially important suppliers of funders and activists. The primary system, that peculiar institution of American politics, guarantees that contenders for public office must first keep the hardliners happy while seeking nomination, and must then move away from them in order to be elected. As we have learned all too clearly, this fatal progression from hypocrisy to betrayal undermines the middle on which any healthy democracy depends.

For the health of American democracy one should hope for more Evangelical Democrats and more secular Republicans. If I were one of those billionaires being asked by President Obama to contribute their “fare share”, I would endow a foundation with the sole aim of supporting that vital middle. The foundation’s first grants would be to two new organizations, Democrats Against Same-Sex Marriage, and The Association of Republican Abortionists. (This would in no way imply ideological identification with these two causes.)

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Secularism | 13 Comments
January 25, 2012

Stubborn Amish and Stubborn Atheists

Peter Berger

One of my earliest memories is of an incident in the kindergarten of my childhood in Vienna. I must have been at most five years old. I was supposed to speak a line in a play about which I have no memory. All I remember is that I was wearing a top hat and was sitting on some sort of cupboard—and that I did not want to speak my line. The teacher cajoled me several times, but I kept shaking my head. She was quite angry, but finally gave up. I came down from my perch, having successfully disobeyed an order from legitimate authority.

I am not sure that this episode indicates a profound character trait. But, although I am both temperamentally and philosophically inclined toward compromise in conflict situations, I have always resisted if authorities or peers wanted to make me do things against my will. Furthermore, I have always sympathized with people who stubbornly refuse to be swayed from deviant views or behaviors. Unless the views or behaviors are morally repugnant (I don’t sympathize, say, with deviant racists), my sympathy does not hinge on agreement with the stubborn refuseniks. In my own field of the sociology of religion, along with most colleagues I concluded long ago that secularization theory—the notion that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion—cannot be maintained in the face of the evidence. Yet there is a rather small group of social scientists who stubbornly continue to adhere to the theory. I rather admire them. Admittedly the sociology of religion generates less than profound disagreements. But I have a lingering admiration for people who refuse to accept evidence of a more fundamental kind—such as socialists or creationists—perhaps, at a stretch, even flat-earth theorists.

The Religious News Service provides daily briefings which are quite useful to obsessive religion-watchers like me. On January 12, 2012, the briefing contained two stories from different sources. Each dealt with stubborn people, the sort I instinctively sympathize with even though I totally disagree with them.

The first story, reported by the Associated Press, came from Kentucky. As other states, Kentucky has a law which requires slow-moving vehicles (such as tractors or trailers) to affix reflective signs to avoid faster vehicles to run into them from behind. The horse-drawn buggies favored by Amish of the strict observance clearly fit the description of slow-moving vehicles. There have indeed been some collisions with Amish buggies, including one in Kentucky when an SUV ran into such a buggy and killed a teenager. The mandated sign is a bright orange triangle. An especially strict group of Amish, going under the melodious name of Swartzentruber, refused to affix this triangle. They claimed that the object is garish and offends their commitment to “a simple, plain life”. They also said that they rely on God for protection on the road. They are willing to use (supposedly less garish) gray tape and hanging lanterns. Other states have accommodated the Amish position, on grounds of religious freedom. The Kentucky authorities did not. They pressed on. Amish buggies were ticketed. But the Amish refused to pay the fines and were accordingly jailed (for some days at a time). A more recent story in daily newspapers indicates that the conflict continues, with more Amish going to jail, though a bill is pending in the legislature to allow an exemption from the putatively garish triangle.

The second story comes from a blog of one Jonathan Turley under the highbrow title Res ipsa loquitur (“The Thing Speaks for Itself”). It is about Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high school girl. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ahlquist went to federal court asking that her school be compelled to remove a large mural displaying a prayer asking God, among other things, to help students “to be good sports and smile when they lose”. Before resorting to federal court, Ahlquist had made her demand at various meetings of the local school committee. She said that “As an atheist, I have the right to go to school and not feel discriminated against by the people who are praying there.” She met with strong hostility from committee members and many fellow-students. She received insults and threats in school, on the way home from school, and online. She said that she felt alone and hated—and, most important, that her first-amendment rights were being violated. The US district court agreed with her. The school was ordered to remove the prayer. I don’t know if “the thing speaks for itself”, but it seems to speak for the readers of the blog—there were ninety-eight responses, most of them endorsing the sentiment expressed by the title of the post: “Brava, Jessica Ahlquist”.

