Does Religion do More Harm than Good?

Rupert Shortt

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780281078714
• eBook ISBN: 9780281078721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

History is littered with wars and atrocities apparently inspired by religion, and today there seems no end to reports of cruelty and violence carried out in the name of God. But is it belief in God that motivates these evils? Or do they spring from other motives?

At the same time, history testifies to numerous benefits to humanity brought about by religious individuals and movements. But despite these positive outcomes might it be true, as some atheists aver, that religion in general does more harm than good? Is religion itself inherently toxic?

Or could it simply be that there is good religion and there is bad religion, and we just need to learn to tell the difference?

Rupert Shortt's investigation of these questions will encourage both believers and unbelievers to discard the lazy thinking and easy assumptions that so often disfigure the arguments on either side of this debate.

It will also facilitate a more sensitive, nuanced and honest approach to religious differences that today still lead to misunderstanding, hatred and violent conflict.

1

Grasping the question

The world swarms with self-appointed experts on religion. A leading sociologist such as David Martin has noted that few matters are as heatedly debated – and pronounced on at a moment’s notice – as the relationship between faith and culture. When I was invited to answer the question posed in the title of this book, responses from a gallery of figures in journalism, academia and on the street proved tellingly confident. Consider the following, which represents my own summaries of two widely held views.

Religion does more harm than good because it is based on dubious speculation, often imposed in authoritarian ways, about what cannot be known in principle. Since there are no earthly scales capable of weighing questions relating to our final source and destiny (if any), it is better to abandon a flawed project and get on with living a decent life in the here and now.

Religion does more good than harm because the major faiths set the experience of human beings – who are often selfish or destructive but also potentially noble – against a transcendent horizon. In this broader perspective believers can face the future with courage and hope, learning among much else that life is worth living responsibly, because it has ultimate meaning.

That religion does more harm than good is especially clear in our age of growing ‘endarkenment’. Blasphemy has re-emerged as a hot-button issue in the West, as well as less tolerant societies. It is not only enforced by Muslims who kill cartoonists and denounce Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of female genital mutilation, as a rabble-rouser. Toxic Islamists resemble the toxic Christians who were once as intolerant as any al-Qaeda or Daesh terrorist today. The sword has been the shadow of the cross for much of Christian history. Islam has its own variants of the Emperor Constantine’s notorious slogan in hoc signo vinces. And although they are the worst offenders by dint of their size and missionary thrust, the world’s two largest faiths are not a special case. The trouble really centres on religion as such – or the lion’s share of it. Right now, Hindu mobs are oppressing non-Hindus in South Asia for not sharing their outlook and thus not being ‘authentically’ Indian; Buddhists are displaying allied forms of chauvinism in Burma and Sri Lanka. Any reasonably open-minded person will grant that the great spiritual traditions preach worthy ideals for the most part. But they also create in-groups and out-groups by definition. So when faith isn’t directly responsible for poisoning the wells of discourse and public life, it can itself be poisoned by them. Land grabs, shrill nationalism and other mainly political evils become more pernicious still when sanctified by angry little gods. What’s more, false claims to infallibility come in many forms. In North America and Europe, the antics of no-platforming, trigger-warning thought police on social media represent religion transposed into a secular key. Trial by Twitter recalls the Salem witch hunts. Lastly, there is an unbridgeable chasm between religion and science.

That religion does more good than harm is especially clear in its status as our best hope in neo-pagan times. Almost all past societies have acknowledged and cultivated the spiritual dimension; for well over a century, scepticism about faith has fed a wider spurning of goodness, beauty and truth. Godless modern mores were not only seen in the horrors of Auschwitz, the gulag or Mao’s China. They are also reflected in moral relativism, crass consumerism, large-scale family breakdown, drug abuse and the sexualization of children. Opponents of faith should be careful what they wish for. The secular liberal state now claims more than its due, including the right to govern a citizen’s conscience and set norms as though the government were the only force in society that mattered. Authentic religion offers richer visions of a just humanity. The coarsening of what passes for debate both on and off the internet marks a further rejection of such visions. Much journalism misrepresents faith because it alights on today’s news at the expense of deeper currents. Reporters tell us about sudden volcanic eruptions, but not the steady, barely noticed irrigation supplied by underground streams. Humanity is not the measure of all things. The two pearls of greatest price in most people’s lives are love and happiness. Neither can be commodified; neither is to be attained directly. The best mapping of this mysterious terrain comes in the major religions. Of course they can be put to corrupt use. Faith is like fire: it warms, but it can also burn. And just like heat, spiritual allegiance contributes greatly to our flourishing under the right conditions. The benefits have been intellectual as well as social. Whatever hotheads on either side of the debate may think, claims of a genuine clash between religion and science are illusory.

