Holy Books: Is Religion the Problem? by David Goa

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), in his last essays when he was close to 100 years old, said that what will save us is a conversation between religions and that it will focus on transcendence, on the ineffable. That is the only way of peace. Being part of a tradition we are both circumscribed and open at the same time. Religious tradition brings finitude and the eternal together. Tradition is reiterative. It is not repeated, but the very event again, and again, the inaction again. 

The organizers of “Building World Peace: The Role of Religions and Human Rights” have suggested that the theme “Holy Books: Is Religion the Problem?” “serves to highlight the differences between sacred religious texts and the political practice of their teaching. Since September 11^th, 2001, especially, there has been great debate about the role of religious texts in acts of social and political violence. In order to preserve respect for the diverse religions, cultures, races, and ethnicities throughout the world, we ought to focus on the message of peace shared by a majority of peoples.”

If I had my own way I think I would have framed this question differently: “Holy Books: Is Religion the Answer?” This reveals my presuppositions just as the title that I was given does for those who framed it. I think I would have begun with a suite of stories about how those informed by their treasured holy book have behaved in this part of the world. Many behave well, but some behave badly some of the time. I have spent thirty years doing field research work in the religious communities of Alberta, seeking always to understand how others understand.

The people in these communities have taught me, just as my own formation and tradition have done throughout my life, that a large part of a life of faith calls one to, and gives one the capacity for, spiritual friendship. It does so beyond the borders of one’s own tradition. 

I would have told you the story of introducing the Imam and the Rabbi in the public space of the first exhibition ever presented in Canada by a public institution on the religious life, and of how, after initial resistance and the intervention of another Imam born in Western Canada (Salem Ganam of blessed memory), they took each other’s hands and repeated “Salam” — the Imam saying “so you are from ‘Beth Salam’ (in Hebrew “Shalom”) synagogue not ‘Beth Israel’.” I would have told you about how an ecumenical arsonist burned eight houses of worship in Edmonton during a late night spree and I went in the morning, after I heard the news, to the Rabbi's house and held him in my arms as he wept.

When he finally regained control of himself he said that something extraordinary had happened. Before dawn the two Imams to whom I had introduced him some years earlier in the public space of my exhibition Spiritual Life / Sacred Ritual, a museum exhibition that affirmed both Jewish and Muslim pathways, had come to his door. The firefighters were still trying to ensure the smouldering ruins did not flame up again. “We have come to offer the condolences of Dar al-Islam [the House of Islam], for a house of God has been destroyed. Come and bring your people and meet in the basement of our mosque.” The two Imams who stood in the entryway of the Rabbi’s house responded out of the teaching, sensibility, and courage born of the Glorious Qur’an and the struggles for faithfulness. 

I would have told you of a conversation in the Sikh Gurdwara after a Sunday service where we remembered with joy the birth of Guru Nanak. I was told about the free kitchen that is part of Sikh spiritual discipline and how tragic it was that this discipline that provided the poor in India with a day’s sustenance, no matter what their faith, had turned, in Canada, into an occasion where only Sikhs ate together. “How about my going to 97th Street, our derelict district,and telling them they can get a meal here?” I said. A chorus rang out almost before I finished the question: “Will you, please!” It was the Guru Granth speaking out of the heart of the faith.

I would have told you of the biblical impetus for self-defined fundamentalist Christians who work seven days a week with the poor and bereft of our city, and of the liberal Christians who work diligently at an analysis of the systemic ways human beings around the world are deprived of the necessities of life. 

Indeed, if you care to look you will see that the first responders to disaster virtually everywhere in our fragile world are not humanist organizations or governments. Government and humanist aid organizations eventually come but they are never first and are rarely quick. Look at New Orleans, Palestine,  Lebanon, and the places of earthquakes, tsunamis, and other catastrophic events around the world. It is women and men who have a faith that has taught them to respond to the life of the world directly, immediately, and without our usual cautious attitude who are there first. It is only in our civil culture that we continue to try and separate, and for good reasons, the religious life from much of what constitutes the best in the political and civil life. The history of this habit of separating religion and public life is a three-hundred-year-old story and, in Canada, it has been writ large for the last fifty years. However our ways of trying to do this are now very frayed and it is foolhardy to pretend we do not need to rethink them.

“Holy Books: Is Religion the Problem?” This is an awful question to have on the table if your goal is to find new ways to engage those with a strong religion who care deeply about civil life and what is happening in our fragile world. It tells them that they are not welcome, that they and their deeply treasured beliefs and foundations for action are the problem and the only problem. Many people — Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Native American — have a strong religion. For many of them it has provided a language of meaning that has illuminated their experience. It has given them a community and a way of viewing the world beyond their self-interest. If you ask them they will quickly tell you that it gives them something to live for. In all too many cases that are spattered across our newspapers, it gives some of them, some of the time, something to die for. They care about how their own society is unfolding and about the destructive ways global politics and various cultural and economic issues are reshaping their life, the life of their children, and the life of the world. 

