Increasingly, we have no clear idea what we’re trying to articulate when talking about religiosity or belief. Two recent events illustrate the point.
The first is the inter-religious violence between Muslims and Christians in the Central African Republic. In the most shocking instance, reported here by the BBC, a Christian anti-balaka mob assaulted a lone Muslim. Dragging him from a bus, they beat him to death. At some point, one of the mob proceeded to eat the victim, a fact about which he openly boasted to a BBC journalist the following day.
The second is the brief debate prompted by a story in The Times last week. The Office for National Statistics has released data from the 2011 census had been analysed to conclude that 1 in 10 newborns “are Muslim”.
Richard Dawkins, aka ‘Angry of Oxford’, wrote a letter: there could be no such thing as a Muslim child, since “babies and toddlers are too young to know what they think about origins, moral philosophy or the meaning of life: too young to know whether they have a religion at all”. Dawkins has incendiary form on the issue of children and religion, of course, having argued in the past that to expose the young to the notion of hell is a psychological cruelty worse than sexual abuse.
Babies are born male or female, black or white, even British or French or American, but it’s meaningless to ascribe ideas or philosophical commitments: “Imagine an article telling us the proportion of babies that are fiscal conservatives, ornithologists or golfers. Would you speak of a trade unionist baby or a logical positivist baby?”
What these two stories have this in common is the question of when and how is it meaningful to talk about someone having a religious identity. On one level, of course, religious descriptions are mainly being used in a loose adjectival sense – i.e., children born to Muslim families, mainly Christian ethnic groups. On another, there’s clearly more going on.
In the Central African Republic, Muslim and Christian are convenient but simplistic tags for groups that are literally at each others throats. Perhaps they’re used because other descriptions or explanations elude us, or perhaps explanations elude us because we resort to the religious conflict angle too early. Think hard enough about it, though, and you’ll realise neither the names nor the explanation really seem to work.
Why not? Partly because just as ethnicities and conflicts travel easily across political borders in Central Africa, so fixed categories like the ‘nation state’ or a religion don’t shed much light in that heart of darkness. But also because we intuitively know that, whatever Christianity is, it can’t – at the very least shouldn’t – be synthesised into ethnic bonds.
Writing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that it is a fatal mistake of the false Protestant ethic to dilute Christian love into patriotism and the ‘better righteousness’ of the Sermon into justitia civilis. Why does Jesus ‘reject’ his mother and brothers? Simply because the gospel does not proceed by ties of kinship, but by message and miracle. This is why Christian nationalism, even of a benign kind, is an incoherent idea, and why we can call the mob in the Central African Republic ‘Christians’, not Christians.
So Dawkins is seems initially to be straightforwardly right, but he makes two mistakes. The first is assuming that all religions as essentially the same kind of thing, with different sacred texts and names for God. The second is that thinking that there’s only two ways in which our identity is legitimately formed – by genetically inheriting a characteristic or by freely choosing an ideological position, with religion being the latter.
Sorry, but on both counts it’s just a bit more complicated. Babies can’t be born Christian, but they can be born Jewish. And no, Islam is not an ethnicity, but the fact that it is as much about jurisprudence as it is about theology should give us a hint that it’s something else again.
Come to think of it, babies might be born male or female, but latterly Parliament has enacted legislation which offers the option of altering that. Perhaps we shouldn’t ascribe a sexual identity to a baby, since we would not want to do the harm of imposing a gender position them. Dawkins is right, it makes no sense at all to call a baby a logical positivist, but it might make more to talk about them as being born a trade unionist or a chess grand master. Maybe Islam is more like golf than fiscal conservatism – more like a practice, art or skill in which children can be immersed, than it is a concept which can’t be truly held without the consent of a mature mind.
Politics lurks underneath these questions of identity. The Time’s tone was reasonable enough, but it’s hard not to think of panicky stories of Muslim birth rates and the Islamisation of Europe. Is there an implication that to be Muslim is to be less than fully British? And if so, what is it to qualify as British? Racism would say you ought to be white, Christian nationalism that you ought to be Christian.
Maybe Richard Dawkins would say that you have to be an autonomous, freely choosing rationalist.
Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme at Theos
Image by LaBellaVida from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
