The Case for Religion

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781780746708
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

A brilliant and accessible rebuttal of The God Delusion from one of Christianity's most incisive thinkers

In this, his first new book since the best-selling God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oneworld, 2002), Keith Ward turns his attention to the role - and the validity of religion over the centuries and in the world today. His erudite yet informative and factual narrative outlines the various attempts that have been made throughout history to explain religion, including the anthropological, psychological, sociological and philosophical theories of key thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Sigmund Freud. Adopting a comparative approach, the book covers all the religious traditions from West and East alike, concluding in a compelling manner that not only are the world faiths much more than a series of theoretical perspectives, but that, in the face of discord and violence, religious understanding retains more resonance than ever before within our global community.

PART I

RELIGION DEFINED AND EXPLAINED

1

RELIGION AND THE TRANSCENDENT

In Search of a Definition

It is very difficult to know what religion is. That does not stop people being vehemently for it, or against it. But it turns out that they are often for or against very different things. And when it comes to defining religion, almost anything goes.

Many colleges in America and Europe have courses on ‘Religion’. These courses usually start with a lecture entitled ‘What is Religion?’ After running through a few dozen definitions, the lecturer almost invariably concludes that nobody knows what religion is, or is even sure that there is such a thing. The courses continue to be called courses on religion, however, because that sounds better than having a course entitled, ‘I do not know what I am talking about’.

The problem became clear when, in the 2001 government census in Britain, thousands of people put down their religious affiliation as ‘Jedi Knight’. This is not quite as absurd as it might sound. Jedi Knights wear funny clothes, are in close contact with an invisible Force, and often pronounce platitudes with great profundity. Is that enough to make this a religion? If it is a religion, it has great tax advantages. But how can we decide? Could my grandmother get tax exemption if she started a new religion in her living-room? What about Scientologists, pagans, Druids and X-files devotees?

In recent years many scholars, both in anthropology and in social and cultural studies, have queried whether ‘religion’ is an appropriate or even an identifiable subject of study. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, in The Meaning and End of Religion, argued that the concept of religion is ‘recent, Western-and-Islamic, and unstable’, and that the term should be dropped.¹ It is recent, because in Europe the word ‘religion’ at first meant the observance of ritual regulations. Later it most often meant ‘piety’ or ‘worship’. So to be religious was to be pious, and ‘true religion’ was, in Augustine for instance, true piety or devotion. However, in the seventeenth century, Cantwell Smith argues, the word ‘religion’ came to have a new meaning, of a system of doctrines, and ‘true religion’ came to mean the true set of doctrines. This, he suggests, makes religion into a matter of having correct beliefs, whereas it should be, and usually was before the seventeenth century, a matter of personal faith and experience.

The term ‘religion’ is Western, he goes on to say, because a great many cultures, such as the Chinese or Indian, do not have a word for ‘religion’, and so the word does not quite capture what they do when they are being religious. Finally, the term ‘religion’ is unstable, because it can mean so many different things, and it deceives people into asking useless questions such as ‘What is the essence of religion?’ When they ask that question, they either come up with something suspiciously like what they themselves believe or, if they are atheists, something that is obviously ridiculous. Either way, the question is simply not profitable, and we should stop asking it.

What Cantwell Smith objects to is labelling a whole lot of different things in very different cultures ‘religions’. Then each religion is seen as a total isolated system, which competes with others, and is a fixed entity whose essence is clear, precise and exclusive. This, he says, turns a matter of living faith into a set of abstract, ‘frozen’ doctrines, as though there were a number of ‘religions’, each with a fixed essence. He recommends that we should speak instead of many cumulative traditions, which are always in flux, always changing, and closely intermingled with their own histories and cultures. We can separate this from the lived experience of faith, of personal relation to the Transcendent. He hoped, when he wrote the book in 1962, that we might have stopped using the word ‘religion’ by the year 1987. Like most prophecies, this one has turned out to be completely false – and he himself helped to make it false by calling his book The Meaning and End of Religion, and writing it so well that it was still on sale well after 1987. There is something slightly paradoxical about a book about religion, the argument of which is that no one should write books about religion any more.

It is an excellent book, and its main argument, with which I wholly agree, and which this book also tries to advocate, is that we should not view religions as discrete and fixed sets of competing doctrines. We should pay close attention to many faiths, seeing each one as a dynamic, fluid and culturally influenced complex, the heart of which is a living personal quality of faith in a transcendent reality. The irony is that, in saying this, Cantwell Smith is precisely advocating a view of what the ‘essence of religion’ is, as distinct from its many cultural forms. He is not at all saying that there is no such thing as religion.

Other writers, usually anthropologists, have argued that it is artificial to separate religion from the general cultural life of a society. We may speak of the beliefs and practices of various cultures, and the way they change in response to new environmental and economic pressures and opportunities. But cultures are very diverse, and it is not helpful to invent general categories into which we try to force this diversity.

