Theology and Religion

Why It Matters

Graham Ward

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509529728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Graham Ward argues that the study of theology and religion, as a single academic discipline, plays a vital role in helping us to understand politics, world affairs, and the nature of humanity itself. Religion can be used to justify inhumane actions, but it also feeds dreams, inspires hopes, and shapes aspirations. By invoking a sense of wonder about the natural world, religion can promote scientific discoveries, and by focusing on shared experiences, religion helps to bind societies together. Some scientists now believe that religious feeling might be hard-wired into our DNA, a fundamental aspect of what makes us human. Because religion is rooted in the imagination itself, its study involves staring into the profundities of who we are. Religion will not go away, so it needs to be understood.

1
A Millennial Age

Many students today choose to study theology and religion because they want to understand something about the world they live in; a world in which religion has such a constant media presence. For those in the West who undertake this study, this is a ‘Millennial’ or ‘Generation Y’ world: the world as it is experienced by those between the ages of seventeen and twenty-nine or those born between the late 1980s and 2001. Millennial dates are flexible, but the world these individuals have entered is in complex flux and that complexity has to be adapted to and, as much as it possible, regulated. It is a world of red, apocalyptic presentiments and orange, futuristic promises.

It is not the world I was born into where a man or a woman left college and started a profession and worked their way up to as far they aspired or had the talent for or the luck to reach. Many of my generation were upwardly mobile, bought their homes, and could afford to take early retirement. Pensions were secure and secured. With prudence and savings a last stage of life could be planned and, for many, the plans worked out. Mine was a property-owning generation, and even though many were caught in the easy credit available until the banks crashed (2008), many others grew up with a post-war aversion to credit and an obsession with putting aside for a rainy day. My generation sits on stockpiled assets that others will inherit, use well, or squander.

Millennials, by contrast, have no such job security – technological advances move so fast that training and retraining is perpetual, and likewise the skills for employment. There are jobs in the future few of us can guess the shape of and demand for. Millennials will rarely have a single career trajectory. Their savings are thin, their college debts deep, and retirement is a dream at least fifty years in the blue-sky distance. It’s a dream that they are not over-convinced they or the human race will ever realize. They scan their social media headlines, sorting the fake from the true, and because they live the globalization that has been creeping up on all of us since colonization, they know they will not be unaffected by a nuclear war in the far-flung east, the rise in sea-levels as the polar ice melts, the depletion of oil resources or the effervescence of Middle Eastern politics. They read the signs of the time well, but their optimism for the future waxes and wanes depending upon whether they get wellpaid jobs with prospects or a place on the property ladder or they party with friends. Friends are more important than family. What is uppermost, as far as attainment is concerned, is some stable years of a chosen life-style. And they travel, like their restless Homo erectus descendants.

And into this fluid, fast-paced, pop-up mix emerges religion – frequently emotionally frothed like a macchiato, vivacious, and calling attention to itself with its hard-headed, even violent, selfassertiveness. It’s not one thing. But it’s everywhere. Viral. The situation is not quite as new as some think. The debate still is out on how deep or superficial secularism (often understood as the same as atheism) really is. It’s not a world-wide phenomenon. In Britain the decline in church attendance, for example, occurred only in the 1960s and was both paralleled and outrun by the decline in the participation in other institutions, from boy scouts to trade unions and political parties. The situation is new if you believed that Western progress meant the decline and disappearance of religion. Secularism was and remains a bureaucratic ideal. It’s a way of governing people by providing a common denominator, a default position: we choose what we want to believe in. It became, for some, a mindset.

Secularism

All university programmes in the study of theology and religion provide a foundational year offering a series of ‘Introductions to …’ that enable students to orientate themselves in the discipline: an introduction to various world faiths, for example; an introduction to the languages of those faiths and their sacred texts; and an introduction to how we approach and interpret both those practices of religious piety in their historical and ritual settings, and the various forms they have taken over the centuries. How we approach and make sense of religious things in theology and religion is often called ‘methodology’, and in the first year familiarization with any number of ‘isms and ologies’ is necessary: secularism, atheism, agnosticism, existentialism, on the one hand; ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, mythology, on the other. But ‘secularism’ is a good place to start because it is often understood as ‘anti-religious’. That’s not how the ‘ism’ began and it’s not what the French government, with their constitutionally enshrined principle of laïcité, believe the enforcement of that principle amounts to. The French government believed they were protecting the public sphere from Roman Catholic bigotry, exclusivism, and preferential privilege. But, as will be increasingly observed, there is a difference between an idea (or, for the French, a policy) and its reception.

The modern development of secularism was born in the West. It’s a Western notion primarily, taken up and adapted elsewhere – and often criticized elsewhere for being imperial and Eurocentric. It was born from a particular historical set of circumstances that brought ravaging wars in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that are often labelled ‘religious’ because positions were consolidated around Catholicism and Protestantism. But the power grabs of princes and the emergence of the nation state, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the advancement in new technologies (like printing) were all part of a potent cultural cocktail.

The Wars of Religion offer an early insight into the complex affiliations between religion and politics, and the mobilizing power of religious conviction. Somewhere between 3 and 11 million people lost their lives in the Thirty Years War over the Holy Roman Empire (1618–48); between 2 and 4 million people lost their lives in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98); and around 185,000 people lost their lives either in combat or in war-related diseases in the English Civil War (1642–51). Europe had not been so devastated since the Black Death (1346–53).