 I think it is fair to say that in Canada, and most other liberal democratic societies, the goal for the last fifty years, when it comes to the intersection of religion and public life, has been anything but engagement. We have a fifty-year history in this part of the world of doing precisely the opposite. The academic study of religion has also spent far more time cultivating the hermeneutic of suspicion than it has teaching students how religious traditions work and why they endure. The consequence of this is that we are not well prepared to understand, much less address and engage, either the question that the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights has placed before us or most of the other questions that stand behind the other sessions of the conference. Yet we must begin to try. The issues are too grave to be left in the hands of those who have refused to seriously consider them for the past several generations.

What is behind our asking of this question?

Most of us who have a liberal cast of mind, who have come to treasure the hard-won values of human rights, who respect the dignity of all at all costs, who work for peace in our fragile world, have little patience with men and women who have a strong religion. This is not new. The impatience is rooted in the European literary and philosophical movement of the eighteenth century called the Enlightenment, which is itself rooted in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and the ideas of Kant, Locke, and Newton.   

 Its basic belief was the superiority of reason (technical reason) as a guide to all knowledge and human concerns. From this flowed the idea of progress and a challenge to traditional Christianity and all other forms of religious authority and wisdom. Scholars often distinguish between the various national contributions to this movement of transformation in Europe:the materialism of the French encyclopédistes (d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire); the Scottish interest in political economy (Hume, Smith, Stewart); and the more cultural concerns of the Germans (Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Schiller). A similar invigorating freedom of ideas affected writers as far apart as America and Russia, while the Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe also experienced a new dynamism in the mid nineteenth century.

The French Revolution marked the end of the Age of Enlightenment, its proponents having been an important catalyst for change that continues down to our own day. Of note, of course, is that this is also the age of European expansion and this movement was taken, often as the orthodoxy, to all corners of the world. I mention this because we are struggling to address its legacy and doing so while largely unconscious of how it shapes our attempts. 

Let me put it succinctly and simply. In this country and much of Europe, we are children of the Enlightenment, inheriting its understandable fear of religion. We have experimented with replacing traditional religious worldviews (which are the centre of all traditional cultures) with the civil values of individualism, progress, and reason. This has given us modern civil societies most of us treasure. Part of the cost of this, though, is a long period in which our marginalization of religion has made it difficult, if not impossible, for us to think about the place of religion. The fear born in these early European culture wars has made us impotent in the face of our current challenges.
 

Why are we unable to engage strong religion?

I want to highlight only one of the reasons we are unable to engage strong religion and use this to propose how we might move past the fears that paralyze us in the face of strong religion. Central to our inability is how the Christian Bible came to be understood in North America over the last hundred years or so.

The debate that filled churches for several generations, and still rattles around and spills over into the public square, has provided the template for most of our considerations of the relationship of religion to public life. We are now busy exporting this template into other religious cultures, often convinced that it is the necessary antidote to their religious diseases. For example, one of the keynote speakers in this conference argued the need for all religion to adopt the hermeneutic of suspicion because, in his view, “religion is the problem.” Until a few years ago we were largely convinced that our antidote had worked, that religion was fading away and that the human family could get on with living the rational life. Whole schools of thought developed to argue and promote this perspective. 

The “end of religion” or the “age of secularism” was the clarion call of my generation, and there are still many sociologists, religious studies scholars, and other intellectuals who lead the imaginary charge in the final dethroning of faith perspectives and religious traditions. Most scholars and journalists my age and a bit younger were shaped by these perspectives and went about their work unconscious of what they were actually doing. This is how the culture of amnesia developed. We do not know the religious sources of the West so we have little or no capacity to understand or engage the religious sources of anyone else. We have little to draw on to combat and hedge in religious extremism. We have few ideas worthy of the name that have the capacity to hold together difficult questions and complex answers. We have virtually no way of making this kind of depth and texture a part of public discourse. Let’s look briefly at where this last chapter originated.

Co-dependent twins

Two opposing views — the evangelical-literalist perspective for the understanding of the Bible and the liberal-modernist perspective for the understanding of the Bible — have shaped public discourse in North America almost entirely and still largely do. They have influenced, although in not as marked a way, European public discourse as well. What seems to have escaped most of us is that they were born together. They are co-dependent twins. They need each other for their own identity. It is so with all neuroses. Literalists like to see the modernists as the firstborn. They must battle with them for a recovery of a living, engaged faith. Modernists like to see the literalists as the firstborn. They must battle with them for a recovery of reason. My sense is that each of them sees the other as a scapegoat for the problems of modernity. Here is one of the taproots of religious fundamentalism and secular fundamentalism in North America.

