Religion and Other Curiosities: Peter Berger's Blog | The American Interest

January 30, 2013

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!

Peter Berger

As readers of my blog have discovered (perhaps with a measure of irritation) my favorite cognitive style is free association. The following post is an exercise in putting together bits and pieces—in the event: flea markets, cowboys, hobos and the root insight of anarchism.

This exercise was triggered by the issue of The Christian Century on January 23, 2013. The cover story, a rather surprising one for this usually staid banner publication of mainline Protestantism, has the title “Flea Market Capitalists”. The story is by Arthur E. Farnsley II (a mainline Protestant name if there ever was), who holds a Ph.D. from Emory University, teaches and researches about American religion, and also proudly identifies himself as a repeated tomahawk champion of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association. The article summarizes some of the findings of his recent book Flea Market Jesus (2012). I have not read the book, but I can warmly recommend the article.

Flea markets are marginal businesses—literally dealing with bits and pieces of discarded merchandise. The businesses are generally operated by poor people who use its scanty profits to augment equally scanty income from other sources (many of them are on disability). Farnsley’s research into flea markets was conducted over several years in central and southern Indiana. He was not primarily interested in the economics of the business, but in the culture and religion of its entrepreneurs.

The culture is peculiar. It characterizes people “who do not see themselves as belonging to any community… they experience institutions as centers of power and control who do things to them, not for them or with them”. They are icons of radical individualism. They are (sort of) small business people, express patriotic sentiments, and are quite religious (generally in an orthodox but unaffiliated form of Christianity). Yet they are distrustful of any institution—including large business (some keep money under the bed), government and church. Their religion has magical undertones (they believe in miracles), their God helps “little people like themselves”. They are attached to guns, “the ultimate ability to say no to coercion”, but they are unlikely to be loyal members of the National Rifle Association.

The quality that sticks out is a fierce devotion to individual freedom—“not to freedom to do whatever you want, but to freedom from being forced to do what you do not want”. Most of the flea market dealers are against abortion and homosexuality, but “I wouldn’t want to tell anyone else what to do”. This is a basic personal value, not based on some libertarian or anarchist ideology. Farnsley, who describes himself as a libertarian, obviously sympathizes with these people, but he admits (one surmises, almost regretfully) that “most of us have too much to lose to chuck it all and sell socks at a flea market”.

The story in The Christian Century made me recall something that my colleague Christopher Marsh told me about a year ago. He was thinking of doing some research about a group calling itself “Cowboy Baptists” and who were about to have a convention in Texas. The research did not occur, but I was intrigued by what seemed to be an incongruous name of this group; I then forgot about it until now. It turns out that quite a lot of information about it is available on the Internet. As recently as October 08, 2012, the newsletter of the American Baptist Press carried an informative story by Jeff Brumley.

Going back to the 1970s, the Cowboy Baptists have become a sizable group. They have an organization, the Cowboy Church Network of North America (the name suggests some Canadian affiliates). As one would expect, the group is strongest in the Southwest (though there are branches as far north as Minnesota—or maybe Saskatchewan?); in Texas alone there are about 800 churches. The group is characterized by an emphatically Evangelical faith and a cowboy lifestyle. The Evangelicalism expresses itself in intense missionary activity—“church planting”, in the customary Evangelical parlance. Once “planted”, every church immediately prepares to clone itself. The cowboy lifestyle is omnipresent—worship is very informal, people come to services in cowboy gear, services are held in connection with rodeos, preachers arrive on horseback, baptisms are often performed in cattle troughs. All of this is meant to make a certain category of people feel at home, as against the “roadblocks” they have encountered in more conventional churches. However, one cowboy pastor admits that most of his flock are “armchair cowboys who just love watching ‘Gunsmoke’ and don’t ride horses at all”.

What I find interesting in this phenomenon is a mélange of two cultures that are usually (and quite correctly) seen as opposites. It makes me think of a man I knew some years ago: He despised what he called the “health cult”, and he ceremonially desecrated it by pouring rich whipped cream over granola bars. (Or, if you prefer, imagine a big building in Washington containing the national lobby of flea market dealers.) Cowboys have been associated with riotous living, both in historical fact and in the myth that has been propagated in American popular culture. Baptists (especially Southern Baptists) are associated with the very opposite: an uptight and abstemious way of life. (Old joke: “Why are Southern Baptists against premarital sex? – Because it may lead to dancing.”) A white-washed sanctuary is the proper locale for good Baptists. The meeting place associated with cowboys is the saloon (and the whorehouse, frequently located one flight up—if one gives credence to Western movies). It is worth mentioning that the cowboy culture, at least today, is no longer exclusively male: There are many cowgirls, whose participation in the historic antics of the saloon may have some limits, but who apparently enjoy swaggering in their distinctive getup as much as their men. In any case, Cowboy Baptists celebrate a very distinctive form of ecumenicity, as embracive as any under the auspices of the World Council of Churches.

The lone cowboy riding into the sunset is a distinctive American icon. There are analogues elsewhere of solitary individuals moving from place to place. Both the loneliness and the freedom of the open road make up a cross-cultural narrative. There are the Travelers in Ireland, still today a distinctive and officially recognized “social group”. Of course there are the Gypsies (who now prefer to be called Roma and Sinti), who may be the descendants of a Hindu caste of musicians who at some time began to move westward. The Jewish peddler was a well-known figure in eastern Europe. And going back into the Middle Ages, there were the wandering artisans appropriately called “journeymen”, the vagrant scholars, and last not least the troubadours in search of romantic encounters.

Back in America, there has been another myth, that of the hobo. He did not drive cattle across the prairies, but rode the freight trains criss-crossing the vast spaces of the continent. Here too is a figure of loneliness and freedom. He even had a kind of national anthem, the song “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”. There are different versions of its origin. According to one story, it was scribbled in 1897 on a prison wall in Kansas City by a hobo known as “One Finger Ellis”. It is sung to a tune that was originally a Protestant hymn “Revive us Again”. It was adopted by the famous Wobblies, the anarchist group whose official name was the Industrial Workers of the World; the IWW published the song in 1908. Its refrain went as follows:

Hallelujah, I’m a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again.

The Wobblies were the American expression of a much larger international phenomenon, which played an important role in European revolutionary movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Known as anarchism (the word in Greek means “without ruler/without government”), it become prominent in Russia and was associated with spectacular acts of terrorism. Dostoyevsky drew a very negative picture of anarchists in his novel The Possessed. Possibly its last moment of glory came during the Spanish civil war. Its militia, known by the acronym POUM, helped defend Barcelona against the Franco forces, until troops controlled by the Soviet security service massacred the anarchists from behind, literally shooting them in the back. (George Orwell wrote a memorable obituary to the POUM in his Homage to Catalonia, 1938.)

When I was a student at the New School for Social Research, where most classes let out late in the evening, a group of us often stayed around in the “Oviedo”, a bar on 14^th Street owned by a veteran of the Spanish civil war. Over the urinals in the men’s room hung an inscription “Muerte a Franco!”, so that you could solemnly piss on the hated dictator. I cannot recall the beginning of a conversation I had with the owner; it may have been an occasion when I mentioned my passionate opposition (then as now) to the death penalty. The anti-fascist veteran put his hand on my shoulder and said: “It is clear that you are a decent person. All decent people are anarchists deep down”.

Was he right? No and yes. No, anarchism as a political ideology typically begins with senseless murders and ends in tyranny. But yes, there is a root insight, not in anarchist theories, but in what could be called an anarchist sensibility. The insight is that most institutions are based on fictions, often homicidal ones, and that individual freedom is a precious and precarious commodity that must ever again be defended—both against the coercive institutions of modernity and against the more subtle coercion of traditional community. The sociologist knows that society must provide a morally legitimated order of institutions, without which human life would descend into chaos. Balancing order and freedom is the challenge to the institutions of liberal democracy. But it is salutary to remember that all institutions, however benignly constructed, contain the potential of oppression—and that the core of individual dignity is the capacity to say no to the oppressors.

Image courtesy Shutterstock.

Posted in Culture, Evangelicalism, United States |

Comments

January 23, 2013

Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

Peter Berger

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University publishes a very informative electronic newsletter about religious developments all over the world. On January 12, 2013, the newsletter carried a story originally published in the Buffalo News, about Joelle Silver, a high school science teacher in a community in upstate New York called Cheektowaga. This melodiously named place, now a suburb of Buffalo, is located in the general vicinity of the so-called Burnt-Over District, which in the nineteenth century was a hotbed of Protestant revivals and other charismatic movements (the Mormons originated in the same neighborhood). Silver (a photo shows her to be an attractive young woman) is a committed Evangelical Christian, thus more or less in continuity with the regional religious history (although the town now has a large Polish community unlikely to be strongly Protestant).

It so happens that Cheektowaga, or at least its high school, also contains a militantly secularist teenager. This individual (no name given in the story) took umbrage at Silver’s displaying a variety of religious objects in the classroom, including posters with religious messages and a “prayer request box” belonging to a students’ Bible study group. The offended student alerted the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a militantly secularist organization operating out of Madison, Wisconsin. In response to its intervention the school ordered Silver to remove her religious materials from the classroom.

Silver sued the school authorities in U.S. district court for violating her constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. Her suit was supported by the American Freedom Law Center, a foundation with headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, self-described as the “first truly authentic Judeo-Christian public interest law firm”. Both organizations engage in a mix of litigation and advocacy (respectively, of “nontheism” and of the Judeo-Christian values supposedly foundational for American democracy). As part of its advocacy, the “nontheist” organization promotes signs wishing people “a happy Solstice” to replace Christmas messages. (I trust that they don’t put any of their signs up on public property, since someone might then sue them on the grounds that worship of the Solstice was part of the ancient Anglo-Saxon religion.)

