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The Republic Of Heaven
David Boulton, author of The Trouble with God: Religious Humanism and the Republic of Heaven, was one of the keynote speakers at the 2004 SoFiA Conference in Perth. You
wouldn’t expect me to come to Australia without doing a little research on
your country. I like to go back to beginnings, and I was intrigued to find you
have your own Australian creation myth in your very own Australian version of
the scriptures. So, my reading is taken from Genesis Down Under,
chapter 1, verse 1: “In
the beginning God created day and night. He created day for footy matches, going
to the beach and barbies. He created night for going prawning, sleeping and
barbies. God saw that it was good. Evening came and morning came and it was the
Second Day. “On
the Second Day God created water - for surfing, swimming and barbies on the
beach. God saw that it was good. “On
the Third Day God created the Earth to bring forth plants - tobacco to burn,
malt and yeast for beer, and wood for barbies. God saw that it was good. “On
the Fourth Day God created animals and crustaceans for chops, sausages, steak
and prawns for barbies. God saw that it was good. “On
the Fifth Day God created a Bloke - to go to the footy, enjoy the beach, drink
the beer and eat the meat and prawns at barbies. God saw that it was good. “On
the Sixth Day God saw that this Bloke was lonely and needed someone to go to the
footy, surf, drink beer, eat, and stand around the barbie with, so God created
Mates, and God saw that they were good blokes. Evening came and morning came and
it was the Seventh Day. “On
the Seventh Day God saw that the blokes were tired and needed a rest. So God
created Sheilas - to clean the house, bear children, wash, cook, and clean the
barbie. Evening came and it was the end of the Seventh day. God sighed, looked
around at the twinkling barbie fires, heard the blissful hiss of opening beer
cans and the raucous laughter of all the Blokes and Sheilas, smelled the aroma
of grilled chops and sizzling prawns, and God saw that it was not just good, it
was... AUSTRALIA!” And
I have to say that, although I haven’t yet had time to sample the barbies,
I’ve met some wonderful blokes, mates and sheilas - and I agree with God!.
Both in my previous incarnation as editor of the UK Sea of Faith journal and in
my more recent capacity as a roving Seafarer I’ve been an avid SoFiA-watcher
ever since the first isolated groups appeared and began to evolve into a
network. I’ve admired the irreverence and wit of Greg Spearitt’s Newsletter,
and stolen some of the best bits for my own articles. I’ve made good friends
courtesy of email, and earlier this year it was my pleasure to meet Nigel
Leaves, first at the Westar Institute conference in New York, where the two of
us together were invited to make a presentation to honour a certain Don Cupitt,
and again a couple of months ago when it was our pleasure to have Nigel as a
keynote speaker at the UK SoF conference. So I feel I’m among friends - and of
such is the republic of heaven. I’m
here to talk about “the trouble with God” and the case for religious
humanism, in the context of our conference question, “Where to now with
religion?”. Most of what I have to say broadly summarises the thesis of my
book The Trouble with God, and I’ll begin, as I do there, by telling
you a bit about myself. From Gospel Hall to the White House My
mother and father were Brothers. If that strikes you as unusual, I should
explain that they were members of a strict Bible-based sect called the Exclusive
Brethren, which worshipped in Gospel Hall. Gospel Hall was where God lived when
I was a little boy. It was a decidedly unpretentious home for a heavenly father.
Sandwiched between two suburban houses in a quiet residential street in Ashford,
Middlesex, fifteen miles south-west of London, it was built of wood and
corrugated iron, resembling an army billet-hut left over from the first world
war rather than a place of worship. Inside, the boards were half-covered in
coconut matting. At one end, near the door, stood a stove in the middle of the
floor, its black and stained cast-iron flue rising to a bare wooden roof. At the
opposite end was the preacher’s platform, never referred to as a pulpit, since
the word smacked of churchianity - an evil scarcely to be whispered. Between
stove and platform were rows of plain wooden benches, never referred to as pews.