A separation of church and state was called for as various edicts of toleration were drawn up by governments and came into effect. A new organization of society was needed where religion might withdraw from open view, become interiorized, and be made a personal choice. A new political space was created: the public realm. It was a space increasingly buzzing with the free market in opinion, and legislated by the parliamentary state. It was an ideal; a bureaucratic ideal. It was never fully realized, and there were complex relations between thrones, altars, and elected representatives to governing bodies. But along with the development and increasing acceptance of human rights (for centuries more accurately the rights of man), the stability of a new order in Europe was slowly established, taking longer in some countries (like Germany and Italy) than in others (Britain and Holland).

The bureaucratic ideal was first exported to what is now known as the United States in the eighteenth century. As colonial expansion inflated, it was made quite clear in the territories annexed abroad that their subjugated peoples were neither competent to wield the power of the state nor human enough to be given ‘rights’. But that is another story – taught today as part of courses in post-colonialism, world Christianities, and liberation theologies.

As a bureaucratic ideal, secularism sought to foster inclusivity, even multiculturalism. Bigotry and intolerance, however, lay just beneath the legal tarmacking – against Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Roman Catholics; against people of colour (as if being ‘white’ wasn’t a colour), gays, and women. But the ideal was established and increasingly encoded in civil and sometimes constitutional law. It gained in attraction because it offered what was much needed after the Wars of Religion: social peace. Social peace facilitated nation-building. And to dismiss the benefits of secularism, for the West, would be a little like the reply given in Monty Python’s Life of Brian to the dissident who demands to know, ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’

But, gradually, as the secularization thesis gained ground after the Second World War, secularism became something more than a bureaucratic ideal. It became a culture in which it was believed that notions of ‘God’ would be left behind – at least in Western Europe, and most particularly in France. Spain, Italy, and Austria remained somewhat recalcitrant. Despite the First Amendment to the Constitution – ‘the United States Constitution prevents Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion’ – the US has remained a predominantly Christian country. Outside Western Europe, the bureaucratic ideal of secularism gets played out very differently, and not at all securely. When countries like India, Tunisia, Turkey, and Egypt (to name only a few) talk about ‘secular government’, this is, to employ a phrase by Naser Ghobadzadeh, ‘religious secularity’. That is, the government is inclusive with respect to all persons but committed to maintaining the importance of religious opinion in the public sphere.¹

The Secular Imagination

In becoming more than a bureaucratic ideal, secularism fostered a certain culture in the West. ‘Culture’ is likely to be another word that the foundational year of any course in the study of theology and religion will examine. If what we call ‘society’ is a group of people (and we’re talking very generally here), then ‘culture’ can be understood as the way that people express themselves – from the clothes they wear and the films they make, to the practices they develop and perform to the buildings they design. All the practices and the makings involve the use of symbols, though some of the symbolic force involved may now be diluted to the point of not being apparent at all.

When we examine literature or painting or even billboard advertising, it’s obvious we are decoding symbols – language, images, colours, and designed depiction. But washing your hands before a meal? At a time of increased awareness of bacterial infection and superbugs, and the ways they can be transmitted, it may now seem like a good hygienic practice. But behind it lies an ancient purification rite of entering a sacred place having bathed first, and a whole set of hidden ideas about dirt and where it belongs. It’s a practice that marks the end of one kind of collective activity (labouring), even a certain time of the day, and the start of a very different collective activity (eating). It often demarcates outside activity (in the fields) from inside activity (in the house). We can call it a ‘liturgy’ because it’s bound by certain unspoken rules, values, and social expectations. We are creatures of habit; habit saves space in our short-term memories.

On the other hand, some ways of doing things are evidently and consciously more symbolic – like laying a wreath of poppies at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, or welcoming a new neighbour with a gift of bread, salt, and oil (often found in Mediterranean countries), or even dressing up for Halloween.

Religious cultures are rich in liturgical traditions, and flamboyant in their use of symbols. In fact, religious cultures are dependent upon symbols for their identities and continuation: codes of dress, ways of behaving (and not behaving), foods enjoyed (and foods forbidden), their use of water or oil or wine or fruit, and, most prominently, the architectures and furnishings of the sacred buildings where their most important rituals take place. If the Jews have their scrolls, then the Christians have their cross and the Muslims their crescent. I once had a student who told me he learnt most of his understanding of the wide variety of Christian theologies that were possible as an altar server watching the way different priests dressed and approached the celebration of a liturgy like the mass or a baptism. ‘Some bowed and kissed, elevated and genuflected. For others it was a more like a lesson in cookery or the hospitable laying out of a meal.’ These symbolic activities also serve to mark divisions in the year (with feasts and festivals) and divisions across a lifetime (from initiations of belonging to burial).

If, in the ascendance of secularism, fewer people participated in these religious rites or chose when to participate and when not to, then secularism was not lacking its own symbolic cultures. It invented its own ‘liturgies’ and its own ‘traditions’. Charles Dickens and Victorian Britons cultivated the Christmas most of us are familiar with. They invented most of the foods we associate today (in the northern hemisphere) with Christmas. Much of what goes for the frills and trimmings of Christmas has been driven by commerce and is only loosely now associated with a religious festival in the Christian calendar. There’s very little in A Christmas Carol, other than the word ‘carol’ itself, which is religious. But the story has retained a moral tone and features ghosts and spirits of various kinds, even though the cultural imagination behind it is infused with secular humanism.

First-year students are often asked what they consider religious, and the answers can be wideranging. The question is a way of getting them to think about what the term might mean and where religion might be found. And it’s surprising how, in their responses, its Latin roots (religare – to bind...