My own sentiment is not as enthusiastic. But between Jessica and a clutch of hostile Godders, as between the Swartzentruber and the mighty state of Kentucky, I empathize with the stubborn orneriness of the former two. This despite the fact that, God knows, I strongly disagree with the two respective worldviews. (In the unlikely case that Jessica reads my blog, I hope that she concedes my first-amendment right to invoke the deity). The best I can say about the Mennonite faith of the Amish is that it derives from the less bloodthirsty version of the Dutch Reformation. I find the Amish lifestyle quaint but unappealing, and their pacifism morally irresponsible. As to the atheism in question, I consider it, precisely, a worldview appropriate in adolescence but not later in life. To be an agnostic is a very reasonable position to take in view of the depressing realities of the human condition and the absurd puzzles of the universe. The agnostic says “I don’t know what it ultimately means”; the atheist claims to know. Those of us who have not been visited by angels are, almost by definition, agnostic. Yes, we can have faith—I would say, faith alone (sola fide). But faith is not knowledge. That is another story. The ACLU featured in Jessica’s story has a view of the separation of church and state that can be described as Kemalist—the public space of the republic must be kept antiseptically clear of the religious virus. Kemalism has not been working very well in Turkey. It will work even less in the United States.

Posted in Freedom, Modernity, United States | 25 Comments
January 18, 2012

A New Direction for the Russian Orthodox Church?

Peter Berger

On January 7 The New York Times reported that Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Department of Church and Society of the Moscow Patriarchate and one of the highest officials in the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, said in a radio interview that the ROC should serve as a mediator between the state and the people. Two days earlier Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader, had called for just such a role by the Church: “I would very much like for the Russian Orthodox Church to take up such a role in society, so that all conflicting sides would seek and accept its mediation.” Although Chaplin did not mention Navalny, it is reasonable to assume that he was responding to the latter’s appeal—and indeed that he was, in this very broadcast, initiating precisely this sort of mediation. He did not endorse the recent demonstrations, but he said that Russia would never be the same after these demonstrations and that a government that did not respond to popular concerns would be “slowly eaten alive”. He called for a national dialogue including all “patriotically inclined” people, not just the urban middle class that was staging the demonstrations. He specifically said that the charges of fraud in the recent parliamentary elections must be addressed.

Fifteen minutes after Interfax, the Russian news agency, reported on the Chaplin interview, another Church spokesman announced that on the next day Patriarch Kiril I would give “a very important interview” on Rossiya 1, the main television channel. And so he did—on Saturday, January 7, which is the day when Orthodox Christmas is celebrated. The Times again reported on this on the following day. Reuters had a somewhat fuller report. (Interfax apparently carried the full text of Kiril’s address, but I could not access it in English.)

Kiril’s language was somewhat more moderate than Chaplin’s. After all, he spoke just a few hours after celebrating a solemn Christmas liturgy in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But he essentially repeated Chaplin’s message, giving it the most possible official blessing. He did say that “If the authorities remain insensitive to the expression of protest, this is a very bad sign of the authorities’ inability to adjust.” He affirmed the right to protest, but warned against revolutions, which are easily manipulated in the interest of those seeking power. He cited the revolution of 1917 as a relevant warning: “Then we were unable to preserve balance and wisdom. We destroyed our country.” From the quotations available to me, it is not clear just to whom the “we” refers to. Given the context, though, I surmise that it includes the official Church, which had uncritically supported the anti-revolutionary authorities—“balance and wisdom” would have meant mediating between the government and its critics. And of course the Communist regime which emerged from the revolution inflicted enormous destruction on Russian society.

