David Chapman
At the 2024 Sea of Faith AGM a motion changed the ‘tag line’ statement of purpose of the network from:
exploring and promoting religion as a human creation
to
exploring and promoting religion and worldviews as human creations for this life
This is now the official statement of purpose of the Sea of Faith Network.
However, the vote was 12 in favour, 10 against and 8 abstentions, out of a network membership of 219. So only a small minority of members were party to the decision, and an even smaller number voted in favour. For the health of the network, it would be good for more members to engage with the decision, so here below we have two papers: one in favour of the change and one against.
For myself, I abstained at the AGM and I find that as I read each these papers I agree with whichever one is in front of me at the time!
Please read these papers and join the debate.
Send your comments to: editor@sofn.uk
Worldviews For This Life: Refreshing the Network
Dave Francis
This is not a proposal to change the name for the Sea of Faith as a charitable body, but for a freshening of the Network and a new course. In my view, the Sea of Faith Network (SOFN) should now broaden its horizons by moving towards becoming, in essence and practice, a worldviews international network for this life.
Throughout the history of the SOFN there has been a focus on values and meaning in human life. Members have been concerned, not so much with beliefs about the hereafter, but with the ‘here and now’. Religion, such as we find it, has been valued, not for what it may believe and teach about divine intervention in human affairs, but for how ‘religious’ people have acted in the world to enhance this life; often with works of great creativity, acts of great courage, and provision of aid for those who are suffering.
The refreshed Network will continue to possess no creed. It will insist on no set of prescriptive beliefs or practices to which a member must adhere. But it will move on slightly from the broad intent to ‘explore (not ‘believe in’) and promote religion as a human creation’. It may be true that this gives the Network a unique flavour; providing a sharp focus on what we learn from religion when we see it as springing entirely from human imagination and experience. But what exactly do we mean by ‘promoting religion as a human creation’?
Certainly some SOFN members are firm atheists, denying the possibility of, for example, divine intervention, either in an individual’s life or in the world’s affairs. But are we all so sure? The firm rejection of the ‘divine’ and/or the metaphysical as such, can appear arrogant and exclusionary. How certain are we if we claim that there is no ‘cosmic consciousness’ or ‘ultimately divine principle’ underpinning the world as we experience it? How necessary is it for the SOFN to completely reject any ideas of ‘divine inspiration’ or ‘mystical revelation’ behind the world’s religious belief systems? And why would we want to exclude vast numbers of seekers and agnostics from the dialogue? After all, Don Cupitt himself argues that all our ‘knowledge’ in this regard is secondary; we simply can’t get any ‘primary’ knowledge of the ‘True’ or the ‘Real’ unfiltered by our language about it.
In this proposal, therefore, I suggest we clarify the, I believe, mistaken impression that all members of the Network firmly reject all metaphysical beliefs.
Instead we should emphasise our focus on how we can learn from the wisdom and experience of religious and other philosophical traditions regarding the human condition, our history, cultures and possible futures.
On the other hand, we should strengthen our moral edge, especially in the fight against identity fundamentalism. This is where the Network’s new emphasis could be best placed: we resist certainties and embrace contingency; we resist absolutes and embrace temporality; we resist wishful thinking about a life beyond death where all will be made well and embrace the day today. We already have a ‘mission’ of sorts and this is a kind of ‘faith’ position.
I have argued elsewhere that the Network’s by-line or mission statement should be ‘For This Life’ rather than the current ‘religion as a human creation’ one. In that article I argued that our reason for acting in a self-sacrificial, generous and loving way (irrespective of belief or non-belief in life beyond death), may be found in deciding that we are ‘for… this… life’. ‘FOR’ this life, because we affirm and do not deny the value of this life, promoting that which helps people to keep out of a ‘bad’ life.
For ‘THIS’ life, because we concern ourselves with the matters of the life we experience in the here and now, not with any life supposed to be ‘beyond’ this one. Thus, the old distinctions between inner and outer life, or between secular and sacred spheres, or temporal and eternal concerns, disappear.
For this ‘LIFE’, because, as people say, ‘Life is what you make it’. In saying ‘Yes’ to life we face up to the whole package of ‘it all’. With Don Cupitt we say, life is ‘finite, temporal and contingent… It is outsideless… Life is, simply, everything’ (Cupitt, Life, Life, 2003, p.7).
