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Showing posts with label sin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sin. Show all posts

Monday 2 April 2018

Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community

Kenan Malik in The Guardian

Dante and Virgil cross the Styx river in Gustave Doré’s interpretation of the poet’s vision of hell


Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. So runs the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Through those gates walks Dante with his guide Virgil:

Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation
Resounded through the starless air,
So that I too began to weep.
Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents,
Words of suffering, cries of rage, voices
Loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands…


Inferno is the first part, or canticle, of the Divine Comedy, Dante’s great triptych of journeys through hell, purgatory and heaven. Today, we read it as poetry, even if it is poetry that seems to have been touched by the divine. Seven hundred years ago, it was read as a glimpse of something far more real. Dante’s imaginative recreation of both the physical and the moral universe, and of the interlacing of the two, infused medieval culture and allowed Europeans to understand both their place in the physical architecture of the cosmos and their duties in the moral architecture of Christian society.

So far have we moved today from Dante’s reality that even the pope, if we are to believe the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, no longer acknowledges the existence of hell. Scalfari asked Pope Francis where “bad souls” go after death. Hell, Francis supposedly replied, “doesn’t exist”. “Sinning souls” simply “disappear”.

The Vatican has condemned the article, published in La Repubblica, insisting that the pope was misquoted. Whatever the truth, the controversy nevertheless points up the dilemma in which religion finds itself in the modern world. Religious values are immensely flexible over time. Christian beliefs on many issues have changed enormously in the past two millennia. Yet an institution like the Catholic church can never be truly “modern”.

Christianity, like all monotheistic religions, views human desires and beliefs as unreliable guides to notions of good and bad. Values derive primarily from God, and the authority of the church rests on its claim to be able to interpret the Bible and God’s word. Were the church to modify its teaching to meet the wishes of its flock, the authority of the institution would inevitably weaken. But were it not to do so, a chasm would emerge between official teaching and actual practice. Dante’s hell may be difficult to believe in, but to jettison difficult beliefs is to question the need for religion itself.

A recent pan-European survey by Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology at St Mary’s University in London, showed that in a dozen countries, including Britain, a majority of young people are irreligious. And even those who identify as religious have attitudes increasingly like those of their irreligious neighbours.

A survey of the social attitudes of British believers published in 2013 by Linda Woodhead, professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University, suggested that two thirds of Catholics accepted abortion of some kind. Half said that they are primarily guided by their own reason, intuition or feelings. Fewer than one in 10 sought guidance from the church or Bible.


Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community


Meanwhile, Woodward observes,, a minority of believers have marched in the opposite direction. They possess an absolute belief in God, make moral decisions primarily on the basis of religious sources, and are deeply conservative on issues of social morality. The literalism of fundamentalist Muslims and evangelical Christians speaks to a yearning for the restoration of strong identities and moral lines. The sectarianism of fundamentalist religion is reflected also in the political sphere. Witness the rise of tribal politics and of social movements built around excluding the Other.

All this poses a challenge, not just for believers, but for non-believers, too. Religion is not simply a set of beliefs. It is also a means of creating a sense of community, identity and meaning. One reason for the growth of fundamentalism is that all these seem in short supply today. The world appears increasingly trapped between an atomised liberalism, on the one hand, and a sense of community created by fundamentalist religion or reactionary politics, on the other.

In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who spent three years incarcerated in German concentration camps, meditates on that experience; a meditation on surviving hell.

“This is a profoundly religious book,” suggested the rabbi Howard Kushner in the foreword to the second edition. Frankl’s faith is, however, very different to that embodied in religion. It is a hymn not to a transcendent deity but to the human spirit that, through its own efforts, can transcend the immediacy of its being in the world. Humans, he suggests, find themselves only through creating meaning in the world. Meaning is not something to be discovered through God. It is something that humans create. “Man is ultimately self-determining,” Frankl wrote. “Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be.”

Today, it is that very capacity to “decide what our existence will be” that seems to have ebbed away. For all the material improvements in the world, life feels more precarious for millions of people. They seem to have less control in shaping the direction of their world.

