37 – What is Religion For?

Editorial

On our bomb there sits a dove.

Hallelujah! Bang the drum!

Blow the world to kingdom come...” (Sydney Carter, 1960s peace song) en your steering committee agreed some months ago to make the theme of this year’s SoF conference “What is Religion For?”, a new wave of “ethnic cleansing” was under way in the Balkans and the international community seemed helpless to stop it. As I write, that part of the international community calling itself NATO has just called a conditional halt to its campaign of bombing the hell intoYugoslavia, loudly proclaiming the victory of good over evil, God over the Devil, and civilisation over barbarism. Whether the wretched Kosovars, Serbs, Albanians and Macedonians who must live (or die) with the resultant hatred, bitterness and trauma will join the New Triumphalists is yet to be seen.

But what has all this got to do with our Network, and with our theme, “What is Religion For?”?

Quite a lot, I suggest. Our Network is about exploring meaning in religious culture and religious language when the old-time religion, with its irrational supernaturalism, its gods and holy ghosts, is dead and decomposing. Our newlyemerging sense of what religion is for, what purpose it might still fulfil in our godforsaken and god-forsaking world, must have something to do with what we can make of the values religion is supposed to affirm and celebrate: the human values of compassion, honesty, generosity, lovingkindness, fairness - Blake’s “mercy, pity, peace and love”. Unless we are content to relegate these values to the realm of romantic poetry or private piety, we have to find ways of applying them in the real material world. If our values won’t stretch that far, does our religious-humanist language have any content? And if it has no content, what is religion for?

I am not suggesting that the linkage between the action of bombing and the “Our Network is about exploring meaning in religious culture and religious language when the oldtime religion, with its irrational supernaturalism, its gods and holy ghosts, is dead and decomposing.” application of our values is a simple one: only that there is a linkage, and that if we choose to discuss what religion is for without exploring the connections, we are refusing any critical engagement with the real world. (And let’s be clear, old jokes apart, that theological nonrealists are every bit as much engaged in the real world as old-time realist believers).

We are a network, not a campaign or a lobby, and we don’t need an SoF “line” on NATO strategy (and I don’t imagine NATO strategists would be much concerned if we had one). But we all need to be clear that our theology must be done in the real world, engaging with real issues - than which nothing could be more real than the business of killing our enemies for the good of our friends, and for the satisfaction of feeling we are doing something.

A good starting point, perhaps, is the recognition that those who passionately opposed the bombing and those who equally passionately supported it were, for the most part, motivated by a shared compassion for the appalling suffering of the ethnically cleansed and a shared revulsion against the barbarities of the ethnic-cleansers. Pro-bombers, often with the heaviest of hearts, backed NATO because the stream of misery seen on their televisions night after relentless night convinced them that “something must be done”: something more effectual than UN pussy-footing and diplomatic bluster and blunder. To bomb and damn the consequences (including the consequence of killing innocent men, women and children) was at least to do something.

Anti-bombers, on the other hand, called for a halt because “doing something” quickly turned a tragedy into a catastrophe. There was an alternative, the anti-bombers say, to making things worse, which was not to make things worse. There is no certainty that harder-headed UN diplomacy, draconian sanctions, direct support for the brave Serbian peace movement and democratic opposition, would have succeeding in making things better in the short term, but they would not have unleashed the frenzied response which could only make things worse for the one million men, women and children we were supposed to be protecting, and whose lives we are now responsible for rebuilding.

Do our values, expressed in our religious language and practice, our stories and our dreams, have anything to say to us in this situation? If not, what earthly use is religion? If they just seem romantic, sentimental, impracticable when they face a testing time, are they worth the candle?

There is another dimension we dare not forget. It would be an oversimplification to say that six hundred years of Balkan feuding was all about religion: but it would be a grosser falsehood to say that religion played no part, and grosser still to suggest that it ever effectively challenged or ameliorated the wretched hatreds in which it became embroiled. The Catholic cross was long the symbol of Croatians, the Orthodox cross that of the Serbs, the crescent of Islam that of the Albanian Kosovars. Religion gave each community its identity, its separateness, its sense of superiority, its conviction that God was one of them. Is that what religion is for? Can we live with that?

Whether in the last few grim months we lined up with the compassionate bombers or the compassionate advocates of relentless diplomacy, our insistence that values are to be taken seriously - are, indeed, the irreducible matter of religious sensibility once we have shuffled off the old gods and dogmas - will surely lead us to redouble our efforts to find alternatives to the violence which has scarred the last century of this millennium.

There was a time when it was taught that godliness made people good. But the godly turned out to be no better than the ungodly. So we withdrew our faith from God and placed it in Humanity, with hope that “a loftier race than e’er the world has known shall rise / With flame of freedom in their soul, and light of science in their eyes. / They shall be gentle, brave and strong...” Fat chance! The Somme, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the liquidation of class enemies and ethnic cleansing soaked our century in blood and shattered the illusion of an evolutionary moral ascent of humankind.

We have to do better in the next millennium, or perish in the attempt. Either the values to which we have chosen to commit ourselves will help us find ways forward, or they will prove idle dreams.

Which is one way of saying that either the values we have now come to understand as wholly human can be made to work, or they can’t. If they can’t, let’s not bother asking “What is religion for?” Let’s do the garden, go clubbing, fiddle with ourselves while the world burns.

I don’t suggest (you will be relieved to know) that SoF can solve the world’s problems or resolve dilemmas which have been with us for centuries. But we can choose to be merciful, compassionate, peacemaking and loving. And if we can’t figure out how to make things better, we can at least choose not to make things worse.

Religion may be for rather more than that. It surely can’t be for less @ EDITORIAL SoF’s very own Weekend Break in the Lake District Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd October 1999 Our second Sok-organised weekend break last autumn was fully booked. So, by popular demand, we have again booked the 40 rooms at Glenthorne Quaker Guesthouse in the heart of Lakeland and on the edge of Grasmere Lake and village.