It could be argued that it was only when Christendom began to break up that writers such as Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648) started to speak of ‘natural religion’, an essence that underlies all particular revelations. Religion, for Edward Herbert, consists of five innate ideas: the existence of God, the duties of worship, of moral conduct, and of repentance for sin, and the existence of rewards and punishments after death.²

Thus the word ‘religion’ comes, at a particular point in European history, to stand for an essential nature which is supposed to express the common truth of the many diverse religions, whose particular revelations are all in fact false (except for Christianity, whose essence happens to represent the truth most adequately, according to the European thought at that time). This essence, however, may seem to be only the skeleton of decayed Christian faith. The emphasis on God, on the moral nature of religion, and on final judgement, is what remains of Christianity when its most distinctive dogmas of Trinity, incarnation and atonement have been left behind.

So ‘religion’ became established in Europe as a post-Christian, minimal notion, allegedly founded on pure reason, which could be used as a criterion in the light of which all particular religions could be found wanting, especially those of foreign, heathen lands. This idea of religion supported the ideology of growing European colonialism, in its mission to bring primitive and savage races under the benevolent shade of civilisation (and to subjugate them economically in the process).

Thus seen, the use of the term ‘religion’ becomes part of a colonising process, by which all people are persuaded or forced to use a term that subsumes their own culture and belief-system under a European pattern. That in turn subtly undermines their belief-system, by transmuting it into one among many competing ‘religions’, whose true inner essence turns out to be just that recommended by the colonial powers of liberal democracy. The European colonisation of the savage mind triumphs when religions become options to be freely chosen, and options which in the end must be judged by criteria of reason which in fact embody the bourgeois, liberal, aristocratic morality of capitalist Europe.³

There is just enough truth in all this to make any European, and any American too, rather uncomfortable. It is, however, difficult to see what positive alternative is being recommended. It could be that each culture must be studied strictly as a whole on its own terms, without trying to subsume it under general global categories of explanation. But that would be to make any cross-cultural understanding impossible or at least undesirable. The study of religion would be subsumed under Cultural Studies, or it would perhaps disappear as a politically incorrect subject, which had always disguised a liberal secularising agenda for sanctioning the superiority of the West.

Ironically, it could be argued that Cantwell Smith himself, the advocate of the end of the concept of ‘religion’, falls prey to the charge of cultural imperialism. He states that the many cumulative traditions are grounds for individual faith in Transcendence. But in using the concept of ‘Transcendence’, he is focusing attention on a supernatural reality and on the possibility of personal experience of it. A critic could say that he is using what is precisely a liberal, post-Christian term to characterise what he sees as a universal object of human belief. Whereas Lord Herbert had spoken of an innate idea of God, Cantwell Smith goes further in denuding the religious object of content, and is left with the bare idea of ‘the Transcendent’. He has thereby left all particular religious traditions behind – none of them worship just the Transcendent. Yet he retains a minimal content, for ‘the Transcendent’ is that which is beyond and greater than the immanent or the everyday. Thereby he is picking out precisely what he thinks is central to religion. He is himself, an unfriendly critic could say, continuing the secularising liberal programme of viewing religion as a discrete cultural option, suggesting that its real essence is so vague as to be without significant social impact, and thus downgrading all specific revelations in favour of a cultivated, reasonable, tolerant and voluntaristic view of religion as one cultural activity among others, for those who like that sort of thing. The ideology of the West has triumphed, even in the work of one of its chief critics!

DEFENDING ‘RELIGION’

In response to such criticism, it must be agreed that speaking of ‘the Spiritual’ or ‘the Supernatural’ is vague, and that no actual object of worship is identified simply by that term. But it by no means follows that it must therefore be a decayed remnant of some full-blooded religious belief, much less a Christian one. Any observer, from any culture, looking at the huge variety of human beliefs and practices throughout the world, will naturally be led to see that his or her own beliefs are just one selection from a great number of actual beliefs. That will at once suggest that they should not just be taken for granted, as obvious to everyone. They should be compared with differing beliefs of the same sort, to see what sorts of justification they might have, or what accounts for such differences. This is not simply what happens in a specifically Western culture. It is what will happen to any reflective observer in any culture who takes note of what humans in general believe and do.

For such comparative study to take place, we have to determine what we shall count as ‘beliefs of the same sort’. A Christian could talk about differing beliefs in an incarnate God, but that would cover a relatively small range of extant human beliefs. So, like Edward Herbert, one could extend the range by talking about beliefs in God in general. We now know, as he did not appreciate, that many humans have beliefs in a supreme spiritual reality, which they do not know as ‘God’. We can extend the range further, and in doing so we gain more knowledge about the varieties of human thought. We may also gain more understanding of and respect for sorts of beliefs that at first seem very different from ours.

