A God of One's Own

Religion's Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence

Ulrich Beck, Rodney Livingstone

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745646190, 9780745646183
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant. The New Testament says: 'We are all equal in the sight of God'. To be sure, this equality applies only to those who acknowledge God's existence. What this means is that alongside the abolition of class and nation within the community of believers, religion introduces a new fundamental distinction into the world the distinction between the right kind of believers and the wrong kind. Thus overtly or tacitly, religion brings with it the demonization of believers in other faiths.

The central question that will decide the continued existence of humanity is this: How can we conceive of a type of inter-religious tolerance in which loving one's neighbor does not imply war to the death, a type of tolerance whose goal is not truth but peace?

Is what we are experiencing at present a regression of monotheistic religion to a polytheism of the religious spirit under the heading of 'a God of one's own'? In Western societies, where the autonomy of the individual has been internalized, individual human beings tend to feel increasingly at liberty to tell themselves little faith stories that fit their own lives to appoint 'Gods of their own'. However, this God of their own is no longer the one and only God who presides over salvation by seizing control of history and empowering his followers to be intolerant and use naked force.

1
The Diary of a ‘God of One's Own’
Etty Hillesum: An Unsociological Introduction

Is it possible to begin a book with a confession of failure? Yes, it is possible and, in this instance, essential, even though the irony implicit in the question is unmistakable, since the question contains its own answer. Nor is it an expression of arrogance (as some readers may perhaps surmise); it is not a frivolous game with one's own limitations and blind spots. No doubt, a certain metaphysical ingenuousness is needed to coin the glib phrase a ‘God of one's own’ and to ‘expound’ it (whatever that might mean). In principle, however, the sphere of religion relates to that of sociology like fire to the water that puts it out.

As a sociologist with a firm belief in the redemptive power of sociological enlightenment, I have the idiom of secularism in my blood. The premise of secularism – more specifically, the idea that with the advance of modernization, religion will automatically disappear – cannot simply be expunged from sociological thinking, not even if that prognosis were to be refuted by history. It is for this reason that the contents of religious beliefs, with their – relatively – autonomous force and reality, their visions of a different humanity and their power to make whole worlds tremble, are so rarely exposed in their full ambivalence to the gaze of sociology. Sociologists are more concerned to demonstrate that even though rain-dancing Indians produce no rain with their dance, they successfully ‘interact’, because their dance has the ‘function’ of contributing towards the ‘integration’ of the group. However, such an approach tells us absolutely nothing about the whys and the wherefores of the cultural productivity and destructiveness of religious belief.

In sociology such lacunae are regarded not as defects, but as proof of scientific integrity. The discipline concerns itself with only one half of such basic religious distinctions as that between creator and creation, eternity and time, the next world and this one. Even if sociologists do not deny the depth and power of religious feelings, they refuse to accept that religious phenomena must be understood and explained in religious terms. Instead, they establish a ‘methodological secularism’, according to which religious phenomena are primarily seen as having social causes and functions. And that is as it should be: it satisfies the sceptical scientific mind.

However, such a view is in conformity with the process of secularization. It makes visible its own leading idea: the de-mystification of the religious sphere. And it renders invisible and incomprehensible something that increasingly determines reality, namely the re-mystification of reality by religion. Hence it is not necessary to be religious but merely to think consistently in sociological terms to be subject to doubts about whether the a-religious or anti-religious tendency of sociological scepticism is best suited to decoding not just the religious significance of a ‘God of one's own’, but its social and political power as well. Thus the present book sets out on what is doubtless a vain quest for an alliance of fire and water – in the service of both: that is to say, of sociology's claims to knowledge and perhaps also of religion's own self-understanding.

Etty Hillesum

In her diary Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman from the Netherlands, left a record of the ‘God of her own’ she had sought and found. Her handwritten diary entries start in March 1941 and end in October 1943. At the beginning of her diary the young woman leads the life of an ordinary citizen, although her very existence is threatened by the racist delusions of National Socialism. As her outward life became increasingly confined, Etty Hillesum progressively turned her gaze inwards. She read Rilke, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, St Augustine and, again and again, the Bible. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, the conversation with herself turned into a conversation with God. Etty Hillesum even developed a special style for speaking to God. She talks to God as if talking to herself. She speaks to Him directly without a trace of self-consciousness. Self-discovery and the discovery of God, finding herself and finding God, inventing herself and inventing God – all merge naturally into one. Her ‘own’ God is not the God of the synagogues or the churches or the ‘believers’, as distinct from the ‘unbelievers’. ‘Her’ God knows nothing of heresy, the Crusades, and the unspeakable cruelties of the Inquisition, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, or of the mass murders of religiously motivated terrorism. Her God is free from theology and dogma; He is blind to history and, perhaps for that very reason, merciful and helpless. She says, ‘When I pray, I never pray for myself, but always for others, or else I carry on a crazy or childlike or deadly serious dialogue with whatever is profoundest in me and which for simplicity's sake I call God’ (Hillesum 1981: 165).

