Scepticism gets you only so far. Even nonbelievers need to have faith
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Version 0 of 1. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s first Reith lecture on identity gets one important thing about religion entirely right: that it is shaped by what we do and who we do it with far more than by what we believe. He makes this point with great clarity and some well-chosen examples: “Changed practice can lead to changed belief. Scriptural passages can get new interpretations. And if they can’t adapt, they’re often abandoned. That passage in the Psalms about how blessed you will be if you dash Babylonian babies on the rocks; the passage in First Peter about how slaves should submit themselves to their masters, however cruel – these we can usefully look away from. “If scriptures were not subject to interpretation – and thus to reinterpretation – they wouldn’t continue to guide people over long centuries. When it comes to their survival, their openness is not a bug but a feature.” Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work for everyone, but the one thing it does demand is that people believe in it This has to be right, and anyone who studies religions seriously understands it. All of them change. Even fundamentalists will agree to this, although they see the change as a process of decay from the original purity, which must now be restored. But there are – as the lecture pointed out – great passages of scripture that have no discernible meaning at all, such as St Paul’s great question to the Ephesians: “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions?” What indeed? Yet these things still work, in the sense that believers are able to imbue them with personal and important messages. One of my favourite examples, because it was compressed into such a short space of time, comes from a truly great American religious invention: Alcoholics Anonymous. When AA started, the doctrine was that alcoholism was a genetic flaw. Fifty years later, genetics were right out as an explanation. Now, I believe, they are creeping back. And none of this theology matters at all. What matters is the meetings, and the alcoholic’s rebirth into a new fellowship, and so into a new kind of person: one who is able to not drink. Similarly, the nature of the higher power to which they are to submit is wonderfully flexible. Obviously, it started off as nondenominational Protestant god, but it turns out that almost anything works, provided it is outside the ego, and the patient really believes in and listens for its workings. It’s not even necessary to believe that anything will work. You don’t have to be a liberal to enjoy the benefits of a liberal theological framework. AA doesn’t work for everyone: no single belief or practice could. But the one thing it does demand is that people believe in it, and bet on it, even if they are flexible about the content of that belief. Sceptical irony will carry you only so far. And that is the great thing that Appiah’s lecture gets wrong. He has far too much faith in reasoned scepticism. Although it is true that religions can survive only if they are flexible and pragmatic, they can work only if they seem to believers to be fixed and eternal. Who would bother to die, or kill, or even to live, for common sense? I was present at the lecture, as a sort of invited heckler, and when he had finished I asked him how we should reconcile the knowledge that religions are constantly changing with the need to believe that they put us in touch with eternal truths. His answer, to general laughter, was that this wasn’t his problem. But it is. The difficulty of placing eternal and absolute truths into secular frameworks remains, whatever your truths are. If liberal democracy and human rights are just contingent preferences, they lose all their moral force. They turn out to be like money: if people don’t believe in them, they have neither use nor value. It turns out that even unbelievers, if they want to preserve the freedom to doubt, must learn to believe in that freedom beyond where the evidence takes us. |