There was no adornment: a cross, a stained-glass window, any hint of vestments,
priestcraft or the beauty of holiness would have been anathematised as the
distractions of the Devil. The
only wall decorations were faded posters with Bible texts: “For God so loved
the world...”, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”,
“How sweet it is for brethren to dwell together in unity...”, and pictures
of men in the desert in long colourful robes and long colourless faces, often
surrounded by sheep. A large round clock ticked its smug, relentless way to
Judgment Day. I remember best the smell: of damp wood, damp coconut matting,
stacks of damp “Golden Bells” hymn-books, damp ashes in the stove. This was
where we spent our Sundays: at the breaking-of-bread meeting (never referred to
as communion) in the morning, at Sunday school with Mr Stone and Mrs Burr in the
afternoon, and at the Gospel meeting in the evening, which was open to
all-comers, though none but the saints (as the regulars called themselves) ever
came. The Gospel was preached in obedience to Christ’s command to go into all
the world, but the saints expected the world to come to Gospel Hall, and it
showed some reluctance to make the trip. In
those wartime years when we were very young, God and Jesus were family friends,
spoken to familiarly, and participants in our games no less than in our worship.
We were aware, sometimes uncomfortably, that they could always see us, even
though we couldn’t see them. I don’t remember that it worried me too much
that they saw me when I was naughty, but I did hope they were not looking when I
was in the lavatory. Small boys do worry about that kind of thing. Brian and I
sometimes played God and Jesus, I, by virtue of seniority, taking the role of
God, and Brian playing second fiddle as my Son. We squatted on the high back of
our sitting-room sofa, imagined as our heavenly home, and looked down with fixed
seraphic smiles on our humble creation below. Once, when God proposed sending
Jesus down to earth to save poor sinners, Jesus refused to go and had to be
pushed, falling with an undignified bump. Jesus wept, and God was given a
smacked bottom. But generally speaking, mother was not shocked by these games.
It was enough for her that her children were growing up in such intimacy with
the Lord. A
primary article of our family creed, and one not widely shared among the
Brethren, was that our God had a
sense of humour. He enjoyed a good laugh. Charlie Boulton, our father, drew much
of his own playfulness directly from the Bible. The smallest man in the world?
Bildad the Shuhite. Why Isaiah? Because one eye’s ’igher than the other. A
favourite game of ours was challenging the grown-ups to find animals in hymns.
They soon got through lambs and lions, and father tried “Oh what needless pain
we bear”, but we trumped him with “God is walking his porpoise
out”. Moving on from animals to items of clothing, obvious references to
coats, shoes, armour were trumped with “As pants the hart for cooling
streams” (which scored an animal too). We even risked body parts: feet, arms,
hands, mouth, lips, heart came quickly, but we were puzzled by the embarrassed
giggles which followed our contribution of “Here I raise my Ebenezer” (it
was knees we had in mind) and we knew we had gone too far with “He is my ark
and arsenal”... If this sounds a far cry from the popular understanding of an
Exclusive Brethren upbringing as all po-faced piety and pain, that is because
our experience was nothing like that of poor Edmund Gosse as recorded in his
classic Father and Son. Ours was a happy childhood in the bosom of a
happy and loving family. But
one day in 1945 Gospel Hall burnt to the ground. (Brother Roberts put it about
that Brother Woolley, who had “a weakness”, had been smoking in the
lavatory). God, it seemed, was now numbered among the homeless. Where, then,
were we to find him? The parish church up the road was certainly not a suitable
home: it was far too worldly, we were told, though what being worldly meant was
never clear. As for the Roman Catholic church which we passed every day on the
way to both day school and Sunday school, that was the Devil’s own territory,
a place of fearsome incantations
and holy smoke, presided over by the Whore of Babylon, whoever she might be.
From my tenth birthday in 1945, God and Jesus would never be quite as
uncomplicated or intimate, never quite as trouble free, as they had seemed when
they ran the universe from our Gospel Hall. Our
speciality in the Brethren was our belief, indeed our certain knowledge, that
Jesus was coming back, and coming back very soon. The Second Coming was the
dominant feature of our lives. It was imminent. We were living in the Last Days.
Every tick of the clock might be the last we ever heard. If he didn’t come
tomorrow, it would probably be the day after; if not this week, the next. Every
activity was organised on a “DV” basis: Deo Volente, God Willing.
