How to avoid religion going bad

Belief can inspire us to do great things: think of the lives of Michelangelo, Newton, Malala. 

Belief can also inspire us to terrorise one another: think of the Inquisition, Orange Order marches, Malala’s shooting.

How can we safeguard against waking up one day to find ourselves using our beliefs as tools of oppression, without denying them any practical role in our lives? Can we continue to be comforted and uplifted by spirituality whilst escaping the nagging concern that its indulgence leads to irrationality and eventually bloodshed?

Here is a suggestion of how we might. Follow these three rules.

1) Never regard revealed truth as a reason for anyone else to behave in a certain way. 

By all means, treat a belief in God as a reason for your own actions. You can allow belief to influence your own goals, your life plan. Indeed, it is probably a good idea that you do, at least as part of a “balanced, healthy diet” of motivations that includes lots of rational ones too. (As numbers of thinkers have observed, pure logic can’t explain why you should continue to get up the morning.) But never, ever demand that others enter into your beliefs. If you want to make demands of others, you must do so on the basis of reasons that everyone – including those who haven’t received the revelations that you have – can accept. 

2) Never treat someone else’s religious faith as a reason to think any more or less of them.

Again, revealed truth can’t provide a reason for anyone who doesn’t share the revelation. So, don’t even privately treat it as a reason for them. If someone doesn’t believe in your God, your scripture (or your certainty that there is no God…) you should not allow this even to enter in your personal judgement of their character. Equally, don’t give anyone additional respect because of their religious faith. Judge people on grounds that everyone, not just your co-believers, will accept as good grounds for judging people (things like: whether they are wise, skilled, kind, etc).

3) Don’t ever put your trust in anyone who uses their faith to recommend themselves to others. 

  The world would instantly be a happier place if everyone adopted this rule. Bush Jr won elections by parading his Evangelical credentials. He then led his country into (what is now universally recognised to have been) a disastrous foreign invasion and an economic meltdown. Malala Yousafzai recounts in her autobiography, I Am Malala, how, tragically, the Taliban gained a foothold in her once-peaceful home region with the support of ordinary folk. Decent men and women handed over fistfuls of rupees to that bunch of worthless thugs, the former beguiled by the ostentatious piety of the latter. In both cases, America and Pakistan, people regretted their decisions. But how do they avoid making the same mistake again? Not by developing a Pavlovian aversion to the mere appearance of turbans or crosses, but rather by observing this rule.

This set of rules is intended as a tool, a kind of “thought-gadget”, to help citizens work out what role religion can play in their lives without it potentially endangering society.

Continuing the consumer tech analogy, I discuss the rules further below in the form of a set of FAQs.

FAQs

1.    How are these rules any advance on the ideology of secularism?

Secularism, in a nutshell, is the idea that there should be a separation between State and religion and that the State should be neutral in matters of belief. It is an idea with a long and distinguished history in political philosophy. 

Unfortunately, as a piece of practical thought technology it leaves a lot to be desired.

Its basic weakness is that it is a top-down ideology. It’s a theory about what the governments should or should not do. Such theories are all very well in the sense that no doubt there are things that governments generally should and should not do and, perhaps, if such principles were generally implemented the world would be a happier place.  But you or I are not States. We’re individual citizens. We’re individual voters, individual members of communities.

Saying that there should be a separation between Church and State… well, how does that help me decide who to vote for? Am I being asked not to vote for anyone in a turban, anyone with a belief? If so, isn’t that rather discriminatory. (And in a country where only a minority are free of religious affiliation, rather undemocratic?)

Or perhaps, conversely, “separation of religion and State” is something that has no role at the point of a person making their democratic choice. Perhaps it only applies to politicians once they have been installed in office. If so, that doesn’t to me sound like a great political principle. Modern political thinkers rightly emphasise the importance of an active citizenry and of democratic engagement. This means, bluntly, it is up to you and me to make sure that politicians stick within their constitutional limits. And, conversely, you and I should take ownership of what our leaders do within the limits of the constitution. Hence, in a democracy, the idea that there is a political principle (“secularism”) which is terribly, terribly important but is only for the political elite to worry about is surely a non-starter.

Moreover, much of what it is political in the world doesn’t have anything to do with the State.  People can club together to exercise power over other people in all sorts of ways that don’t require the take-over of the reins of government. They can form organisations, companies, raise money, spread (dis-)information, and shun and boycott one another. 

