WHAT IS RELIGION FOR?
15th November 2003
I do not mean "what does religion stand for - what do its adherents proclaim?"
I ask "What is religion's observable function in the human scene?"
Clearly it has not, historically, provided a reliable guide as to what real things are like - the religious answers to such inquiries have proved hugely undependable such as the flat earth, geocentricity of the solar system, the immutability of species, the impropriety of childbirth anaesthesia, the supernatural (fiendish) origin of mental disorder, the perceived impossibility of leading a good life other than by recourse to received supernatural beliefs and the arcane practices associated therewith.
In regard to the good life, it cannot be doubted that many religious people are indeed good people - as are many religious unbelievers. Equally there are plenty of bad people in both camps. Many believers have become more tolerant as a result of living in a secularised country and many secularists owe much of their goodness to all that is best in Christianity.
It is useful at this point to distinguish two very different mindsets to be found among both among believers and unbelievers. These mindsets may be termed the assertive and the inquiring respectively and specimens of both kinds are to be found on all sides.
The assertive approach in religion (and indeed in politics) is simply a lever of power. If superior persons (self or mutually appointed superior persons) announce that such and such statements are true then uncritical believers will be in the power of those persons - the control freaks. The uncritical believers will simply think and do as they are told. They, in effect, agree to be 'cannon fodder' to save themselves the trouble of thinking for themselves, to save themselves the burden of responsibility for their own actions or inactions. In return they get an IOU permit to Heaven rather than a fast track one-way ticket to Hell.
It works thus ........ "You ought to do God's Will'; I am an expert on God's Will so you must, in God's name, do what I say". (It works just as well if, instead of God's Will, the control freak says "the Glory of Our Nation" or the Historic Necessities of The Revolution.").
The inquiring mindset moves us to ask upon what grounds is any given statement held to be true and are those grounds sufficient? This, roughly speaking, is the liberal mindset and so the main question so far unasked in this article is what is liberal religion for?
My answer rests mostly upon my twenty-six years of residence in this island community. Some facts relevant to the question are as follows:
We have a resident population of about five hundred augmented by a few visitors, holiday makers and the like. We have only one organised Church - the Church of Scotland usually known as the Kirk. There are a little over one hundred adults on the Sanday Congregational Roll and the attendance at the weekly Sunday morning service varies from twenty to sixty but rather larger numbers attend weddings, baptisms and funerals connected with people they care about personally. (I do so myself). Members of other denominations are welcome to all these services and usually there are a few Catholics, Episcopalians and others who go to church here. (The minorities are included in the weekly approximate attendance figures).
There is a full time resident Minister of the Kirk in Sanday but the charge includes the small offshore island of North Ronaldsay. There is little or no sectarian hostility endemic in Sanday.
Sanday is thus, demonstrably, a more religious place than most of Britain. In particular, the Congregational Roll numbers a far higher proportion of the total population than in most places in the country and as does regular attendance at the kirk.
Now for some history of what I have seen the Sanday Kirk do.
We have had the tenures of five ministers since autumn 1977 (including the minister who was in post in 1977 and the one who is currently in post, 2003). All but one of these ministers have maintained sufficiently good relations with their members and with the larger public here. The one exception occurred a few years ago when the then minister described himself as a 'conservative evangelical'. He caused huge division in the congregation - the majority being against him for his perceived cantankerous intolerance and a small minority thinking highly of him because of his perceived fearless steadfastness to what he defined as the true faith. Things got so bad that many members of the Kirk held additional religious meetings on Sunday evenings. These were often better attended than the official service held in the morning. Some gluttons for piety even attended both the official morning and unofficial evening gatherings.
The offending minister was pushed out of the job as a result of formal complaint against him. The Orkney Presbytery - the management of the Kirk in Orkney as a whole - voted overwhelmingly to uphold the complaint when it heard the calmly reasoned case put to them by a widely respected woman Elder of the Sanday Kirk (she is, incidentally by Kirk standards, a rather young activist).