It is important to realize that neither of these two men is theologically or politically liberal. Kiril was born as Vladimir Gundyayev in Leningrad in 1946. Both his father and grandfather were Orthodox priests. He was ordained in 1969, elected as Patriarch in 2009. In 1971 he became the principal Orthodox representative at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, and he has participated in ecumenical events ever since (something that he has been criticized for by ultra-conservatives in the ROC). One must assume that he has acquired cosmopolitan skills by rubbing shoulders with all sorts of non-Orthodox people over the years, but one should be careful not to assume that these contacts greatly influenced his worldview. The World Council of Churches is dominated by Protestants and in the 1970s, when Kiril got there, was engaged in an orgy of theologically legitimated Leftism. In any case, from the beginning, the major activity of Orthodox participants at ecumenical gatherings was, over and over again, to say no! to WCC theological and political initiatives. Soon after becoming Patriarch, Kiril said that he was opposed to any doctrinal or liturgical reforms. Politically, he praised the Byzantine concept of sinfonia—the harmonious collaboration of Church and state in the maintenance of a Christian society.

Vsevolod Chaplin was born in 1968, the son of an agnostic professor. Thus, unlike Kiril, he did not come to Orthodoxy because of family background but as the result of a personal quest. He was ordained as a priest in 1992, as an archpriest in 1999 (the title seems to be similar to that of monsignor in the Catholic Church). Before assuming his present position as head of the Patriarchate’s Department of Church and Society, he headed its Department of External Relations. Like Kiril, he participated in activities of the World Council of Churches, and, also like Kiril, he apparently has been unaffected by these heretical contacts. He has publicly refused to pray with non-Orthodox Christians. He recently achieved a certain notoriety for criticizing Russian young women dressing “like prostitutes”, thus inviting rape. As a remedy, he advocated a “nationwide dress code”.

I have never met Kiril. I have met Chaplin, twice—in the course of a research project on the Russian Orthodox Church and Democracy, which our research center at Boston University conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Church-State Studies at Baylor University (the Baylor center was then directed by Christopher Marsh, a highly competent political scientist with expertise on religion in Communist Russia). The project was undertaken between 2002 and 2004. Early on Marsh and I had a meeting in Moscow, during which we interviewed Chaplin; toward the end of the project we held a conference in Washington, of all places at the Woodrow Wilson Center, on the general topic of Russian Orthodoxy and democracy. Chaplin performed memorably on both occasions. In Moscow he made a spirited defense of the 1997 law on religion, which stopped short of restoring the ROC as the official state religion, but gave it a privileged position denied all others. He was particularly hostile to Protestant missionaries who, with pockets full of American money, come to Russia to “steal Orthodox souls”. Marsh, who speaks fluent Russian, came ready to translate, but we were surprised to find that Chaplin speaks good English. In Washington he gave a lecture on the Patriarchate’s view of the place of religion in the state. He was very open on this:  The ideal would be rulers directly inspired by God, “like the Judges in the Old Testament”. This, unfortunately, is no longer possible. But close to ideal would be a monarchy with (his exact words) “a monolithic relationship between Church and state”. He added that “we have concluded that democracy is preferable to anarchy”. This ringing endorsement of democracy evoked some gasps in the Washington audience, a reaction presumably shared by Woodrow Wilson if his spirit still hovers over the center named after him. A young Russian woman in the audience, in a somewhat shaky voice, contradicted Chaplin: there are many Orthodox people in Russia who disagree with his view of religion and democracy. Chaplin, looming over her dressed all in a black cassock with a large pendant cross around his neck, clearly did not appreciate this sort of public criticism (especially, I guess, coming from a young woman—I was pleased that she stood her ground).

Do the recent statements by the Patriarch and one of his highest associates indicate a radically new direction in the ROC’s understanding of its role in society? Definitely not: It is obvious that neither man has been converted from his overall theological and political traditionalism. But does this mean that these Christmas utterances are unimportant? I think not. They represent a small but potentially significant change in the understanding by the ROC of its place in contemporary Russian society. Since the advent of the Putin government, the relation between Church and state has become increasingly intimate—not quite “monolithic”, in Chaplin’s inimitable phrasing, but approximating more and more the concept of sinfonia evoked by Kiril. The ROC has used the government to enhance its privileges and its power. The state has used the ROC as an instrument to advance both its domestic and foreign policies—and, most important, to support the nationalist ideology, which is now its principal if not its only source of legitimacy. If the Church is now to define its role as mediator, this suggests a loosening of the erstwhile “sinfonic” embrace.