Both these perspectives, born together as they were, are tired and worn out. I think they are all but spent. Why? Because both of them have an important concern, faith and reason, but both of them have shaped a hundred-year battle in such a way that they have lost their own capacity to do anything but circle round again in the neurotic fashion to which they and the public have become accustomed. Instead of revisiting their own sources of meaning, their deep ideas and complex and textured ways of thinking, they have habitually let their enemy define the terms. It is a kind of spiritual and intellectual anorexia with a complete loss of proportion, purpose, and goal. My sense is that their day is over. These co-dependent twins have brought us to the advent of the twenty-first century but we have the twentieth century as the witness of how effective their unconscious cabal has been in shaping a regard for culture and the religious life and a life of service. At best it is a mixed story with many remarkable and good things on both sides of the battle lines, but it is the deep diseases they have bequeathed to us that we must begin to heal. 

Pathways of conversation, understanding, and transformation

I have suggested that we have a problem even thinking about the themes and issues on the table at this conference because we participate in the language of the co-dependent twins born in the debate over how to understand the Bible in Protestant North America. The liberal-modernist notions within Protestant culture and within its secular counterpart spend all their time critiquing women and men who, by their own definition, were seeking to be faithful. On both sides of the divide — evangelical-literalist and liberal-modernist — they argue about the facts present in sacred texts and the principles of interpretation. It is a one-hundred-year-old sad story and, while it persists, it increasingly rings hollow, and offers no insight, value or person who can call the serious minded to a life of service. 

My first response to the question “Is religion the [or a] problem?” is, of course, yes. Religion is a problem because it is like sex. Both are powerful, both are capable of the highest expressions of love and self-giving service. For that very reason, like sex, religion is capable of being polluted and dealing death. We all know this and I do not see that repeating it endlessly, as the secular fundamentalists insist on doing, gets us anywhere on what is the real need. What is the real need? We need to learn how to engage those with strong religion. Not one was invited to this conference nor was there any attempt to consider how they might be engaged. This is not unusual. It is typical. Both liberals and conservatives in the religious life, as in politics, circle the wagons and consider themselves virtuous by exclaiming truths and critiques to their fellow travellers. However, for those of us who care about human rights and their awful abuse at the hands of religious leaders it is simply not good enough to continue to preach to the choir. We have done that for the first generation of work on human rights, indeed for the first fifty years. We now enter the second generation of work. It had better be characterized by a new approach if we are to have any effect as we address the use of religion against human dignity. 

We need to break up the cabal, conscious or unconscious, of the co-dependent twins: religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists. We need to bring forward the depth and texture of ideas, as well as the limitations, that are part of the sources of both religious culture and civil culture. We need to bring forward those values that the co-dependent twins of the past hundred years have sought to hide or ignore. This requires an enlarged regard for religious ways of being and a much-improved knowledge of the sources within both holy books and religious tradition. This requires an enlarged regard for the sources of civil values, a revisiting of the Enlightenment, and an uncovering and pulling forth of its ideas that can help us move beyond the experiment with banishing religion from the public square which has led us to our current crisis. This effort will lead us onto new ground, the ground of content-leavened pluralism. 

The colonization by the co-dependent twins, secular and religious, of how we understand and talk about religious tradition and the landscape of meaning is an enormous problem. It is a civil problem first and foremost. It is a problem for religious communities as well, but that is an issue for those communities to address. The fear that animates the secular partner in this cabal bears a large responsibility for reifying religious fundamentalism and that is the responsibility of all of us, be we public intellectuals, politicians or religious leaders, who care about civil life. When the depth and texture of a life of faith and religious tradition becomes part of the common knowledge of the faithful, and a portion of it becomes common public knowledge, strong religion will no longer be the problem. When the depth and texture of the sources of liberal democratic society becomes part of the common knowledge of all citizens, including those who hold to strong religion, secular fundamentalism will no longer be the problem. The antidote to what many have seen as the problem of religion has clearly not been found in attempts to banish it from public discourse and the public square. The twentieth century has provided us with the results of that civil experiment.

David J. Goa is the Director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life.

An earlier version of this paper was given, at the invitation of the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights, as part of the international conference “Building World Peace: The Role of Religions and Human Rights,” in Edmonton, Alberta, Oct. 20-22, 2006.

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