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ANALYSIS
THE MYSTERIOUS OPIATE
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Producer: Simon Coates
Editor: Nicola Meyrick

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Broadcast Date: 06.04.00 Repeat Date: 09.04.00
Tape Number: TLN012/00VT1014 Duration: 27’43”

TAKING PART IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

The Rt. Rev and the Rt. Hon Richard Chartres Bishop of London
Professor John Bowker Fellow of Gresham College,London

Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbock Professor of Judaism, University of Wales at Lampeter

Dr Aziza al-Hibri Professor of Law, University of Richmond and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the Library of Congress, Washington DC

Tu Weiming Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies, Harvard University

Father Michael Barnes Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies, Heythrop College, University of London

The death of God has often been announced. The announcement has always turned out to be premature. Today in America and much of the Third World, religion is booming: not just making money and putting bums on seats but stirring new passions and sometimes new politics. Meanwhile, in our part of the West, we're still hearing how religions will wither; they'll merge in mushy post-religious humanism. They'll be replaced by science; shivered by individualism; choked by consumerism. If religion is to endure in the world, surely, it has to survive the test in the West. Congregations in the Church of England have fallen by forty per cent since 1970. In the most economically-developed parts of Western Europe, religious vocations have declined twenty to thirty per cent. But other surveys show huge majorities professing uneasily-defined faith. To know the future - to know whether religion is going to survive in our society and, if so, what it will be like - we have to transcend short-term statistics and look at long-term trends. The longest continuities in history concern what's true and what's natural. Religious people sometimes say religion can survive anything history throws at it simply because it's true.

Richard Chartres : : Although I think the conditions in the coming century may well be more propitious for faith than they have been the day before yesterday in cultural terms in our civilisation, nevertheless the reason for my confidence is not one or two fleeting historical or sociological straws in the wind. It is because I believe that this is the nature of reality, this is the nature of truth, this is the nature of human and divine life.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Richard Chartres is the Bishop of London. So he would say that, wouldn't he? And even if he's right, religion still might not have staying-power: in open competition, after all, lies often oust the truth. But the Bishop's opinion raises a further possibility. Religion may be ineradicable because it's part of our nature - inscribed by evolution in our brains and genes. John Bowker, Fellow of Gresham College in London, is one of the foremost authorities on world religions.

John Bowker : Religion is certainly natural but the forms that it takes may change very greatly because religion is parasitic on the human body. But it might be a beneficial parasite. The point about religion is that it is the consequence of the ways in which human beings have explored first of all themselves - what their nature is, what does it add up to, what can it experience, where is it going, what is its meaning? And as humans have made that exploration of their body, so they have built communities to protect the information as it's transmitted from one life to another - or much more important, from one generation to another. So religions are the earliest systems that we know about in terms of evidence that protect human communities and the information with them.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: So religion's not just wired into the brain, it's built into society. If John Bowker's right, religion's a fixture. But perhaps it's not that simple. History and evolution are processes in a perpetual state of turnover; they create nothing for keeps; everything inside time is under threat of erasure and extinction. Now, in the modern West, there are new challenges. Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbock , Professor of Judaism at the University of Wales at Lampeter.

RABBI DAN Cohn-Sherbock : We live in a new age and these kinds of challenges, I think, have never existed before - particularly the challenge of science. Answers are given by science that were formerly given by religion. God seems to be receding in the universe in terms of providing the answers to the questions that human beings have sought in the past. Science is not just going to be a passing fad, it's going to be with us into the future. It's going to explain more and more because it's true and we know it's true.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Science doesn't just invade believers' turf. It cuts the ground from under their feet. It says, everything real is perceivable. What you see is what you get. It can really take over from religion, can't it? Aziza al-Hibri, an expert on Islamic law currently based at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

AZIZA AL-HIBRI: I don't see it as taking over. I see these things as explanations of reality from different lenses, different perspectives. They're not necessarily incompatible, they just focus on different aspects of the same thing. I could take a problem now in life, give it an analysis which is scientific which would be quite different from my analysis looking at the problem from a legal perspective. It doesn't mean that either one of them is wrong or incompatible with the other. It just means that the total picture requires all the information we could put in it.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: This is an old view: science and religion can safely ignore each other or agree to confine their empires to exclusive spheres. Richard Chartres isn't so sure.

