Gaylene Middleton
Stephen Crittenden
Religion - Worth Reporting
On
Stephen Crittenden is Head of ABC Religion Department. This is an
edited version of his speech to the Sydney Council of Australian Humanist
Societies (CAHS) Convention on Sunday 2 May 2004.
The Religion Report is a current affairs program, is like the 7.30
Report, except it deals in religion. I come from a Catholic background and
describe myself as a lapsed Catholic, but I think religion is important. When I
first became the Editor of the Religion Department I declared that I was the
first atheist head of that department and that upset a few people, but it's
worked out very well. One of the things that it means is that even though I have
a greater knowledge of, for example, the Catholic Church in Australia, I'm not
coming from a position of being a doorkeeper for any one religious tradition.
Certainly the Religion Department at the ABC now is very, very different from
what it was at its inception 50 years ago, when the founder was an Anglican
clergyman, who I think saw the radio as a great opportunity for preaching the
gospel. For many years the ABC Religion Department, it's not unfair to say, was
a radio branch of the Anglican Church in Australia.
The times have changed and the ABC Religion Department has changed with
them. One of the things that I was most intent on doing when I came to the
department from mainstream current affairs and the arts was to preserve its own
area of study, which was religion. There were pressures, particularly in the
Shier era, of removing the 'religion' word and turning the department into
something like 'faith and belief or 'faith and ethics.' I think the very clear
implication was that, over time, the department might transform into something a
bit like Radio National's Life Matters. I've run the line all along that the way
to avoid that was not to lose sight of religion and the Churches as objects of
interest. What I've attempted to do is to come at what I do from a mainly
secular point of view.
So this afternoon I hope to offer a few ideas about what's going on at
present in the world of religion, with a view to where secular humanism might
fit in all of this. I want to refer to an article by David Brookes in Atlantic
Monthly. He's the contributing editor of Newsweek, the senior editor of The
Weekly Standard and on the conservative side of American politics, but a very
interesting man. He wrote recently that like a lot of people these days he was a
recovering secularist and until September 11 he'd accepted the notion that as
the world became richer and better educated, it became less religious. He said,
"extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity in Western
Europe and parts of North America, this theory holds that as history moves
forward, science displaces dogma, and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A
region that has not yet had a reformation or an enlightenment, such as the Arab
world, sooner or later will. However, it's now clear that the secularisation
theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it
grows richer and better educated. We're living through one of the great periods
of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we're in
the midst of a religious boom."
Now, I wouldn't describe myself as a recovering secularist, but I do
have a lot of sympathy with some of the things that I think David Brookes is
saying. In particular, my experience at the ABC has been one where I inherited
an ABC dominated by baby boomers and still is. Kerry O'Brien will still be there
in ten years time and that generation that grew up with Vietnam is hostile to
religion and materialistic in its basic precepts of the world. My generation,
the under 40s didn't, as a rule, roll its eyes at the announcement that I was
moving from the arts to religion. It's much more open to ideas about
spirituality and that religion, like it or lump it, is here to stay and is
important. I guess all I want to share with you is the idea that for many of the
baby-boomer generation it's fair to say that they were tone-deaf to religion and
to the non-materialist ways in which the world works, though this tone deafness
is breaking down. Religion is back, but that doesn't necessarily mean that
committed faith in religion is back. What's back is interest in religion, which
may be interest from the outside looking in. However, not all religion is back.
On a program like mine, I spend a lot of time on a very small number of
unfolding issues. The clash with militant Islam is obviously one, whether
militant Islam in South East Asia, the war in Iraq or Al-Qaeda. Another issue
ironically enough is the story of the decline of mainline Christianity. In
saying that, I see myself as no different from an ABC reporter stationed in
Baghdad or in New Delhi who is reporting on what's happening there.
One of the big issues in the last two years has been that September 11
has not simply revealed a clash between fundamentalist Christianity and
fundamentalist Islam, but a triangular clash between a pre-modern world, a
medieval Islam, and the modern world. Although the mainline Christian churches
which have modernised in many respects in the case of the Catholic Church in
particular, they are still fundamentally pre-modern organisations, and not
unlike Islam, are having problems dealing with the modern world.
The other triangle is post-modernism which for many of my
contemporaries is experienced as a withdrawal from active participation in the
political realm, the decline in the sense of the individual as citizen and a
decline in trust in major institutions, like parliament, the police force, the
judiciary and government, and a decline in the trust in reason. There are
aspects of post-modernism which have a lot in common with pre-modernism. The
decline in the faith in reason is replaced by a valuing of anti-rational ideas
and the rise in the importance in the newspapers of things like star charts, to
give one very trivial example.
One of the things I'm doing in telling the story of the Catholic Church
is talking about the way in which two very interesting parallels exist between
the Arab world and the Catholic Church at the moment. One of the things that not
being tone-deaf to religion and looking at the clash in the Middle East is
enabling people to do, is to think about the role of the Arab tribe in the way
that it affected Islam over the last thirteen centuries, and the way in which a
closed tribal anthropology has infected Islam itself and been transported all
across the world.
Similarly, with a lot of the work that I'm doing on the modernist
crisis in the Catholic Church, which was at its height around the 1910s and
1920s. It's a way of looking at a clash between an Anglo-Saxon cool, common
sense and valuing of progress, and an anthropological world-view that's
Mediterranean. You can understand this best if you think of movies like The
Godfather or if you watch TV programs like The Sopranos. In other words, a
world-view that has a lot to do with the Mediterranean family, with the closed
secretiveness and sense of conspiracy of the Mafia, and it perhaps gives an
explanation of the inner workings of an organisation like Opus Dei.
