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THE DESIGN OF GLOBAL RELIGIONDate: 04.16.01 Author:Andrew Brown If the Third World War explodes tomorrow it is a
safe bet that the man who pushes the button will be launching his
missiles at people of a different religion. This
is the first of two truths about global religion in the 21st century.
Count round the nuclear powers in the world. The only ones who are
almost certain not to start World War III are the ones where religious
belief is not an important determinant of politics: France and Britain.
All other nuclear powers are surely pointing their missiles to an
opponent whose religion is not only different from theirs but also is
the most integral part of that nation's identity. India, Pakistan, and
Israel were all founded partly as refuges for particular faiths and all
built their bombs partly to protect their own religions against the
threat of neighboring infidels.
The second truth about religion in the new millennium seems
directly to contradict this: there have never been so many atheists,
agnostics and skeptics in all of human history. The most powerful
nation in the world, the U.S., is officially neutral about religious
truth. In large parts of Western Europe, only about 10% of the
population goes to church on a Sunday-and they're not going to mosques
or stupas instead. For most serious academic students of the subject,
the mystery is that anyone believes at all.
"Why do religions persist?" the title of one scholarly book on the
subject suggest. Although the evidence is overwhelming that a
scientific education does not in fact inoculate people against
religious belief we feel that it ought to. We are astonished and
ashamed when less than thirty years after man landed on the moon a
school board in Kansas votes to make the most fundamental scientific
theories of our time optional to science students.
How can these two developments be reconciled? How can unprecedented
secularization go hand in hand with an unprecedented fundamentalism,
which has broken out in all the major world religions? There is not one
single explanation for any of this. But there is one large pattern into
which most of these developments will fit, and which will, I think,
allow us to make some reasonable guesses about the future of global
religion.
It starts with the observation that about once a millennium,
Christianity disappears from its heartlands and moves into the alien
cultures further out, so that if you look on a map, the faithful form a
ring enclosing an almost hollow center. The first time this happened,
was in the fifty years after Jesus' death, when the Christians stopped
being a devout sect of Jews based around the temples in Jerusalem and
became Gentiles centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, where St. Paul
made his journeys. The next time, between 700 and 1054 AD, was when the
Arab conquest of most of the Byzantine Empire established Islam in the
Eastern Mediterranean, leaving the Christian center of gravity in
Western Europe. That fact shaped much of the history of the world for
the next thousand years: if it had not have been for the need to get
around Muslim traders, literally, the Europeans might never have
explored the rest of the world.
Now the same pattern seems to be repeating: Christianity has left
Western Europe for Africa, Asia and the Americas. In most of Europe,
the cathedrals are no more than historic monuments. They are revered
and admired as much as the Acropolis in Athens, but for most people
they have no more religious significance than a statue of Pallas
Athena. In South London you will find African missionaries working to
convert the natives to Christianity; the Pope himself proclaims that
Europe is now a "mission field" and the birthrate in Catholic Italy is
now the lowest in Europe.
What has distinguished this change from the earlier centuries has been
that Christianity has not been replaced by any other religion in the
region where it has disappeared. When it was driven from Jerusalem,
this was because it was caught between the Jews and the Romans. When it
was driven from the Near East, it was driven out by Islam. And,
perhaps, when the process of secularization started in the nineteenth
century, it looked as if Christianity would be replaced by some kind of
secular humanist faith in progress or in the perfectibility of man. But
this hasn't happened. The Catholic intellectual G.K. Chesterton
observed that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in
nothing, they believe in anything. But this was only half true. What
replaces belief is a kind of conditional credulity, or half-belief.
It turns out that people who no longer need to believe in God
half-believe in anything: they read their horoscopes, but they don't
act on them. They mess around with Feng Shui, but they don't duck for
low-flying dragons. This state of half-belief, in which nothing is
completely true and nothing completely false, seems to be the defining
condition of the age of shopping. You can call it irony or
post-modernity if you like. But those suggest a self-consciousness, a
knowing, fashionable quality which is not really necessary at all. They
have post-modernity in Midwest shopping malls now. (Illustrate this
fact, somehow) In fact the state of half-belief, or pleasurable
confusion, may be the only safe and sane one when we are so bombarded
by advertising.
Here is an example: the morning's post brought a whole load of junk
mail that I read in a curious suspension of disbelief. I know that none
of the things I am implored to buy will actually make me younger,
richer or more attractive, but still it is fun to allow myself to be
fooled just a little. I parallel this conscious, deliberate disbelief
with an article I saw in the paper leading up to the Millennium. In it
an Archbishop said that the Millennium celebrations on New Year's Eve
marked the two thousandth anniversary of Jesus' birth. He knows
perfectly well that this is not true, just as I know that buying a new
Saab convertible will not actually solve many of my problems. Part of
his mind knows that we have no idea on what day Jesus was born, and the
only thing that we know for certain about his year of birth is that it
cannot have been exactly on December 25, 2001 years ago. So this is a
kind of half-belief too, even though he certainly believes in all the
rest of his speech.
