I have been sound off about the issue of
'generic religion' in some recent blogs. Here is a review of a recent book that takes
up the same theme. This is a revised, extended and slightly more conversational version of a review that
originally appeared in St Mark’s Review
(No.217, August 2011). Word limits left the published version somewhat elliptical in style.
Let me start by pointing to the connection between religion and violence that
has become a familiar theme in both media commentary and the public polemics of
the “new” atheists. Peter
Vardy, Vice-Principal of Heythrop College in the University of London, has
written, Good & Bad Religion to
try and redirect the whole debate. He wants to get away from the sort of purely
defensive reaction on the part of religious people that he believes, quite rightly I think, is neither helpful, nor
interesting. Instead he embarks on an attempt to establish that there is some
common ground between believers and atheists.
The outcome of this worthy enterprise is Good & Bad Religion, (SCM Press,
2010) a brief paperback, relatively accessible in style and targeted at a
thoughtful, but non-academic audience. Hopefully this sort of audience still
exists. In a relatively non-defensive and consistently even-tempered manner
Vardy moves to place the entire public polemics about “religion” and the
contemporary warnings and assumptions of its dangers, and indeed its deep and
consistent inhumanity, more clearly within the history of western philosophical
and theological thought than has been the case in much of the debate to date.
While this is a helpful step in placing the debate into a wider context, I want to note that Terry Eagleton’s interventions on this issue
by comparison have sought to remind us of the taken for granted political
background to the contemporary emergence of this debate.
Vardy develops his argument in two distinct
parts and at the end of each section, he provides a clear summary of the argument that
he has developed and the conclusions that he draws.
In
Part One, entitled The Challenge, Vardy
sketches the critique of 'religion' provided by contemporary atheists. Religion can be bad, Vardy concedes to the
atheists, but supporters of “good” religion should be at one with them in
resisting “bad” religion. It may be, Vardy asserts, that … in today’s world there is a more important distinction between atheist
and theist, namely that between those who pursue bad religion and those who stand
for truth and what is right, whether it be within, or without a religious
framework (p14).
Vardy then takes us through a discussion of
the nature of the truth and the good in the major philosophical traditions as
an aid to assessing what “good” and “bad” religion are, He concludes with an
account of Aristotle’s approach to the nature of human flourishing which he
argues is the most helpful way of distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion. This is an
interesting philosophical move, given the role that engagement with Aristotl,e
played in the early development of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity
and the fact that he moved on to recover the thought of Thomas Aquinas because
of Aristotle’s inadequacies in the restatement of a natural law approach to
ethics.
Aristotelian philosophy, Vardy contends … offers a partial solution to the problem
of devising standards against which to judge religion and religious practices.
… the natural law approach is compatible with the major world religions and
indeed has been used by them in the past to extend and enrich their
philosophies of religion … Further the approach may be acceptable to atheist
philosophers as well. …most normative
philosophical systems rely on defining good and bad in relation to what it
means to be a fulfilled human being.(67)
In Part
2: A Way Forward Vardy covers a range of issues that arise in any attempt
to undertake an assessment of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad religion’, starting with
questions of authority and textual interpretation, and then moving on to the
topics of science and religion, justice, equality and freedom. From the
discussion in each of these chapters Vardy provides us in The Conclusion with a summary based on an Aristotelian, natural law
framework, of six broad conclusions, and 26 more detailed criteria that we can
use to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religion.
Given the natural law basis of his argument,
the conclusions that Vardy draws are coherent, admirable in their intent and largely
predictable. The major problem that I have with the structure and argument that
he develops lies not in his analysis, or his conclusions, but back in the underlying assumptions
about the character of religion that were touched on briefly in the first
chapter but not systematically developed, either then, or later.
The brief references to 'religion' that he
provides in the early part of the book do not add up to a consistent, or
coherent account of what religion is. Vardy starts out the discussion in a promising vein by noting
that religion is the cord of ideas, beliefs and practices that hold communities
together and that it is not a consistent monolithic phenomenon. However, he
then goes on to affirm that religion can be used in damaging ways, but that it
is important to the human psyche and cannot be eliminated. In taking the argument in this direction he is moving inexorably towards
an essentialist and non-historical account of religion. Religion becomes a generic category into which particular faiths or traditions can be shoehorned (or not).
This is followed by the observation that
religion has often been taken over for political purposes. A key question
arises here. If religion is as he acknowledges, the cord that holds communities
together, how could religion not be political in character, and can we then
distinguish in any meaningful way between religion and politics? Augustine in
his critique of Rome seems to have found himself up to his neck in political
theology when discussing “religious” issues. This phenomenon has reappeared min modern guise in the form of civil religions, of which the cult of Anzac Day has emerged in Australia as a recent local variant.
The working assumption that I draw from
Vardy’s references to ‘religion’ seems to be that we all know what religion is,
and that it can therefore be treated as a timeless generic category that can be
evaluated in its specific manifestations as either ‘good’ or “’bad’. Who indeed
would be in favour of “bad” “religion”?
The problem with a generic account of
religion becomes clear when Vardy refers to the early Christians as having
taken a stand against “bad or debased religion”. This really will not do. The
early Christians affirmed that they were followers of Jesus whom they affirmed
as “Lord”, a term in with both political and the religious connotations and
implications. What they took a stand against was not “bad” religion, the Romans
called them “atheists”, but the specific political religion of the Roman
Empire. Roman officials sought a commitment to the Emperor that would
overrode their primary and basic loyalty to Christ. That after all is the whole
point of the book of Revelation.
I would, therefore, argue against overall thrust of
Vardy’s project to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, that people
are not committed to ‘religion’ in general. People are committed rather to living
lives from within specific traditions, traditions that embody differing
accounts of the world, and differing accounts of what it is to be human and how
one should appropriately live and shape one’s life in that. Indeed they may have very differing understandings of what the "world" is.
As my friend William Cavanaugh argues in
his important work, The Myth of
Religious Violence, religion has a history … and what counts as a religion and what does not in any given context
depends up different configurations of power and authority … the attempt to say
that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is
separable from secular phenomena, is itself part of a particular configuration
of power, that of the modern secular state as it developed in the West. In this context religion is constructed as
transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct
from public secular rationality. (59)
Entirely in its favour is that, in an era of loud shouting, and rhetorically excessive, and factually limited ambit claims passing as argument from protagonists on both sides of the debate, Vardy’s apologetic is overall
an eirenic, even tempered and thoughtful response to the new atheists that
tries to reframe some of the terms of the debate. He seems willing to share
with them an account of religion as a transhistorical and trans-cultural
phenomenon and hopes that something can be built on that common ground.
If, however, we do not accept Vardy's implicit account
of religion as generic, as I do not, the task before Christians and members of other faith
traditions and communities will take us down a different path from the one that
he maps out in this book. Our task will be to interrogate the history of our
own traditions, their specific beliefs and practices, both for their
implication in encouraging violence at the individual, family and communal
levels, and for their resources for witnessing to, and embodying shalom. This
seems to me to be a more promising, and interesting, though more difficult project than the one
that Vardy has undertaken and one that will require churches as communities
committed to peacemaking to get involved.