Needless to say, both organizations deploy lawyers. Rebecca Markert, an attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation”, said: “Public employees, including teachers, have to act neutrally with regard to religion. They cannot push any religion.” Robert Muise, an attorney with the American Freedom Law Center, countered: “They essentially want her to cease being a Christian once she enters school district property.” He added that the other side regards any religious reference in schools “as if it’s some disease that has to be eradicated”. Dennis Kane, the school district superintendent, made a comment that is undoubtedly a correct (if you will, “neutral”) assessment of the situation—to the effect that the district was caught in the middle of a dispute between “two big special-interest groups”, and that it would be sued regardless of what it did or didn’t do.

Americans are addicted to litigation like no other people on earth. The delicate balance between the two religion principles in the first amendment to the US constitution—no establishment and free exercise—continues to assure an avalanche of lawsuits in the federal courts. But similar problems exist in other democracies. The European Center for Law and Justice, located in Strasbourg, is a Christian-inspired organization defending “the spiritual and moral values which are the common heritage of European peoples” (as stated in the Preamble of the Statute of the Council of Europe). In its newsletter of January 8, 2013, the Center reports on four individuals, citizens of the United Kingdom, who claim violations of their freedom of religion. The first two complaints are somewhat similar to that of the aforementioned American high school teacher. Both involve women who, supposedly as an expression of their religious beliefs, were wearing necklaces with small silver crosses. One worked as a check-in clerk for British Airways, the other as a geriatric nurse in a public hospital. Both were ordered to remove these ornaments. The BA case seems rather plausibly based on anti-Christian bias, since the airline has previously accepted Muslim and Sikh headgear. The justification of the order to the nurse to shed her cross was that a patient might be injured as a result of pulling on it (perhaps gripped by a sudden attack of “nontheist” rage?). The second two complaints have to do with an issue south of the navel. One complainant is a public registrar, who refused to conduct civil ceremonies for same-sex couples, the other a marriage counselor who said that he felt unable to work with such couples. Both believe that homosexuality is contrary to God’s will, and both were threatened with termination.

All four cases were appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, on the grounds that domestic law in the United Kingdom has failed to protect their right to freedom of religion. Under the principle of subsidiarity, only if such failure can be shown may a case be carried to the European Court. There is a piquant irony here, given the fact that the Church of England, with the monarch as its head, is still established by law as a state religion.

I am reluctant to enter into the legal ramifications of these cases. I am not a constitutional lawyer. It seems to me that the four European cases are more serious in terms of religious rights than the case of the American high school teacher. Presumably school authorities are within their rights to limit some religious expressions in the classroom (say, by prohibiting a teacher coming in with a big sign saying “Repent, the end is nigh!”). I don’t really know whether Silver’s collection of Christian messages comes close to that limit. I would point out that whatever violations of religious freedom do exist in the U.S. and in Western Europe, they pale compared to the massive persecution of Christians in many countries, be it by states or by tolerated lynch mobs. It is useful to keep a sense of proportion in this (as in most other matters).

But I do want to make a general observation: In all these cases the authorities accused of violating the plaintiffs’ rights operate with a definition of religion as a private matter to be kept out of public space. There is here a general issue of government overreach, as clearly illustrated by the (still unresolved) attempt by the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception coverage in their employees’ health plans. Beyond that, though, there is a very ideological view of the place of religion in society. In other words, religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in private. The attorney for the Judeo-Christian side in the aforementioned American case had it quite right when he compared the treatment of his client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.

An aggressive secularism seems to be on the march in all these cases. It seems more at home in Europe, which is far more secularized than America. Even in the United Kingdom, it seems, the drums of the French Revolution still reverberate. But how is one to explain this sort of secularism in the United States? The “nones”—that is, those who say “none” when asked for their religious affiliation by pollsters—are a very mixed lot. One theme that comes through is disappointment with organized religion. There is an anti-Christian edge to this, since Christian churches continue to be the major religious institutions in this country. Disappointment then, or disillusion—but why the aggressive hostility? There is yet another theme that comes through in the survey data: An identification of churches (and that means mainly Christian ones) with intolerance and repression. I think that this is significant.

Let me venture a sociological hypothesis here: The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the 1960s there has indeed been a sexual revolution in America. It has been very successful in changing the mores and the law. It should not be surprising that many people, especially younger ones, enjoy the new libidinous benefits of this revolution. Whether one approves or deplores the new sexual culture, it seems unlikely to be reversed. Yet Christian churches (notably the Catholic and Evangelical ones) are in the forefront of those who do want to reverse the libertine victory. Its beneficiaries are haunted by the nightmare of being forced into chastity belts by an all too holy alliance of clerics and conservative politicians. No wonder they are hostile!

Posted in Christianity, Secularism |

Comments

January 16, 2013

Ethnic Religions

Peter Berger

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The story described the candidates eagerly seeking the endorsement of black clergy in the area. The candidates are black as well, with one exception: a white woman who had previously run and lost against Jackson. She too is actively seeking the same clerical endorsements.

Jackson had been endorsed by a considerable number of pastors. This political involvement of clergy is by no means limited to Chicago, but is common elsewhere if African-Americans are a significant factor in the electorate. Candidates are not only openly endorsed by pastors, but often are invited to speak from the pulpit. There is some dispute on how important these endorsements are, given the decline of the church as an institution in many black communities. Apparently it is still worth the effort. One candidate observed: “You can go to a church and talk to a few thousand people. That’s a huge audience to capture at one particular time. You can walk blocks and knock on doors and not reach a thousand people”. And this is how one of the pastors put it: “We want it stay an African-American seat. We want a voice for us in this area. There’s access that comes with culture.”

An interesting question here is the legality of such endorsements by tax-exempt institutions. But this is not my interest here. Rather it is the linkage between religion and ethnicity. Through much of history this linkage has been very close indeed. Even in our time ethnically defined religion has been an important social and political reality—for example the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, Buddhism in Tibet.

The American case has been distinctive. Of course churches and synagogues played an important part in easing the transition to a new country during the earlier period of mass immigration, but this did not generally lead to separate religious bodies. Rome decided early on not to organize American Catholicism along ethnic lines (though of course individual parishes could accommodate the linguistic and cultural needs of different immigrant groups). American Lutheranism was organized in ethnically defined synods—German, Swedish, Norwegian, and so on—many of them using the original European languages in worship. The Germans gave up first, during World War I, in response to widespread anti-German feelings. The Scandinavians followed suit a little later. In America today two religions continue to be strongly identified with ethnicity, because they had been so identified for centuries—Judaism and Hinduism (Buddhism in this country is a somewhat different story). But in American Christianity two religious traditions stand out in this respect: African-American Protestantism and Eastern Christian Orthodoxy. Both their differences and their similarities are noteworthy.

The black church has been a central—for long periods the central—institution for African-Americans. Victims of slavery, segregation and racism found in their religion a source of dignity and comfort, and at times an inspiration for rebellion. While the specifically black churches were almost all broadly Protestant, they developed their own very distinctive forms of Christian piety and worship. Black Gospel music and the Spirituals eloquently expressed this distinctiveness. This same tradition was at the core of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the late 1950s, when I had my first full-time teaching job in North Carolina, I heard Martin Luther King speak at an NAACP rally. What impressed me at the time was the thoroughly religious atmosphere of the event—religious in a decidedly black version. Much later, when I had my first contacts with Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, it occurred to me that people from that tradition could easily recognize the role played by King—in their terminology, he was an ethnarch, a religious leader representing his people in a struggle for their rights, as did Orthodox clergy for many centuries during which their people had to live under capricious Muslim rulers. In the last fifty years or so, for a variety of reasons, the black church is no longer the central institution it once was for African-Americans. But the story about the Chicago election shows that the institution has not lost its influence altogether.

Eastern Christian Orthodoxy in America was from the beginning, and still is today, almost entirely organized along ethnic lines. The one exception is the rather small Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which used to be a Russian diaspora church but, as its name indicates, re-invented itself as an American church of Orthodox Christians, with its liturgy in English and a large segment of its members consisting of converts to Orthodoxy. The bulk of the Orthodox in America worship in churches that are extensions of their home countries, sometimes directly under the latters’ jurisdiction. The big boy on the Orthodox block in America is Greek. The Moscow Patriarchate has been working to re-assert its authority over Russian diaspora churches. And then there are ecclesial bodies representing the ethnicities of the Balkans (Serbian, Romanian, and so on) and the Middle East (including the so-called Oriental churches—Orthodox in most ways but theologically deviant from Constantinople—with the largest being the Armenian Church). Many Orthodox Americans, especially lay people, have found this ethnic mosaic irrational and counter-productive, but so far efforts to create a unified Orthodoxy in America have not gotten very far.

There is one big difference between these two ethnic religions: While whites have generally been welcome in African-American churches—they have attended black services as visitors—whites have rarely if ever been converted to black Christianity. By contrast, there has been a steady stream of converts joining Orthodox churches in America. Some years ago a sizable group of Evangelicals converted en masse and affiliated with the American branch of the ancient Patriarchate of Antioch (whose traditional liturgy is in Syriac and which was brought to America by Christian Arab immigrants). I am told that so-called “cradle Orthodox” have been uneasy about the zealous religiosity of the conversos (who, like so many converts, tend to be more Papist than the Pope). Converts to Orthodoxy (unless they live in proximity to the sparsely diffused OCA) have a problem: Just which of the several ethnic bodies are they to join?

This first came home to me when I was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York, which had large and very heterogeneous classes. A young man came to speak with me after class. He had a pronouncedly Anglo-Saxon name and spoke impeccable American English. When I asked him what he did besides attending New School classes (which met in the evening and had many students with full-time jobs), he smiled and said “I am an Albanian priest”. He had no relation whatever with Albanian ethnicity. He told me that, after he had converted and decided to become an Orthodox priest, he went to some sort of counseling service, which advised individuals in his position where there was a need for Orthodox priests and where converts would be accepted as candidates (whether reluctantly or not). I had very few contacts with this individual after our initial conversation, so I don’t know how he fared as an “Albanian priest”. At the time he had not learned any Albanian and officiated in English (which some of his parishioners did not understand).