Some years before there had been elsewhere in Scotland the case of a minister of the Kirk who had been convicted for the murder of his mother. He served a prison sentence and when he was duly freed he began to look for a job as a minister again. The Sanday job was vacant at the time and I took a straw poll of twenty local believers - whom I selected as a rough and ready sample. I make no claim that my sampling was more than informed guesswork but, knowing the place as I do, it was probably a reasonably fair sample. The question I asked was "Do you think .....YES, an application for the vacant minister job from this man should be treated exactly as any other application might be treated or ...... NO, an application from him should be not even considered. The results were interesting. Eleven voted YES, eight voted NO and one person was undecided. In the event the man did not apply for the Sanday job so the matter remained happily unresolved.
I submit, on the basis of such evidence known directly to me, that liberal religion is a defence against religious fanaticism. (Other defences are the small secular humanist organisations and, principally, public indifference to religion).
Defending us from fanaticism is one of the things that liberal religion attempts to do, and does, and should be given at least two cheers for doing so.
Another aspect of the Sanday Kirk (which I suspect is true of the Kirk elsewhere) is that it is, in the best sense, a social club.
I do not use this phrase in any sneering sense; I believe that a social club is a useful thing in so far as it is a means whereby people can make valuable acquaintances and friendships with others whom they perhaps would not otherwise meet.
Two necessary features of a successful social club are that membership should be varied and that it should not be riven by strongly pressed differences of opinion. Observation of the Sanday Kirk (from the point of view of a benevolent atheist) leads me to think that our Kirk is almost an ideal social club. There is little evidence that its members discuss religion; they merely follow local forms of the standard church things like weddings, baptisms, funerals and, of course, fund raising.
The Sanday Kirk is quite remarkably undemanding of its adherents. It marries divorced persons; it baptises infants whose parents manifestly have no intention of bringing up their children to be practising believers; the question of Heaven or Hell is never mentioned - especially never at the times of funeral and bereavement. Indeed the above mentioned "conservative evangelical" ex-minister gave enormous offence at the time of a funeral when he announced that the deceased was probably in Hell already. That same minister often asserted that "he knew he was going to Heaven". (Most believers think that their God has the last word in these matters but that is no business of mine).
There is much amiable hypocrisy among members of our Kirk. The Kirk, in general, is against gambling and 'drink'. This, in no way, prevents various Elders and Committee members - not to mention the wife of one of our several successive ministers - from playing bingo every fortnight and generally going to the pub for a few drinks afterwards. (Any US readers, or others, who do not know what I mean by "bingo" and "pub" may wish to e-mail me for explanation).
The church is notionally against gambling and drink but these are sure fire fund raisers for various good causes well supported by Sanday people. Needless to say, Kirk members (including Elders) work very hard running these events and disregard the Kirk's aversion to gambling and alcohol in that they organise fund raising raffles at which alcohol is among the prizes. There is very often a licenced bar as well. This amiable humbug is all very well - it makes no demands upon those who profess to be adherents to the modern day Kirk. Why don't they cut the cackle and admit to being simply human beings unburdened by guilt-inducing doctrines that have long since become as dead as the dodo. Why not indeed ........ that would be to admit that Kirk people are as secularised as those of us who admit freely to the unbelieving frame of mind. And in any case a watered down religion is, as experience shows, a time honoured basis for a reasonable social club (cemented by ritual words and actions whose significance is now barely thought about) while a watered down non-religion can have no such cement. Non-religion has to be rather intellectual, or it is nothing, and the membership of the social club that embodies liberal religion is pretty much composed of non-intellectual but, nonetheless, reasonable people.
When asked directly such questions as "Do you think that Jesus really did walk upon the water?" the liberal believers resort to 'symbolism' while making no meaningful attempt to explain what the story is meant to symbolise and no attempt whatever to show that believing such a story is necessary for the leading of the good life. One very serious man actually told me that he "felt a need to believe the unbelievable!" There's no useful well-mannered answer to that! Why embrace one unbelievability rather than another?
But, blarney apart, liberal religion is a bulwark against fanaticism and is a useful component of the Open Society. I fear that the Kirk will continue to decline and may well come to be superseded by a smaller, slimmer but more efficient means of using belief as a tool of power for the benefit of control freaks.
It is the 'fundamentalist' religions that are booming and we liberals, believers and unbelievers alike, will all be the worse for that.
E.S.