The Wardman Wire

How it used to be…

When I started writing, thinking and commenting on religion 30 years ago the main problem was that people just didn’t care. Apart from those “interested in that kind of thing”, the landscape was marked out by an interest in what seemed spiritually exotic, the odd kerfuffle involving a vicar in a nightshirt, the dominance of the secularization thesis (which said
that faith was on the way out), and moral philosopher Alasdair McIntyre ’s famous dictum:

“The religion of the English is that there is no God and it is wise to pray to him from time-to-time.”

If that era was once solid, it melted into air.

What has changed?

Let me mention just three things:

• Globalisation - the world has become one unevenly erupting economic and environmental entity.
• Mass Transit and cyber-Communication - the world has turned up your living room at the flick of a switch.
• and 9/11 - a bit of the world has been brutally woken up to the fact that the rest of the world wasn’t at all like they thought it was; they are still getting it wrong.

And where are we now?

The upshot of all this seems to be a convoluted state of permanent “we must do something ” panic – of which the brouhaha about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mild and complex thoughts about civil and religious law is just the latest example. Except that what people are saying about that is either “we must do nothing ” or “go away “.

Anyway, everyone has now at least noticed religion, though very few have any clue as to what it is. This is partly because there is no single ‘it’ that can be pointed to, yet we all behave as if there was. ‘Religion’, as philosopher and theologian Nicholas Lash points out, is a fiction . There are religions, for sure - but they are often incommensurate without and within; they aren’t one kind of thing.

To say that the apocalyptically Christian Pat Robertson and a peaceful non-theistic Buddhist hermit are part of the same thing because they can both be labelled ‘religious’ is numbingly illiterate. Yet Richard Dawkins’ books have earned a vast amount of money and attention by saying things barely more sensible. And so do a welter of commentators every hour of every day.

But my point is not that religions are harmless - far from it.

My point is that what makes them good or bad or indifferent can be internal factors, external factors or things that have little to do with ‘religious’ stuff at all. This is what a little bit of scrutiny of the real world shows, once we have learned (whoever ‘we’ are) to try to observe it without needing play an ‘us’ and ‘them’ game; scholar of ‘religion and secularism’ Charles Taylor calls this ‘block thinking’.

So what am I “Thinking Aloud” about?

In this column I hope to dissect some of the strange and interesting things that get reported, written, said or thought about religion. Not in order to prove that I am right (I know darned well that isn’t always the case), but in order to try to encourage a mutual exercise in ‘raising the level of discourse’.

Whether we are Christians, humanists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jedi Knights or recruits to the growing legion of couldn’t-carers and floating voters, we can only benefit from more light and less heat. Blaming all the planet’s ills uncomplicatedly on some beast called capitalism, communism, atheism, Islamism, green lizards or ‘religion’ (now the most fashionable option) is basically a way of avoiding the complexity , ambiguity and plurality of the world. Tempting, but ultimately hopeless.

There are real wrongs to be combated. But they do not all hide in one corner with a convenient label.

And who is Simon Barrow?

Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator and theologian. He is o-director of the think-tank Ekklesia, which is critical of ‘established religion’ and seeks to look at how Christianity may flourish creatively in an era where it is no longer ‘the norm’ and here it has forgotten how radical some of its ideas can be.  Simon as worked both in current affairs journalism and in senior positions within the church. He is uneasy with ready stereotypes about left and right, liberal and conservative.Simon blogs at Faith in society. You can read more about the context for this column there.

Tags: simon barrow, ekklesia, thinking aloud