Next Sunday’s Gospel meeting would only take place “if He should tarry”.
We did not doubt that, while in his mercy he might tarry a few weeks, even a few
months, he would not be in a mood to tarry much longer. His return was promised
in God’s Word, and it was known as the Rapture. At the sound of the Last
Trump, Jesus would appear in the clouds. The graves would open, and the dead in
Christ would rise to meet him. We, the living in Christ, would follow them to
glory. So far, very much in line with the earliest surviving Christian document,
Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians. But
the Brethren’s 19th century founder, John Nelson Darby, had elaborated
Paul’s poetic fancy into a detailed doctrine of “dispensationalism”,
prescribing precisely how, if not quite when, all this would happen. As he and
his followers told it, we few would be taken, the many would be left. The train
driver who believed would fly heavenwards from his cab, leaving his train and
its unbelieving passengers to run on till it hit the last buffers. Driverless
cars belonging to taken saints would career into lorries driven by the
unregenerate. The unbelieving batsman at the cricket crease would face an empty
space where a moment earlier there had been a believing bowler. The unbelieving
lover in his bed, the unbelieving brother, sister, friend, would suddenly find
themselves alone in a God-forsaken world. And it would serve them right for not
believing. However, in his mercy, God would offer one last chance of repentance
during “the Tribulation”, which would last seven years. That would end with
the Third Coming and the start of the Rapture proper, when Jesus would return
one last time to reign on earth as he did in heaven, and we would return with
him to help run the place, co-partakers in his power and glory. That
I might not be one of the elect, the lucky few, the happy band of Brothers who
would rise to meet Christ in the clouds, did not occur to me. I had Blessed
Assurance, a foretaste of glory divine. I sang, Each
happy morning Thou dost give, I
have one morning less to live. Then
help me so this day to spend To
make me fitter for my end. I
took the Rapture very seriously. Since Jesus was coming for me any moment,
probably before the weekend, there was clearly no point in school work, no point
in homework, no point in education, qualifications, career. Like Peter Pan, I
would never grow up. The Rapture would get me first. In vain, my mother and
father tried to convince me that, although there was no doubt whatever that he would
come, he really would, I would be prudent to take on board the thin
possibility that he might choose to tarry longer than we all expected, if only
to give the unbelievers one more chance. But I thought he’d given them all the
chances they needed, especially the school bully, and I was confident that Jesus
wouldn’t see much point in delaying a moment longer than necessary. There
were times, admittedly, when I felt somewhat let down by the postponement of
paradise: for instance, when I was punished for not getting my homework done, or
caught out in some misdemeanor which I had supposed would not be discovered till
after the Rapture. There were also times when I fervently hoped the tarrying
would last a little longer: before a birthday, a Christmas or summer holidays.
And when I first found the courage to invite a rather attractive young Sister to
come out with me I prayed hard that Jesus would hold back till I had at least
brushed my hand against hers... “Even so, come quickly, Lord” - but not too
quickly! Well,
I grew up. I left the Brethren behind me, and the Rapture became a quaint
childhood memory - till I woke up to discover that John Nelson Darby’s “dispensationalism”,
far from disappearing into sectarian obscurity, was capturing the imagination of
millions. Today, no fewer than 20 million Americans, and 33% of the Republican
Party, describe themselves as “born again” believers, looking to the
Rapture. Rapture theology had spread from my little Gospel Hall to George W
Bush’s White House, and today God’s mighty army of telly-evangelists are
beaming it wholesale into Africa, Latin America and the former communist bloc. And
with Rapture theology comes rupture politics. A cardinal conviction of
dispensationalist fundamentalism is that in “the last days” the Jews will be
restored to all their ancient lands and will then convert to Christianity. Hence
the impassioned Christian Zionism which piles up the votes to ensure unswerving
American support for the state terrorism of the current Israeli regime, which in
turn creates the despair which fuels a counter-terrorism of suicide bombing and
the sado-fundamentalism which cuts off the heads of the innocent, in God’s
name, after making sure the execution is properly framed for the video camera.