Liberals often laud the Enlightenment as the moment when faith was replaced by reason. The new moral vision was, however, also rooted in faith, though of a different kind – faith that humans were capable of acting rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. It was that faith upon which Frankl drew. It was expressed not just through science and technology but also through politics that helped overthrow tyranny and bring about democracy. That faith, too, has eroded, as have the movements in which it was embodied.

Religion once helped provide meaning and identity through sublimating human agency to God’s will. Not only is it less capable of doing so these days, but when it does so, it often takes sectarian or bigoted forms. Equally, as the optimism that once suffused the humanist impulse has ebbed away, politics, too, is less capable of providing a means through which people can express agency. The politics that today seeks to do this is also often sectarian or bigoted.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote, before adding: “Yet his shadow still looms.” That shadow is in reality our failure to create movements and institutions that can nurture a sense of meaning and belongingness and dignity. Disbelief in God carries little weight without also a faith in ourselves as human beings. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a different kind of hell.

Saturday 27 July 2013

Thank God we have an archbishop who views Wonga's loans as modern slavery


Justin Welby is keen to recover the economic meaning of salvation as redemption. We are lucky to have him
Welby condemns attacks on Muslims
The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, wants the Church of England to expand credit unions as an alternative to payday lenders. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
"Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us." The familiar words of the Lord's prayer, right? Except, in the earliest Greek manuscripts, the word isn't sins, it's debts. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." That is how the King James Bible renders the Lord's prayer, though it still feels clunky when used in church.
But it feels even more clunky in the context of the whole Jesus v Wonga debate. The archbishop may want the church to have a greater role in supporting credit unions. But what sort of a lending model can be sustained when the mission statement of that organisation has the forgiveness of debts at its heart?
OK, to be fair, it's not the church that will be doing the lending on the Welby plan. The idea is for the churches (who have more outlets that the banks) to offer their facilities and human resources in support of credit unions. And it is credit unions that will be doing the lending. But even so, the church does have serious historic issues with money and the advent of a capitalist archbishop serves to bring these to the surface.
Though lots of Christians talk about sin (often translated in the mind as sexual misadventure), debt is the more basic theological category. Redemption, for instance, is a word that the church has borrowed from the ancient financial services industry. It is the recovery of something pawned or mortgaged. In a world of slavery, that something can be one's very life. And so it is today. Those who are trapped in Wonga's wicked 5,000% APR, often borrowing money to pay off other loans, thus deepening the crisis, have their lives owned by other people – by those, in this instance, making £50m a year profit off their misery. This is modern slavery.
Those who argue that it is not the church's business to get involved in this have little knowledge of the Bible. Redemption is absolutely what the church is for. And it is something supremely practical. Of course, when the church itself was subject to a successful takeover bid by the Roman Empire, all this forgiving debts stuff had to be re-imagined (as did all the anti-war stuff too). And what better way for the marketing department of the Caesars to do this than to turn its newfound religion into something spiritual. Better "blessed are the poor in heart" (St Matthew) than "blessed are the poor" (St Luke). And in this process of ideological rebranding, sin becomes a more convenient category than debt.
But if the debt and slavery idea was conveniently re-thought, the church retained a peculiar and eventually poisonous doublethink about money. Lending money at interest was deemed a sin for centuries. And this meant that Christians ended up forcing Jews to do it for them, and then hating them for doing it, thus generating the conditions for European antisemitism. It took Calvin to argue that usury was not lending money at interest but lending money at excessive interest. As Max Weber famously explained, this was the point at which capitalism was given moral sanction by the church. Even so, Calvin would have been perfectly comfortable with the idea of legislating against Wonga's 5,000% APR – ie a cap on interest rates – rather than having to out-compete them through credit unions, which is the Welby caring-capitalism plan.
And however much I am with Calvin on this one, the C of E is lucky to have found an archbishop who is keen to recover the economic meaning of salvation as redemption (listen up, church commissioners). In Liverpool and Durham, he recognised the existence of modern slavery. And thank God he is pressing the church to do something about it.