But the question which arises from this is whether he is
believing in a new way, or whether religious belief has not always
involved these shifting veils of ambiguity-and I think that it probably
always has. The knowledge that large parts of the Bible are meant as
allegory goes back at least as far as St. Augustine, in the fifth
century. What has really changed over the last century is not that
religious belief has been corrupted by worldly doubt, but that worldly
transactions, and especially advertising, have gained some of the
glamour and ambiguity traditionally reserved to religious truth. And
this is the pattern that will determine the future of religions around
the world in the next millennium: religions will have to reform
themselves in the light of advertising.
How can religion compete now that all of the functions once supplied by
religion in the shape of monasteries - healthcare, education and some
degree of shelter from endemic warfare - have been usurped by a modern
state in the developed world. Throughout Western Europe we have
compulsory schooling, health insurance and medicine that works, and if
we need protection, the state has a police force and an army in the
last resort. And the more democratic and efficient any state becomes,
the more choice its richer citizens feel they have about how they get
their health care and their education, and the pickier they become
about the religions they subscribe to. Religious affiliation becomes
merely one of the ways in which you can get feelings of belonging, a
social network and the pleasures of glamorous half-belief.
This does something to explain why organized Christianity continues to
flourish in the USA when it has almost died out in Europe: North
American society is so much more mobile and amnesiac that there is a
much greater need for plug-in communities of the sort that churches can
supply. To that extent, an advertising-driven society, in which people
regularly uproot their entire lives and reinvent themselves, will
create its own demand for religious institutions. The need they will be
supplying is social rather than transcendent, but that, I think, has
been true of all flourishing religions. Of course it is not certain
that all societies will in the future follow the American model very
closely.
For instance it seems probable that there is a pretty sharp correlation
between the widespread availability of health insurance and the
frequency of prayer, not because prayer works, necessarily, but because
the uninsured have so much more to pray for. This would be another
reason why Europe, where universal health insurance is the rule, has
lost the need for Christianity. If I had to give one reason for the
decline of a belief in the necessity of prayer, it would not be
science, nor historical knowledge, nor even the spread of philosophical
atheism. It would be the development of insurance. That, more than
anything, has tended to make the catastrophes of the world seem
manageable and calculable, rather than the blows of a fate that must be
propitiated.
The really interesting, and perhaps dangerous, developments come in the
societies making the transition between rich and poor-and most of these
are Islamic. By the Islamic calendar it is not the Millennium, but the
year 1421 and there are deep similarities between the condition of
Islam now and Christianity 600 years ago. It is now in the grip of a
reformation, as Christianity was then, and the results are not going to
be pretty. Fundamentalism, like Protestantism, is a profoundly
democratic movement. It casts aside traditional interpretations and
humanizations of the law in an attempt to get back to the simple truths
of the texts. It allows people to choose their own authorities.
You can see this most clearly in the rise of Islamic
fundamentalist web sites. They carry discussions about every possible
aspect of life from the conditions of a just war, through the
legitimacy of IVF down to such minutiae as should a man dye his hair.
All these questions, posed using the most modern technology on the
planet, are decided by reference to the words of Muhammad or his
immediate followers 1400 years ago. And if you visit these sites, you
will quickly learn what otherwise takes years of study: that Islamic
fundamentalism is not one thing or one program. An appeal to the
original texts and practices of the first Muslims can be used to
legitimize the most horrible oppression of women, as in Afghanistan.
But it has also been used by university-educated Western Muslim women
to argue that patriarchy is not essential to Islam, but simply a
cultural corruption which must be swept away to get back to the
Prophet's vision. In this sense fundamentalism is not a program of
action, but a mode of discourse. That does not make it less dangerous.
The Christian reformation was accompanied by about 150 years of
religious wars, fought with the most modern technology and the utmost
ferocity. No one can afford such an outcome to an Islamic reformation,
yet it's not clear what is to stop it.
But it would be wrong, I think, to blame religion for these horrors.
That would be like blaming advertising for greed, or blaming Hollywood
for adultery. In all these cases, humans are simply dramatizing their
own inner lives and often trying by this drama to improve them. The
greed, the lust and the selfishness were all there before we started
telling stories about them. And over the millennia these stories work
to change our nature. If they preach a message of universal brotherhood
for centuries, sooner or later people will perhaps believe themselves.
If there is one thing that is clear at the dawn of a new
millennium, it is that there is not one future for global religion, but
many. And in the pre-modern, pre-state world in which most of the six
billion people now alive still live, there is no such thing as secular
society. Religion is - and will continue to be - as much part of the
air they breathe as advertising is - and will continue to be - in ours.
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