Mani’s idea that all religions are, if not completely the same, at least capable of living together like suburban neighbours who do not interfere with each other, is almost what many in the U.S.A. have come to believe. In 1920, 94 per cent of American Christians said their religion was the only true religion; today, only 25 per cent do, and the rest believe that there is some truth in all religions. ‘Our government’, said President Eisenhower, ‘makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply held religious faith – and I don’t care what it is.’ But that attitude infuriates many others. ‘My religion offers the only true path to God’ is what (according to a poll) 79 per cent of Saudi Arabians think, and 65 per cent of South Korean Christians, and 49 per cent of Indian Muslims, 42 per cent of born-again Americans, 37 per cent of Indian Hindus, 33 per cent of Israeli Jews, 31 per cent of Korean Buddhists, 25 per cent of Peruvian Catholics, 24 per cent of Orthodox Russians, 16 per cent of American mainstream Protestants and 15 per cent of American Catholics. On a more down-to-earth level, about two-thirds of Muslims, Hindus and Jews assert that they disapprove of interfaith marriage. So consensus is not just around the corner.
When the Bahai (founded 1844) attempted to create one world religion, even recognising most existing religions as valid, and incorporating a modern programme against discrimination and inequality, other religions rejected it as a rival, because it presented itself as a separate religion, based on a prophet’s divine revelation; and since it had a Shi’a origin, it was apostasy to Muslims. It is better to stop talking about religion as though it is a single, uniform force. Each religion has a separate voice, and usually many voices. Even UNESCO announced that it did not know what ‘religion’ meant, listing forty-eight different definitions. The World Parliament of Religions, inaugurated in 1893, is, like the United Nations, a confirmation of the independence of each.
This may suggest that all one can look forward to is yet more religious wars and disagreements, even though religion’s aim is to offer certainties amid the anxieties and chaos of life. However, when I delve into the history of certainty and doubt, I get a glimpse of other possibilities. In their early years, religions did not expect or win complete acceptance of strictly defined beliefs. After Jesus’ death, some Christians believed in one God, but some in two gods and some in thirty or 365 gods. The very notion of belief used to be much looser, implying not conviction and certainty but an emotional attachment rather than an intellectual assent. Creed originally meant cor do, I give my heart, I love. The Bible was originally valued as a collection of tales about heroes, allegories open to many interpretations, without a necessarily consistent message. The early Jewish rabbis established a tradition that the scriptures should be an invitation to continuous discussion and development, a tradition perpetuated in the saying that when two Jews meet, there are at least three opinions. Medieval Christian preachers used sacred stories as launching pads for individual spiritual journeys. The Compendium of All Speculations, written by Madhava Acharya in the fourteenth century, describing every known theology and atheism with dispassionate impartiality, illustrated the capacity of Indians, in some periods, to find harmony between apparently irreconcilable ideas, while believing that none contained all the truth. The idea of heresy developed slowly. ‘Heresy’ originally meant choice, and there was nothing pejorative about it. Only gradually did theologians turn disputations into condemnations. Only slowly was disagreement seen not as an opportunity for intellectual and spiritual vitality but as a threat to harmony, and it was then that churches became increasingly censorious, often proclaiming new doctrines not because they had discovered a new truth, but to repress dissonant voices within their fold. Sometimes, in imitation of absolute monarchs intent on eliminating all rival warlords, they tried to impose absolute obedience to their orthodoxy, on pain of excommunication. Sometimes, in response to the questioning of science, they tried to match its precision by envisaging God differently, no longer as indescribable and unfathomable, about whom nothing certain could be said, but as a leader larger than life speaking with precise commands. Religion used to be poetry. But under attack, it became prose. It thought it was entering the same boxing ring as science, and became unrecognisable.
Of course the sacred texts have always been the bedrock of belief. But they had to be interpreted, and scholars who interpreted often disagreed. So there has been an enormous amount of uncertainty in religions through most of their history. In medieval Islam, for example, the differences between the ‘five schools’, each interpreting the law with its own methodology, and each dominating different territories of the Islamic world, were accepted as instructive rather than antagonistic, nurtured by an ‘ethics of disagreement’ (adab al-ikhtilaf). Scholarship meant argument, ingenuity, and independent reasoning (ijtihad). One of the most famous of all Islamic theologians, Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayn (1028–1085) said, ‘The purpose of shariah enquiry is not to reach the right result but the enquiry itself.’ That is what scientists say today.
The Christian Bishop Gregory of Nyasa in Turkish Cappadocia (A.D. 335–394) was not shocked by lapses from orthodoxy, when there was much less orthodoxy than there would be centuries later. He refused to give his followers exemplars of the good life drawn from the past, telling them instead to choose people known to themselves. He wrote books that were deliberately ambiguous, believing as he did that the Bible contained fruitful ambiguities to make its readers think for themselves. Religious doctrines had not hardened yet. His biography of his sister Macrima gives her masculine as well as feminine virtues, and he argued that when humans are resurrected, ‘there will be no males or females’. And Bishop Demophilus of Constantinople (d. 386) responded to objections to his opinions by quoting the gospel of Matthew: When you are persecuted in one city, flee to another. Recent research has shown how in the early years of Christianity, most worship was organised locally, independently of any central lead or regulation, dominated instead by families or clans with wildly different emphases, and resisting the efforts of bishops to impose uniformity upon them.