Post 9/11, the Rapture isn’t funny any more. So
as I grew up I exchanged the Rapture for the mushroom cloud. Treading the
familiar path from conservative to liberal to radical theology, I became a peace
activist as a founder-member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disamement and editor
of its newspaper. After a spell on the socialist weekly Tribune I moved
into television, where I edited an international weekly current affairs
programme, World in Action, with the motto “To comfort the afflicted
and afflict the comfortable”. I was now a happy godless humanist and a left
social-democrat flavoured with a dash of anarchism. The Rapture and its
associated fantasies, dreamt up by Paul and fleshed out by Darby, were behind
me. Then
something happened. Not a Damascus Road blinding light, just a change of home.
We bought a seventeenth century farmhouse in Dent, a remote corner of the
Yorkshire Dales. Researching its history, I found that our house and its
neighbours were at the heart of “the Quaker Gallilee”, where George Fox’s
Quakerism rocked Cromwell’s republican England in the 1650s. Reading the old
records, I discovered a Christianity which had rejected creeds, priests,
clerics, hierarchies and an infallible book in favour of an inward light of
conscience and a gospel of radical social action. (Sea of Faith has some way to
go to catch up on that!). I started attending Quaker meetings - without ever
relinquishing my humanism. I had found a way to live a modern twentieth century
life, understanding religion to be a wholly human, cultural creation, but
learning to value a community of faith drawing its inspiration from stories and
traditions which, though they had originated in a pre-modern past, still spoke
to the condition of the present. I had found a way of keeping my eyes on the
skies and my feet on the ground (which, incidentally, makes the
cover-illustration for The Trouble with God). So
that was my evolution. But what about the evolution of faith itself, which is
supposed to be my theme? Religious evolution - and how we got it so wrong! There
was a time, beginning around the 1850s and culminating perhaps twenty years ago
at the time of Don Cupitt’s celebrated Sea of Faith TV series, when it really
did seem that the jig was up for organised religion, at least in the
“developed” world. We are all familiar with the way Matthew Arnold caught a
whiff of its death in 1859 with Dover Beach, where he mourned “the
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith, “retreating, to the
breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the
world”. Whether they mourned or celebrated the twilight of gods, devils and
things that go bump in the night, educated folk who had never heard of the
Rapture shared a sense that religion was on its way out. In
Europe, church-going began to decline, slowly at first, but with gathering pace.
Morality began to be defined in humanist and secular terms, a process which had
begun among the intelligentsia in the Enlightenment but now spread remorselessly
through the whole of society. A new concern for human rights edged out the old
imperative of blind obedience to an implacable divine will. And from 1917 on,
tens of thousands of churches in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were
turned into museums and warehouses as religion was commanded to wither away -
helped, when it failed to wither fast enough, by a dose of the gulags. Old-time
religion, it seemed, was dying on its feet, a relic of superstitious
pre-modernity which looked increasingly out of place in modernity, and quite
irrelevant in post-modernity. It was on its way out, along with all the other
grand narratives and overarching systems which, in Tennyson’s words, had
“had their day and ceased to be”. As one of the more creative graffiti
artists of the 1980s scrawled on the churchyard wall (and I use it as the
screensaver on my PC), “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I’m not feeling so
well myself!” To many of us who had read our John Robinson and our Don Cupitt,
it seemed that faith was in terminal decline, lingering on in dark and unsavoury
corners, its appeal now limited to the very young, the very old, the very
gullible, and the shamelessly nostalgic. Reason and plain common sense had
sapped it of its appeal, its power and its purpose. The very force which had
once claimed to rob death of its sting was itself in its death throes. Or so it
seemed to many of us. And now, twenty years on, we look back... And
we see just how wrong we were! Or,
at the very least, how staggeringly insular! Twenty years after Don’s Taking
Leave of God we can see that faith was in retreat only on the beaches of
northern Europe and some of its far-flung former colonies. Over much of the rest
of the world the tide of faith has swept back in with the force of a tsunami.
