Last night former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas, Left Wing academic Beatrix Campbell and Guardian economist Aditya Chakrabortty were at Kings Place in Kings Cross, London, debating who will own the progressive future.
In their five minute speeches, not one of them talked about what role religions would play in that progressive future so my hand shot up as soon as the chair, Guardian journalist John Harris, opened the debate to the floor.
Only Beatrix got to answer my question - and that was only because John pushed her. Sadly, her perspective was downbeat and, for the large part, dated. "Religion is about patriarchal domination," she said. "I have great unease about organised religions playing a role in the future."
How can she not know how much has changed since the 1970s? In the Methodist Church, for example, there is nothing stopping women taking the top positions. Women are involved at all levels of the institution and many men recognise women as agents of change. In the Church of England, women are fighting to become Bishops. Revolution is happening from within. Writing religion off as essentially "patriarchal" actually feels oppressive when you are aware women are making head way. How can Beatrix not know about feminist theology? Surely, supporting women of all religions to shift ground within what used to be a male-only run dominion is the way forward.
And as for her comment that "institutionalised religion" is the source of war mongering - Christianity teaches peace. Quakers preach pacifism whatever the price. Many faiths have been involved in pushing social justice to the forefront and lobbying for equality. Faith drives a number of people to fight for these causes. Why don't we acknowledge this?
A progressive future without a spiritual forum would be a bleak one. Many people will want to look for more meaning in their lives than just their mortgages. I don't think religion and spirituality should own the progressive future, but I think they should share a part.
In Conversation: Rocky Dawuni
6 years ago
2 comments:
I agree! Similarly, there are Progressive and Reform Rabbis now. Chomsky said something that seemed perfectly even-handed to me about Religion - people have done the most depraved and enlightened things in the name of Religion, so you can pick-and-choose.
There's a big market for Religion bashing at the moment, it seems to be a very 2000s thing, and the Christian right in America didn't do much to help this. Religion became aligned with Conservatives and anti-intellectualism in public consciousness. But, I suspect a more moderate view will eventually take the place of the current one.
Given Beatrix's call from the platform for the replacement of the patriarchy with a matriarchy (I've certainly heard worse ideas in my time), I'm sure she'd have no problem with an institution like the Methodist Church per se.
One thing that struck me during the debate was that if you're looking for a way of tackling the global problem of religious extremism, a political campaign of female emancipation might be one way of gaining some kind of leverage. There's no reason why it couldn't make use of relevant theological arguments - whatever religion was involved.
As I mentioned on the night, I'm currently working my way through Sam Harris's book The End of Faith, which takes a pretty hard line against religious belief, arguing that nuclear proliferation makes it a luxury we as a species cannot afford - almost no matter what form it takes. Here's the Amazon description on the hardback edition:
In a debut certain to anger anyone who is not an atheist, the author argues that religious faith is the root of all evil. Sacred books, Harris declares, are either sacred or not; religious adherents must therefore either believe everything in them or question everything. People cannot, he continues, assert that the virgin birth is true because it is in the Bible and simultaneously decline to murder their children for apostasy, as Deuteronomy prescribes. Harris believes the most dangerous religion today is Islam and quotes several pages of passages from the Koran to illustrate his contention that it is manifestly not a religion of peace and tolerance. But he is an equal-opportunity opponent, so he also assails, in phrases that coruscate with sarcasm, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and by extension all the world's religions. They are medieval at best, he declares. And anti-intellectual, requiring believers to accept without question notions that they would summarily reject in all other arenas of life. How would we react, he wonders, if President Bush replaced the word "God" with "Apollo" in his public comments? There really is no difference, states Harris. He begins his treatise by showing how religious faith trumps rationality, proceeds to a disquisition on belief itself, glances at the Inquisition and the Holocaust (to show religion run amok), gnaws on the problems in the Middle East, attacks religious objections to stem-cell research, drug use, and sexual privacy, considers how ethics may thrive in a nonreligious world, and ends with a dense discussion of consciousness, much of which he ought to have consigned to the lengthy and often discursive endnotes. In many ways this is a courageous analysis whose theses will deeply trouble readers who choose to think about them rather than summarily reject them. But Harris's discussion of ethics sometimes reads like an undergraduate essay-the probable parent of his arguments. Provocative is too pale a word. (Kirkus Reviews)
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