Journal of Globalization for the Common Good

Let me start with a simple parable. In the interests of promoting friendly interfaith relations my city’s Christian-Muslim dialogue group last year decided to arrange a Muslim Imams and Christian Clergy. The Imams romped home with a stunning 6-0 victory. Undeterred by defeat the clergy proposed a cricket match. Again, the Imam group was triumphant. We needed a solution to a developing crisis: how to rescue a reverse colonial take-over, a potentially religious holy war, and the politics of oppositional antagonism? A brilliant solution emerged. There was to be a further cricket match, but this time one between joint teams of clergy and Imams from two cities, Leicester and Bradford. Leicester batted to victory and celebrated its sense of multicultural pride.

My simple parable is intended to raise the issue of how, in western society, we can move from oppositional politics and oppositional intellectual life to some sense of shared hope. How to move from defining ourselves in terms of Us-Against-Them to Us-As-Them? Right now the antics of a polarised outlook shapes the public space – in the media, government and academy. Take all three contexts. Recently a story was published in the British press that the teaching of the Holocaust of the Jews in the Second World War was to be discontinued in schools because some Muslim pupils objected to it. The story circulated across the globe and outrage about blackmail was boiling up. It turned out that there was one incident in one classroom in one school involving one weak teacher. No national policy hung on it. Yet the media loved the oppositional politics of it. Then, in government circles, there has begun a concerted policy move in the UK, with financial backing, for local communities to promote multicultural and multifaith community cohesion in order to derail the potential radicalising of young Muslim men. This would be fine, but at the same time the government refuses to accept the overwhelming evidence that part of that radicalising is to do with its foreign policy and particularly with the ‘war on terror’ and the occupation of Iraq. Government and the majority of the citizens are at logger-heads. Finally, in relation to the academy, in the West we are aware of the recent industry of anti-God books, most famously that of Richard Dawkins’s ‘God Delusion’. By common consent, Dawkins sets up a straw-man and comfortably destroys it. That’s not difficult to do. Or take another author, Sam Harris, and his books ‘The End of Faith’ and ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’. He says that Muslims and the American Christian Right are two of a kind. To the Christian Right he says ‘Non-believers like myself stand beside you dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well – by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service of your religious myths and by your attachment to an imaginary God.’ Psychological denial, responsibility for suffering, intellectual craziness – that’s quite an accusing list. And there is truth in some of it. But there is no truth in its oppositional caricature.

In the UK, as in other western countries, we have a crisis in relation to globalisation. On the one hand we have pursued the economics of liberalism and the free movement of capital and the labour market. That continues to bring benefits to the already rich. On the other hand, we are resisting other aspects of globalisation: the movement of peoples to our shores, the need to develop better models of multiculturalism, and, most significantly now, the recognition of religious plurality. If globalisation conjures up an ‘Us-As-Them’ then we are not sure we want it. Into that uncertainty comes a polarised debate of Religion versus Secularism, Multiculturalism/Integration versus Assimilation and Political Liberalism versus Traditionalism. It is difficult often to carve out any shared ground for sensible debate between these opposites. Each side has its foundational dogmatics for comfort, yet each knows that in a post-critical world the spectre of relativism is always threatening.

So I repeat: how to move from ‘Us-Against-Them’ to ‘Us-As-Them’? Without it, what chance will there be for the common good to influence the rapid globalisation now taking place?

Actually oppositional postures do not characterise the whole of the political and intellectual landscape. There are some on the secularist left who lament the absence of any worthwhile moral direction in western political liberalism which seems, they aver, to have surrendered everything to economist interpretations of human living. For example, Guardian columnist Neal Lawson, self-confessed ‘atheist and a full-time politico’, has written: ‘ [I]n words and deeds, in the world I see around me, the positive role faith plays far outweighs the negatives. Religious leaders hold a mirror up to the injustice and immorality of our society and are prepared in their own small way to do something about it.’ (‘If they preach the cause of the poor, they’re my people’, The Guardian, 3 January 2007). In other words, there is no need for the polarising of views. Then from the religious side, the Muslim academic, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic Studies and Public Understanding in the University of Glasgow, has written in support of anti-discrimination law, arguing that there should be no opt-out clause for religions on matters of discrimination. She writes: ‘[I]f our Government has deemed fit to make illegal any sort of discrimination, whether it be on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation, it is inevitable that this eradication must be total; there can be no room for just a little bit of discrimination.’ And again: ‘[If] we are all to be treated as equal citizens, then the ills committed in the name of our faith and culture, should be equally condemned.’ What she had in mind specifically here was the practice of forced marriages. In other words, there is no reason why the religions should pose themselves as necessarily opposed to the political liberalism of the West.