Far from fading, religion has become once again a matter of life and death:
especially death. Today, barely half way through the first decade of the 21st
century and the third Christian millennium, we are living through a mighty
revival of religion in its crudest, most bigoted, most pernicious forms. Our
oh-so-modern world remains awash with superstition, supernaturalism, and
stubborn belief in good and evil spirits, gods and devils, extra-terrestrials
and disembodied authorities who demand our obedience and command our lives. The
United States of America has embraced the shadow-side of its puritan past, where
faith overcomes facts. George W Bush as firmly believes that God commanded him
to invade Iraq as Bin Laden believes the same God commanded him to organise
9/11. Millions agree. Hollywood
finds the flagellation of Jesus a bigger turn-on than viagra. The Rapture books
in the Left Behind series (you’ll be left behind unless you get washed
in the blood of the lamb) outsell Harry Potter. In
Britain, and no less in Austrealia, so I’m told, the churches continue to
empty, but the “mind/body/spirit” shelves in our bookshops groan under the
weight of tomes recommending a thousand varieties of bottled spiritualities -
three for the price of two. One in ten men and one in four women tell pollsters
they think there’s something in reincarnation. One in three women say they
believe in angels, particularly the guardian variety. Churches, both Orthodox
and those planted by western telly-evangelists, flourish in the new Russia.
Africa is awash with mission-planted supernaturalism in the form of happy-clappy
churchianity. God is invoked by all sides in what is sometimes still called,
with apparently unconscious irony, “the Holy Land”. And above all, a century
after free-thinkers thought they’d thought God into his grave, two monstrous,
murderous religious fundamentalisms square up to each other, for God’s sake
and in his name, to devour our world’s precarious stability. In
one corner, we find a distorted Islamic fundamentalism: the product of despair,
humiliation and ignorance. The fastest growing world religion, Islam has doubled
the number of its adherents since 1970, and much of the increase has been at the
most conservative, irrational end of its spectrum of beliefs and practices. In
the other corner crouches a perverted Christian fundamentalism, the product of
pride, greed and ignorance. It is estimated that 680 million people - 11 per
cent of the world’s population - describe themselves as “born again” or
“saved”. When the roll is called up yonder it will take one hell of a time
to read out. Pentecostalist churches are growing at a rate of 8.1% per year.
Evangelical churches, distinguished by their barbaric emphasis on salvation by
blood sacrifice, have a growth rate of 5.4%. Russian television is now
substantially funded by American telly-evangelist corporations. In
Latin-America, the fastest growth is in the charismatic churches sponsored by
the religious right in the United States specifically to counter the threat of
radical liberation theology. Add to these the Zionist fundamentalism which
asserts the right to occupy lands given to a chosen people by their own tribal
divinity three thousand years ago, and throw in the Hindu fundamentalism which
has ripped open ancient wounds in supposedly secular India, and we see just how
wrong we were when, in building our humanist sand-castles on Dover beach, we
allowed ourselves to believe that religion in it ugliest and most violent forms
would be swept away on the ebb tide and replaced by the sweet reason of a Cupitt
or a Geering. Am
I talking too much gloom and doom? Well,
of course it is possible to find good religion as well as bad, just as there is
good politics and bad politics, good and bad sex. Religious motivation played a
key part in the anti-slavery movement, the black civil rights movement, the
Jubilee 2000 “Drop the Debt” campaign, Peace and Reconciliation in South
Africa, Ghandian non-violence in India, the Islamic practice of zakat or
alms tax whereby 2.5% of income is donated for those in need, and in the
twentieth century creation of a global network of humanitarian agencies for
famine relief, fair trade and the release of prisoners of conscience. Some
religious traditions, such as Unitarianism, have placed a high value on reason.
Some, like Quakerism, have put active non-violence, reconciliation and
peace-making at the heart of their faith and practice. Local churches of many
different persuasions have offered friendship and community in a world where
friendship and community can be hard to find. We cannot value these too highly -
but we can’t allow them to blind us to the damage being done by the flood-tide
of resurgent religion in its most pathological forms. So
when we address the question of the future of religion, we cannot any longer
seriously persuade ourselves, let alone anyone else, that religion as a whole is
evolving into enlightened rationalism and moral humanism. It is patently
refusing to follow any such script. Indeed, it seems that evolution, understood
as a gradual progression into something better, just doesn’t figure on
religion’s agenda. Christianity must change or die, says Jack Spong. But I see
little sign of it doing either. Some
people find comfort in the shift from old-time religion to the
variety of “new age” spiritualities which, for many, have filled a
church-shaped hole. I’m not one of them. Are these spiritualities any
improvement on what went before? They tend to be less hierarchical, less
dogmatic, less judgmental, less damaged by sexual repression, less violent. But
they also tend to be self-absorbed, narcisistic, obsessed with self-fulfilment,
contemptuous of rationality, and intellectually empty. They have little
significant ethical content, no social programme, no hunger for a better world.