For instance, I Am Malala has been banned by the AllPakistan Private Schools Management Association, which represents 40,000 schools in the country (banned, incidentally, on account of its alleged secularism). And in some places, violent “non-state actors” – such as the Pakistani Taliban – wield as much, if not more, power than the official government. The aforementioned banned book describes how the Taliban established themselves in the Swat region by winning local hearts and minds. One of their leaders ran a popular radio broadcast peddling an initially soft and then increasingly strident Islamist message. Armed groups went around distributing earthquake relief before publicly forcing DVD shops and other centres of alleged vice to close down. The Taliban takeover was insidious, gradual, in other words, and done with a significant measure of public support.

For these reasons, if you want to stop people using religion to justify hateful, domineering behaviour, a principle about political institutions, about constitutional law, just doesn’t cut it. You need to a principle of everyday thought – of “practical reason” in the jargon of moral philosophy. The notion that one can use religion to guide one’s own life but not to make demands of others is just such a principle.

It’s a principle that you can take out of the box and use immediately. When your mate asks you if you want to come along to a protest where they’re burning an effigy of someone who has converted away from the religion, the principle that “you can’t use religious faith to tell anyone else what to do” (rule 1) provides a direct answer, in a way that “there should be a separation between State and religion” does not. 

Ditto the principles that you shouldn’t judge people based on their faith and that you should be suspicious of those who invite you trust them on that basis (rules 2 and 3). In a country where corruption is rife the (secularist) idea that a politician should be “neutral” about anything is going to be treated with derision. No politician in Kenya (say) is neutral as regards the distribution of public funds.  So why should they be neutral as regards matters of faith? In any event, a grand theory as to the proper role of the State isn’t going to persuade anyone not to vote for the “Christian Salvation Front” or the “True Islamic Faith Party”. But the notion that it is simply rather dodgy to sell yourself on your religious affiliation stands, I think, on its own two feet as an intelligible ethical principle. It is an idea that people who are never going to buy into the hifalutin apparatus of secularism might nonetheless buy into on its own terms.

2.     Does rule 1) basically stop politicians being driven by “inner convictions”? 

I don’t think so, no. You can go into politics and see your calling as a God-given one if you want without necessarily forcing your beliefs on others.

To give a slightly more controversial/problematic example, I think it might be a legitimate for a politician to draw on religious conviction in coming to a personal view that abortion is wrong, and hence to decide to campaign for its restriction – so long as, in conducting that campaign he strictly obeys rule 1). That is, he should never use scriptural justifications for what he is advocating, but only use reasons that make sense to people who don’t share his particular religious convictions. And if those reasons don’t convince, he will have to graciously back down and try again some other time (as opposed to going off and bombing clinics).

Even in the rather religiously intense US, I think it is fair to say this approach is generally adhered to. People there understand that religion can inspire political action, but it can’t justify it. 

3.    Do these rules mean I can’t allow myself to relate more to other atheists / Evangelicals / Jews than I do to other people?

No they don’t, in short. We can’t help relating to people who have similar assumptions about the world to our own. That’s just human nature. Maybe we should try to be a bit more open-minded about who we relate to, who we make friends with. But that would be another project. 

The above rules are, instead, about how we criticise, praise and make demands of one each other, which is a somewhat different topic to how we “relate” to one other. A guy who likes Tom Waits might get on well with another guy who likes Tom Waits. But he wouldn’t deny someone a job based on their not liking Tom Waits (or we would criticise him if he did). Still less would he consider burning an effigy of a Tom Waits-hater. Luckily, in our world, we don’t need a set of rules to stop this kind of behaviour in the case of musical taste. But we do apparently need it in the case of religion.

4.    Ok. Nice try with these rules. But aren’t beliefs such as “human life is valuable” – which you need to explain even basic social rules such as the prohibition on murder – pretty much revealed truths? I mean you can’t prove that “human life is valuable” is valuable; it’s just something that everyone believes.  So why treat religious beliefs any differently?

The key here is that “human life is valuable” is indeed something that everyone, or practically everyone, believes. That means we can deal with it by agreement. Hence, there is no violation of rule 1). Anyone who, in an argument, references the principle that “human life is valuable” can rely on the consensus to establish the point and does not need to rely on any underlying blind faith or revelation. To condemn murder, you don’t need not use some personal spiritual intuition as a trump card.

Many moral and political demands in which the claim that “human life is valuable” plays a part are contentious ones, it is true. Take the debate over gun control. Some people say the principle that human life is valuable supports banning guns, because unrestricted gun ownership leads to more deaths.  Some people say that same principle means that there should be more guns because thus will lead to fewer deaths (despite the overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary) because of, like, this cartoon, see.  But everyone understands that the making, and assessment, of these competing claims depend on evidence and logic, not revelation.

As that example reminds us, these rules are hardly going to solve all political controversy. No simple principle ever will.  But in places like Pakistan (and Poland, Alabama… etc) they might draw some of the dangerous heat out of political life, and allow the debate to proceed on a more rationale – and more humane – basis.