Obviously it is much too early to say whether such a new role will measurably affect Russian politics. It is possible that the recent statements are simply tactical, motivated by the Church’s desire to distance itself from troubles that might engulf the Putin regime. However, if there is hope to arrest the authoritarian drift of the regime and to return to the democratic developments of the Yeltsin period, then a truly mediating role of the Church could be very helpful. There could also be positive implications for the global place of Orthodoxy. Russia contains by far the greatest number of Orthodox people in the world. A more independent and vibrant Russian Orthodox Church would inevitably have an influence on Orthodox churches outside Russia, which almost everywhere are damaged in their public witness by their close identification with nationalism and ethnicity. Orthodoxy represents a distinctive and immensely rich version of the Christian faith, which deserves a much better hearing than the one it gets in its present condition.

Posted in Orthodoxy, Politics | 3 Comments
January 11, 2012

Counting Christian Noses

Peter Berger

In December 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (Washington) issued A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population. Some of the data were developed in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (South Hamilton, Massachusetts). The two institutions are responsible for the bulk of reliable statistical information on religion worldwide. They are directed, respectively, by Luis Lugo and Todd Johnson. I happen to know these two gentlemen quite well. They are the religious nose counters par excellence. Ask them how many Lutherans there are in Mongolia, and how many Buddhists in Finland, they will within a few minutes come back with reasonably accurate numbers.

While the broad outline of the situation has been known for some time, reading the sheer mass of figures in the Pew report is startling. The ongoing comparison is between the years 1910 and 2010. Apart from marking the beginning of a century convenient for comparison, the earlier date is significant in itself. 1910 marked the date of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. It was attended by about 1,300 delegates (all Protestants—Catholics and Orthodox were not invited), most from Europe and North America. The conference (whose centennial in 2010 was celebrated by a series of events) is now seen as the culmination of the Protestant missionary movement of the nineteenth century, and as a prelude to the ecumenical movement of the twentieth. Its official theme was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation”. The mood was triumphalist, the expectations grandiose. Yet I doubt whether any of the participants could have imagined either the size or the shape of Christianity a century hence.

The world population has, of course, expanded enormously between the two dates. Thus the proportion of Christians in the world population has remained stable at about 33%. But the absolute number of Christians has increased very greatly, from about 600 million to about 2.8 billion. Christianity is by far the largest religion in today’s world. Muslims come second, at about 25% of the world population. Among Christians, about 50% are Catholic, about 37% Protestant. [These last figures should be taken with a grain of salt: Catholics tend to include as adherents all who were baptized as Catholics—even if, particularly in Latin America, many may now be noisily enthusiastic (mainly Pentecostal) Protestants. In the other camp, many Protestants (again especially Pentecostal ones) belong to informal groups meeting in private homes, storefronts, garages—and are thus hard to count. Therefore, the above total of Protestants is probably an underestimate. General advice: When counting Christian noses, have a good supply of salt at hand.]

If the size of world Christianity today is amazing, the distribution is even more so. There has been a massive shift in the geography of the religion. In 1910 two thirds of Christians lived in Europe. In 2010 26% lived in Europe, 37% in the Americas, 24% in Africa, 13% in Asia and the Pacific region. But this still does not give the full picture. The figure for “the Americas” is ambiguous, since it includes both North and Latin America. According to the Atlas of Global Christianity (2009—it, by the way, was co-edited by Todd Johnson), in 2010 there were about 283 million Christians in North America (United States and Canada), about 549 million in Latin America. The basic fact: About 1.3 billion Christians, 61% of the total number, live in the Global South. [This is without figuring in the fact that a considerable number of Christians in North America, Catholics as well as Protestants, are Latinos.] The most dramatic shift has occurred in Africa: Christians were 9% of the population in 1910, 63% in 2010. [This figure lumps together mainly Muslim northern Africa and mainly Christian sub-Saharan Africa. The percentage of Christians in the latter would be much higher: Sub-Saharan Africa is basically Christian territory.] Example: Nigeria now has twice as many Protestants than Germany, the homeland of the Reformation. Example: Brazil has twice as many Catholics than Italy, where the Vatican sits as it tries to make sense of the religious landscape. [It is hardly surprising that Pope Benedict XVI regards the “evangelization of Europe” as a top priority. Some African priests might be helpful for this project.]