They prefer making love to making war, and I won’t argue with that, but they
have no taste for “speaking truth to power”, for the hard grind involved in
creating conditions for beating swords into ploughshares and spears into
pruning-hooks. I find new age spiritualities pretty dispiriting. I don’t buy
the suggestion that they are the devolved religion of the future - and if they
are, please stop the world, I want to get off. Let’s
face it. In ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years time, the whole religious
scene is unlikely to be significantly different from the way it looks today. The
fears and insecurities which feed irrational supernaturalism and breed the
superstitions of conservative religion, fundamentalism and a vapid spirituality
show no sign of fading away. What future for religion? I’m afraid the most
likely answer is: much the same as the past and the present. Bad religion will
always be with us as the disease rather than the cure. So
I’m going to address a much more limited question: Where to with our faith? By
“our faith” I mean the open-minded, open-ended, undogmatic reflection
on what our diverse religious traditions can mean to us today when we have
abandoned absolutes, ultimates and an external God:
our on-going search for the precious core of wisdom and insight which is
at once both ancient and bang up-to-date. Isn’t that the essence of the Sea of
Faith quest? Where to, then, with that? It
is our responsibility in Sea of Faith and the growing networks promoting a
humanistic understanding of religion to nurture it, to grow it on, to see that
it is not entirely swamped by the tidal waves of irrational supernaturalist
religion. It is our responsibility to see that a questioning faith, a critical
faith, a rational faith survives, if only on the margins of an overwhelmingly
negative religious culture. We have to speak up for that in our churches and
meeting-houses and Sea of Faith groups. We have to be prepared to stick our
heads above the parapet, to open our mouths, to “come out” as men and women
who have taken leave of God for God’s sake, who value religion not as magic
and mystery but as a poetry to live by, speaking a language which reaches the
parts that everyday secular language can’t penetrate. We must keep our flame
alive, “like a little candle burning in the night”. Yes,
I’m talking about a humanist understanding of religion, where “no Saviour
from on high delivers”, where we know we can no longer look to the sky for
help, “for It / Rolls impotently on as Thou and I”. I’m talking about a
way of looking at religion whereby, in community, we work out our own salve-ation
- the salving, or healing, of our shared wounds, and find our own way to
atonement - at-one-ment - with ourselves, our fellow-creatures and with the
world of which we are a material and a living part. (I emphasis that we do this
in community, together: not as isolated individuals absorbed in private notions
of self-fulfilment). In this very human world God is not an external
reality but our very own idea, our concept, our creation, our projection,
our dream - though, paradoxically, we discover that it’s true, after all, that
God is our creator, since it is the gods we make for ourselves which make us
what we are! A
vision of God as the embodiment of what makes us most human has never been
better expressed than by William Blake two hundred years ago. The italics are
mine, but the poetry is his: To
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love All
pray in their distress, And
to these virtues of delight Give
forth their thankfulness. For
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love Is God,
our Father dear; And
Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love Is man,
his child and care. For
Mercy has a human heart, Pity
a human face, And
Love the human form divine, And
Peace a human dress... Don
gave us Sea of Faith, and William Blake gave us Sea of Faith’s religious
humanist anthem! But
I need to make one thing clear. A God-symbol who is the incarnation of our
highest human values is not an easy option. A theology which simply equates God
with human values and supposes that’s the end of the matter is a pretty
shallow theology unless it moves on to spell out the difficulty and cost of
affirming and living out those values. Love isn’t easy. Loving your neighbour
is hard enough sometimes, when your neighbour won’t follow the soap jingle
about neighbours “being there for one another... that’s when good neighbours
become good friends”! But loving your enemy is something else. Loving the
fundamentalist who would drive you from his church? Loving the suicide bomber?
