Twelve months on, SoF is still working out its response to Don Cupitt's challenge, given at last year's Conference, to "start delivering". But former Sea of Faith magazine editor CLIVE RICHARDS argues here that we need more incubation time...
It's a typical meeting in my Bristol flat - nonchurchgoers, Anglicans, Quakers, URC and Roman Catholic getting quickly into questions like what, if any, comfort might radicals draw from the long overdue ordination of women? Serial killers and conflicts abroad set us off onto testing our understanding of the word "evil" - a construct like "God"? Is it a poetic epithet applied to the morally mind-boggling or maybe just the top rung of a scale of badness? Did "evil" as a label preclude attempts at understanding? - which led us into considering punishment. From penal punishment to other punishments - like the gagging of New Age theologian Matthew Fox, some of whose notions we find fresh and intriguing but whose ultimate submission to the Vatican seems puzzling. (This was before he was kicked out of the Dominicans in March!).
We go on to consider Catholicism in North America generally - so fertile in the fields of liberation and feminism; so unlike the reactionary force of fundamentalism in that continent. The fundies this side of the Atlantic alarm some, not all, of us and we speculate on the limits of our tolerance. We can't share their absolutist Truth but one of us who has worked with schizophrenics challenges our glib formula that "truth is subjective". A report from our friend who is bravely slogging his way through Iris Murdoch's metaphysics leads into a brief canter around "faith and works" and a final conundrum - what the heck can we, such staunch this-worlders in our various spins on faith, understand by "spirituality"? - which we find ourselves left each to unravel separately...
All this in a couple of hours - ideas tumbling out and leavened, as usual, with people's own experiences; the personal and the theoretical. It has been a useful exercise, a good mental work-out, but it is not, in my view, to be confused with anything mote significant than its value to the participants. it's a sort of time-out in all our on-going challenging, thinking, questioning. evaluating, acting, and SoF is at its most successful where it enables this.
One thing we have certainly not been doing is advancing a cause.
Not everyone has a taste for, or geographical access to, such group interaction. It was my fervent hope when I proposed and brought the Sea of Faith magazine project to fruition that some of the energy and excitement I'd experienced at both Conference and local level might be captured in its pages for the Network at large. I should have been proud indeed to have put together an issue with a range of contents like my first two paragraphs! There is certainly no lack of articulateness in SoF but there is seemingly widespread diffidence when it comes to any response or comment, in print, and I felt hugely for writers who'd obviously worked damned hard on their pieces only to have them fall into an apparently indifferent void. I know that some of them left the Network as a result, frustrated that no-one would engage with their ideas.
It is a great source of regret for me that during my time as editor of this magazine the liveliest debate was sparked only by something as prosaic (albeit painful) as divorce. Feedback in the two local groups to which I had access confirmed my hunch that most readers found this unedifying and hardly the cutting-edge of radical religious thought! And surely state-of-the-art is where we should be at -
Hey, we're talking all human life here! Not a narrow critique of established ecclesiastical practice. I can't see any point in growing old and stale besieging that particular castle - let's go round it, let's look ahead, even if it is slightly round the bend! We need a torrent of ideas, a kaleidoscope of ideas - we need to brainstorm and blue-sky our way into imagini:ig the future context of faith twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. Our debates must inspire ourselves if we are ever to inspire others. Above all, we should strive to collapse distinctions between what is and is not "religious", distinctions which hamper the imagination and fence off areas - like politics or entertainment - from discussion.
It has been suggested that there is a vast, largely non-churchgoing constituency "out there" waiting to be turned on by our, hardly new, ideas about the human creation and direction of values. At our last Conference Don Cupitt challenged SoF to become a delivery vehicle commending "new religious forms" to this constituency. This was rapturously received at the time but I remember thinking "Deliver what exactly?", for as far as I could see there had been little or no speculation within SoF to date as to what shape these "forms" might take.
Nevertheless some enthusiasts think they have enough material to shape SoF into a movement to carry the "gospel" of human-centred religion to the wider world. I remain sceptical.
I see no evidence that SoF has done anything like enough work on innovatory thinking that energizes ourselves, let alone the targets of any potential movement. It's no good simply asserting that religious faith (and by implication God, purpose, eternal life, etc) is a human creation, and expecting a warm welcome. That simply offends against what believers cherish most and deprives the irreligious of the only existential consolation to which they can cling in the face of suffering and death - and which underpins their continued yea-saying to belief in God in opinion polls despite the plainly godless nature of their lives. On the face of it we're "bad news" for traditionally religious and irreligious folk alike!
This very real difficulty about our basic "message" leads me to feel that keen "deliverers" must retain the humility to remain "explorers" whilst trying to find a path sufficiently understandable and attuned to everyday concerns and fears down which they might beckon others. In the process, there should be a sensitivity to the tentative steps of many of our fellow-travellers, those who are simply curious about SoF and especially those, whom I suspect may be the majority, who do not in fact want "new religious forms" but instead desire a conscientious accommodation with the old. I'm not sure the agenda of the latter category is particularly well served by debate about "delivery".
I doubt if we either know or can agree upon what to deliver, let alone how! I would suggest to those who favour the model of SoF as a movement developing to meet Don's challenge that they get stuck into developing the substance of a form that might not only be capable of inspiring "them out there" but might also be able to convince us why we should consider transforming SoF into a movement with that end in mind. And, of course, they should use the pages of this magazine to do it!