In practice too, the polarisation so beloved of the media and the academic community does not reflect every context. In Leicester - city of interreligious soccer and cricket! - there are several public dialogue groups which flourish; churches and mosques jointly raise money for justice projects around the world; faith leaders meet regularly in order to anticipate the fall-out from the next international event, and they stand robustly by their commitment that an attack on one community is an attack on all. Over a decade ago the Leicester Anglican bishop’s chaplain was also employed as the Secretary for the Jain Centre of Europe one mile from my home, and the pioneering St.Philip’s Centre which is run as a Christian ecumenical centre for study and engagement in a multifaith society, also employs a Muslim and a Sikh on their staff. Leicester has not always been like this. We have come a long way since the 1970s, when Idi Amin was persecuting and expelling his Asian population from Uganda, and the Leicester City Council took out an advert in the Uganda Times telling people not to come to Leicester on the grounds that there was no work and nowhere to live.

Today the city could not function without its Asian entrepreneurs and it trumpets itself as a successful multicultural and multifaith city. Everything is not totally well, of course. New groups are arriving from eastern Europe and parts of Africa at a time when the ‘war on terror’ is being used as an excuse for tightening immigration measures and creating an air of suspicion, around Muslims particularly but also around anyone else not recognisably British, and this puts a strain inevitably on neighbourhood relationships. Moreover, the good cooperation between religious leaders does not always filter down to local levels or into people’s homes. But my main point here is that, on the whole, not only in theory but also in practice the polarising of views does not properly reflect reality.

However, we need to understand why the polarising has happened. The reasons inevitably will be complex. I cite two major ones. The first is to do with what is called religiously-motivated violence, and the second with the making of an ideological ‘ism’ out of a pragmatic procedure. Let me take each in turn.

Undoubtedly, 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ has made a massive impact. This is not breaking news, but it is persisting news. It is sometimes said that, having once been banished, religion is back in the public arena with a vengeance. Precisely how this return is experienced or received will be different in different European countries, and different again from the United States. In the UK, a country fairly robustly secular in outlook, in spite of having an established church, the picture is mixed. The spectre of religiously-motivated violence created a suspicion of Muslims which was further deepened after our own violence with the London killings on 7/7/05. The realisation that the perpetrators of the 7/7 killings were home-grown young men whose backgrounds were not defined by poverty or educational under-achievement led to pressure being put on Muslim communities to do something about those who might be vulnerable to extremism. The scene was set for collision between Islam (and by extension other communities, including even the secularised Christians) and secular liberalism, as present realities were filtered through the historical lenses of medieval history, crusades and holy war, colonialism and occupation. So-called ‘otherness’ was a threat. Enlightened Freedom versus Religious Dogmatism had returned. Perhaps we should not be surprised at this, for it was wars between religions and within religions which was partly instrumental in promoting the secularist outlook in the first place.

So religiously-motivated violence has thrust religion back into the public gaze, but in a fashion which requires religion to justify itself even more than previously and after a period of unprecedented secular dominance. And religiously-motivated violence, we might agree, is a good enough reason for holding religion as such at arms length in the public square. The second cluster of reasons why the polarisation of views has happened concerns the enormous success in western countries of political liberalism in theory combined with secular pragmatism in policy-making. But there is a feeling now that secular liberalism has not brought all of the benefits it perhaps once promised. For example, it has not had the strength to withstand the corrosive effects of globalisation. More than that, in separating off the material bases of living from spiritual needs it has no convincing answer to the basic question of what goals we should pursue as human beings in society. This was summed up in a famous sentence once uttered by our former PM, Margaret Thatcher, who said that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and the family. In a simple question one commentator has observed: ‘The politics of recent years has been almost obsessively focussed on economics. Over the next few years, we need to turn our attention once again to the social – to what it is that makes us able to live together well’ (Geoff Mulgan, The Guardian).

