David Boulton O God, not politics! Don’t we get enough of that at home, on the Today programme, on the News, in the papers? Do we have to drag politics into the Sea of Faith? What next?
SoF telling us how to vote? Where’s the hidden agenda?
Well, there isn’t a hidden agenda: but there is an open one. Social action and politics (in its broad sense, not confined to, but also not excluding party politics) is inescapable to all but hermits. Our Network is many strange things, but it is not a hermitage.
In pre-modern times, politics flowed from religion. In the 1640s, if you believed that the king was God’s representative on earth, you naturally became a Cavalier.
If you believed God devolved his power on the elect, the ‘*godly party’’, you became a Roundhead. If you believed God was dispersed in human hearts, you went to jail without passing Go.
Today, only the Christian Democrats in Europe and John Selwyn Gummer in Britain claim the Almighty as their party leader, It was Marx more than anyone who withdrew the whip from God and expelled him from the political arena. But Marx replaced the will and purpose of God with the will and purpose of the dialectic process.
That was a century and a Soviet Union ago. Today the old God is dead, Marx is dead, and we’re not feeling too well ourselves.
But unless religion is just a supremely selfish business of saving our own souls, seeking self-expression, selffulfillment, looking after Number One, we can’t avoid the social, which is also the political, What was that about releasing the captives, feeding the hungry? About no man (or woman) being an island? About building Jerusalem in our green and pleasant land? That’s politics.
Belief in a supernatural, interventionist God may dictate one kind of politics. Total indifference to moral values may dictate another. But what about humanism (Christian, religious or secular)? What about non-realism, with its claim that the self, the social world and the natural world, like God himself, cannot be separated out from human culture and the language in which we construct our world? What kind of politics does that lead us into?
So in this strand we’ll be asking some questions. Does our post-modern humanist approach give us anything distinctive to say about the ethical basis of politics, about class struggle, about the distribution of wealth, about the uses of wealth (ethical investment? aid? charity?), about human rights and responsibilities, about the use and abuse of power (force? violence? coercion?), about our use of natural resources?
And then there’s greenery. What are the implications of our view of religious faith as a human creation for the way we relate to our natural environment? Can humancentred and eco-centred be reconciled? If the ‘‘natural world’’ is nothing more than a cultural concept with no objective reality, what are our responsibilities within it and towards it? Is non-realist ecology a contradiction in terms? Does the decease or early retirement of the old Creator God enhance or destroy the notion of the universe as an infinitely wonderful ‘‘creation’? which we humans have a unique responsibility to maintain in all its glory and integrity?
I hope, too, that we'll be looking at local social action projects in which SoF members are involved. Please tell me about them so that I can make space for them! If you have an experience (good or bad) to share, share it, Run a workshop, offer a short talk or presentation, Demonstrate!
We may or may not find statements which we can make together, may or may not find ways in which we can act together. We may do no more than begin to map the territory we must explore together. But that’s a start. Let’s use this strand to start exploring.