To understand the importance of this geographical shift, one must look at the respective religious characteristics of Christianity in the two sectors of the globe. In recent years a number of influential works have described this, such as Philip Jenkins’ The New Faces of Christianity (2006) and Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity (2009). The slow-burning schism in the Anglican communion, with dissident Episcopal congregations in the United States putting themselves under the care of African bishops, has made clear that Christianity in the Global South is both theologically and morally more conservative. Thus African Catholics are rarely troubled by the issues (from papal authority to traditional sexual morality) which agitate their liberal coreligionists in Europe and North America. Thus African Protestants, across denominations, are largely Evangelical in their beliefs and values. More than that: Christianity in the Global South is robustly supernaturalist, while Christians to the north of it tend to constrict the supernatural components of the faith within an essentially naturalist worldview. This is most glaring in the case of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians. The Pew report lumps these two categories together—very plausibly, as the dividing line between them is artificial; the report claims that about 584 million Christians, or about 26.7% of the world total, fall under this category. However, what I have called “supernaturalism” is not limited to the Pentecostal/charismatic grouping. The Catholic Church, dramatically in Latin America, has always succeded in adapting itself to the supernatural beliefs and practices (“superstitions”, if you will) of indigenous people it baptized. And (largely Evangelical) Protestantism in Africa has been strongly infiltrated by charismatic supernaturalism—some scholars have coined the term “Pentecostalization” for this process.

If this seems a bit complicated, let me simplify: A few months ago I was talking about this North/South split with a Methodist minister in Boston. I said that, it seemed to me, the North could be put on the defensive over this split. When he asked what I meant, I said: “I would like you to explain to an African Christian why you do not raise people from the dead in your church.” I said that the African interlocutor might go on: “Jesus did. The Apostles did. We do. Why don’t you?”.

Of course this is an oversimplification (albeit, I think, a useful one). There are pockets of supernaturalism in America, as there are Christians in Africa whose notion of “superstition” is no different from that of a liberal Protestant in America. And admittedly, the question about raising people from the dead is a little extreme: It is a relatively rare event even among Catholic curaderas in Guatemala or Protestant charismatics in Nigeria. But the broader category of miraculous healing is empirically more applicable. Virtually all Christians believe, at least in theory, that God can heal illnesses, and most will pray for such healing if the occasion arises. But in America most Christians (even conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants) will assume that God heals through naturalist means—the hands of a surgeon, the efficacy of a drug. African Christians are much more likely to believe that a charismatic healer, by putting his hands on a sick person, can directly cause a miraculous healing there and then.

Behind all the numbers collected so assiduously by Lugo, Johnson et al. looms a vast challenge to the taken-for-granted naturalism in Europe and North America: The majority of global Christians (and, needless to say, the majority of all religious people in the world) question this naturalism, and behave accordingly. Will this challenge diminish with greater affluence and higher education?  Possibly.  Thus far it doesn’t look like it. Thus it would seem that an important dialogue is still outstanding. In recent decades there has developed a veritable dialogue industry, much of it initiated by official church bodies. There have been dialogues between Christians and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists—dialogues between Catholics and Protestants as well as agnostics, Lutherans and Calvinists, and so on. As far as I know, there has been no sustained dialogue between Christians in the two global regions—other than what must be sporadic exchanges in informal settings. I am not at all sure what would be the result of the outstanding dialogue. I am sure that it would be important. [Full disclosure: Our research center at Boston University has such a dialogue on the drawing board.]

Posted in Christianity, Inter-faith Dialogue, Pentecostalism | 23 Comments
January 4, 2012

Islamic Philosophy and the Future of the Arab Spring

Peter Berger

There are few current questions about international developments as important as the ones concerning the future of what, rather optimistically, has been called the Arab Spring. Will this series of popular uprisings indeed lead to a new era of democracy and progress in the Middle East? Or will it rather lead to an era of  violence and totalitarianism inspired by a Jihadist version of Islam? Obviously either outcome will be affected by a variety of factors, many of them with little if any relation to religion. I would like to suggest that a controversy which preoccupied Islamic philosophers a thousand years ago may have a surprising relevance to this alternative.

