SOME REFLECTIONS ON POPULIST PIETY
15th April 2002
The next issue, Number 71, will appear on 15th May 2002.
A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, is reported as having remarked that "religion is like a swimming pool - most of the splashing is at the shallow end".
It is not quite clear what Dr Runcie meant by this bon mot but I take it to be an attempt to draw a distinction between the more thoughtful religion, about which the public hears little, and the crude populist religion with which we are almost saturated. Thoughtful sceptics attend mostly to criticising thoughtful academic religion while leaving exposure of populist piety to a few outspoken publications. Restrained thoughtful critics and abrasive debunkers have something in common - they both exhibit the defects of their virtues. This 'Thought' is an attempt to be both outspoken and rigorous in its approach to scepticism in some religious matters.
We are all heavily dependent upon our personal histories for the way we tend to react to life's challenges. When I look back from the serenity of my seventy-eighth year I see myself as emotionally secure. I can't do much but I am content to do what I can. There is generally a misquotation applicable to any given situation in life; 'season of mists and mellow fruitlessness' just about sums up where I'm at.
I owe largely to my Mother both my emotional security and my religious scepticism. She was immensely kind, patient and devoted to her husband, her children and to the many people around us. She was also a pious nutter who, suspecting that I was beginning to harbour sceptical thoughts, told me (I was about twelve at the time) that if I did not believe in God then He would likely "strike me dead".
It proved to be impossible to get through to her that a just and merciful god would not be so severe on a young boy and, moreover, would not visit upon a faithful believer the sorrow consequent upon her beloved son's death. I had not yet learned the word
'inncoherence' - certainly not in its precise philosophical sense - but from that day to this, as they say in old fashioned adventure stories, I have asked myself "Does religion have to be so daft?"
Decades of such questioning have led me to think that religion is very often daft - but not always and not in all respects. The relation between believing absurdities and committing atrocities is well known but does not always match reality; there are daft good people.
To back up the notion of not-daft religion I refer readers to three books. One is Wolf in the Sheepfold, subtitled The Bible as a Problem for Christianity, by Robert Carroll (ISBN 0-281-04525-9). Another is Being a Person, subtitled Where Faith and Science Meet, by John Habgood (ISBN 0-340-69073-9). The third is When Bad Things Happen to Good People, subtitled For Everyone Who Has Been Hurt by Life, by Harold S Kushner (ISBN 0-330-26827-9 Carroll is/was a leading academic at the University of Glasgow; Habgood is a former Archbishop of York; Kushner is/was a Rabbi in New England. The subtitles of these books indicate clearly what they are about. They all, very differently, sustain the notion that religion can be intellectually mature.
Kushner's book deals honestly and humanely with the problem - how can innocent suffering be squared with the idea of a god who knows everything, can do anything that it is logically possible to do and who is just and merciful? Populist piety is at its worst - at its most intellectually dishonest - in this connection.
When confronted by the question articulated in Kushner's title, populist piety offers three answers and each one is a fall-back option when the preceding one collapses. The first of these three answers is that the 'good person' has been foolhardy - we can't reasonably expect God to rescue us if we insist on swimming in shark-infected waters. Eliminating this 'well, you asked for it' scenario, the next fall-back is that the 'good' person is actually a rather bad person who deserves to be visited by bad things happening. Eliminating the 'bad person' scenario, the final fall-back (a favourite excuse for their God among naive believers) is the 'blessing in disguise' option. God, it is claimed, always acts for the best but, of course, we don't always find it easy to see things that way. God moves, they say, in a mysterious way. One of His more mysterious actions was to rob my children of their much loved mother when they were nine and seven years old respectively. Nobody can claim that their folly or wickedness could reasonably have led to years of terminal cancer in their mother. We have either to accept the 'blessing in disguise' scenario or give up on the god of populist piety.
Of course you can set up any dogma you please including the dogma that God knows, and does, best. But if you embrace a dogma you ought to embrace its logical consequences. Populist piety does not take kindly to logical consequences of facile dogma.
Clearly if God knows best, and does best, then it is idle to pray to Him to make events take a course that we, quite reasonably, may happen to prefer. He does not stand in need of our advice; He knows what is right and He does it - or allows it to happen. In spite of this piece of simple logic, naive believers are always praying for this or that to happen, or to not happen, as the case may be and they do not seem to be discouraged very much when prayer after heartfelt prayer is evidently unanswered.
This failure of prayer to 'work' in the business of influencing events is perhaps harmless enough? But is it really harmless? There are projects to test, by field trials set up along the lines of field trial of various drugs, to test the curative power of prayer. These trials cannot be expected to yield significant results because God, as ordinarily understood, will know that He is being tested and so the procedure bears no comparison with field trials of drugs - substances which, quite obviously do not 'know' that they are being tested. These field trials of the efficacy of prayer as a curative procedure are, I claim, merely an attempt to give pseudo-scientific backing to a faltering theological perception. The danger is that people may come to be persuaded that prayer works, clinically speaking, and can be used as a cheap substitute for sound clinical practice. After all, praying is an unskilled activity needing no expensive equipment and, given faith, not needing to 'get results'. Proper medicine, on the other hand, requires expensive skilled professionals, expensive equipment and is increasingly subject to 'value for money' criteria demanded by taxpayers and their elected legislators.
It would be sad indeed if populist piety were to drag us back to the mediaeval superstition that illness is either a punishment from God or mischief from the devil and that the only answer to it is pious observance.
It may be earlier than you think; we are not yet so very far out from primitive piety; or as someone might have said, 'Rome was not burnt in a day'.
E.S.
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