So the boundaries between different religions used to be less clear-cut, even though furious religious disputes persisted. Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism were, for a time, given official recognition in China as being not rivals but Three Teachings to be valued simultaneously, each in a different sphere, the first to guide public administration, the second to comfort private anxieties and the third to offer hope of ultimate individual salvation while also bringing all classes together in great festivals. The collaboration appealed to the first Ming emperor Taizu (1328–1398), who started life as an illiterate orphan peasant, an outsider to the philosophies of the learned elite, and so open to the idea that all three teachings could contribute to the maintenance of peace and to his own glory. In medieval Spain, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side, also for a time, in more or less peaceful ‘convivencia’, with some brilliant results in agriculture, poetry, singing and scholarship, bilingual in Latin and Arabic, though with some persecution mixed with the toleration.
In the eighteenth century, the Church of England abandoned enquiring into the private beliefs of its members, and became a ‘broad church’, maintaining that the exact details of liturgy, doctrine and ecclesiastical organisation were ‘things indifferent’ in the eyes of God, who cared only about moral behaviour. In the U.S.A., Henry Ward Beecher (1833–1887), the most famous preacher of his day, argued that charity was more important than belief, and that ostracising unorthodoxy was unchristian. Humanity may imagine that it is becoming more ‘tolerant’ but it is losing an old tradition of finding the sacred wherever it could. Many dogmas are denser and harder than they once were.
The most widespread religion of all, ‘popular religion’, has never bothered much with metaphysical distinctions, and has throughout the ages focused principally on obtaining practical relief from the anxieties of life, sickness, misfortune, poverty and hunger. Its unchanging concerns through three thousand years are revealed in China, where the
ancient God of Wealth Tsai Shen continued to be worshipped irrespective of ideological fashions and his effigy, which attracts prosperity, is still to be found at the entrance of many homes and buildings. Numerous Chinese temples are being rebuilt today, not to preach new or old theologies, but to aid in the struggle for survival, to bring folk customs out of hibernation, to reassert peasant ideals of mutual help, to organise festivals, build schools, facilitate the bribing of local officials, fight for positions of leadership, and provide services such as fortune telling and exorcism, which are paid for, since religion is also business. That is why in just one northern province of five million inhabitants (Shaanbei) over 10,000 temples have recently been revived. It is in the same spirit that one half of Americans have changed their religious affiliation, and half of these have changed it at least twice, not because they have changed their theological opinions (only 18 per cent give that reason), but more commonly because they marry someone of a different faith (37 per cent), or because they move to another city and make new friends (25 per cent). A church is to many essentially a community of mutual support. When young Americans are asked what their religion means to them, most reply that it provides someone to ask for help when things go wrong; and they add that a religion is true when it makes one happy. However, even popular religion becomes sectarian as expectations rise, and inequalities lose their justification, and frustration reaches boiling point, because even moderate prosperity and respect seem unattainable, and it is then that religion turns into an angry political movement.
The battles between believers and unbelievers have been in great part due to religion being transformed into an instrument of power and control. Much of the hostility to religions has been not a quarrel about supernatural mysteries but a protest against the arrogance or corruption or hypocrisy of the pious telling everyone else how to behave. Governments have used religion to increase obedience and business leaders to make their employees work harder. Religion has even allied with patriotism to turn nation against nation. But this manipulation has also encouraged people to seek refuge in religion, to seek from it what earthly powers do not provide; in India, for example, there are two and a half million places of worship but only 75,000 hospitals.
The world’s religions began as revolutions. The prophets have all been rebels protesting about the morals of the masses and the corruption of the rich and powerful. They have all wanted to change the world. But when a message is encapsulated in an institution, it metamorphoses into shapes that would surprise its founders. As religions grow rich and powerful, they can progress from enthusiasm to complacency, from courage to compromise, from idealism to corruption. Most of them, at one time or another, have made deals with aristocrats and plutocrats, while preaching equality and humility. Success is not the ideal partner of spirituality. That is why new sects, schisms, heresies, interpretations are born almost every day, privately or publicly; each is a mini-revolution, a reminder of what has not been achieved.