Christian churches divided by ethnicity have a (usually dormant) theological problem: Almost all Protestants and all Orthodox regularly recite the historic creeds, which affirm faith in the “holy catholic church”—“catholic” with a lower-case “c”, meaning “universal”. How does a church that only contains blacks or only Greeks represent the universality of the faith? Originally, if this question was posed at all, the answer was not difficult: Blacks were forced into their separate churches by whites who excluded them. And Greek immigrants naturally gravitated to churches speaking their language and where they felt at home. This theological rationale has become less plausible, as racial and ethnic barriers have increasingly collapsed, and as individuals move ever more freely and even intermarry across the old divisions. Whatever their theological rationales, both black and Orthodox churches in America face a common sociological problem: How to explain their existence within the tumultuous religious and cultural pluralism of America?

I think that this problem will be felt more urgently by middle-class people—as against, say, inner-city African-Americans and working-class immigrants from Albania. Ethnic and religious prejudices decline most sharply as individuals go up the educational and class ladder. If they are African-Americans, they find white institutions, including formerly all-white churches, more welcoming and they are more comfortable in these milieus that were formerly closed to them. If they are Greek-Americans, their ties to their ancestral homeland have become weaker and they must find better reasons for attending the divine liturgy than a waning ethnicity. As Reinhold Niebuhr long ago showed, the denomination is the prototypically American religious institution—that is, a religious institution which is based on voluntary association and which recognizes the right of other such institutions to exist in the society. Inevitably, this institution, coupled with the strong legal support of religious freedom, encourages inter-denominational migrations. Children will ask: Why should I go to this church, and not to the one on the next block where my best friend goes? In a curious way, this leads to a new question: What does my tradition have to offer to people not raised in it? How these two closely related questions are answered, will determine the future in America of the black church and of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.

Posted in Christianity, Orthodoxy, Politics |

Comments

January 10, 2013

Why are there no humanist funerals?

Peter Berger

On December 29, 2012, the New York Times carried an article by Samuel Freedman, who is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and who regularly writes in the religion column of the Times. The article is entitled “In a Crisis, Humanists seem Absent”. It dealt with the strong religious presence in the aftermath of the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. At the interfaith service attended by President Obama there were clergy representing the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Baha’I faiths. The families of all the murdered children requested funerals under religious auspices.

Freedman asked a simple question: Where were the humanists in all of this? He made clear that he was not charging some sort of discrimination: An interfaith service rather logically did not include people without a faith, and the bereaved parents obviously had the right to decide on the type of funeral for their children. But the question suggests itself given the religious demography of America, especially as it has recently been reported on by the Pew Research Center (an organization whose findings are competently arrived at). According to Pew, about 20% of Americans reply “none” when asked their religious affiliation, a figure that reaches about one third with respondents under the age of thirty. “Humanists” is one term often used to refer to the “nones”, who are a very mixed group. They include a large number of people who are quite religious (about 80% say that they believe in God, and many of them regularly pray), but who have not found a church in which they feel at home. “Humanists” are also described as a category embracing both atheists and agnostics – respectively, people who are sure that there is no God, and people who don’t know. These are very different positions. Be this as it may, if one subsumes all the “nones” under the category of “humanists”, there are certainly more of them than Jews or Muslims, not to mention Baha’is. Why don’t people think of turning to them when seeking comfort in the midst of grief?

Apparently the question is also being asked within the self-described humanist movement. The question is sharpened by the fact that “humanist celebrants” are in demand at weddings. A non-religious ceremony seems to be plausible to celebrate a marriage; clearly it is not very easy to celebrate a death within the same discourse (especially, I would think, the death of a child).

Greg Epstein is a “humanist chaplain” at Harvard. (Come to think of it, I would love to see his job description.) He gives an answer to the question: “It’s a failure of community… What religion has to offer to people—more than theology, more than divine presence—is community. And we [humanists] need to provide an alternative form of community if we’re going to matter for the increasing number of people who say they are not believers”. Epstein also proposes that emphasis on reason, often presented as an antidote to religious faith, is not enough for the humanist message; it should be “reason in the service of compassion”. What he means is that humanists should engage themselves in activities that improve lives in this world, rather than simply rejecting the faith that there is anything beyond this world.

This proposition is not exactly new. One often hears it from liberal rabbis who first tell us that Judaism does not necessarily imply belief in life after death. Which is obviously true, since these rabbis exist. It is also true that, in the early stages of the religion of ancient Israel, God’s promises of resurrection referred to the people, not to individuals. But as rabbinical Judaism developed, this focus on the collectivity was deemed insufficient. The same liberal rabbis like to cite the old Jewish notion of tikkun olam—“repair of the world”—which they interpret as engagement for social justice. This is a translation from a decidedly supernaturalist discourse to a naturalist one: The notion first had a limited meaning in divinely revealed Jewish law (repairing a legal mistake), but then it came to mean all good deeds in the service of God, and eventually it became a central idea in Jewish mysticism. But this type of secularizing faith has been a dominant feature of liberal Protestantism for a long time, and has been an important factor in the decline of its version of Christianity. Efforts to, say, raise the minimum wage or increase funding for public schools are not very effective in comforting bereaved parents. When the message of the risen Christ is translated into the Social Gospel, the church tends to make itself irrelevant: It becomes an unnecessarily cumbersome instrument for this or that political project.

Where is Epstein right? Yes, community helps people cope with grief—any community—even a few neighbors coming over with some hugs and a meal. Of course a group of humanists can serve the same purpose. But this will hardly make their message more plausible, though it may make a particular group of humanists more likable. Activity on behalf of a good cause can divert the mind from sorrow; there is nothing wrong with that. Also, it is possible for individuals without faith to face tragedy with stoic dignity. But one does not need a humanist church for that.

Where is Epstein wrong? Yes, of course a religious community can offer comfort of the same kind as any other community. But religion offers something much more central than community in the abstract: It offers a community gathered around the message that death is not the final word about an individual life and nothingness not the final destiny of the universe. At any rate this is the message shared by the Abrahamic faiths that came to Newtown. Whether this message is true or not, humanism in the sense of “no faith” cannot offer a plausible alternative.

Posted in Christianity, Philosophy, Secularism |

Comments

January 2, 2013

Just in case you failed to notice: The world did not end on December 21, 2012

Peter Berger

About the same time, in early December 2012, that the media went into high gear discussing the putatively catastrophic consequences of a “fiscal cliff” on January 1, 2013, they also reported quite extensively about another looming date, that one a little earlier, on December 21, 2012, when according to some calculations the so-called Long Count calendar of the ancient Mayas predicted the end of the world. The possible fiscal apocalypse was of course taken with utmost seriousness by the media (with the great majority of economists, and public figures from the secretary of the treasury on down), the Mayan doomsday prophecy was reported on in a tone of amusement, perhaps to provide comic relief from the mounting economic anxiety.

The golden age of Mayan civilization was centered in what is now southern Mexico (especially Yucatan) and Guatemala, a region still inhabited by people descendent from that civilization. Along with other Mesoamerican cultures, Mayan religion was an odd combination of a fascination with astronomy and the belief that the gods had to be fed with a steady supply of human blood. Both obsessions led to the construction of the gigantic pyramids which continue to be great tourist destinations. Their platforms served observation of the stars and also were the sites for the grisly ceremonies of human sacrifice. Mayan theology managed to link stargazing with vivisection (trust theologians to perform such intellectual feats). The former activity, which produced astonishingly accurate data on celestial motions, produced detailed calendars, some for short-term time measurements, others (like the Long Count calendar) measuring past and future time by millennia. According to some readings, this calendar predicts the end of a cosmic cycle or baktun on December 21, 2012 CE. This date has also been differently defined—as the quite non-catastrophic end of one of many eras—or as the time of a huge disaster. The latter interpretation, not surprisingly, has caught media and popular attention.

I don’t know how much of the popular attention was serious (that of the media was not). I would think that many of the gatherings celebrating the date were in the spirit of fun, similar to Halloween parties not implying belief in spirits or hobgoblins. In any case, there were large gatherings of people at Mayan locations, notably in Chichen Itza in Yucatan, apparently a mix of irreverent tourists out for fun and an ecumenical assembly of miscellaneous “spiritual” cults (many of whom expect redemptive wisdom from this or that indigenous religion). Some in the latter crowd believed that their exercises could avert the threatening doom, others did not expect any real doom but went for some sort of mystical experience. The Mexican tourist industry benefited. The Merida airport (closest to Chichen Itza) had a countdown clock installed.

But the excitement was not limited to the Mayan territories. There were sporadic get-togethers of doomsday fans in Russia and in China (particularly alarming the Chinese authorities, ever on the lookout for “evil cults”). There was a gathering at Stonehenge, linking Celtic with Mesoamerican “spirituality”. One baktun-associated fear was that a giant meteor was about the hit the earth. To allay such fears NASA and other official centers of modern (as against Mayan) stargazing were moved to issue bulletins stating that there was no evidence of any dangers to our planet from outer space. Some people evidently believed that time zones did not matter, so that the big event could occur anywhere where the clock said December 21, not just in southern Mexico (which is many hours ahead of the International Date Line): When the ominous day ended just west of that line, this message appeared on a social medium: “The world has not ended today. Sincerely, New Zealand”.

There have been many occasions in the past where, either because of certain dates or because of phenomena in the heavens, there were expectations of an imminent great disaster without any salvific benefits being associated with it. As the year 1000 CE approached, there was such a panic in Christian Europe. As 2000 CE came near, there was a secular reiteration of this: Computers would be unable to adjust to the millennial change—the financial system might collapse, there would be wide power failures, planes would fall out of the sky. The periodic returns to visibility of Halley’s Comet also caused similar anxieties. I am not sure about the psychology of this. Perhaps it goes back to early experiences, as when a child is frightened by an adult approaching in a threatening manner, but already anticipates the relief when the adult removes the threat and makes clear that it was only a joke. Or perhaps an all-embracing planetary fear makes the many more individual anxieties more bearable. Be this as it may, I find more interesting the prophecies of doomsday where the latter is the forerunner of a great salvific event.