Political liberalism combined with pragmatic decision-making has brought many benefits. It brought an end to the over-weaning power of religious institutions and opened up a new sense of dignity for individuals. Yet wholesale accommodation to the processes of secularisation which accompanied political liberalism was bound to remain problematic for the religious mind. The concern is mainly with what is sometimes termed the Rawlsian contract theory of liberal democracy, from John Rawls the American political scientist. Theoretically speaking, Rawls proposed that our reasoning over public policy should be based on that which no reasonable person could reasonably reject. It is a sort of highest common factor or pragmatic approach: put simply, decisions are made according to what works and what citizens will accept.

From the same point of view, the philosopher, Richard Rorty, says that when religion enters political/public debate it acts as a ‘conversation-stopper’. When the religious person says that God commands this or that policy, what sense can be made of it by citizens outside of that particular framework? Therefore religious believers ought to keep it for themselves – privately. This is a familiar secularist argument.

The difficulty for many believers is that this immediately cuts out religious doctrines as a basis for moral decision-making in relation to public policy. Religious voices want to ask questions of purpose and meaning in the making of public policy, but a government shaped by secular-pragmatic assumptions has no mechanism for answering those questions. In law, government might maximise human liberties and even help civil society to develop the intermediate means for influencing public policy, but it simply is at a loss when it comes to policy-making from a single comprehensive point of view. In the debate between ‘human goods’ and ‘human ‘rights’, the religions are likely to be on the ‘goods’ side and the governing powers of a liberal democracy on the ‘rights’ side. Finding a decent balance between the two seems continually precarious, to say the least.

Furthermore, there may be a contradiction at the heart of the social contract theory. If the social contract is meant to allow freedom of expression and argument for all citizens and yet cuts out the reasons a great number of citizens give for arguing the way they do, then how can the social contract facilitate proper freedom? There is a feeling from many educated religious voices that public debate requires deepening. Where are the virtues that create human character and habits of relating based on respect and dignity? Political arrangements must surely have some connection with what human life is for. Freedom from coercion is good but there is freedom ‘for’ as well as freedom ‘from’. Liberal democratic governments have no answer to what our freedom is ‘for’. So Archbishop Rowan Williams, for example, complains that secular liberalism needs to address better the issue of what view of the human is involved when it comes to legislation. Pure pragmatism, he avers, seems not up to the task when deciding on matters such as ‘the status of the embryo in relation to genetic research, or the legalisation of assisted dying, or the legal support given to marriage’. He observes further: ‘While there can be no assumption that a government will or should assume that such arguments (derived from religious tradition) must be followed, there must equally be no assumption that these arguments may not be heard and weighed, that an issue has to be decided solely on arguments that can be owned by no particular group.’ (Lecture given at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, November 2006).

So what is to be done? We do not want to return to the theocratic state, yet a polarised stand-off between ‘Religion’ and ‘Secularism’ seems equally unattractive, not least because it oversimplifies what probably really transpires. It might help to see that there is no need to imagine that secular approaches to public reasoning are necessarily a function of an ideology labelled Secular Liberalism. The American political scientist, Jeffrey Stout, reminds us that secularization arose at the beginning of the modern period because of difficulties over finding common assumptions in the interpretation of biblical texts, and not because of commitment to an alternative philosophical ideology based in the Enlightenment. He cites the historian Christopher Hill who has documented how the Bible passed from a position of unquestioned authority in political debate at the beginning of the 17th century to one where it had been effectively ‘dethroned’ by the end of the 1650s. Different interpretations of holy writ came to prevail and this undermined any common ground on which to decide issues of difference over policy-making. It follows that theocracy cannot be sustained if there are legitimate different interpretations of the bases of polity and policy. Democracy, on the other hand, allows difference of views. So in the 17th century religious arbitration in political matters began to seem unstable, but not because there was supplanting by something called secularism. Therefore in present-day debate, argues Stout, there is no reason to suppose that religious voices cannot make their points boldly from a theological perspective; they simply must understand, however, that their reasoning will not necessarily be accessible to everyone in the debate, and they will have to make their own adjustments in terminology and argumentation accordingly.