Loving Donald Rumsfeld? Positive peace-making, particularly when it involves a
determination to find alternatives to violence, demands more than most of us
feel capable of giving. How we do it is almost impossible to imagine. But unless
we imagine it, it won’t happen. Religion is not concerned simply to utter the
platitudes of a certain ethical idealism. Instead, it invites us to enter a
drama, in which we discover that we are as vulnerable as the values we wish to
affirm, and it is precisely in that vulnerability that those values are tested
and achieved. To pledge allegiance
to the God who is the symbolic embodiment of “mercy, pity, peace and love”
is no soft option. It is to chose to serve a symbolic God who really does demand
my soul, my life, my all. Mercy,
pity, peace and love only come alive in action, in public expression. So I want
to put this to you: In a faith, or a spirituality, which privileges mercy and
pity (or compassion), can there be any room for excluding political and
social issues from our religious discourse, since it is the political and social
which govern our relationship with others? In
a spirituality which privileges peace-making and reconciliation, can
there be any room for resolving our conflicts, personal, local, national or
global, by violence? And by violence I mean not just the scandal of the Iraq war
and the Middle East quagmire but the social violence of unjust trade agreements,
the greed which causes us to poison our planet and threaten the survival of life
itself, the imperialism of the strongest nations, the economic exploitation of
the weakest, the oppression or marginalisation of women. And
in a spirituality which privileges love, which even makes the
breath-taking demand that we love our enemies, for God’s sake! - can
there be any room for demonising those who see us as the devils, or for blinding
ourselves to our own complicity in the oppression which has fed their
fanaticism? It’s
our job in Sea of Faith not just to talk about these things but to
demonstrate that a Christian or religious humanism is better equipped,
intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, to help us begin to live out
the demands of mercy, pity, peace and love, the virtues which, says Blake, are
what we mean by “God”? How can we put our religious humanism, our faith
in the wholly human spirit, into practice? Where are our guides? The republic of heaven Well,
we could do worse than go back to a Mediterranean peasant-teacher called Jesus.
Never mind whether he was historical or mythological, the Jesus of the Jesus
stories offered us glimpses of a possible alternative reality which he called
“the kingdom of heaven”. In this new society, it was the poor who would be
blessed, the peace-makers who would survive, the powerless who would inherit the
land. Liberation theology? Certainly a liberating vision, an enabling dream.
Here’s a spirituality with a kick in it, a revolutionary dynamic. It’s a
social spirituality, a political spirituality. It’s an action spirituality. I’m
not talking about cut-and-dried blueprints, party programmes, power trips. I’m
not suggesting Sea of Faith adopts its own social or political programme. God
forbid! But I am saying that a spirituality which shies away from exploring the
social and political implications of a radical religious humanist faith is a
half-cock spirituality. And half-cock isn’t half good enough! Jesus’
challenge is still with us. My own modest proposal is that we start by bringing
ourselves up to date and dropping the “kingdom” bit in favour of the republic
of heaven. I did this when I published a book four years ago on the 17th century
radical Gerrard Winstanley, which I called Gerrard Winstanley and the
Republic of Heaven. Some readers thought the term was Winstanley’s. Since
then, it has been popularised by Philip Pullman in his marvellous trilogy His
Dark Materials, based on Paradise Lost, where God, “the
Authority”, and his church, “the Magisterium”, are dethroned and replaced
by the republic of heaven. When Philip spoke at our UK SoF conference a couple
of years ago he told me he had wanted to call the last book in his trilogy The
Republic of Heaven, but his publishers had politely opined that it wasn’t
a title that would sell!
No doubt I’d have done better if my publishers had had the same
commercial acumen! I
don’t want to suggest that the republic of heaven is nothing more than the
kingdom with a new brand name, but continuity demands that the kingdom is at
least our starting point. The kingdom is the inescapable foundation for the
republic. The republic is post-kingdom, as our western culture is
post-Christian, where the present is not a denial of the past but is shaped and
changed by it. There’s
a lot that I would be happy to import into the republic straight from the
kingdom. The republic of heaven proposes an overturning of the old order which
puts down the mighty from their seats, privileges the hitherto unprivileged,
sees the hungry fed, gives the unhappy cause to laugh. Membership is offered to
those who don’t lead respectable lives and are no better than they should be.