What is needed is the viewpoint of a sociology of religion that does justice to this subjective dimension of the religious – even if establishing such a yardstick makes failure unavoidable. Historians have discovered religious biographies and autobiographies and other works of testimony that have proved to be documents of extraordinary revelatory power, and so it may well be meaningful to allow one such work of testimony to speak for itself and then to interpret it.

11 July 1942, Saturday morning, 11 o'clock. We can really only speak of the ultimate and the deepest things of life if the words well up inside us as simply and naturally as water from a spring. And if God does not help me to go on, I shall have to help God. The whole surface of the earth is gradually turning into one vast prison camp from which few escape. It is a phase we have to get through. The Jews here are telling one another some weird stories: that in Germany people are being buried alive or exterminated by poison gas. What is the point of passing such stories on, even if they turn out to have some truth in them?

… I know that I shall cope with whatever happens, all by myself and that my heart will not be paralysed by the bitterness of it all, but that even the moments of deepest grief and black despair will leave fruitful traces in me and will finally make me stronger. I do not deceive myself about the actual situation and have even given up any pretence that I'm trying to help other people. I shall always strive to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in that, well, I shall be able to help others as well. But it would be wrong to have any heroic illusions about that either.

I wonder what I would really do if I held the summons to be deported to Germany in my hands and had to leave in a week's time. Just imagine that the summons came tomorrow, what would I do then? To begin with, I wouldn't tell a soul; I would retreat to the quietest corner of the house and try to gather all my physical and psychological energies together. I would have my hair cut short and I would throw my lipstick away. I would try to finish reading the Rilke letters that same week. I would have a pair of trousers and a jacket made out of the heavy coat material I have left over. … I would take the Bible with me as well as the two slim volumes of Letters to a Young Poet – and The Book of Hours,¹ surely there would be room for them in a corner of my rucksack? I would not take any photos of my loved ones but shall keep the images of their faces and gestures in the most secret corners of my mind, so that they will always be with me. … And even if I do not come out alive, how I die will say something about who I really am. It's no longer a question of keeping out of a particular situation, come what may, but rather with how I would conduct myself in any given situation and then go on living. …

Sunday morning prayer. Dear God, these are terrible times. Last night was the first time I lay there sleeplessly in the dark with burning eyes, as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I promise You one thing, God, just one small thing: I shall not let my fears for the morrow weigh heavy on today, but that does take some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall help You not to abandon me, God, but I cannot vouch for it in advance. One thing alone is becoming ever clearer to me: You cannot help us, but we have to help You, and only in that way will we end up helping ourselves. The only thing that matters is to safeguard a piece of You in us, God. Perhaps we can help You to enter into the tormented hearts of other people. Dear God, You do not seem able to influence circumstances very much; they are just all part of the life we have. I do not hold You responsible. In the time to come You will call us to account. And almost every heartbeat tells me that You cannot help us, but that we must help You and defend Your dwelling place in our innermost being to the last. It is true that there are people, there really are people, who at the very last moment want to rescue their vacuum cleaner and their silverware, instead of safeguarding You, dear God. And there are people who want only to rescue their own bodies, although these are nothing more than a shelter for a thousand fears and bitter feelings. And they say, ‘I shan't let them get me into their clutches. But they forget that we are in no one's clutches if we are in Your arms. I am gradually starting to calm down again, God, thanks to this conversation with You. I shall soon have many conversations with You in the hope of preventing You from abandoning me. You will probably also have some lean times with me, God, times in which my faith fails to nourish You, but believe me, I shall always labour for You and remain faithful to You and I shall not drive You from my heart.

Dear God, I feel I have sufficient strength to endure great, heroic sufferings; what frightens me are the thousand little everyday cares that sometimes attack us like some noxious vermin. Well then, I'll just scratch myself a little in my despair and tell myself every day: I have taken care of today, the protective walls of a hospitable home still surround me like a familiar, well-worn item of clothing. I still have enough to eat for today and the bed with white sheets and warm blankets awaits me at night. So don't let me waste even a spark of energy worrying about my own petty material cares. Let me make use of every minute of the day and enjoy it, let me make it a fruitful day, a sturdy stone in the foundations on which to support the wretched, anxious days of the future.