Such events can be found in different parts of the world, but they are most common where the three Abrahamic faiths have dominated. The terrible events to come are to be followed by the final events, the eschata, in which the redemption of the world will culminate—respectively the coming of the Messiah, the Second Coming of Jesus, and the establishment of the universal rule of Islam by the Mahdi. In each case believers have looked for signs and omens suggesting that these things were about to happen. And in each case (at least an empirical historian must so conclude) the eschatological expectation was disappointed. The New Testament suggests that the earliest disciples of Jesus expected his return in glory during their own lifetime. It did not happen. Biblical scholars have coined a ponderous term for this disappointment— Parousieverzoegerung—roughly translatable as “a slight delay in the Second Coming” (the parousia). In a way, the entire history of Christianity can be described as a centuries-long attempt to come to terms with this fact. Jesus himself is reported to have warned his disciples not to look for “signs and wonders” but always to stay alert, because he will come “like a thief in the night” when they least expect it (Matthew 24). They did not listen to him.

In American church history an important case in point was the birth of modern Adventism during the Second Great Awakening. In 1833 a Baptist preacher by the name of William Miller predicted, on the basis of obscure calculations derived from the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, that the Second Coming would take place sometime around 1843 and 1844. Miller’s ministry took place in northern New York State, in the so-called Burnt-Over District, the locale of one charismatic explosion after another (Joseph Smith started Mormonism in the same region). Miller’s prediction was rather reckless: In about a decade it would be open to falsification. Still, there was enough time left for his word to spread across the country and even to Europe. Some of Miller’s followers were even more reckless: They specified the ETA (“estimated time of arrival”, in aviation parlance) to be October 22, 1844. There was an air of breathless expectation wherever Millerites gathered. Some of them thought that Jesus would land more or less where the prophecy was first pronounced. A group of them, dressed all in white, sat all night on a hill somewhere near Rochester, NY, waiting for Jesus to appear. His failure to do so was soon called the Great Disappointment.

There were different reactions to this. Some Millerites deserted the movement. Most did not. They offered various explanations: The Second Coming was secret, or it was spiritual rather than physical. Their faith had not been strong enough. The arithmetic was wrong. Miller himself kept recalculating, never giving up his belief in an imminent Second Coming, until his death in 1849. The Adventist movement continued and spawned other groups (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses) with a similar sense of millenarian urgency. But most of these were more careful than the early Millerites: They did not commit themselves to specific dates, only saying that Jesus would come “soon”. The biggest offspring, the Seventh Day Adventists, have become a major Protestant denomination in America. Perhaps the oddest support of the Millerite prophecy has come from the Baha’i faith: Baha’is have said that Miller was perfectly correct with his arithmetic. He was just wrong about the name of the arriving savior. It was not Jesus, but the Persian religious figure who called himself the Bab and who in 1844 announced that he was the bearer of a new revelation to replace the Quran for this age. (The Persian government responded by executing him, but Baha’is claim that he was only the forerunner of Baha’ullah, the true prophet of a new era. The sources suggest that the Bab himself had a less modest view of his role.)

If some of the newly fashionable atheists should be reading this post, I can visualize their smirk: Another example of the absurdity of religion! Let me suggest that they stop smirking: There are innumerable secular parallels to these attempts to fend off empirical evidence that denies faith. Most of them are in ordinary life. Let me just recall Dr. Johnson’s description of second marriages as the triumph of hope over experience. But there are also parallels in secular, even anti-religious movements (“denominations”, if you will). A telling example is the story of how Marxists have dealt with the great disappointment of the failures of their prophet. There was the major failure of Marx’s expectation that the revolution would occur in the bosom of advanced European capitalism; instead it occurred in “backward” Russia. Let me not go into the details of this particular false prediction and its tortured rationalizations. In my own lifetime each socialist utopia turned out to be disappointing, and then the utopian imagination turned elsewhere. The Soviet Union turned out to be a huge disappointment. Where then was one to look for the “true socialism”? The geography kept shifting. It shifted from Russia to China, to Vietnam, to Cuba, to Nicaragua. I was lecturing in Denmark in the 1970s, at the height of the neo-Marxist wave in western Europe. I talked with students who had been disappointed by each country that claimed to embody the socialist eschatology. They thought that they had finally located a non-disappointing, genuinely socialist country—Albania! Unlike Cuba (a favorite destination of utopian tourists) there is no sugar cane to be cut in Albania, but some students were getting ready to volunteer for work on the Albanian railway. I don’t know whether their faith survived that experience, or, if not, to which country their utopian hope might have turned.

Leon Festinger (1919-1989) was one of the more interesting social psychologists of the twentieth century. He first became known for his book When Prophecy Fails (1956), which was an important building block for what soon afterward became the theory of what he called cognitive dissonance, which is what happens when people are confronted with information that contradicts what they previously believed. The book deals with a curious episode that came to Festinger’s attention and led him to study it. Dorothy Martin, a Chicago housewife, practiced so-called automatic writing—a technique often employed in séances intended to communicate with the dead —in which a pen or pencil is held in such a way as to allow it to move freely. I don’t know whether Martin received messages from beyond the grave. But in early 1954 she received a very specific message from outer space. It came from some friendly extraterrestrials, who informed her that a huge cataclysm would destroy much of the earth on December 21, 1954 (as far as I know, without reference to the Mayan calendar), but that she and a small group of her associates would be picked up just in time by a spacecraft landing in her backyard and carried to safety on the planet Clarion. When Festinger learned about this, there were several months before the doomsday date, so that he could observe how these latter-day imitators of Noah’s Ark behaved. They behaved very logically on the assumption that they would soon embark on a journey without return. One detail that particularly impressed me when I read Festinger’s account was that they stopped changing the oil in their cars!

Well, the date came and went. No spacecraft landed and no cataclysm took place. But Festinger was still there, observing the behavior of Martin’s disciples. Some of them did decide that the whole thing was nonsense. They left the group. But some stayed on, and it was their behavior that really interested Festinger. They reacted just as the Millerites had in the face of the Great Disappointment. They huddled together more closely than before. They strongly reaffirmed their faith in Martin’s prophetic qualities. They found reasons why the predicted event had not occurred (the God of Earth relented). They tried to convince outsiders (which they had not done before—perhaps so as not to overcrowd the rescue ship). As far as I know, though, the little cult did not survive.

What can one learn from all this? One can certainly draw the lesson that Festinger did—that cognitive dissonance is unbearable, when it involves beliefs that are important to people, and that they will go to any length to defend against it. Put more cynically, one could say that the credulity of the credulous has no limits. But there is a more kindly way of looking at this: The human condition is intrinsically fearful. Alfred Schutz called this the fundamental anxiety. If some way has been found to allay the fear, one will be very reluctant to abandon it. The question then becomes which comforting messages can survive the Great Disapointments without indulging in delusional denial.

Posted in Culture, Religion, Secularism, Supernatural |

Comments

December 26, 2012

Would I want my neighbors to decide my fate?

Peter Berger

Religion News Service on December 14, 2012, carried a story about a Southern Baptist pastor in Missouri who has been accused of child abuse. At first I glossed over the story, having had my fill of stories about clerical pedophilia (though it is, so to speak, ecumenically welcome that for once the alleged offense cannot be blamed on Roman Catholic clerics deranged by celibacy). But then something interested me in the story after all.

The pastor in the story has been accused of having had sex with a number of women over several years. Some of the women were minors at the time, which of course shifts the issue from Baptist morality to criminal law. According to the story, a legal process is underway. The accused pastor preached a sermon in which he pleaded for forgiveness from his congregation. He quoted the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospel of Matthew: “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins”. What must be noted here is that this was not a general sermon about the Christian duty to forgive. The plea for forgiveness was addressed to the people who will decide the fate of the accused individual as a pastor. After quoting Jesus, the alleged offender said “Salvation is conditional”, adding a not so subtle threat to the appeal for mercy—implying that if the congregants don’t forgive him, they may go to hell.

I have no idea whether this individual is guilty or not (though I should add that I am somewhat skeptical about many such accusations, which are difficult to prove and which may stem from quite different motives). Of course this particular Baptist congregation will have no say in whatever legal procedures may yet ensue. But the important background to this event is the staunch opposition of Southern Baptists to any centralized authority in their denomination. The Southern Baptist Convention does have a national headquarters in Nashville, but the local congregation is sovereign on all matters of church discipline—including the hiring and firing of pastors. I think one can say that Southern Baptists today are more Congregational than those who still use this designation (though the denomination thus designated, the direct descendant of the Puritans, merged in 1957 with some other bodies in the Reformed tradition to form the United Church of Christ).
It seems that local parishioners often come to the defense of their accused pastor. A deacon of this particular Baptist church put it this way: “[He} was rough around the edges when he was younger, and that’s where all this comes from. But he has a good heart, and he’s good for our church”. One can guess how she would vote if the congregation assembles as a quasi-juridical body. Others may be less understanding.

There is one curious aspect of this situation that had not previously occurred to me: Very commonly in these cases a civil suit runs parallel to the criminal case. If you are going to sue, better do it against a defendant with deep pockets. The Roman Catholic Church, with its highly centralized structure, is a very promising target for civil suits—many of its dioceses have discovered this, as they teeter toward bankruptcy. So are most other denominations. Thus Episcopal parishes wanting to secede from their national church have had local bishops claim all their property. I would think that the Southern Baptist Convention and its state subdivisions are much less (if at all) vulnerable. Sometime I may want to speculate about the relationship of ecclesiastical structure and civil liability, and the possible renascence of a radical Congregationalism spelling the demise of an age of religious bureaucracies. (The Bible tells us that God may even work through the Assyrians. Why not through greedy tort lawyers?) A tempting topic—but not for now.

Rather this story made me reflect about a quite different matter: If I were accused of a crime, would I want my neighbors to decide my fate (even though they could not send me to prison)—that is, decide my professional status, my paycheck, the benefits stemming from my employment, and indeed the financial future of my family? I find myself having a mixed reaction.