Richard Chartres : : It depends which science, I think. I don't think that necessarily those involved in many aspects of genetic research would be content to accept that there had been a new rapprochement between science and religion. And I think the way in which so often peace was declared before between science and religion on the basis of mutual irrelevance - I think that that certainly has led to a lack of appreciation of how value-laden modern science has been in the last two centuries. One of the very interesting developments is the new enthusiasm for holism, for looking at the whole system and the fact that the exploration of ecological systems is a comparatively new way of looking at the world. There's new enthusiasm in so many departments, and therefore the practice of a science in those areas which actually does seem to reverberate more with classical religious insights.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Science and religion may not be mutually irrelevant. The view that they're mutually contradictory now looks even more old-fashioned: physics is getting close to metaphysics, grasping mysteries beyond reason and observation, groping for the mind of God. Science insists there's nothing special about humans, we're just animals; and nothing special about our world: it's just a speck in a vast cosmos. But this doesn't mean religious values are exploded: on the contrary, religions need a humble attitude to creation - what a leading Confucian thinker calls a holistic view. What does Tu Weiming, Professor of Chinese Philosophy at Harvard University, think of the idea that science and religion can be kept separate?

Tu Weiming : It's de-spirited and de-natured. Religion flows, religion is not something static. It interacts, it transforms itself. The dynamism is precisely its ability to deal with human situations, conditions, in a long-term perspective. But religion is not just personal. It is inter-personal, it is also between us as human beings and the cosmos as a whole - the animals, the plants, the trees, all these things are relevant to our religious consciousness. I don't think there's any other tradition, no matter how broadly defined - scientistic, rational, humanistic - that would be able to encompass that broader arena.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Tu Weiming sees religion as hyper-scientific; indeed, better-equipped to comprehend and manage our relations with the world and each other than science, logic, humanities or any system based on secular knowledge. If he's right, religion must have some extra ingredient - some special power that alternative systems haven't got. This may explain why so many secular movements cannibalise religious myths, copy religious rituals. For Father Michael Barnes, who teaches theology and religious studies at Heythrop College in the University of London, secular philosophies flatter religions by imitating them.

FATHER MICHAEL BARNES: It's what people actually do together by way of enacting their own memories which give some sense of meaning to their present. Take Marxism as an example, which begins as a particular critique of society and then turns itself into almost a cult and so the sort of ritual element of that takes over, anchoring people - giving a sense of anchorage within time - with a thought, with something, which is central to the great religions and indeed to substitute religions.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: If Marxism can't supplant religion, what about capitalism - the new post-religious ethic which has put the money-changers back into the temple? It's outbid Marx. Can it complete its ideological monopoly by buying out God?

Richard Chartres : : I go back again and again and again and read one of the most prophetic works it seems to me which illuminates so much about the modern situation and that is Marx's Communist Manifesto in 1848. He wasn't wrong about everything!

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Bishop Richard Chartres.

Richard Chartres : : And the more I go back and read it, the more I see resonances in what he says. And, of course, one of the things he talks about is the universalisation of the commodity form, and it's a problem also for God. Well, you can't enter profoundly into the spiritual way if you're relating to a commodity.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: The trouble is a lot of people seem happy to relate to commodities and to abandon spiritual ways. Material glut suffocates holiness: but the American case proves, religion can thrive in societies obese with affluence. Meanwhile, in the market-place of ideas, religions remain highly saleable. Secular programmes copy their packaging and their product. Militant atheists treat evolution as Providence. Nazism had its God of History, who claimed millions of human sacrifices. Feminist extremism erects Goddess-consciousness; environmentalism sidles into earth-worship. Can a worldly movement hijack religion's most valuable cargo: what John Bowker calls a shared symbol system?

John Bowker : Of course it can be done outside religions, but it's very difficult because you have to generate almost from nowhere a long, long memory, social memory, of a shared symbol system. But there are examples. You mention something like Nazism. That's trying to generate a similar system from nowhere and you can see how shallow it is. Ingenious, spectacular - but shallow. So you can manipulate human emotions very fast and religions do that a lot of the time. But for an alternative or an addition to religion to take root it must develop a confident shared symbol system. The point I'm making, I think, is - it's the point of the tourist in the Cambridge college - how do you grow grass as beautiful as that? Can I do it in my garden? Start five hundred years ago!

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: So is long nurture what's special about religion? Will the sheer momentum of a long history be enough to carry the great religions of the past into the future? Aziza al-Hibri.