I suggest
that secular humanism may in part be a victim of its own success. You only have
to go to a shopping complex and stroll around, on say, Easter Sunday morning, to
see what I'm talking about. The materialist creed has been fully implemented in
Australia, and what it means in practice is not collectivist farms and the
collapse of the class system, but Australian Idol, endless home renovation, home
delivered pizza and mobile phones that take photographs of yourself while you
and your boring girlfriend are standing in the queue for the checkout at
Ikea.
There's another sense in which secular humanism has been a failure, if
you turn that image I've just given you on its head. The philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche foresaw all of this, in that the death of God opened up a huge
challenge. If life without God wasn't just going to be trivial or absurd we'd
have to live like supermen and create our own values. Nietzsche knew that we
would probably not prove worthy of our freedom and that instead of supermen we
would end up with supermarket-men, and a therapeutic society rather than a
society of heroes, and perhaps it's just as well when you consider that Hitler,
Stalin and Mao taught us what it meant to live like supermen in practice in the
20 th century.
As Professor John Gray of the London School of Economics put it
recently in the New Statesman, "the role of humanist thought in shaping the past
century's worst nightmares is easily demonstrable, but it is passed over or
denied by those who harp on about the crimes of religion. Yet the mass murders
of the 2O~" century were not perpetrated by some latter day version of the
Spanish Inquisition, they were done by atheist regimes in service of
enlightenment ideals of progress. Stalin and Mao were not believers in original
sin, even Hitler, who despises enlightenment values of equality and freedom,
shared the enlightenment faith that a new world could be created by human will.
Each of these tyrants imagined that the human condition could be transformed by
the use of science. History has demolished these ambitions. Even so, they have
not been abandoned in dilute and timorous forms, they continue to animate
liberal humanists. Humanists angrily deny harbouring the vast hopes of Marx or
Comte, but still insist that the growth of scientific knowledge enables mankind
to construct a better future than anything in the past. There is not the
slightest scientific warrant for this belief"
I think one of the things also that's happening at the moment is that
recovering like David Brookes from this sense of secularism, people see religion
as interesting again and want religion explained to them. And one of my key
insights here has been that religion informs all kinds of contemporary ideas and
values in ways that perhaps we haven't always recognised, and I want to say to
you that my definition - well I wouldn't want to make a definition of religion -
but to me religions are no more than grand ideas, grand ideas that have become
combined with a cultural tradition and so those ideas grow and transform and are
transmitted across the centuries. Often they wither and die, but one of the key
ideas I'm trying to convey in my program is that our Western Enlightenment is
heavily predicated upon the gospels. It was in fact made possible by the
gospels, because it's intellectually important to acknowledge that ideas like
individuality, egalitarianism, feminism and democracy are indeed incipient in
the gospels.
As John Gray, who is no friend of the Enlightenment puts it, secular
societies may imagine that they are post-religious, but actually they're ruled
by repressed religion. He is no friend of religion either. One of Christianity's
most dubious legacies, he says, is the belief that the hope of freedom belongs
to everyone. Well, I'm a child of the enlightenment. On my program, I think one
of the things that I'm trying to do in the post-September 11 world is cast
around at ways of reviving the enlightenment because I think the third of the
three triangles is the triangle of enlightenment and modernity. In so many ways
our post-modern society has ditched the enlightenment along with religion. We
still enjoy all of the fruits of science for example, but perhaps we're no
different in that respect from the medieval Islamic world.
For me the future is somehow bound up with recapturing those
enlightenment values with I guess recapturing the ideas of Diderot and of Thomas
Jefferson. These are the universals, the ideas of the rights of man, justice and
truth. A lot of those are ideas that have been ditched by post-modernism, and I
guess I'd also want to say that I don't think the future, for secular humanism,
does in fact have anything to do with Darwin in that respect. I'm talking about
a set of political ideas, rather than a set of scientific ideas and perhaps the
faith in science and its ability to create a perfect world and to make meaning
of our lives has irrevocably gone. It may make us more comfortable, it may
provide us with hot and cold running water, all things that the Islamic world
doesn't have, but it's not going to necessarily provide us with meaning in our
lives.
I'll conclude with a passage from an article by Giles Fraser a couple
of years ago in The Guardian. He says that the problem with militant secularism
is not so much that it is anti-religious, but that in its desire to eliminate
the religious instinct, it closes off any sense of an explanation out of reach.
In that sense I think that's a very similar idea to what I mean by being tone
deaf He says the challenge is to make humanism something more than reactive or
just unobjectionably inane as when the National Secular Society of Great Britain
declares its aims to be, "on the side of all humanity, the side of intelligence,
rationality and decency", he says that's just like saying you're on the side of
truth or good things as opposed to bad things. Or when the British Humanist
Association declares its belief in "an approach to life based on humanity and
reason." Well what does that ultimately mean he says, and he goes on to say that
these kinds of aspirations are very close to a similar kind of aspiration which
you'll find in the ecumenical movement, in the Christian churches. That sort of
broad belief in truth and reason and why can't people all just be kind and nice
to each other and get on. The truth is that human nature just isn't like
that.
One last thing. I wonder whether the nuns have something to teach us. I
wonder whether what we are left with in Australia in the Howard era is an
Australia in which the great social activists are nuns, and I wonder what that
tells us. Of course they're not the only social activists, I'm not suggesting
that for a moment, but I wonder whether the idea of bearing witness with your
own life is something that secular humanism has lost. That idea the nuns have to
teach us is that ideas shrivel and die unless they're put into practice in
peoples' real, everyday lives. r
From Australian Humanist No. 76 Summer
2004