These two sets of replies are of course sharply opposed. Other responses I heard are harder to categorize. A historian pointed out that religion is an aspect of culture, ‘so asking whether religion does more harm than good is as futile as asking the same question about culture’. John Lennon’s invitation to ‘imagine no religion’ thus betrays a basic misunderstanding of what religion is. You can guess at what the world might look like if Al Gore had become President of the United States, or Germany had won the First World War. But asking how things might be if religion (or culture) had never existed is a counterfactual speculation too far. This insight strikes me as crucial. Although I hope that what follows will shed light on the merits and drawbacks associated with spiritual belief, the elusiveness of my theme should be underlined at the start.

A Buddhist thought the answer simple: ‘It all depends on the practitioner. Faith can make good people ­better and bad people worse.’ A philosopher questioned whether there is any such thing as ‘religion’ outside the minds of opportunistic or maybe soft-headed ­public servants:

Religion in the abstract does not exist. No one apart from politicians voices allegiance to it. It’s just a catch-all term devised by eighteenth-century rationalists to label the superstitions of the vulgar masses who weren’t like them. The creeds of the major faiths are in any case mutually contradictory. So if any religion is true, then most religions are false.

A squadron of atheists told me in terms leaving no room for doubt that faith is profoundly harmful through fomenting violence as well as being a social and mental straitjacket. More than one quoted Pascal’s dictum that men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they act from religious conviction. Evidence for the prosecution in the continuing suit of secularism vs God is familiar: Galileo; the Inquisition; witch-burning; young-earth creationism; Christian anti-Judaism causing or feeding evils including the blood libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pogroms and the Holocaust; religiously based gender discrimination and homophobia; the melancholy stat­istic that Islamist fanatics are responsible for most global terrorism today; the arrogance and cruelty of so many missionaries (see the testimony of witnesses from Rousseau to Kipling to Lévi-Strauss), especially those convinced that unconverted ‘heathens’ would burn in hell for all eternity.

Lastly, a Christian theologian with an open-handed attitude to faith in general praised what she sees as the richest articulation of the human spirit:

Interest in the flourishing of all beings has been placed on the moral agenda of most religious trad­itions. It is religion which can promote the honing of virtue and offer the securest embedding of moral community. Alongside the humanist dimension, faith adds a rationale for commitment to freedom and dignity. Believers have come to see life as a freely bestowed gift, and so to open up to a calling from outside themselves to accept divine mercy and make it real for others.

Later in my exchange with the historian he added an important caveat, pointing out that religion is not an abstract noun. It involves sets of relationships between people who are typically agreed about basic beliefs, or at least some core set of commitments about ritual practice. Being a human practice, it can be used for good or ill. So can medicine, for that matter. There are doctors who have used their skill to help torturers do a better job.

These comments strike me as the shrewdest to have emerged from my straw poll. My agreement with the philosopher was more qualified. In one sense his insight was wholly valid. Viewed from a wide angle as it has unfolded over millennia, religion is certainly very hard to define. It would include rites in the ancient world, such as animal and human sacrifice, employed as forms of scapegoating. But to dwell at any length in such territory during a brief overview would be eccentric. We are here concerned with global faiths that have produced major bodies of critical thought, and with markers given by the sociology of religion, which sees its subject as involving an apprehension and symbolic representation of sacred or non-ordinary reality. Scholars in this field remind us that human beings do not merely investigate the natural world at a scientific level. We also seek to make sense of our lives via all sorts of evolutionary adaptations – agriculture, dance, literature – that have emerged from animal play, animal empathy, ritual and myth, during a long history of tribal societies without much sense of the beyond, through supernatural king-god monarchies, to more recent societies with their religions of value transcending the brute givens of existence.

With this arc in mind, we might point up developments during the first millennium bce. Whether or not one accepts the term ‘Axial Age’ to encompass this period, it can nevertheless be described as transformational. The ideal was contrasted with the real; visionary horizons of hope were set against the frus­trations of the everyday world. Though expressed in different idioms across the world, the quest for transcendence – a higher dimension of reality embodying more exalted values – arose in China, through reflection on the way of nature; in India, through worldly renunciation; in Israel, through prophetic denunciation; and in Greece, through theoretical reflection and the quest for wisdom.

Critics (including those who would kick away the apparently superfluous spiritual ladders that have raised us to the branches we now perch on) may neverthele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• DOES RELIGION DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD?
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Grasping the question
• 2 Spiritual paths in theory and practice
• 3 Bad faith, good faith
• Notes
• Index