It is impossible to predict how people may behave from the beliefs they nominally profess. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, after fighting each other in one of the most merciless of religious wars, revealed themselves, in the first enquiry ever made into what they actually know about religion, to be unable to say what the First Commandment is (only 17 per cent of young people aged between sixteen and twenty-four know it, and only 46 per cent of the older generation); only 21 per cent of the youngsters and only 54 per cent of those aged over sixty-five know that there are four gospels. Only half of Americans can name even one of the gospels; and about a quarter call themselves Christians while believing in reincarnation and astrology. After a half century of atheist education, very few Chinese (only 8 per cent) say they belong to a religion, but they still have religious practices and beliefs; 44 per cent think that life and death are controlled by the Will of Heaven or by the God of Fortune; 56 per cent have had a ‘religious, spiritual or visionary experience’, which is more than Americans (49 per cent). Only 4 per cent identify themselves as Buddhists but 27 per cent pray to Buddha and three-quarters affirm beliefs which were once Buddhist but no longer carry that label.
I am not sure that I, who never received any religious guidance from parents or teachers, and who only began interesting myself as an adult in what religion meant, am more disadvantaged than those who have had the elementary religious education that is normally given to children and that usually dissuades them from paying attention to any but their own prophets.
Though religions have always tried to be havens of stability, protecting against the confusions of daily life, they succumb to trends and fashions nonetheless. Established creeds are being supplemented by new therapies and spiritual techniques from bizarre sources. Counter-cultures are unobtrusively being absorbed by conventional churches. Even denominations that aim to preserve ancient traditions are creating new ways of doing so. People who have lost their self-confidence are once again seeking reassurance from exotic beliefs, just as the Greeks and Romans became adepts of numerous Oriental and mystical sects when their empires crumbled. The Japanese turned to a succession of new religious movements in the Middle Ages when they felt their world was, as they put it, ‘turning upside down’, and they are doing the same again today. ‘All human efforts are stupid and vain,’ said one of their poet-musicians in the twelfth century, withdrawing from the city to worship nature, while demoralised warriors transformed tea drinking into a spiritual ceremony, and merchants making fortunes exporting arms to the world (Japan was once supreme in that trade) re-engineered Buddhism into a simplified, quick-fix guarantee of personal salvation, freed from any worries of conscience or any need for ascetic privations. Japan today is a major manufacturer of new religions, as much as of electronics and cars.
New religions are being invented almost every year, winning millions of adherents and spreading to distant continents far from their local roots. The world now counts 4,200 different religious denominations, but within each there is a multitude of nuances. To say that one is a Roman Catholic in Brazil, Mexico or the Philippines glosses over the practices each country is re-appropriating from its African, Aztec-Mayan or Malayo-Polynesian past. Nigerians, who now almost outnumber the English in the Anglican Church, are resurrecting the stricter morals of the Pilgrim Fathers. Many African Christians are finding inspiration in the Old Testament through the conviction that their society resembles that of the ancient Hebrews. Like many African Muslims, equally devoted to a memorised Holy Book, they are reviving radical aspirations for social justice. The Methodists of Fiji are not content to maintain Wesley’s rituals: they teach their children not just ‘the way of the church’ but also ‘the way of the land’. The converted natives of Peru often forget what the missionaries taught them and claim to ‘have always been Christians’. The victims of colonisation are revealing that their conversion left a less permanent impression than the colonisers believed. Women are finding that their struggle for recognition is increasingly being ambushed by revived misogyny. The fall in religious observance in Europe is counterbalanced by fervent concern for the environment, which is of course the oldest religion of all. At the same time, the motivation of adherents varies as denominations pass through phases of being dynamic or static, aggressive or defensive.
Religions build walls around themselves to maintain their coherence and to keep out strangers, but they have demonstrated over the centuries that they are capable of changing; even on subjects on which some are so adamantly uncompromising now, like marriage and abortion and homosexuality, their attitudes used to be quite different. However, they have not applied the Quran’s famous injunction – ‘We have created you male and female and have made you nations and tribes so that you may know one another’ – because they know one another only as monolithic organisations, not as a collection of individuals with a whole variety of opinions and temperaments. The more they interest themselves in others, and not just themselves, the more there is a possibility that they will use less of t
heir energies in mutual hostility.
The more they recognise their debt to each other, the better they can appreciate what individuals seek through religion. The superficially bizarre beliefs of the ancient Egyptians cease to be irrelevant to me when they come to the conclusion that immortality is not just for pharaohs, but for everybody: that is an invitation to consider what immortality can mean apart from survival, what gift each individual should leave to benefit humanity after death. The realisation that seven of the Ten Commandments are taken from ancient Egyptian texts makes me reflect on how beliefs can be transformed by seemingly slight modifications. When I hear the Jewish sage Hillel (a near-contemporary of Christ) sum up his faith in one sentence: ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation’ – words that exactly echo the Golden Rule of Confucius, I meditate on why all attempts to create a universally accepted common world ethic have failed. When the story of the adoption of monotheism by the Israelites is told – one of the most momentous events in history – the unexpected consequence emerges, that they gave up on having a female consort for their God, which they used to have, and which the polytheistic ancient Greeks also had, with priestesses holding respected public positions and exercising important influence. It is fruitful to reflect on how the whole of history would have been different if the Prophet Muhammad’s efforts to get Jews and Christians to agree to a united reformed religion had not been rebuffed.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 11