The refreshed Network will continue to hold no doctrine. But instead of the tendency firmly to dismiss the possibility of divine inspiration, prefer instead, an epistemological humility alongside a focus on the human. There will thus continue to be no fixed certainties about the nature of being and existence, especially of any higher power. Instead, the Network will broaden its appeal to the ontological agnostic. More positively, members will usually be axiologically committed individuals, each acting according to their own capacity to support, or even promote, the human values expressed, for example, in Cupitt’s ‘radical humanism’. In this sense, setting aside any certainty, we maintain a profound faith. Basically, our personal project is: ‘to free ourselves from all forms of ressentiment and learn how to love life and to live generously’ (Cupitt, Ethics in the Last Days of Humanity, 2016, p.72).
If anyone asks me what the Sea of Faith is all about, I can now say, “We are radical humanists, in the tradition of Don Cupitt.” And if they are still listening: “Our members have a variety of religious and non-religious worldviews but we are focussed on the here and now and don’t look beyond the human for our help. Our purpose is to explore and promote religion and worldviews as human creations for this life. Would you like to know more?”
Just to be clear, we will NOT be saying to any prospective new members belonging to religious traditions, ‘Join us, believe what you like, just don’t talk about it’. Rather, we will be inviting Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Humanists and members of new and other religious movements, to join us in raising big questions of life and existence in a spirit of openness and dialogue, perhaps comparing what the different religions and philosophies have themselves created, and learning from each other’s wisdom and experience. In some ways the Network will act as a ‘Religion and Philosophy club’ for adults, but with added ‘edge’ of working across traditional religious and philosophical divides, while resisting any appeal for justification to powers beyond the human.
In particular, members will seek to investigate and act upon their own understandings of such traditional values as beauty, goodness and truth, while keeping an open mind on the idea and nature of what forces or powers may underpin our existence. Nevertheless, the Network will retain its distinctive character. There will be a critique and a challenge to those who want to a maintain an identity fundamentalism, insisting, for example, on the capital T Truth of their particular faith or belief position.
The Network began, it is sometimes said, as a refuge for ‘atheist vicars’, but was always more than that. From the early days, Sofia, the magazine of the Network, has explored themes such as ‘The Poetic Genius’, ‘Dangerous Religion’, ‘The Art of Humanity’, ‘Brain, Belief and Behaviour’, ‘Spirit and Creation’ and ‘Where is Christ’s Body?’ – a selection revealing something of the breadth of interest amongst members. Then there are the developments in the field of education, including ‘Solarity’ – a website full of ideas for running a ‘religion and philosophy outof-school-hours club’ for children of all ages.
The task now is to broaden interest in what the Network offers, across the range of faith and belief and across the ages. Since the demise of the Interfaith Network, following government spending cuts, there may be extra interest in what the SOFN is and has been doing, but only if we expand our reach beyond the current membership, to faith communities (especially those interested in fostering dialogue across the boundaries), to student societies interested in the ‘big questions of life in the here and now’, and to all people interested in fostering human values, however provisional, for this life.
Our work, setting aside differences in metaphysical belief, will be to explore the human dimensions of religious and non-religious worldviews, their contexts and consequences, and implications for building a better, more truthful, and more beautiful world. In that sense it is ‘inter-faith’ and ‘inter-belief’, and promotes dialogue amongst those with different identities, towards ‘wiser’ relationships and interactions. The refreshed Network will offer physical and online spaces where people can share purposes and plans. There may well be implications for social structures and personal action. Members will work this out for themselves, taking action as fits their interests and concerns outside the Network.
The magic, the mystery, the creative, the inspirational, the emotional and the sheer genius of life remain. We, as members of a Network of individuals pouring ourselves out into the world, are driven by dialogue, by curiosity, by a desire to make things better, more beautiful and more truthful, towards a spreading of creativity, value and love, across the many landscapes of life.
‘Don’t let the b******s get you down’
David Boulton
At Easter time in 1992 the BBC TV programme The Heart of the Matter picked up on the shock/horror news in the popular press that there was a new breed of atheist vicars who had given up on the old, old story and were telling a new, new story where God was no longer our creator but our creation, there was no heaven above the bright blue sky, and the resurrection was to be understood in a non-realist sense (i.e. that it didn’t actually happen). Two prominent members of this network of pariah priests, the Rev. Stephen Mitchell and the Rev. David Paterson, faced the BBC’s grand inquisitor Joan Bakewell, introducing her and the audience to the gospel according to the Sea of Faith.
Stphen Mitchell wrote it all up in SOF Magazine, Summer 1992, quoting from the sackful of letters he had received after the programme. One told him: ‘The second you die you will believe in the resurrection and life after death’. But many were more supportive, including one which concluded ‘Don’t let the b******s get you down’. (Clive Richards, SOF Mag’s editor, suggested in a footnote that the unprintable word was ‘bishops’, but he’d obviously failed to count the stars).