I have previously in this blog expressed my lack of reverence for the law, with its enormous propensity toward abstraction. Beginning with Roman law and as it further developed since then, law in Western civilization has become a highly abstract system of thought and practice, antiseptically removed from the concrete reality of human life – and that means removed from all the idiosyncrasies (good or bad) of individuals. This is very different from legal institutions in other cultures. The difference is sharply illustrated by an episode that is supposed to have occurred in a British colony in West Africa (as I recall, it was in Nigeria). The British did there was they did elsewhere in their Empire—they set up their own courts to deal with serious criminal offenses, but left minor crimes and most civil disputes to traditional law—which here meant tribal chiefs sitting in court. In order to make this category of law more efficient, they authorized at one point to broaden the chiefs’ jurisdiction to act as judges in tribes other than their own. One of them complained: “How can I judge these people. I don’t know them!” A British (or any other Western judge) would of course have to “recuse” himself from any case where he does know any of the people appearing in his court. I resonate with the chief’s logic: Would I not want to be judged by people who know me as an individual—with all my virtues and vices—that is, where I would be judged as a person rather than as “a case” squeezed into a system of classification devoid of individuality?

I suppose that means to be judged by members of what Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), called the “small platoons”, the opposite of the abstract classifications (such as “citizen”, or “aristocrat) beloved by the revolutionaries. At first it sounds attractive. But then what comes to my mind is another phrase, from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum—the pre-capitalist “idiocy of village life”, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), gave credit to the bourgeoisie for destroying, only in the next breath indicting them for even worse “idiocies” in the capitalist class system. In this instance, leaving aside the wide disagreements between them, the juxtaposition of Burke and Marx points to an obvious fact: there are good and bad small platoons. Abstract institutions can be murderous—just remember that the movement that proclaimed the rights of the citizen also invented the guillotine. On the other hand, small platoons have an unfortunate habit of turning into lynch mobs. Of course, it will depend on the political circumstances whether I will be more afraid of my neighbors who know and hate me, or of judges who don’t know me and may destroy me as a case in their code of abstractions. Of course juries introduce a platoon element into modern law and judges have some discretion to take account of individual circumstances in their decisions. These modifications do not change the abstract quality of modern law.

As is so often the case, the question of who I would want to judge me resolves itself into a choice for the lesser evil. If I lived in a traditional African village, I might opt for the chief (though there is the possibility that he may hate me because I won the favors of a tribal beauty he had also wooed, or that he will rule in favor of a cousin who wants a plot of land that I own). Living in America I would opt for the impersonal judge (though I know that some judges are corrupt, and that some of the laws they administer are blatantly absurd). If I were a clergyman accused of some lecherous misdeed, I would prefer to be judged under Roman Canon Law rather than by a committee (or worse, a full assembly) of my parishioners. I am open to the suggestion that this choice could be a mistake.

Posted in Christianity, Modernity, Protestantism |

Comments

December 19, 2012

Two Old Germans Drinking Coffee

Peter Berger

Joachim Gauck and Pope Benedict The Sueddeutsche Zeitung is generally regarded as one of the two best newspapers in Germany. I don’t normally read it, but a German colleague sent me the issue of December 7, 2012, thinking that it might interest me. It did. A story, filed by a reporter named Renate Meinhof, covered a breakfast meeting on the day before between two Germans of advanced age—Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and Joachim Gauck, formerly a Lutheran pastor in East Germany and currently President of the Federal Republic of Germany. December 6 is the feast day of St. Nikolaus (the ancestor of the American Santa Claus), when good German children get small presents (the big ones have to wait until Christmas) and naughty children get smacked by a small devil who is the rather odd companion of the saint. The Pope’s private secretary (another German) confided to the reporter that the breakfast table had been set up in the traditional manner—with gingerbread (Lebkuchen), a little replica of St. Nikolaus made out of chocolate, nuts, mistletoe branches and an Advent wreath with lit candles. That is, the event took place in a distinctively German setting. The secretary also confided that the Pope had looked forward to the meeting with joyful anticipation; the reporter recounted that the President had expressed similar sentiments to the reporters who accompanied him on the flight to Rome.

The Pope greeted his visitor with “A hearty welcome, Herr Bundespraesident”. The latter responded: “Holy Father, this is a great joy for me. I come as Federal President to greet a compatriot. But above all I come as a human being and as a Christian”. The response strikes a diplomatic balance between the official and the personal meanings of the event, carefully avoiding mention of the President’s past role as a Protestant clergyman. Of course this meeting in Rome was a newsworthy event in Germany. It is also newsworthy that the very first foreign trip of the President was to Poland, with whose anti-Communist resistance he had deep ties. The second trip was to Israel, where he spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust and of the moral duty of Germany to help make sure that nothing like it ever recurred (in this connection he mentioned the threat from Iran). We don’t know what happened at the private conversation between the two men at the papal breakfast, where there were no witnesses. The President later said that they spoke of many things, also about God (“as theologians are in the habit of doing when they meet”). He also said that he did not bring up the differences between them, but rather spoke on what unites them as Christians. In this connection I find it interesting that, despite my scurrying around in the Internet, I could find no information on Gauck’s past or present theological views (perhaps my googling skills are too limited). In any case, the media do not seem to be interested in this (they report at length on his political views).

I think that the age difference between the two men is important: Joseph Ratzinger was born in 1927, Joachim Gauck in 1940. The political views of both were shaped by their revulsion against totalitarian terror. But Ratzinger consciously experienced both the Nazi and the Communist one, Gauck only the second. Quite apart from that, their careers were very different indeed. Their roots are in almost opposite ends of Germany, geographically as well as culturally—Ratzinger’s in deeply Catholic, as it were baroque, Bavaria (whose accent still colors his speech), Gauck’s in a soberly Protestant region on the eastern border of the country.

Ratzinger’s formation was strongly intellectual. He spent many years teaching theology at a number of universities, until in 1977 he was made Cardinal Archbishop of Munich. In 1981 he became head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the sanitized successor of the Holy Office, previously known as the Inquisition). In that capacity, despite the liberal tendency of his earlier years, he acted as a fierce watchdog of conservative theology. In 2005 he became Pope Benedict XVI. Since then he has continued to be theologically conservative, but at the same time he has acted as a vigorous defender of human rights and democratic liberties. Outside observers (including Ms. Meinhof of the Sueddeutsche) find this mix of religious traditionalism and political liberalism hard to understand. It makes them seasick.

By contrast, Gauck’s formation was much more practical—in the praxis of a Christian in an anti-Christian state. Born in the seaport of Rostock, he was the son of a sea captain, who was arrested by the Soviet occupation forces and spent years in the Gulag. For young Gauck the persecution of his father made him into a committed anti-Communist. He was barred from university studies because of his tainted family background and his own political views (which were well known to the Stasi, the state security agency). Instead he trained as a Lutheran theologian and became pastor of a congregation in provincial Mecklenburg, far to the east. The Protestant church was one of the very few institutions that retained a tightly controlled but nevertheless real autonomy within the Communist society. In this milieu Gauck became an important figure in the cautious resistance movement, which some have called a “Protestant revolution” and which greatly helped the collapse of the Communist regime. (For a short time after that Protestant leaders played an important role in the transition. Then, disappointingly, the Protestant church lost most of its influence and the territory of the former German Democratic Republic returned to its former secularized culture.) Gauck became active in the Social Democratic Party and from 1990 to 2000 he headed the archive of the Stasi, where citizens had access to secret files about themselves (which frequently led to distressing discoveries of betrayal by family members and friends). Gauck published books and articles about the crimes of Communism. He also wrote in praise of freedom and democracy. In March 2012 he became President, after his predecessor was forced to resign under a cloud. In this new role (as some German secular media observed with a bit of irritation) he continued to be a preacher—though about the virtues of freedom rather than about the Protestant faith. One might also note that his private life is not very Protestant either: Separated but not divorced from his wife since 1991, he lives with what progressive Germans call a “life partner”, the journalist Daniela Schadt, who acts quite openly as a first lady. (No one seems to mind, proving that Germans are now as liberated as the French, whose president has a similar arrangement. However, Ms. Schadt did not come along on the trip to Rome, presumably so as not to embarass the Pope.)

The meeting on December 6 is significant in three contexts. In the German context, it is a sort of summit ratifying the new unity between the East and the West of the nation. As Gauck himself observed (apparently to the journalists who went with him to Rome), he wanted to reassure German Catholics who have become a minority in the country as a result of reunification. Not only do they now have a Protestant ex-pastor as President and the daughter of a Protestant pastor as Federal Chancellor, but a state secretary in the presidential office is also the son of an East-German pastor (on top of all that, a leader of the Green party is a woman who, believe it or not, is a theologian from the East). After going over this list, Gauck is supposed to have imagined what Catholics must be thinking: “Good heavens ! Where does this leave us?” One might also imagine what some West Germans of either faith might think: “We thought that we took them over. It now looks as if they took us over!” Conversely, some East Germans may look at the same facts and conclude that their resentments at being “colonized” by the West could now be put aside. In any case, Gauck wanted to signal that he wants to be President of all Germans—East and West, Protestant and Catholic.

In the context of ecumenical relations, the event is yet another reaffirmation that the common identity of being Christian is more important than the differences between Catholics and Protestants. The climate between these two branches of Western Christendom has been good for a long time, at least in Europe (with the exception of Northern Ireland). This is certainly a happy development, in contrast to events as recent as the Kulturkampf in the late 19th century, when Bismarck tried to subject the Catholic Church to control from the Protestant government in Berlin (not to mention the ghastly wars of religion, which decimated the population of Europe in the Thirty Years War, and later events such as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the rebellion of the Netherlands against Spanish rule). But one expectation will surely be disappointed: that the ecumenical rapprochement would lead to ecclesiastical unity, with full intercommunion and reciprocal recognition of ministry (such as now exists between Lutherans and Calvinists in the EKID, the Protestant Church in Germany). There is no conceivable development this side of the coming of the Kingdom of God that would induce Rome to give up the authority of Pope and Magisterium, or that would persuade more than a handful of Protestants to submit to this authority. Opinions will differ whether one looks upon this intractable division as a refusal to obey Jesus’ alleged commandment of unity, as an obstacle to Christian faith, or as a perfectly acceptable manifestation of religious pluralism.