So, given that I discern a serious lack of substantive thinking at the heart of SoF, I have to assert that any debate about SoF's "delivery" capabilities is, at least, premature. But there is another factor which more than gives me pause - the more than doubling of membership recently. Were I newly associated with Sea of Faith I should be rather dismayed to find the only debate apparently being solicited in the magazine and newsletter to be one concerning SoF itself rather than examination of the hint of radical ideas and visions that stimulated my original interest.
Were I such a newcomer (and they outnumber us aboriginal SoFties over two to one) I'd feel short-changed by this, for me, abrupt descent into self-absorbed self-scrutiny on the part of SoF. I am no such neophyte, having been around since the original Loughborough conference, and I have to tell you 1 do not welcome this debate at all! It shuts out all these new people and rather suggests that we're moving the goalposts, changing SoF from what they thought they were getting - an open forum for a network of interested individuals - into something where the emphasis is more on representing a particular stance.
There are those who argue that SoF is a symptom of a wider trend in society and would maybe point to our increased numbers as evidence. I don't see it myself - those who are religiously dissatisfied seem to want more supernaturalism and mysticism, not less! Witness, for instance, the growth in the happy-clappy end of the Christian spectrum, the endless profusion of all manner of New Age `We need a torrent of ideas...
We need to brainstorm and blue-sky our way into imagining the context of faith a hundred years from now' hocus-pocus and the astonishing hold astrology continues to exert on the popular imagination. Far from feeling that they are riding the wave of the future, I suspect that most people who associate with SoF as a network do so only too gladly because it's such a relief from their sense of isolation, often built up over years, when it comes to their view of faith; of being in a minority within the faithful minority in society. Put 150 of us in a room for two days, mix in SoF's terrific mutually supportive ethos and we may feel like a movement, for once feeling secure (right, even!) and allowing our solidarity to produce an illusion of majority. But when we get home, we revert to being a collection of individuals connected, but not bound, to the Network. I suspect most of us prefer it that way.
OK, some of us may continue to cluster in local groups, reviving the Conference ethos for the odd evening or afternoon here or there, but we do so primarily for our own ends of shared interest, friendship and support. The achievement out of nothing of SoF as a forum of like- or similar-minded people is not to be sneered at simply because it only services those people. That SoF as SoF is unproductive in a larger sense ignores the seeds it sows in the minds of its participants. Impatient, movementminded, activist people might decry it all as idle chatter and in a sense, of course, it is - but it's a damn sight more stimulating than most of the chatter one hears normally in a world where to evince an interest in the spiritual and moral anatomy of humanity is often regarded with incomprehension, dismissal or hostility.
Whilst I have to admit that I don't share the notion that there is a vast constituency out there waiting to be spiritually renewed in some postmodern way of our devising, that doesn't mean that I think that any debate in SoF on "religious" innovation is a waste of time. You don't have to be an enthusiast for new moral and spiritual forms to be intrigued by where following the implications of SoF's concerns might lead. You can be mad keen or you can be... well, just interested. And why not? The looseness of the network model allows people to either dip a toe in or immerse themselves more fully in a pool of unorthodox people and ideas.
Just as I said earlier that the significance of a local group lay in its value to the participants, I'd contend that this applies in a wider sense to the Network which I believe amply justifies itself through what those associated with it gain from it. It does not require further justification either through chasing increased membership to boost its self-importance or through masquerading as a "movement" when clearly the vast diversity of its membership makes anything that coherent quite impossible. There may well be something in this strange endeavour in the end, but it won't be forced. Beware of saddling SoF, or more explicitly those who generously give of their time to keep it going, with unrealistic expectations. Let's keep talking. Let's keep a sense of proportion. And hasten slowly.
Don Cupitt adds:
Many thanks to Clive Richards for his piece. My original thesis was prompted by a memory of the `sixties. During that decade a great deal of radical theology was produced, and discussed enthusiastically. The Sea of Faith-type magazines of the time - Prism for eiample - had big circulations. A number of the writers of the period talked a great deal of sense. But few of them apart from John Robinson are remembered now; and although the Second Vatican Council was a major event and seemed likely to renew the Catholic Church, the present Pope has buried it. The government of the Roman Church, instead of becoming more collegial, is now more monarchical than ever.
So for some years I have taken the lesson of the Sixties to be that we must try this time to build something that will last. Otherwise the "institutional drag" of the churches will again prevail and reduce us, too, to a bit of froth, a temporary excitement that made no lasting difference. I guess what we have got to deliver is convincing evidence that there can be a new religious order, more vigorous and more liberating than the old now-declining system.
By the way, I had a letter from Rosemarie Wedell, ticking me off for not getting around the country more to visit SoF local groups. She's quite right; and that's exactly what I'm hoping to do if and when I can get my strength back. At the moment I'm still not allowed to drive, which also limits my mobility. But I'm hoping that I'll persuade the medics to recommend me for a driving licence within a few months. In addition, I have already returned my Licence to Officiate to the Bishop of Ely, telling him that I'd like in future to have an extra-ecclesiastical ministry. I remain a priest in good standing in virtue of my teaching Fellowship, but I want to feel free to do my own thing.
So that's the plan. When I'm fit and more available, I'll let it be known.