Some two years earlier the newborn network inspired by Don Cupitt’s writings had agreed a Statement of Aims: ‘to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation’. Simple. And revolutionary, turning religion upside down and inside out. All religions, including Christianity. All gods, including the one named God. Religion, at its best and its worst, no longer conceived as a divine hand-down but a human construct, embedded in human culture, human language, and homo sapiens’ evolutionary drive to seek meaning in chaos.
From its first issue, in Spring 1990, SOF Magazine proudly emblazoned its Statement of Aims – explore and promote – across its masthead. But successive issues tended to feature rather more exploration than promotion. One prominent founder-member found promotion ‘abrasive’. Others thought it smelt of evangelical proselytising. Some Quakers preferred ‘outreach’. But promotion held its place on the masthead.
I see the Heart of the Matter programme and the storm it created as the Network’s first promotional strike. Mitchell and Paterson seized their opportunity and went on the offensive. In his SOF Magazine article following the programme, Mitchell wrote: ‘We must continue to wage war against theological naivety’.
I remember some of the key occasions when we went on to do just that. In the wake of the programme the Council of Churches in Britain and Ireland invited SOF to send a representative to a one-day consultation on ‘Contemporary Western Cultures and the Gospel’. Right up our street. This was our contribution: ‘All religion is a cultural product, like pop videos, Blind Date, Harrison Birtwistle and Wensleydale cheese. It is not something outside and above culture… It is not the Truth against which human culture should be tested. It is not a set of revealed absolutes, the same yesterday, today and for ever, free from and apart from the flux and fashion of human culture. It is not the Holy Secret possessed by a Church empowered to redeem a hopelessly relativistic humanity. Not in our view.’ We were not invited again.
Two years later, in 1994, the sacking of Anthony Freeman, vicar of Stapleford, for writing a book called God in Us, put SOF back in the press – the church papers of course, but also the Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Spectator and even Newsweek in America and something unpronouncable in Norway, all asking what the hell this Sea of Faith Network was. So we told them. I remember one-day conferences we organised, one with the Humanists, another with Robert Funk, chair of the Jesus Seminar. (For the latter, we published a booklet, Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up). We took advantage of the Guardian’s low-price advertising for community organisations and ran a series of display ads featuring our Statement of Aims. Some of us got ourselves invited to contribute to the Guardian’s ‘Face to Faith’ series, and we complemented Don Cupitt’s expanding bibliography with books of our own. We explored and promoted.
But over time, specifically promotional activity began to falter. Perhaps we just ran out of energy. ‘Explore and promote’ disappeared from our magazine’s masthead. Our lively network of regional groups began to shrink, as did our membership. And it all came to a head in 2024, when we both celebrated our origins in Don’s Sea of Faith TV series and turned our attention to the Network’s present and future.
In a written presentation to the annual conference and AGM in July, David Francis proposed that the Network should ‘move on slightly from the broad intent to explore and promote religion as a human creation’. But the move he proposed was not exactly slight. The ‘refreshed Network’, he argued, should become ‘a worldview international network for this life’, embracing or exploring a wide variety of viewpoints. It should abandon its ‘tendency firmly to dismiss the possibility of divine inspiration’ or mystical revelation, which he saw as ‘arrogant proselytising’, preferring instead ‘an epistemological humility alongside a focus on the human’. If that wasn’t clear enough, he explained that ‘In some ways the Network will act as a “Religion and philosophy club” for adults’.
Throughout his essay he insisted that he is not against promotion. He would retain ‘explore and promote’ in a revised Statement of Intent adding ‘worldviews’ and ‘in this life’. But it is unclear what we would be promoting if we abandoned or weakened our core viewpoint that religion is a human creation rather than the product of divine inspiration and mystical revelation. Yes, we do take a distinctive view, that all religious faith is a human creation. Taking that view, we promote it. We promote it because we think it is the case! We explore, and we promote the value of our exploration. And far from being dogmatic, or ‘arrogant and exclusionary’, it is precisely because we see religion as grounded in human experience that we cannot be dogmatic. Our only dogma is that there is no divine foundation for religious dogmas. In promoting our faith that religious faith is wholly human in its origin and infinitely varied expression, we combat (let’s not be afraid of the word) the dogmas rooted in old-time religion.
And it is religion that has always been our focus. What is meant by adding secular ‘worldviews’ to our target is unclear, since secular worldviews, by definition, know very well that they are human constructs. And what is gained by adding ‘for this life’? What other life could we be promoting? Just twelve people at our poorly-attended AGM voted in this new Statement of Intent, replacing a clear and pithy one with one which needs an essay to explain it. I think that was a mistake, and one we’ll come to regret.
Join the debate.
Send your comments to: editor@sofn.uk