Finally, there is the context of European secularism. By any criterion, Europe is the most secularized region on the planet. Paul Zulehner, an Austrian sociologist of religion, said that Estonia, the Czech Republic and the territory of the former German Democratic Republic are countries in which atheism has become the established religion. Be this as it may (and leaving aside here the question of why this should be), Benedict XVI is well aware of the phenomenon of Eurosecularity. This is why he has put the re-evangelization of Europe high on his agenda. Collaboration with Protestants makes sense in this context. Secularism, which may be defined as the ideological embrace of secularity, has become more aggressive of late, and allies in the fight against it would be welcome. (Incidentally, the Moscow Patriarchate has made similar noises, and there have been voices suggesting that Islam in its more moderate versions could eventually be an ally too.) Whether such conspiracies of believers could change the European situation is debatable. In the short term, I would be rather surprised. But stranger things have happened.

Posted in Catholicism, Christianity, Protestantism |

Comments

December 12, 2012

The First Amendment: An Icon Sometimes Erected in Curious Places

Peter Berger

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is an icon of religious freedom, and rightly so. It contains a double prohibition: no establishment of religion and no hindrance to the free exercise of religion. The two clauses often grind against each other. Adopted by Congress in 1791, the Amendment still comes up again and again on the calendars of federal judges. On the whole, they have done a decent job, and religious freedom is more single-mindedly protected by the law in this country than about anywhere else.

I say this despite the fact that I have little respect for law as an institution: The “rule of law”, often evoked with breathless awe, is nothing sacred. Rather, it is the regrettable consequence of the profane proclivities of our species, which would quickly lead to murderous chaos unless reined in by coercive regulations. I also don’t much admire judges, an occupation that must greatly reinforce any inclination by its members toward delusions of grandeur. I am told that first-year law students are told by their professors that the law has little to do with justice—it is a system of impersonal abstractions imposed on the concrete realities of living persons. Most of the time the law is a lesser evil than chaos.

This being said, in a liberal democracy there is a reasonable chance that the law will have some resemblance with what one might call justice. There are few causes more just than religious freedom, which is finally the right of every person to make sense of the mysteries of the human condition. So, albeit grudgingly, I do respect those federal judges who put on their quasi-priestly robes and try to defend the battlements of the First Amendment. What follows here are some of the curiosities they come up against.

The Center for Law and Religion of Emory University has a useful aggregator. In one day, on December 1, 2012, it contained two items that would merit the label “curious”. First item: Since 1953 the city of Santa Monica, California, has displayed nativity scenes in a public park, which earned it the nickname of the City of the Christmas Story. The First Amendment would never have come up if these displays had been located on private property, say on land owned by a church or on somebody’s front lawn. Since the location has been in a public park, and since Americans are a litigation-prone people, sooner or later the charge would be made that Santa Monica was making Christianity the established religion of the city, in violation of the Constitution. Well, it was later rather than sooner, when an atheist by the name of Damon Vix, to make sure that Christianity was not the official faith of the city, was granted his own booth alongside the traditional nativity display. Apparently the Christians did not make a fuss at the time, although the atheist booth must have upset them: It sported a sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson “Religions are all alike—founded on fables and mythologies”, and another sign reading “Happy Solstice”. Apparently the understanding was that the city could legally permit such religious or anti-religious displays around Solstice-time, provided that the permit included equally all religions (or presumably anti-religions).

But Vix was not ready to be satisfied with one measly booth. He got ten other sympathizers to inundate the city with applications to erect booths similar to his in the same park, displaying signs similar to his, including one that pictured Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus and Satan. The atheists managed to get eighteen out of twenty-eight slots made available at auction. The Christian reaction was predictable. It was furious. Most of the atheist booths were vandalized. Thereupon the city banned all such booths, Christian or atheist, in the park.

The story does not say whether the atheists were willing to accept the ban. The Christians were not. Something called the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee sought an injunction to force the city to reopen spaces for the cherished displays. The injunction was denied by a federal judge, in a 25-page ruling (which I have not read), saying that the city had the constitutional right to issue the ban, because the change affected all possible applicants (not just the two involved in this case) and because there were other venues available for public religious speech. The attorney for the plaintiff said than an appeal was intended.

Of course a non-lawyer such as myself cannot fully grasp all the legal esoterica involved in this case. But I was wondering: What would happen in federal court if a group of militant Protestants (maybe from Northern Ireland?) decided to invade Manhattan’s Little Italy during the annual Feast of San Gennaro, an event steeped in Catholic religiosity—say, one street over from the Feast—with signs casting aspersions on Our Lady? I assume that they would claim a First Amendment right for their anti-Catholic speech, and I assume further that a federal judge would agree. Under the law as it now stands, what remedies would the Little Italians have? Perhaps they could purchase Mulberry Street from the City of New York, which then would change from a public to a private piece of real estate, allowing them to keep out the anti-Catholic demonstration? How much would Mulberry Street cost? Would Mayor Bloomberg be willing to sell? What if a Hindu resident sued to block the sale? Under any imaginable scenario, constitutional lawyers would have a field day!

The second item reported by the busy researchers at Emory University is broadly related to the first. Dearborn, Michigan, probably has the highest proportion of people of Arab ancestry than any other American city. It stages an annual Arab festival. I don’t know the distribution of Muslims and Christians among the participants, but it seems that the event as such is not identified in religious terms. At the 2010 event four individuals, described only as “Christian missionaries” were arrested by Dearborn police for preaching to Muslims and were charged with “breach of the peace”. Some details are missing from this story (and my readers will understand that, having decided not to apply for admission to law school, I did not do the research to find out). I don’t know what branch of Christianity the missionaries belong to (three of the four have Arabic names, but of course they might be Evangelical Protestants—the usual suspects when it comes to aggressive proselytism). In any case, enough of the festival attendees were sufficiently annoyed to call the police.

Three months after the alleged offense the case came to trial and the missionaries were acquitted by a unanimous jury verdict. Thereupon an organization called the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Dearborn, its mayor and chief of police, and seventeen police officers. Subsequently an amended complaint included as defendants two executives of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce (AACC), the organization in charge of the festival. A jury trial is scheduled for the summer of 2013 (the mill of federal justice grinds slowly).

Of course the First Amendment rights of the defendants are at issue, not those of the city or the AACC (who are not religious actors). The senior counsel of the AFLC stated that “The detailed allegations of our 100-page civil rights complaint set out a pattern of misconduct that had the purpose and effect of depriving our clients of their fundamental constitutional rights”. The federal judge who agreed to the addition of the AACC to the complaint stated that “The Court finds that Plaintiffs do properly allege a civil conspiracy among Defendants, including the AACC, to deprive Plaintiffs of their constitutional rights sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss”. I take it that the constitutional rights at issue include not only the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment, but also the latter’s protection of free speech in general. What I wonder about is this: Let it be stipulated (look how easily one falls into legal terminology!) that in the United States I have the right to preach with intent to convert. But do I have the right to do so anywhere at all? On a public street, or also in a building in which putative convertees are worshiping? Using any kind of language? Threatening eternal damnation to those who refuse conversion? We are back with my San Gennaro fantasy.

The daily online bulletin of the Religion News Service also contained two related items on the same day, December 3, 2012. First item: A federal district court in Indiana rejected a First Amendment complaint by an individual certified as a “secular celebrant” by an organization called the Center for Inquiry, which the story described as “non-religious”. The “certification” was supposed to authorize the individual to perform legally valid marriage ceremonies. If the court had agreed with the complaint, this would in effect have challenged the constitutionality of the Indiana “marriage solemnization statute”. But the court did not agree. Instead it stated that “The Solemnization Statute is rationally related to the legitimate purpose of alleviating significant governmental interference with pre-existing religious beliefs about marriage”. I suppose the court had doubts about the “pre-existing religious beliefs” of the Center for Inquiry.

Two things interest me here. First, there seems to be an assumption that a federal court can decide what is and what is not “religious”. The term “pre-existing” indicates the direction of judicial logic here, previously relevant in cases of conscientious objection to military service and in cases involving tax-exemption claims. Let me stay with my San Gennaro fantasy: Suppose that, in the midst of a war, my three brothers and I, in good Italian tradition, proclaimed that our mother is the Madonna. On the basis of this proclamation, with the support of friends and relatives, we incorporated as a religious community, and on that basis claimed tax-exempt status for the family residence and refused to report for induction into the military as priests of Our Lady of Mulberry Street. I don’t think that a federal judge would grant us First Amendment protection. But second, what I find even more interesting is how, in this case, the court listed “several readily available avenues by which a Secular Celebrant may facilitate a marriage ceremony in Indiana”. These are: To preside over a wedding and then refer the couple to an individual entitled under the statute to solemnize the marriage. To become a member of the “clergy” by obtaining immediate Internet ordination from the Universal Life Church (I am seriously considering making use of this service). Or, finally, seeking certification to solemnize marriages from the Humanist Society (evidently a “pre-existing” quasi-religious institution). Would it not be simpler to have the state get out of the marriage business altogether? (I take the liberty of referring to an earlier post of mine on civil unions.)

Finally, here is a case that does not, or does not yet, involve the intervention of the federal judiciary. But it might well involve fear of such intervention on the part of a famously progressive institution: the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Also on December 3, 2012, Religion News Service carried a story that an organization of Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics (AHA) was likely to receive $69,000 from the University, “the largest grant from an institute of higher learning ever awarded to a nontheistic, student-led organization”. The application for the grant is now in a final phase, when rejection rarely occurs. The money comes from a pool of $39 million, collected from annual fees of about $1,400 per full-time student. The grant is to be used to hire eight staffers for a “secular support group”, where students with AHA-approved worldviews can meet in a “safe environment” (presumably protected from theistic thugs roaming the campus), and for a “faith questioning service” where non-believing students could meet one-on-one for discussion (in what looks like an atheist imitation of the study habits in Orthodox yeshivas). It is not clear whether there is much student interest in this program. At present about forty people attend AHA meetings. But its funding by the University has increased impressively. The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization of 387 campus-based groups, reports that over half of these groups operate on $250 or less. In 2009 AHA had no budget; in 2010 it received $200 from the University; in 2011 the budget was $15,000, which helped co-sponsor a Freethought Festival that attracted over 700 people.