The jasmine behind the house is quite bedraggled from the rain and the storms of recent days, the white blossoms are floating in the muddy black puddles on the low garage roof. But somewhere inside me the jasmine goes on blooming, as lush and delicate as ever. And its perfume wafts around the house in which You dwell within me, dear God. As You see, I take good care of You. I bring You not just my tears and my fears on this grey, stormy Sunday morning; I even bring You sweet-scented jasmine. I shall bring You all the flowers I find on my path, and there will be many of them. You shall be as comfortable as possible in my care. To give just one example, if I were to be shut up in some cell or other and a little cloud were to float past the barred window, I would bring You that cloud, dear God, at any rate, I would as long as I still had the strength. I cannot guarantee anything, but my intentions are the very best, as You can see. And now I shall surrender to this day. I shall meet many people today, and the many evil rumours and threats will press in on me like so many enemy soldiers storming an impregnable fortress. …

I should like one day to be the chronicler of our fate. I must forge a new language for these events and store them within me for when I no longer have the opportunity to write anything down. My feelings will be dulled, but I shall spring back to life; I shall fall over and pick myself up again. Much later on, I shall perhaps succeed in finding a quiet space that belongs only to me and there I shall remain, even if it takes years, until life springs up in me again and the words come to me to enable me to bear witness to the things to which witness has to be borne. Four o'clock in the afternoon: the day has turned out quite differently from what I expected. …

The misery is truly great and yet in the evenings, when the day has faded away behind me, I often run around beside the barbed wire with a spring in my step, and I find my heart overflowing – I can't help it, that is simply the way it is, I just cannot contain myself: there is something so great and splendid about life. Later on, we shall have to build a world all over again and we shall have to produce a small portion of love and kindness from within ourselves to counter every new crime and every new act of cruelty. We may indeed suffer, but we must not crack up. And if we survive this age intact, intact in body and soul, above all in soul, without bitterness, without hatred, then, once the war is over, we shall have the right to have our say. Perhaps I am an ambitious woman. I should like to have my say, however small. … One would like to be a plaster on many wounds. (Ibid.: 154, 155, 159–61, 178, 224)

Perhaps we are moved by the utter childlike earnestness of this individual, intimate, dialogical voice because Etty Hillesum expresses and embodies things that appear entirely incompatible. Instead of hatred for the persecutors, trust in her own God. She, even she, faces destruction, she suspects it; we know it. Nevertheless, she writes, ‘And if we survive this age intact, intact in body and soul, above all in soul, without bitterness, without hatred, then, once the war is over, we shall have the right to have our say. Perhaps I am an ambitious woman. I should like to have my say, however small.’

Completely helpless in the face of catastrophe, she notes with the victim's lack of guile, but repudiating her role as victim, ‘One would like to be a plaster on many wounds.’ Caught up in an utterly hopeless situation, she denies that the victims' situation is hopeless and restores their dignity of action. ‘… we shall have to produce a small portion of love and kindness from within ourselves to counter every new crime and every new act of cruelty. We may indeed suffer, but we must not crack up’ (ibid.: 224).

Etty Hillesum was Jewish but she grew up in a family in which Jewishness played no role at all. It was as a Jewess that she was deported to a concentration camp and killed, but she did not accept Jewish identity. Nor, however, did she convert to Christianity. Etty Hillesum experienced and practised a radical version of a God of her own choosing. No synagogue, no church, no religious community. Was Etty Hillesum a non-Jew in her lifetime and a Jew in her death?

Even when imprisoned in the camp, Etty was present without belonging. The metaphor she uses to describe her situation is ‘shipwreck’. Drowning people jostle each other to grab hold of a piece of driftwood in the endless expanse of the ocean.

And then it is everyone for themselves, push the others away and let them drown. All that is so unworthy and I don't care for pushing anyway. I suppose I am the kind of person who would rather drift along in the ocean on my back, with my eyes raised towards he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: The Diary of a ‘God of One's Own’: Etty Hillesum: An Unsociological Introduction
• 2: The Return of the Gods and the Crisis of European Modernity: A Sociological Introduction
• 3: Tolerance and Violence: The Two Faces of the Religions
• 4: Heresy or the Invention of a ‘God of One's Own’
• 5: The Irony of Unintended Consequences: How to Civilize Global Religious Conflicts: Five Models
• 6: Peace Instead of Truth? The Futures of the Religions in the World Risk Society
• Bibliography
• Index