Out of similar sympathies, Rowan Williams makes a distinction between ‘programmatic secularism’ and ‘procedural secularism’. ‘Programmatic secularism’ is what prevails in the minds of those who call themselves secularists; it confines comprehensive convictions to the private sphere and considers public debate about moral direction in society to be purely instrumental. On the other hand, ‘procedural secularism’ imagines a public square crowded with argument, necessarily untidy, risky in terms of ordered debate, and where religious voices take their place alongside others in open exchange. What emerges from such an open exchange will not necessarily be the outcome of a kind of free-for-all ethical slanging match but, in the best possible world, the fruit of listening and rational persuasion – rational, that is, in the desired sense of seeing the persuasive reasons for something, even if one disagreed with the comprehensive view of life lying behind them. As Williams spells it out:

Williams’s optimism is that public political life flourishes better, even benefits from, being engaged with what he calls ‘larger commitments and visions’ derived from religious commitment. So much is commendable. However, there still remains the increasingly unsettling issue of religious plurality. This brings me to my positive proposals in trying to move beyond the stand-off between secularists and religionists.

What seems to be necessary is a model of participation in public democratic debate which allows for the particularities of religious and secular voices, seeking common ground while respecting differences, and balancing compromise where necessary with critical solidarity, for the sake of the common good. Such a model must surely be dialogical at heart if the religions are to develop their democratic political relevance. Most of all, the model must involve the religions self-critically if they are both to overcome their historic mistrust of one another and to learn the values of provisionality and humility that are necessary in the context of interpreting and negotiating plurality. A report prepared by the Millennium Institute for the third Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1999 expressed the view that ‘the greatest single scandal in which Earth’s faith traditions are now involved is their failure to practise their highest ethical ideals in their relations with one another’. Thankfully, this is slowly changing, partly under pressure from world events (9/11 and 7/7) and partly as a result of the permission for dialogue that has been hard-won over three decades of scholarship.

Dialogue, I take it, proceeds best on the basis of trustful acceptance, critical friendship and mutual accountability. With that in mind I suggest two principles which help to place dialogue within the matrix of globalisation: first, dialogue is what the world needs from the religions, and second, dialogue is what the religions at their best potentially offer the world. Let me a say a word about each aspect. First, dialogue is what the world needs from the religions. Calls for dialogue have often begun with reference to crisis. The world is in desperate trouble and so we need co-operation on as many fronts as we can muster to tackle the problems. What has become interesting about this approach is that often those who would normally operate within a secular discourse are now beginning to reach out to the religions. From the pragmatic perspective of the world’s leaders, analysts and institutional shapers, there is a growing recognition that perhaps the religions have more to offer than the violence with which they are associated in the popular mind. The resources of spirituality, transcendence and rootedness in human community are being pitted against the dominance of purely political or economist models of human living.

For example, Richard Falk, who has been a long-time analyst of international affairs and advocate of social and spiritual values in global thinking, has written:

The point seems to be simply that the values which are embedded in our varied religious visions are perennial and are a considerable part of what motivate people at the levels of community and cultural identity.

A similar point was made a number of years ago at a series of meetings, in which I participated, between Jews, Christians and Muslims, convened to discuss democracy in relation to religious views of the state. As the discussion wore on it seemed to the only political scientist in the group that the theologians, in a bid to embrace democracy wholeheartedly, were not as critical as they should have been in relation to democracy’s yoking with political liberalism and economic capitalism in the period of modernity. He thought that liberalism and capitalism, as these have developed, were often destructive of democracy’s best values – values, for example, of building human community and the empowerment of people to take responsibility for their own lives in ways which were not captive to global capital and big business. He put it simply:

I thought the point was fairly made, and more so for being made in an interreligious dialogue context and by a political scientist.