How is this financial bonanza to be explained? Could there be an atheist cabal in control of the application process? I doubt it. Is “free thought” increasing at the University of Wisconsin? Possibly, but not to the degree the funding has. I think it is more likely that whoever is involved in administering the pool of student fees is nervous about possible First Amendment litigation, by the spiritual cousins of the people who caused all the trouble in Santa Monica. I don’t know. But if fear of litigation is a factor here, the University of Wisconsin had better look out. There are many more theists than nontheists, even in progressive Wisconsin, and there are well-funded law centers ready to charge discrimination against believers.

The role of religion in the United States is characterized by a paradox. On the one hand, this is by any measure the most religious country among Western democracies, not only in terms of individual beliefs and behavior, but also in the public sphere. On the other hand, the US has an unusually strict separation of religion and the state, dwarfing France’s laicite (where the state pays the salaries of teachers in Catholic schools) and its imitators in Kemalist Turkey (where a government agency used to write the sermons preached in mosques). This paradox makes it difficult for foreigners to understand the vagaries of American religion. During the same bout of reading that led me to the cases discussed above I came across a curious confusion in a usually very well-informed British source, the Catholic periodical The Tablet.

In its issue of November 24, 2012, the periodical carried a story about the University of San Diego (USD) withdrawing an invitation to lecture from Tina Beattie, a British Catholic scholar, because she had written a letter to the London Times in support of same-sex marriage. USD is a Catholic institution, which by this action believed itself to be following Vatican directives about maintaining its Catholic identity. As far as I can tell, the story was accurate in all its details, notably the identification of the California university. The same issue contained an editorial (it rather mildly disagreed with Beattie’s disinvitation). But throughout the editorial the offending institution was wrongly named the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). That institution (despite its name, located not in San Diego but in La Jolla) is not Catholic at all, but part of the state system of tertiary education. UCSD would hardly have barred Beattie from its campus, and if it had (for some other reason), this might have raised an issue of academic freedom but not of a non-existing Catholic identity. Locating the incident at UCSD makes it incomprehensible.

There is an unrelated question that occurs to me: Would progressives, who are offended by Beattie’s exclusion from USD because of her favoring same-sex marriage, be equally aroused if UCSD excluded a lecturer who proposes that all homosexual acts are sinful?

Posted in Culture, United States |

Comments

December 5, 2012

Two Sets of Keys

Peter Berger

My last two posts had the quality of academic mini-lectures. I don’t want my readers to suspect that I have gone into the business (a growing one, judging by ads all over the place) of long-distance education, so this post will break the pattern. It is somewhere between an intuition and a meditation.

There were two photos in The Jerusalem Report of December 3 dealing with the move by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority to ask the United Nations General Assembly to accept Palestine as a non-state (and thus non-voting) member of that body. (The move has just been successful, with a great majority voting for acceptance.) The move was long expected and its outcome not surprising. What attracted wide attention before the vote was a statement by Abbas on Israeli television, in which he said that he would like to visit Safed, his home town now in Israel, but not to live there – because it lies within the 1967 borders of the Jewish state and must be Israeli “now and forever”. Rightly or wrongly, this was widely perceived as a retraction of the “right of return” of all Arab refugees that left (or in some cases were made to leave) in 1948 during the war in which the State of Israel was established (also, not so accidentally, after a declaration in the General Assembly). This “right of return” was perhaps named ironically to allude to the law of that name which makes any Jewish immigrant immediately eligible for Israeli citizenship. The Palestinian version of the law would give the right to an estimated number of five million Arabs (which includes the original refugees and their descendants) to settle anywhere in Israel, presumably with citizen rights. No small matter: It would cause a demographic revolution leading to Jews becoming a minority in their own state. Abbas’ statement led to a storm of Palestinian protests. Abbas quickly modified his statement, this time on Egyptian television, saying that “It is not possible for anyone to give up the right of return”. Obviously both statements by Abbas are capable of different interpretations.

But this is not the topic that concerns me here. Rather it is something seemingly more marginal: Two photos published by The Jerusalem Report with the Abbas story (subscription required). The photos show, respectively, a woman and a man holding up what the captions describe as “a symbolic key”. What it symbolizes is not explicated, but the context makes it clear: it is, precisely, the Palestinians’ “right of return”. The keys are large, evidently house keys or replicas of these. The allusion here is to an occurrence in the 1948 war: Many of the refugees took along the keys to the houses they abandoned in their flight, as an aid to remembering, but also as a token of their intention to return. Quite apart from the political reality that Israel will never agree to the mass return envisaged by the Palestinians, that intention is belied by the fact that many of the villages from which they fled no longer exist. There are no more Arabs there. The inhabitants are Jews. Even the Arabic names have disappeared from the map, replaced by Hebrew ones. Some years ago I read an English translation of a story by an Israeli author (I don’t remember which one, I think it was either Amos Oz or A.B. Yehoshua). It describes a Jewish boy in one of these ex-Arab villages, who tries to imagine the former inhabitants and who has the sense that they are still somehow present, haunting the places they used to call home.

Readers of this blog will have noticed that free association is something of an obsession with me. I see one thing, I think of another. The keys reminded me of something. At first I wasn’t sure of what, then I remembered: When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many of them took along into exile the keys to their houses. Andalusia in particular had been home to many Jews. For them it was the homeland for which they pined, in all the places where they had found refuge (many in countries under Muslim rule). They continued (to this day) to speak Ladino, the antique Spanish in which they created a literature that expresses nostalgia for the country after which they are still called “Sephardim” (Sepherad is Hebrew for Spain). Sephardic sensibility has been shaped by exile and the longing for a lost home. It is no accident that—of all places in Safed, Mahmoud Abbas’ home town—the mystical school of Isaac Luria, himself a Sephardic refugee, created a cosmology of exile in which even God exiles himself from the world.

The olive tree has been a symbol of Mediterranean countries, evoking both happiness and its loss. Federico Garcia Lorca, a man of Andalusia, ends his greatest poem, “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias”, with the line “I remember a sad breeze in the olive trees”. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) comes from a small village near Haifa to which he cannot return. He also mentions the olive tree in his best known poem “I Come From There”: “I come from there and I have memories….. Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words, and the bounty of birds. And the immortal olive tree…. I learnt all the words and broke them up to make a single word: Homeland.” In other poems Darwish rejects terrorism against Jews, and he recalls that three important characters in his life were Jews—his first girl friend, the man who taught him Hebrew, and the judge who at one point presided over his case.

The Austrian Jewish writer Friedrich Torberg (1908-1979) was himself an exile after the Anschluss (although he returned after the war and became an important literary figure in Austria). One of his novels, Suesskind von Trimberg, is based on a character, a Jewish Troubadour who really lived though very little is known about him. Undoubtedly Torberg identified with this figure. In the novel the statement is made that one is at home (the German word Heimat implies a country or a region) wherever one was as a child. It is where one first heard and spoke one’s original language—the “mother tongue”. I’m not sure that this is true for everyone—there are some people who come from terrible places that they only want to forget. But I think it is true for most of us. We were at home once, the memory of this is a fond one, and its loss is a great sorrow. This fact has no immediate political implications. But its evocation of a common humanity is not politically irrelevant.

[Image courtesy Shutterstock.]

Posted in Culture, Islam, Judaism |

Comments

November 28, 2012

Dialogues

Peter Berger

Recently, on the same day, I came across two religious news items that made me think again about a topic which has long interested me: that of dialogue between religious traditions. The first item was a story in the British Catholic periodical The Tablet on November 10, 2012. It concerns a collaborative project of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation. The plan is to issue a joint statement on the meaning of the Reformation in 2017, which will be the 500^th anniversary of the historic event when (as every Protestant child learned in Sunday school) “Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the castle door of Wittenberg”. (Never mind that the actual event was quite undramatic—the door in question was the place to put up notices for an academic disputation, a common practice at universities at the time, which is what Luther was doing.)

The head of the Pontifical Council, the Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch, attended the annual synod of the Protestant Church in Germany (which includes Lutherans and Calvinists in one ecclesial body). He used the occasion to make a statement that must have grated on the ears of many in the audience. He said that the institution of Protestantism separate from Rome should not be seen as the success of the Reformation but rather as its failure, since the Reformers’ intent had been to reform the Roman Catholic Church, not to leave it. He added that the Reformation would only be successful if the separation was overcome (which, as the Protestant chairman of the synod pointed out, would require the highly unlikely submission of his flock to papal authority).

Needless to say, the announcement of the 2017 joint statement was full of expressions of mutual respect and affection. Cardinal Koch also hinted that Rome might make some compromises to entice Protestants (as the saying goes) to come “swim in the Tiber”, along the lines recently made for Anglicans—their clergy could remain married, they could continue to use some of their accustomed liturgical practices, and the like. These accommodations have indeed appealed to “high church” Anglo-Catholics, and they might appeal to some “high” Lutherans (some call themselves “Evangelical Catholics” and have argued that Protestantism was a reform movement within the Western church, a movement that has now achieved its goals and is therefore no longer necessary).

It is historically correct that the Reformation originally intended a reform of the Catholic Church, not the creation of a separate ecclesial body. However, in the meantime a lot of water has flown down the Tiber, the Rhine, the Thames, and some very diverse forms of the Christian faith have developed on the two sides of the divide. The average Catholic or the average Protestant would be very surprised if told by a committee of theologians that nothing significant now divides them.

