The Roman Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement held a meeting in St Anne’s Church, Soho on Sunday 3rd August 2003 to respond to the UK government’s proposals concerning same-sex partnership rights. The following was an impromptu theological/pastoral contribution by James Alison, put into writing after the event
I have been asked to talk to you about Worship in a violent world. As though there has ever been any other. There hasn’t. It is only because of the introduction into our midst of glimpses of a world, not yet our own, where all is peace that we are able to look at our world and refer to it as “violent”, rather than simply normal. The discovery that might is might, a frightening aberration for which we can take some responsibility, rather than right, a natural part of the order of things which just tends to run away with us, is a hugely complex insight whose consequences we haven’t yet worked out. What I would like to do with you today is to stand back and ask what it is that allows Christians to use a horrid word taken from the world of violence such as “worship”; what we mean by it when we do use it; and what indeed do we do that counts as “worship”.
It is and always has been a proper part of the Catholic Faith, and the life of the Church, that it tends to generate a relatively benign secularity; that far from the “secular” being our “enemy”, it is in fact our “baby”. And a fragile baby, one whose birth and development is well worth protecting. Nowadays our contemporaries are inclined to use the word “religious” as though it were synonymous with the word “sacred”, and the word “secular” as though it were synonymous with “common”, “normal” or “profane”. Nevertheless, to regard those definitions as fixed is, I’m afraid, the result of a mixture of historical ignorance, cultural tone-deafness and the fact that thinking in dichotomies is a great deal easier than anything more subtle.
My main constructive point in this paper is that, whatever else it might mean, a Christian conception of God’s power and human flourishing that come together in “living in the Spirit” involves seeking wisdom and shaping life through reading and rereading Scripture. So it is appropriate to begin by discussing two biblical passages in which the power of God comes together with human flourishing.
First, what is theology and why does it matter today? Theology is not a term that all religious traditions use, but for now I am using it for the thinking that goes on within, between and beyond religious communities concerning their issues of meaning, truth and practice. There can be many dimensions of this, it can draw on various sources and fields of inquiry, and it can have many aims, but above all I am taking it to be about wisdom-seeking. Theology matters because, to put it at its lowest, not to be thoughtful, or to think and be foolish, can be disastrous for individuals and communities.
The first point to make about RE is that it should be the most exciting and important subject in the curriculum. Just think. Four to five billion of the world’s population are directly involved with the major religions and most of the rest are affected by them in various ways. Lives, communities and civilisations – past, present and future – are shaped by them. Yet the other side of their importance
is that many of the major conflicts in our world are linked to them. If we want a peaceful world we have to get the religions right, because they are here to stay. In a world where there is much ignorant faith, foolish faith and dangerous faith, can faith become more educated and intelligent, wiser and reconciling?
Our long term history therefore should encourage us to be sensitive to transformations in knowledge and in society and to be willing to respond to them by further reinvention. What about our present situation? I see a strong case for fresh reinvention. The core factors are intrinsic to the dynamism of knowledge and its use, and especially its relation to the people who discover it, teach it, learn it, interpret it, and apply it. I would suggest that this university, along with others, is being asked to meet four interconnected challenges simultaneously.
What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular.” It is this story that I will challenge tonight. I will do so in two steps. First, I will show that the division of ideologies and institutions into the categories “religious” and “secular” is an arbitrary and incoherent division. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. Second, I ask, “If the idea that there is something called ‘religion’ that is more violent than so-called ‘secular’ phenomena is so incoherent, why is the idea so pervasive?” The answer, I think, is that we in the West find it comforting and ideologically useful. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state.
The presenting question about the category of judgment is its ambivalence: why is it an activity that we are sometimes warned against, sometimes encouraged to undertake? To begin with, we must make some
cursory observations on the scope of the term.