The recently published 12th volume of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a helpful series put out by the Hudson Institute, revolves around the same alternative. The ongoing election in Egypt has brought the matter into urgent attention. While the election process is dragging on, and while the role of the military remains unclear, there has been the alarming success at the polls of the Muslim Brotherhood, which of late has been making liberal noises, and the various groupings of radical Salafist movements who have made very few such concessions. At this time of writing the two groupings appear to have gathered about 60% of the votes. The political party set up by the Brotherhood has deliberately defined itself in terms of the so-called “Turkish model”—supposedly a liberal democracy inspired by “Islamic values”, but definitely not based on shariah law. Recent domestic and international behavior by the Erdogan government in Turkey is beginning to put some question marks behind this definition of the “model”. Still, at least in aspiration this “model” has more liberal potential than anything the Salafists would like to put in place.

The same alternative between more moderate Islamic regimes and unabashedly fundamentalist ones prevails throughout the Muslim world. What, at least for the moment, seems to be off the table is the prospect of secular regimes with some liberal credentials. (It is ironic that the last secular regime still standing, albeit wobblingly, is the one in Syria—with zero liberal credentials). It is not that there are no liberal voices in the Muslim world, even in Iran and Saudi Arabia. But, with the exception of Indonesia and Turkey, they do not have a broadly popular following. As to the secularized intellectuals with whom Western interlocutors are most comfortable, they have no following at all. It is therefore plausible that, if one is to have hopes for liberal democracy in the Muslim world, one will have to pin these hopes on individuals and movements who define themselves within a decidedly Islamic discourse.

Muslims and others like to point out that the Bible contains enough bloodthirsty teachings to compete with any Salafist ideology. Judaism has moderated these teachings early on, and then profited (if that’s the word) from the fact that there was no sovereign Jewish state in all the centuries from the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans to the establishment of the modern state of Israel—no state which, even if it wanted to, would have been able, for example, to inflict the criminal penalties enjoined in the Book of Leviticus. The New Testament is less carnivorous than the Hebrew Bible, but the history of Christianity, from its establishment in the Roman state onward, shows that Christians have had little difficulty legitimating every kind of violence and bloodshed in theological terms. Yet, at least in modern times, there have been sophisticated efforts to separate the core messages of Biblical revelation from various passages, which are deemed to be morally offensive but which can be ascribed to the contingencies of their historical context. I think that the advent of modern historical scholarship has greatly helped this process of separating core and periphery in the scriptural texts. Liberal Protestants have been in the forefront of this development, followed (initially with some reluctance) by Catholics, and then by liberal Jews. Of course there continues resistance in all branches of the “Abrahamic tradition” by conservatives who insist on the “inerrancy” of the scriptural texts.

Such a development is much more difficult in the case of Islam. I think that a major reason for this is the Muslim understanding of the Quran. It is misleading to compare the Quran with the Bible. For most Muslims, the Quran is “inerrant” to a degree far beyond the understanding of this term by even very conservative Christians or Jews. It has been suggested that Christians, rather than comparing the Quran with the Bible, should compare the Quran with Christ—especially the Christ described in the prologue to the Gospel of John—the Christ who is the Word (Logos): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Thus it is very instructive that the earliest controversies among Islamic scholars concerned the question of whether the Quran was eternal or created—a question which curiously resembles the Christological controversies of the first centuries of Christian history.