The other news story was posted online by Reuters, the international news agency located in London, on November 21, 2012. The story was about the inauguration of the King Abdullah Centre for Interfaith and International Dialogue (KAICIID) in a baroque palace in Vienna. It is a very unusual institution, having been established by a treaty between the governments of Saudi Arabia, Austria and Spain, who appoint the governing board. The Saudi government has allocated 15 million euros to set up the Centre and promised 10 to 15 million euros annually for the first three years. This rather remarkable initiative is a continuation of other comparable efforts by King Abdullah (who is 89, and presumably in somewhat of a hurry). The stated intention is to (cautiously) improve Saudi relations with other faiths. Thus a meeting in Mecca in 2005 endorsed interfaith dialogue; in 2007 the King visited Pope Benedict XVI; in 2008 the King called together a multireligious conference in Madrid, where he met with Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist leaders. He has also proposed a center in Riyadh, his capital, to promote dialogue between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, a particularly explosive topic right now. The new Vienna Centre, although its first director is Saudi, is overseen by a board consisting of three Muslims, three Christians, and one representative each of Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism (including an Israeli rabbi, who announced that he would quit at once if the Centre was found to propagate radical Islamism).

King Abdullah has faced strong resistance from the traditionalist Wahhabi establishment in his country. The Austrian media gave (in Reuters’ words) a “frosty welcome” to the new Centre: The Austrian government was criticized for co-sponsoring the Centre. Mention was made of the crass contradiction between the aim of dialogue and the domestic and foreign policies of the Saudi regime, such as the complete absence of religious freedom within the Kingdom and the support for Wahhabi-type Islam in Bosnia, Kosovo and many places in the Middle East.

The two stories already indicate the great diversity of dialogue initiatives. Both share the qualities of mutual respect and voluntary participation already implied by the very term “dialogue”, thus excluding the quasi-debates into which Jews were coerced in the Christian Middle Ages, with the intention of humiliating and/or converting them. (This practice has been imprinted in Jewish collective memory, leading to an almost instinctive suspicion of the motives behind Christian invitations to discuss interfaith questions.) But the stories disclose a very basic difference between dialogues motivated by, respectively, theological and political interests. There are no obvious political interests involved in the dialogue about the Reformation. With the (hopefully waning) exception of Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants have stopped killing each other long ago (and even in that exceptional case one may doubt whether the conflict is really about religion). They are driven to seek greater unity by facing European secularity, which affects them both and which has made Benedict XVI to call for the re-evangelization of what used to be Christendom.

By contrast, King Abdullah’s campaign to put a tolerant face on his regime occurs against the background of what the late Samuel Huntington called “the bloody frontiers of Islam”. I have no insight into the mind of the King. Perhaps he is genuinely motivated by a more tolerant understanding of Islam than has been held by the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia until now. But one may assume that there is a political motive as well. The Saudi regime is characterized by a very conservative version of the faith (which it propagates both domestically and abroad), by the oppression of women, by a barbaric system of criminal justice, and by the complete absence of religious freedom. Such a regime can survive for a considerable period of time, if equipped with sufficient means of repression and if it can strictly control all communications with the outside world. The Saudi economy is too much interlinked with the world for such isolation, and it is too much dependent on its de facto alliance with the United States due to the profound threat from Iran looming across the Persian Gulf. Therefore, quite apart from the King’s theological preferences, a mellowing of his regime may well be in the interest of its survival.

Peaceful dialogue between religions has happened before in history. The so-called conviviencia between Muslims, Christians and Jews was not always characteristic of Spain under Islamic rule, but there were periods when amicable religious and philosophical conversations between scholars of the three faiths did take place, with very positive consequences (such as the transmission of Aristotle to Christian Europe through Arabic and Latin translations). Frederick II (1194-1250), the Hohenstaufen ruler of Sicily, a skeptic and adversary of papal power, also encouraged dialogue between Christians and Muslims. And the Moghul Emperor Akbar (1542-1605) delighted in religious debates of Muslim scholars with Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Portuguese Jesuits (Buddhists, alas, had been chased out of India by Akbar’s predecessors).

But there has been a veritable explosion of dialogue programs since the middle of the last century. The ecumenical movement of Christian churches had begun earlier, but it reached a certain climax with the founding in 1948 of the World Council of Churches, which has sponsored dialogue with any religious community that is willing. Following the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Curia set up an array of agencies to engage in dialogue with other Christians, with non-Christian religions, with Jews (a special case not to be grouped with other non-Christians), and finally with non-believers.

The last of these, ponderously named Secretariatus Pro Non-Credentibus, had a serious problem: It was eager to have this dialogue, but it did not know with whom to have it. Unlike the other interlocutors, the non-credenti cannot be found in the phone book. In 1969 Cardinal Koenig, the Archbishop of Vienna, was head of the Secretariat. He had read some things I had written, and he asked me to help organize a conference in Rome with the purpose of identifying just who and where these people were. I was at the time a quite junior sociologist of religion. The invitation was flattering. The conference itself turned to be a fascinating experience.

This is not the place to go into the details of all the dialogues that have been going on: Catholic/Lutheran, Lutheran/Calvinist, Christian/Muslim, Christian/Jewish (much of this one, understandably, concerned with the Christian roots of anti-Semitism and with the question of how to prevent this ever recurring), Christian/ Hindu (a key figure in this was Raimundo Panikkar, a Catholic priest who lived some of the time like an Indian “holy man”), Christian/Buddhist (some of it highly sophisticated, as in the Kyoto School of Mahayana philosophy). But one can distinguish between five principal types:

1. Dialogue motivated by a desire to understand so as to convert the “the other”. One may call this the missiological type. It has widely come to be viewed negatively in Christian circles, except among Evangelicals.

2. Dialogue with the sole aim of enhancing scholarship.

3. Dialogue to facilitate humanitarian action (say, for coping with epidemics or natural disasters.

4. Dialogue to facilitate political action (say, to resist dictatorship).

5. Finally, dialogue to enrich one’s religious understanding or practice.

With the exception of the first type (with which I, for one, have great difficulty), most people will regard these as acceptable motivations for dialogue.

Put simply, much of the time dialogue between religious traditions is a useful, sometimes a very useful activity. But I would suggest two caveats. First: One should not get lost in the details. Theologians who converse over a period of time can often find areas of agreement. Theologians tend to deal in doctrinal abstractions. An interesting case was the “religion conversation” between a number of high-profile leaders of the Protestant Reformation in 1529 at the newly founded University of Marburg. Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon came from Wittenberg, Ulrich Zwingli from Zurich, Martin Bucer from Strassburg. They did end up signing a joint statement, much of it concerned with the understanding of the eucharist. The main tension was between the Germans and the Swiss. Yet at one point of the conversation Luther exclaimed to Zwingli: “Out of you speaks a different spirit”. In other words, theologians might find the language to claim a unity about this or that doctrine, while ignoring that there may be a profound difference in the “spirit” over and beyond particular doctrinal formulations.

Second caveat: Not to forget that theologians are a small minority in any community of believers. Lay believers often intuit the “spirit” of a tradition better than theologians. A good example, I think, is the so-called filioque issue. In 1979 the World Council of Churches set up a study group to examine this issue. It consisted of Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. The issue is complex and has deep roots in history. The Nicene Creed, which all major Christian traditions regard as authoritative, declared that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father, and together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified”. There were some varying readings in both Greek and Latin versions, but beginning with the Third Council of Toledo in 589 the Latin version of the Creed inserted a word in the article, declaring that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” (in Latin, filioque). The immediate motive was probably to distance the Visigothic church in Spain from the rather popular Arian heresy, which was perceived as having denigrated the divinity of Jesus.

Whatever the original motive, this amended Creed spread throughout Western Christendom, became normative in the Roman Catholic Church, and was taken over by the latter’s Protestant offspring. It was strongly opposed in the East, deemed to be profoundly heretical. It was defined as crucial by both West and East, and served to legitimate the final schism of 1054 when, in one of the most dramatic events in Christian history (this one, I think, was truly dramatic), papal legates marched into Hagia Sophia during the liturgy and deposited on the high altar the decree excommunicating the Patriarch of Constantinople. (The latter then reciprocated by excommunicating the Pope.)

Were there genuine theological problems in this controversy? There were. The Eastern version enhanced the place of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, the Western version enhanced the place of the Son. But it is very clear that the schism was driven by very mundane political interest of the rival regimes in the West and the East, respectively blessed by Rome and Constantinople. But what happened some 900 years later? Two years after the filioque committee was established, it did reach a conclusion. Basically, it supported the Eastern position. In the so-called Klingenthal Memorandum (I believe it was named after a member of the committee) it recommended that all churches should eliminate the filioque from the Nicene Creed.

This recommendation had some concrete consequences. Anglicans agreed with it, in statements by a sequence of Lambeth Conferences (the periodic meetings of the world’s Anglican churches). In 1994 the Episcopal Church in the USA decided that the filioque should be dropped from the next edition of the Book of Common Prayer. An Orthodox/Roman Catholic consultation agreed in 2003 that the filioque issue should no longer be considered as justifying the schism between the two communities. Interesting, no doubt. (By the way, I am interested.) But how many non-theologians in Christian churches cared about this issue, or even were aware of it? As to the piety of the masses of believers, their assumption about the distinctiveness of their own tradition remains unshaken. They know that they are distinctive. Anyone who spends half an hour each in an Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant worship service will agree with them. A “different spirit” indeed!

Finally, a brief sociological question: Why is all this dialogue activity going on now? I think that there is a clear answer: It is one of the results of an ever more pervasive pluralism in modern societies. The easiest and most commonly used definition of pluralism (or, if one prefers, plurality) is a situation where people with different social identities, worldviews and value systems coexist and interact peacefully. All the forces of modernity bring this situation about—through population growth, urbanization, migration, education, and all the media of pervasive communication. This means that it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain or re-establish a religious or moral monopoly in a society. The pluralistic situation can indeed be reversed by the application of massive coercion, but with the result of enormous human and economic costs. Or a society can be torn apart by an ongoing, possibly intermittent civil war between the different ideological camps. To avoid these equally unappealing alternatives the camps—in this instance, the different religious communities—must try to understand and to collaborate with each other. Such dialogue is of course greatly facilitated if religious freedom has been institutionalized in the society. Quite apart from the intrinsic moral and philosophical value of religious freedom, it is one of the pillars of social order in a modern society.

Posted in Inter-faith Dialogue |

Comments