There is no reason why understanding should lead to the subsumption of other beliefs as inferior versions of categories we invent. Indeed, we might change our categories precisely because we see that other beliefs discern aspects of things that we have missed, and we might wish to embrace those aspects under some wider term. That is in fact what Cantwell Smith was trying to do in using the term ‘Transcendence’, and what earlier thinkers such as Schleiermacher and Max Müller had done by using terms such as ‘the Infinite’. They may think that their own faith is actually the most adequate conceptualisation of Transcendence. But anyone, from any tradition, is free to think that. It does not detract from the attempt to find a more general term that will express a genuine interest in, a taking account of, and a due respect for, beliefs that differ from our own, but have some important analogy with ours. Once we have put a term like ‘the Transcendent’ or ‘the Spiritual’ into currency, we can call ‘religions’ those sets of beliefs and practices that attempt to relate human thought, experience and practice to the alleged referent of that term.

This is in one sense a liberalising move. It moves from thinking that my local set of beliefs defines what ‘religion’ is, to seeing a whole set of analogous beliefs throughout the world as widening and extending an understanding of the object of religion. But this does not mean that the term ‘religion’ is a decayed post-Christian, Western or secularising concept. It need not attempt to pervert local cultures by forcing them to conform to Western imperialist models. On the contrary, it is a term which expresses the desire to see very diverse cultural views not as entirely alien (and therefore possibly as ‘sub-human’), but as alternative models of the same world we inhabit, which have the capacity to evoke insights which we may well lack. Herbert was not wrong in speaking of ‘religion’. If he was wrong, it was in his limited view of what religion was. It was precisely because he was unaware of many of the spiritual traditions of humanity that his ‘essentialist’ view failed to capture the flexibility and vitality of the phenomenon of religion.

It may be that anyone who seriously studies a number of religions with respect and sympathy will become less inclined to think that adherence to one religion should be compulsory, or that all its beliefs are quite obviously true. We might come to have a broader and more nuanced interpretation of what revelation is. But that is to say simply that increased knowledge does clearly change beliefs. It ought to produce intellectual virtues, and it is a good thing if it does. The study of religion should produce self-criticism as much as, or more than, criticism of others. There is no disguised liberal agenda, unless one thinks that you have to be a liberal to have sympathetic knowledge and understanding of the beliefs and practices of others. But that is surely not the case.

When people argue that religion cannot be defined at all, they often appeal to Wittgenstein’s analogy of ‘family resemblances’. People may be members of the same family, though they have no one thing in common, but may resemble each other in a number of different ways – some have the same big noses, some big ears, some blue eyes, but none of them looks just like the others. So we might call something a ‘religion’ if it has a sufficient number of resemblances to other things we call ‘religions’, even though we cannot get one definite feature that is found in every case.

This is not in fact a refusal to define religion, however. It is a definition in terms of a set of central features, which is extendable if further resemblances become important. What we want to know is why we should want to group these sets of resemblances together under some one term, ‘religion’. In the case of families, the crucial factor is genetic relationship, or upbringing within a particular social group. We want to speak of ‘families’ because we want to establish special duties of care, or formulate rules of inheritance and responsibility. Is there any such factor in the case of religion? Is there any reason for grouping things together as ‘religions’? And is there any reason for picking out specific sorts of resemblance as relevant to this?

One main reason is the desire to say that all, or most, humans have similar basic intellectual and emotive drives, and that one of these drives is the desire to relate to a transcendent reality, or a belief that they can do so. Within each tradition that does seek to relate to such a reality, there is an inner logic that motivates the believer to see at least some apprehensions of that reality in other apparently diverse traditions. That is just an expression of the belief that, if we are not wholly deluded, we must all be in touch with the same world, and must have some knowledge of the same sorts of things. It would be troubling if only a few people had any knowledge of God.

There are religious views that confine knowledge of God to small groups – usually oneself and one’s friends, strangely enough. But it is rather an odd sort of God who would not make the divine known in any way to any one else. So reflection on the object of our own belief has a tendency to lead to a wider, ‘natural’ knowledge of God, or at least of something vaguely like God, God incognito. Then a due sense of humility might lead us to seek a term that does not commit others too fully to our own beliefs. We get a term such as ‘Transcendent’ in the attempt, not to subject other beliefs to our own, but precisely in an attempt to see our own belief in the wider context of basic human forms of apprehension.

Non-theistic views, such as Buddhism, do a similar sort of thing if they say, as they often do, that theistic views are ‘lesser paths’ to enlightenment. I, as a Christian, have been told by a very senior Buddhist monk, ‘I do not think you should change your religion and become a Buddhist.’ I was very pleased to think how very tolerant he was. But then he said, ‘Christianity is just right for a person at your stage of spiritual development,’ and I paused for a moment’s thought. Was this really tolerance? However, he was just doing what we all do – thinking that his own view was clearly correct, but doing me the honour of thinking that I was not completely deluded, but was seeing the religious object – nirvana – in a rather naive personal guise, which would no doubt be corrected in a few thousand lifetimes.

With real atheists it is more difficult. They do think all believers in a spiritual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Preview of What is to Come
• Part I: Religion Defined and Explained
• Part II: The Great World Religions
• Part III: After Enlightenment
• Part IV: Convergent Spirituality
• Notes
• Index