Thursday 06 December 2007
A transcript of the Archbishop's main address at this major
conference on Christian-Muslim relations.
If you believe what some commentators have to say, one of the
major factors provoking conflict in our world is the sheer fact of
different religious convictions: in our own country, it seems to be
assumed by many that if we could only get the relation between
'faith communities' right, social harmony would inevitably follow.
And conversely, any expression of a belief that one's own religious
loyalty is absolute, any statement of the belief that I, as a
Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or whatever, am speaking the
truth, is regarded as threatening and unacceptable.
Surely the problem lies with this contest over the truth;
surely, if religious people would stop speaking about truth and
acknowledge that they were only expressing opinions and conditional
loyalties, we should be spared the risk of continuing social
conflict and even violence.
But
what this hopeful fantasy conceals is an assumption that talking
about truth is always less important than talking about social
harmony; and, since social harmony doesn't seem to have any
universal self-evident definition, it is bound to be defined by
those who happen to hold power at any given time – which,
uncomfortably, implies that power itself is more important than
truth. To be concerned about truth is at least to
recognise that there are things about humanity and the world that
cannot be destroyed by oppression and injustice, that no power can
dismantle. The cost of giving up talking of truth is high: it means
admitting that power has the last word. And ever since Plato's
Republic political thinkers have sought to avoid this conclusion,
because it means that there is no significance at all in the
witness of someone who stands against the powers that prevail at
any given time; somehow, political philosophy needs to give an
account of suffering for the sake of conscience, and without a
notion of truth that is more than simply a list of the various
things people prefer to believe, no such account can be given.
So the fact of disagreement between religious
communities is in fact crucially important for the health of our
common human life. Because these communities will not readily give
up their claims to truth in response to the appeal from the powers
of the world around to be at one for the sake of social harmony,
they testify that power, even when it is apparently working for the
good of a majority, cannot guarantee that certain values and
visions will remain, whatever may happen. But does this concern for
truth mean that there is always going to be damaging conflict
wherever there is religious diversity? What about the cost of
religious diversity to 'social cohesion' – to use the word that is
currently popular in British political rhetoric? Does disagreement
about truth necessarily mean the violent disruption of social
co-operation? I shall be arguing that it does not, and that, on the
contrary, a robust view of disagreement and debate between
religious communities may (unexpectedly?) play a major role in
securing certain kinds of social unity or cohesion.
The first point I want to make is about the very nature
of religious language. To believe in an absolute religious truth is
to believe that the object of my belief is not vulnerable to the
contingencies of human history: God's mind and character cannot be
changed by what happens here in the world. And the logic of this is
that an apparent defeat in the world for my belief cannot be the
end of the story; God does not fail because I fail to persuade
others or because my community fails to win some kind of power. Now
if I believe for a moment that my failure or our failure is a
failure or defeat for God, then my temptation will be to seek for
any means possible to avoid such an outcome; and that way lies
terrorism and religious war and persecution. The idea that
any action, however extreme or disruptive or even murderous, is
justified if it averts failure or defeat for my belief is not
really consistent with the conviction that my failure is not
God's. Indeed, it reveals a fundamental lack of conviction
in the eternity and sufficiency of the object of faith. In plain
English, religious violence suggests religious insecurity. When
different communities have the same sort of conviction of the
absolute truth of their perspective, there is certainly an
intellectual and spiritual challenge to be met; but the logic of
belief ought to make it plain that there is no defence for the sort
of violent contest in which any means, however inhuman, can be
justified by appeal to divine sanction. The divine cannot need
protection by human violence. It is a point uniquely captured in
the words of Jesus before the Roman governor: 'My kingdom
is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight' (Jn
19.36).
So the rather paradoxical conclusion appears
that the more religious people are utterly serious about the truth
of their convictions, the less they will sanction all-out
violence; they will have a trust that what truly is will
remain, whatever the vicissitudes of society and history. And they
will be aware that compelling religious allegiance by violence is
tantamount to replacing divine power with human; hence the Quranic
insistence that there can be no compulsion in matters of religious
faith. It is crucial to faith in a really existing and absolute
transcendent agency that it should be understood to be what it is
independently of any lesser power: the most disturbing form of
secularisation is when this is forgotten or misunderstood.