AZIZA AL-HIBRI: There is no such guarantee of anything, not even of science itself, that it will always be there - not even of human civilisation, any kind of thought: Hegelianism or Kantian thought or Marxism. Marxism has withered away - and it wouldn't have if it had been able to meet the needs of the people the way religions do. Religions have always offered something over thousands of years. Just looking at that kind of data, I would argue that if there is any kind of belief system that is going to survive, religion has proven its resiliency.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: One problem with this line of reasoning is that really - if you look at the great length of human history - today's major religions, like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, haven't been around for very long. A couple of thousand years is a flicker. And they caught on quickly - before they had built up these encoded memories and vast treasuries of experience. What's really made them durable is their cultural adaptability. Their capacity to adjust helped them spread across the world. By selective self-modification, they survive convulsive changes in their home environments, while empires and economic systems vanish. Father Michael Barnes.

FATHER MICHAEL BARNES: For different reasons those three religions, the three great world religions, have got a sense that their particular message, their understanding of reality is something which can't be limited to any particular cultural form. Buddhism and Christianity, certainly Catholic Christianity, are dominated by a sense that the message of the founder, in so far as one can parallel Buddha and Christ - you're talking about truths which are not limited by any particular culture. I think something could be said similarly for Islam which is seeking always to engage with that which is strange, which is other, which is outside the tradition.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: You can't be a universal religion unless you've got a culturally sensitive message and a culturally adaptive habit. Strategies of self-evolution make religions last. But if that's right, it's risky. Adaptation could become adulteration. Modification could become mutation. How can religions keep up the present pace, without jettisoning past treasure? How can they change and still be themselves? Richard Chartres .

Richard Chartres : : Traditionalism, the obstinate attachment to the customs of the day before yesterday, is the dead faith of living people. Tradition - the golden stream - well, that reasserts itself again and again and again, and I think that any orthodox church that can continue to build a community of people who understand and see that and live that experience is going to be disproportionately significant at a time of major social atomisation.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Paradoxically, it seems that the most traditional religions are the most adaptive and that therefore the future lies with them. In the modern West, demographic change guarantees this result: as our populations get older, our congregations will get more conservative. Reeling from future-shock, they'll reach for their roots. Michael Barnes suggests the religion of the future won't be for boomers and busters, but for Darby and Joan.

FATHER MICHAEL BARNES: I think people are much more conscious of what the heart of a religious tradition actually is. I don't think there's any doubt that religious communities which have got a very strong sense of who they are, perhaps a stronger sense of tradition and how tradition is actually developed in the present, that these are the ones that are attracting people - certainly in the West at any rate. The traditions which are going to be successful are those which allow people a sense of belonging, a sense of experience, a sense of assurance in the present moments, can put them in touch with roots which they never thought they actually had.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Some people talk about roots, some about foundations, others about fundamentals. Fundamentalism is relatively new: a kind of religion which started this century, not by asserting tradition, but by subverting it. Fundamentalism imitates science by claiming to offer unquestionable, verifiable certainties. In today's uncertain world, among people recoiling from bewilderment, it's a form of religion that is growing in popularity. If it goes on growing, it could destroy traditional religion more effectively than any secular enemy.

Richard Chartres : : Fundamentalism, of course, is a very particular difficulty because it's almost a mirror image of the triumph of one particular mode of describing and arriving at the truth. It's the transposition of the scientific mode of arriving at and describing the truth into religious terms.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Richard Chartres .

Richard Chartres: Orthodox Christianity has never been fundamentalist in that sense. There has always been a vast room for discernment and interpretation, the use of the great mobilising stories and narratives of holy scripture in a very creative and imaginative way. Fundamentalism is a particularly modern phenomenon and it's undeniable that it has a great deal of appeal in a time of insecurity. But it doesn't happen to be true.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Indeed, Christian fundamentalism is obviously false: it defies reason and misreads the Bible as a text unwarped by time, translation and human error. Most people worry rather more about Islamic fundamentalism, which, within Islam, seems more cogent. Aziza al-Hibri predicts the triumph of a different tradition, based on Istiha - the principle that religious precepts must be just. As for the fundamentalists...

AZIZA AL-HIBRI: I would tell you the future does not belong to these people. The future belongs to a revival of Islam which is based on active Istiha which is jurisprudential interpretation. Islam is founded on the notion that for each era and for each community the people of that community must develop their own Istiha which is consistent with their needs and the need of their times and the needs of their culture. We have not done that in ages. You can find now active Islamic jurisprudence taking place in the West, in America, in England and in other places where Muslims are trying to say let's see what Islam means in today's society for us. That flexible, that enlightened, that educated Islam is the Islam of the future.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: So the religion of the future isn't going to get fossilised in fundamentalism. What about the equal and opposite danger: that religions will get chewed to pulp by dialogue or atomised by individualism? Harvard's Tu Weiming.