All Muslims agree that the Quran (the Arabic word means “recitation”) was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jibril (Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE—the period spans the time that Muhammad spent in Mecca, under constant threat of persecution by the local authorities troubled by his message, and the time in Medina, when he was head of state and military leader. The angel commanded Muhammad to recite (iqra) the words being revealed. It is unclear how many of these texts were originally transmitted orally and how many were quickly written down. All the texts were assembled in the book now known as the Quran after the death of Muhammad, under the authority of the Caliph (“commander of the faithful”) Abu Bakr. Other traditions about sayings and actions of the Prophet, so-called hadith, were collected separately. They have less than revelatory status, but are nevertheless authoritative. The chain of evidence, leading back to the time of the Prophet, is carefully guarded. The debates as to whether the Quran was eternal or created began at some time in the first century after Muhammad’s death. I think that the majority view ever since has favored the eternity of the Quran—it was with God from the beginning, as was the Johanine Logos. It is the minority view, ascribing created status to the Quran, which is particularly relevant in the present situation.

To a modern outsider these are quite obscure debates (as are the ones that agitated the early Christian councils, from Nicaea to Chalcedon). Why are these debates still important? I can claim no competence in Islamic scholarship, but it seems to me that the question can be answered: If the Quran is co-eternal with God, it has a higher degree of literal infallibility (“inerrancy”) than if it is a creation of God. There are different schools of Quranic interpretation (tafsir), including the highly symbolic interpretations engaged in by Sufis. But it seems to me that a greater range of interpretation is opened up if the Quran is understood as part of God’s creation rather than part of God’s essence. This is particularly important in interpreting the difference between the chapters coming, respectively, from the Mecca and the Medina period. The passages most often quoted by more liberal Muslims come from the former period—those most troubling to liberals come from the latter. Islamic scholars have always acknowledged the difference, but if every passage is equally infallible, it is difficult to give due acknowledgment to the different historical contexts. What is more, once such a broader interpretation is allowed, one is then enabled to differentiate between the core and the periphery of the faith. No non-Muslim is entitled to decide what is core and what periphery in the Islamic faith. Certainly God’s justice is central to Muhammad’s prophecy, including its full exercise on the Day of Judgment. But it is relevant that every chapter (sura) of the Quran begins with the formula “In the name of God the compassionate, who practices compassion” (bismillah al-rahman al-rahim – both adjectives are modifications of the Arabic root for compassion, rahm, distinguishing compassion as an inherent quality and as a form of action). I would think that an Islamic legitimation of liberal democracy, with its panoply of human rights, would put God’s compassion along with his justice at the core of the faith.

An early school of Islamic philosophy was the Mu’tazila, which was cultivated between the 8th and 10th centuries, centered in Basra and Baghdad. The Mutazilites, strongly influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasized the use of reason in interpreting the Quran. They distinguished the core content of the revelation and its historical deviations. And, significantly, they asserted that the Quran was created, not eternal. I find it equally significant that one of the foremost reformist Muslim thinkers today has described himself as a “neo-Mutazilite”. Abdolkarim Soroush, an Iranian scholar, was close to the Islamic Revolution in its early days, but became more and more critical of the regime that emerged from it. A victim of repression in his home country, he has been teaching at Harvard and other American universities. He is known as an interpreter of the great Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi, but he has written extensively on the relation of Islam to the modern world. He has distinguished between the “essential” and the “accidental” elements in a religious tradition. And he has advocated what he calls “religious democracy”—in the event a regime inspired by Islam but not based on shariah law, guaranteeing all the rights of liberal democracy, including full religious freedom—and very significantly including the right to change one’s religion.

History is not an ongoing philosophical seminar. The future of the Arab Spring and of the Middle East in general will be crucially affected by many factors far removed from concerns of religion or theoretical thought—such as the price of oil, the progress of nuclear proliferation, or the decline of American military and political power. But ideas do matter. It is important to understand that those who wish to combine their Muslim faith with aspirations toward liberal democracy have decidedly Islamic ideas to support their agenda.

Posted in Islam, Philosophy, Politics | 15 Comments
December 28, 2011

A Holiday Respite

Peter Berger

We are taking a brief break with posts this week. I’d like to wish all my readers all the best for this holiday season and in the new year. Regular posting will resume next week.

Posted in Symbolism | 4 Comments
December 21, 2011

Miracles and the Historians

Peter Berger

In its December 2011 issue Christianity Today carried an interview with Craig Keener, a New Testament historian teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is the author of a recent book, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Keener has a quarrel with most of his colleagues, who tend to dismiss these accounts as legends rather than actual facts. He recommends jettisoning the “naturalistic tradition” of modern historical scholarship and dealing with miracles as alleged facts to be investigated for their veracity just as all other facts that historians come across. He points out that the “naturalistic tradition” originated in Europe in the modern era, when none of these scholars had ever witnessed a miracle. The situation is different today. Keener spent time in Africa, where Christians claim to witness miracles in their everyday lives: “Extraordinary things are taking place around the world”.