And the difficult fact is that it has been so forgotten or
misunderstood in so many contexts over the millennia. It has
regularly been confused with cultural or national integrity, with
structures of social control, with class and regional identities,
with empire; and it has been imposed in the interest of all these
and other forms of power. Despite Jesus' words in John's
gospel, Christianity has been promoted and defended at the point of
the sword and legally supported by extreme sanctions; despite the
Quranic axiom, Islam has been supported in the same way, with
extreme penalties for abandoning it and civil disabilities for
those outside the faith. There is no religious tradition
whose history is exempt from such temptation and such
failure.
Like others, I have sometimes been very
critical of the heritage of the European Enlightenment where it has
been used to appeal to timeless and obvious rational truths which
are superior to the truths claimed for revelation and imparted in
the historical processes of communal life. But it should
be granted that the Enlightenment had a major role in highlighting
some of the inner contradictions of religious language and
behaviour in the wake of an age when so much violence had been
justified by the rhetoric of faith. After the wars of religion in
Europe, it was plausible and important to challenge those habits of
thought which had made it seem natural to plunge whole societies –
indeed, the greater part of a whole continent – into murderous
chaos on the pretext of religious dispute. For the major thinkers
of the Enlightenment, the contrast was between absolutes that could
be defended only on the basis of arbitrary religious authority and
absolutes that were established by universal reason; and it was
obvious that the latter promised peace because they did not need
any reference to authorities that, in the nature of the case, could
be accepted only by certain groups. By forcing religious
authorities to acknowledge that they could not have the legal and
civic right to demand submission, Enlightenment thinkers in a sense
obliged believers to accept what was in fact an implication of
their own religious faith – that power in this-worldly terms was an
inappropriate vehicle for faith.
But the enlightenment dream of a universal
rationality proved in the event as vulnerable and questionable as
any religious project. It became entangled in theories and
discourses of racial superiority (supported by a
particular reading of evolutionary biology) and
the economic determinism of capitalist theory and
practice; it developed a complex and unhealthy relationship
with nationalism, which was, increasingly, seen as the
practical vehicle for emancipation and
rationalisation; and its own account of universal reason
was (as I noted in a lecture here in Singapore some months ago)
undermined first by Marxian and Freudian theories, then by
the structuralist and postmodernist revolutions. European
rationality – and its American manifestations in the Declaration of
Independence and the political philosophy flowing from that –
came to seem as local and arbitrary as any other creed; in
the world of global politics, it depended on force as much as
argument. And if you come to believe that the values of a
certain culture – whether Western democracy or any other –
are absolute and impossible for rational people to argue
about, then, when some groups resist or disagree, you have a theory
that licenses to suppress them; what is more, because you have no
transcendent foundation for holding to these values, you may come
to believe that any and all methods are justified in promoting or
defending them, since they will not necessarily survive your
failure or defeat.
Thus the Enlightenment hope of universal harmony on the
grounds of reason can become a sophisticated version of the
priority of force over everything else, a journey back towards the
position that Plato exerted all his energy to refute in the
Republic. If the power of argument proves not be universal after
all, sooner or later we are back with coercion; and when that
happens it becomes harder and harder to hold firm to the classical
liberal principles that are at the heart of the Enlightenment
vision, harder and harder – for example – to maintain that torture
or the deliberate killing of the innocent in order to protect the
values of society can never in any circumstances be right. It is
one of the great moral conundrums posed by the experience of recent
years: what if the preserving of civil liberties and the preserving
of the security of a liberal society turn out not always to be
compatible?
The reality of religious plurality in a society
declares, as we have already seen, that some human groups hold to
their convictions with an absolute loyalty, believing they are true
and thus non-negotiable. If they thought otherwise about these
convictions, they might be involved in negotiations about merging
or uniting in some way; there would be no ground for holding on to
a distinct identity. Yet they do hold to their claims to
truthfulness, and so declare to the society around that certain
things are not liable to be changed simply because of to changes in
fashion or political theory or political convenience. The lasting
plurality of religious convictions is itself a mark of the
seriousness of the convictions involved. Some things are too
important to compromise. But if a religious community is as
serious as it ought to be about its beliefs, this refusal to
compromise is accompanied by the confidence that, whether or not
these particular beliefs prevail in any society, they will still be
true, and that therefore we do not have to be consumed with anxiety
about their survival. The religious witness is able to
confront possible political failure, even social collapse, in the
trust that all is not and cannot be lost, even when the future
becomes unimaginably dark; what it will not do is to sanction any
policy of survival at all costs (including the cost of basic humane
conventions and moral boundaries).