The religious who say “Lord, Lord” will have their membership suspended till
they stop talking their religion and start living it. Foreigners, minorities,
asylum seekers, economic migrants, those who think different thoughts and do
things differently, will be welcome. Children, whether naughty or nice, are
honorary members already. Respectable middle-class people who go to church or
temple or synagogue, pop the odd coin in the collection plate, take out standing
orders for Greenpeace or Save the Whale, and read all the Sea of Faith
newsletters, will be excluded if they suppose these attributes and dispositions
give them an automatic right to citizenship, as those who imagine they deserve
it thereby demonstrate that they don’t. (Incidentally, as a journalist I’ve
got a fighting chance of scraping in as one of the despised and rejected!) What
the republic will not import from the kingdom is the notion of blind obedience
and passive subjection to an external divine lord, master and king, for
lordship, mastership and kingship belong to the past. The republic is to be
built, stone by stone, by the free citizens of the republic of heaven, fully
aware that they alone are responsible for what they are building and how they
build it. The republic is to be the masterwork of the wholly human spirit, and
the fruits of the human spirit are the religious virtues of mercy, pity, peace
and love. But there are also religious values and impulses which can have no
place in the republic. As Rabbi Sara Blumenthal puts it in E L Doctorow’s
novel City of God , “the impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to
eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and
politics of religion, God has always been a licence to kill”. So the republic
must embrace virtues which traditionally have been considered non-religious or
anti-religious: independent- mindedness; freedom of thought, speech and action;
liberty, equality, brotherhood and sisterhood; romance, laughter, generosity and
tolerance; common decency and common welfare; creative imagination and reason -
each valued for itself, and not because a sovereign lord so decrees. I
want to call it a republic because I want us to be citizens, not
subjects. And I want us to acknowledge that building the republic of heaven is
our responsibility, not one we can leave to a heavenly king. The
republic is within us when we make the effort to commit ourselves to
mercy, pity, peace and love; it is among us in the communities and
networks which work selflessly to mend our wounded world; and it is a future,
better world, that alternative reality which could be ours if we would only make
it! And
who can doubt we need the vision! Two thousand years after the Jesus stories,
millions live in a world which might reasonably be considered closer to a
republic of hell than of heaven. The long sigh and shriek of misery, grief,
pain, anguish, sickness and despair threatens to tear the world apart. By the
middle of this century, when our grandchildren are in their prime, if the
demographers are right ten billion people will inhabit the earth, most of them
in vast mega-cities where life is consumed by the struggle to control the
planet’s diminishing resources. Even
today, if the earth’s present population were envisaged as a village of one
hundred people, 80 of us would live in houses unfit for human habitation, 70
would be illiterate, 50 would be seriously malnourished, and six would own 60%
of the village’s land and wealth. 30 would be white but would consider the
other 70 ethnic minorities. Ten of these thirty would be actively polluting the
village on which the remaining 90 depend for their living. Where
among them, where among us, are the rebels, agitators and outsiders, the
partisan recruits to the underground army of subversion whose loyalty is pledged
to the republic of heaven, the City of God? Yes,
the City of God. For here’s a paradox for the religious humanist. God does,
after all, have a place in the republic of heaven! God, the most powerful of all
the potent symbols ever created by the symbol-making species called humans, God
understood as our incarnation of mercy, pity, peace and love, tosses away his
crown and joins us in the messiness and absurdities of our human lives. And
that’s the trouble with God: he can’t be written out of the script. So since
he won’t go quietly, let us retain him, as our story of him, in the capacity
of honorary consultant-adviser helping us create the hallowed secularism which
is the hallmark of the republic of heaven.
David Boulton’s most
recent books, ‘’, ‘Real Like
the Daisies...: Essays in Radical Quakerism’ and ‘Gerrard Winstanley and the
Republic of Heaven’ are available from Unity Books, Auckland (unitybooks@xtra.co.nz)
and Wellington (unity.books@clear.net.nz - phone 04 499 4245)
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