Tu Weiming : I think the conception of the person as an isolated individual is now so outmoded that it has to be replaced by the idea of a person as a centre of relationships. As a centre the person may have the dignity, autonomy, independence - you know, using Internet, all kinds of things - we can have many personalities and so forth and then we can become very playful. So I do not believe that atomisation or the individualisation of the human is the only path that the process of organisation or globalisation is going to lead.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Tu Weiming foresees the end of individualism, the resurgence of human "relatedness". But what if he's wrong? How can religion be truly social in a world riven by individualism?

John Bowker : The one thing we know about God in the history of religions and also by looking at the universe which believes in God and is a consequence of God's creation, one thing we know about God for sure is he loves diversity. Every iris of every eye different! Every identical twin different!

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: John Bowker.

John Bowker: Therefore it is not surprising that religions and belief in God take on immensely diverse forms and my own belief is that that diversity is one of the highest values in the universe. It's a value within the non-human universe manifestly. It's of an even higher value in the human universe because the fact of diversity is an invitation into relationship. And therefore what religions are fundamentally about is the perception that you cannot be a self except in a field of selves. You cannot be - even Marx observed this! - you cannot be a Robinson Crusoe.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: John Bowker and Tu Weiming both insist that even if we face a fragmented future in a fissile society of disconnected individuals, religion isn't going to disappear down the gaps. But will it get more distinct or more dissolved? Inter-faith dialogue could take us back to Babel. The information generation cuts and pastes to get the religion it wants. The consumer ethic is: shop around. Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbock makes sense of current trends in Judaism.

Cohn-Sherbock : In the non-orthodox world there are new kinds of Judaisms emerging. There are even non-theistic Judaisms, humanistic Judaism and reconstructionist Judaism. In the United States, there are sizeable branches of the Jewish community with synagogues and rabbis - but they don't believe in a supernatural deity.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: If they don't believe in anything supernatural, what's spiritual about these things? Do they really qualify as religions at all or are they examples of religion transforming itself out of existence?

Cohn-Sherbock : They don't believe in the supernatural but they do believe in the sancta Jewish life and I think that's what's very interesting. On the other side of the Jewish coin, there is enormous syncretism. For example, I know of a movement called Jew and the Lotus. They are Jews who want to incorporate spiritual patterns of the East, in particular Buddhism, into their practice of Judaism. It's true of Messianic Judaism which is a growing movement as well. There are about a quarter-of-a-million Messianic Jews. They believe in Jesus or they call Jesus “Yashur”. So, yes, it is Judaism, Jewish-style. It's not Judaism the old faith. But we're still one family and we're one family together.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Traditional religions will go on adapting to survive; but their adherents aren't about to adapt out of existence. Tradition is flexible - but not bendy enough to twist into unrecognisable shapes. And according to John Bowker, religion has a track record which doesn't just guarantee its future. It also proves its worth.

John Bowker : This is what I call the paradox of religious urgency. Religions are such bad news only because they are such good news. If religions were not such good news, if religions had not produced all the great art, architecture, dance, agriculture - religions even produce the natural sciences - if religions had not transformed life and translated it from dust into glory, there'd be no trouble. They would have gone to extinction thousands of years ago. And it's because religions have done everything for humans that humans most value as they look back on their history and their past that people in the present hang on to them so defensively, aggressively.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: This doesn't mean that religions are useful agencies for worldly problem-solving. Their best agenda for the long-term is to concentrate on eternal questions - not on our safety or security in this world but our chances of salvation in the next. Their record against war, cruelty, poverty, slavery, racism and want is full of mixed intentions and poor results. If they survive, their future will probably be as bloody and imperfect as their past. If they outlive secular rivals, their worst enemies will arise, as they always have, from within. John Bowker again.

John Bowker : The religion of the future will have a ferocious struggle in the next century between those who believe that it's the wrath and the punishment that should have the priority, and those who believe it is the mercy and the meaning and the forgiveness that should have the priority. That's where the religious battles of the future are going to be held.

FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO: Everything we have heard suggests that long-standing religions and long-accumulating traditions are, if not unassailable, amazingly robust. They see off change by their characteristic techniques of adaptation. They fluctuate, but do not fail. They surrender a little, but do not die. Perhaps a future without religion is, as John Lennon sang, easy to imagine. But it's not going to happen. The world will still need ways of encoding memory, hallowing hatred, ritualising life, compartmentalising transcendence and relating to nature. The short-term trends - towards religions which are atomised or engrossed, funky or fundamentalist - will probably be sustained only in the short term. For as long ahead as we can see clearly, the religious future will be surprising only because it will be surprisingly like the past.