My second principle is that dialogue is what the religions at their best potentially offer the world. As theologians and religious leadership are fond of saying, religions provide ethical frameworks, binding beliefs and a sense of human solidarity in community. They promote values such as justice, peace, empathy with the suffering, friendship with the stranger, and connectedness to the earth. In a dialogical setting, the question arises how to cross-pollinate the ethical resourcefulness of the traditions. This opens door to global ethic thinking.

One exercise in harnessing ethical resourcefulness was offered in the much-discussed global ethic thinking of the statement Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, first promulgated at the 1993 Parliament of World’s Religions. This is not the only example of global ethic thinking, but has received the most discussion. It is worth recalling the Four Commitments that lay at the heart of the Parliament’s Global Ethic statement:

These four Commitments, it seems to me, provide sufficient substance for the religions to have themselves a dialogical field day! Moreover, they provide for a substantial critique of much of the destructive effects of human behaviour. They propel the religions and other worldviews into patterns of relationship that will transform the outlook of all of us.

But there is more. We also open ourselves up to challenges from critical reasoning and the democratic spirit. This entails that the values of equality, human rights and human responsibilities, the scientific search for truth in understanding the way the world works, looking hard at the ambivalence of religious texts and traditions towards violence – these cumulatively exact a price to be paid for signing up with a Global Ethic!

Some have said that the four Commitments of the Global Ethic represent nothing more than a liberal agenda and do not arise naturally from the religions themselves. That may be partly true. But dialogue is more than conversation; it is interested in change, and global ethic thinking is an attempt to harness religious energies towards a purposeful end. Moreover, the objection that the religions envisage different ends for the religiously-motivated life and that therefore global ethics is necessarily an oxymoron is not fully sustainable. For the religions themselves are not static entities but dynamic spiritualities which have adapted and changed through history and culture. Why can we not see the present as the latest setting in a series of historical challenges in which we make our own adaptations to a changing world and in the light of new encounters? If dialogue is what the religions can offer at their best then they must also be open to change themselves in the wake of the global problems facing us and the need to cooperate with others on the public square.

Of course, what these commitments entail at practical levels beyond generalisation is the point at which the interesting arguments begin. But that is not for such a model to solve. Each of the religions have their arguments and range of views about each of the themed commitments. My point is that this agenda provides sufficient material for the growing dialogue between religions for the sake of globalisation for the common good.

Dialogue is not value-free. None will be unchanged. There is a journey to undertake.

In summary, let me return to my starting point about religion in public life. What seems needed is not so much an empty public square but what we might call a dialogically filled public square. We acknowledge the history of how secular liberalism arises – there was no agreement on interpretative principles once critical reasoning had arisen – but that doesn’t mean that we cannot explain to one another the reasons we have for believing the things we do and acting on them. Why can we not come to decisions based on that mutual listening and mutuality of respect? This is why I believe our interreligious dialogue is so necessary. It is not only good for our own learning from one another; it could well pose itself as a kind of model for helping us to move beyond the stand-off between ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’. But the religions should only be allowed their voices if they transcend their historic antagonisms and mistrust – listening to reasons we give for policies, and becoming aware of the limitations of different perspectives even as we might cherish them.

The public square should not be filled with a theocratic religious voice or be left hostage to a secular liberal absence of religious reasoning, but a dialogical conversation that values the other even as it might disagree with them. This seems to me to be the next step in the support for liberty and democracy in a plural society. There is, however, one major problem in taking such a step. It will likely require us to suspend, if not surrender, our religious senses of absolutism. And the trouble is, as we know, the religions don’t like to do that.

[1] Richard Falk, ‘The Religious Foundations of Humane Governance,’ in Toward a Global Civilization? The Contribution of Religions, eds., Patricia M. Mische and Melissa Merkling, New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2001, p. 56.