I am not concerned at this moment with whether miracles are to be taken as empirically real, be it in New Testament times or in Africa today. Rather, I want to address the question of the “naturalistic” assumptions of modern historical scholarship. Keener is of course quite right about this: For the last three hundred years or so historians have come to think of their craft as a branch of science. This means an intellectual discipline with specific canons of procedure. Among these is the norm that every statement about the empirical world should be subject to falsification: The historian must allow others to examine and, if indicated, to reject the evidence on which he has based this or that statement. Obviously this presents a challenge to a historian who, as a believer, regards the text under examination to contain divine revelation. This challenge constitutes the great drama of modern Biblical scholarship.

Can the Bible (or for that matter any other text claimed to be revelatory) be studied in any other way? It definitely can. The theologian will extract from the text propositions that cannot be falsified. So will the preacher, who has to address an audience with no interest whatever in scholarship. There could also be an individual, perhaps an agnostic, who is interested in the text simply for its literary quality. The historian, who defines his approach as scientific will come to the text in a very distinctive way.

Modern science has achieved high credibility and prestige, not only for its intellectual plausibility, but because of its immense practical successes. Modern science, and the technology it has made possible, has fundamentally changed the circumstances of human life on this planet. One result of this has been the ideology of scientism, which asserts that science is the only valid avenue to truth. On the part of believers there has been the understandable impetus to present belief itself as being based on science. The prototypical figure in this has been Mary Baker Eddy, founder of a denomination aptly called Christian Science, with Jesus transformed into someone called Christ, Scientist. Not only does this do violence to the Jesus found in the New Testament, but equally so to science as an intellectual discipline. In the same line there have been attempts to establish a Christian economics, a Christian sociology, and so forth. Such constructions are as implausible as a Christian geology, or a Christian dermatology.

But there is something more fundamental involved in all of this: The refusal to accept the fact that there is more than one way to perceive reality.

The most eloquent expression of this fact is the opening paragraph of Robert Musil’s great novel The Man without Qualities (in my opinion one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, because it painstakingly seeks to describe the nature of modern man and the possibility of religion in the modern world). The paragraph begins with the sentence “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic”. It then goes on in the tones of a scientific weather report, to end with the sentence “It was a fine day in August 1913”. The point here is both simple and profound: There is no way of deducing the last sentence from the meteorology that precedes it.

Currently, at least in America, the drama of science and religion has played out in the controversy over evolution. Christians who believe that the account of creation in the Book of Genesis is literally true have sought to discredit the theory of evolution—and they have called this exercise “creation science”. This worldview is hard to maintain in the face of the empirical evidence, but whatever it is, it is not science. Things are a bit more complicated with a follow-up approach—that of “intelligent design”. This centers on the proposition that it is impossible to look at the exquisitely constructed physical universe without concluding that there must an intelligent creator at its foundation. Now, this is a proposition that any believing Jew, Christian or Muslim will agree with. Even an agnostic physicist might be swayed by it. But the proponents of ID have called their conclusion “scientific” and have gone to court insisting that it should be taught in public schools as an alternative to conventional evolution theory. I think a federal court was right in rejecting this claim, calling ID not science but a thinly disguised affirmation of religious faith.

Back to the historian: If he wants to claim the status of “science” for his discipline, he has no alternative to following in the “naturalistic tradition”. The acts of God (miraculous or otherwise) cannot be empirically investigated or falsified. How the historian then looks at the same phenomenon, such as a Biblical account of ancient events, will obviously depend on his theology. If he believes in Biblical inerrancy—every sentence is literally true—he will definitely have some serious problems.  But there are other, more flexible ways of looking for revelation “in, with and under” the Biblical text. In that case, even the most rigorous historical scholarship cannot undermine the approach of faith.

Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Secularism | 15 Comments