by Mark Tully
The fourth reason I gave for the rise of illiberal secularism was indifference. When people are indifferent to the questions that religion raises, they tend to be scornful of those who have a religious faith.
The ethos of Western society is materialist. As the Christian philosopher John Haldane has said, ‘Growing material affluence has shifted consciousness away from questions about the objective meaning and value of life towards choices about which tangible goods to acquire and which lifestyle to cultivate.’ It was put rather more bluntly to me by an Irish priest who noted that, ‘We seem to be happy being cows in clover or pigs wallowing in plenty.’ In an age in which it’s possible to talk sincerely about the benefits of ‘retail therapy’, perhaps my priest friend is right. Serious questions about the meaning of life don’t tend to arise when all is comfortable and pleasures abound.
The media has a powerful impact on the ethos of a society and in the West it tends to be indifferent to religion and often positively hostile. The British media has lost no opportunity to misrepresent Tony Blair’s Christianity during his time as Prime Minister. There was, for instance, the controversy fuelled by the media in 2006 when, speaking of his decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein, Blair said, ‘The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing according to your conscience. I think if you have faith about these things then you realise judgement is made by other people … and, if you believe in God, it is made by God.’ The Prime Minister was accused of using God to justify his actions and thereby escape the consequences of the Iraq war. Yet he wasn’t saying that God would necessarily justify his decision. Rather, he implied that God would be the judge of him, which is of course a Christian belief. But that distinction was too subtle for the secular British press. The mere mention of God was enough to set off a Pavlovian response. Poor Mr Blair would have been better to remember the dictum of his former spin doctor Alistair Campbell who, when asked about his boss’s religious views, said, ‘We don’t do God here.’
When the Western media is not overtly hostile to religion, it tends to be indifferent towards it. The Director General of the BBC at the time of writing, Mark Thompson, is a Roman Catholic himself and he has to tread carefully in order to avoid handing the secularists a weapon to use against him. Nevertheless, he admitted to the editor of the Roman Catholic weekly, the Tablet, that religion had been the poor relation of the BBC’s programming and that he was trying to encourage ‘more of a spirit of adventure’ in the Corporation’s output. He talked about ‘looking at the more interesting aspects of religion’ and attempting to ‘reinvent’ the BBC’s approach. But in the following week’s edition of the Tablet, the Director General was warned that his ambitions might get bogged down in a swamp of indifference. In a letter to the editor, Patricia Maxwell Lewis, a BBC television producer, said the problem with religious broadcasting lay not at the top of the Corporation but on the shop floor. She pointed out that individual producers had their own agendas and world views, which she said might be ‘disturbingly narrow and invariably secular in nature’. The television producer claimed that she had only succeeded in getting religious items aired by stealth and was ‘consistently dismayed by the dismissive way in which religious proposals were generally regarded’.
The message the media puts across is not limited to the news it reports, the articles and columns it publishes, or the programmes it broadcasts. There is also the message of the advertisements that the media depends on for its revenues. Advertisers probably make a more powerful contribution to the social ethos than journalists do. Their message is simple and stark: it’s what you buy that matters, not what you believe. The subtext of their message is that God won’t work miracles for you, but another holiday, a make-over of your house, a new car or fridge, the latest fashion in shoes or clothes might.
In India, religion continues to hold its own on television. There are channels that broadcast non-stop guru-speak. Some of the Hindu preachers who sit in front of cameras for hours on end to put across their message, have become hugely popular. The BJP politicians who fancy themselves as crowd-pullers were very put out when a sit-in they staged, in protest at the arrest of a prominent Hindu priest, didn’t attract much attention until they asked a TV guru to join them. Then the crowds turned out in force.
But consumerism – with its message that the body, not the soul, is what counts – is mounting a formidable challenge to the god-men and -women. There are even more advertisements on Indian television than there are on the British independent channels. Taking advantage of India’s cricket mania, advertisers have invented the five-ball over, with advertisements often being shown before the sixth ball has been bowled. I don’t know why Indians don’t rise in revolt against the crass commercials that interrupt their national game – I know that it drives me mad to see the batting genius Sachin Tendulkar holding his bat one moment and clutching a fizzy drink bottle the next!
Living in India, I can almost physically sense the enormous pressure that the nation is under to conform to the Western secular, materialist way of life. Many of the influential elite in India can’t see that there is any alternative to this development and so don’t think it’s worth trying to find a middle way that would combine increasing the country’s wealth with the preservation of its culture. In their eyes, you are either in favour of economic development and therefore of today’s Western culture, or you are some antediluvian romantic.
I have fallen foul of such criticism myself in the past, perhaps most notably when I wrote a book called No Full Stops in India whose theme could be summed up in this saying of Mahatma Gandhi, which I quoted in the introduction:
My swaraj (self rule or independence) is to keep intact the genius of our civilisation. I want to write many new things but they must all be written on the Indian slate. I would gladly borrow from the West when I can return the amount with decent interest.
A reviewer in the Hindu described the book as shameful. And then one of India’s most pugnacious television interviewers accused me of trying to take the country back to a golden age of spirituality that had never existed and to rob Indians of the chance of enjoying the prosperity that the West enjoys. I replied to him, ‘Do you want a poor imitation of America or an India true to itself?’
Modern Western secularism is a product of a particular form of materialism which can’t conceive of striking a balance that finds a place for the spiritual as well as the material. It’s not surprising, therefore, that this form of secularism has tended to write off traditional Indian culture as irrational, unscientific and unrealistic, and to ignore the heritage of Indian rationalism. Amartya Sen points out in his book The Argumentative Indian that the Western perspective has not always taken adequate notice of India’s immense contributions to rational subjects such as mathematics, astronomy, grammar and linguistics. Those contributions date back to the early centuries of the first millennium, and the tradition continues today. What’s more, Amartya Sen stresses the historical importance of what he calls ‘the interactive openness’ of Indian work in different fields. He notes that in those early centuries of the first millennium, Indian scientists and mathematicians learnt from work being done in Babylon, Greece and Rome. In their turn, Indian mathematics and astronomy contributed to the flowering of Arabian maths. Amartya Sen suggests that this interactive openness is the result of India’s tradition of scepticism and questioning. In the past, India was prepared to learn from developments in other parts of the world and, in turn, influenced those developments itself because its culture wasn’t seduced by certainties and its mind remained open to the ideas of others. Of course all that is a long time ago, but, turning to India today, could a culture imbued with spirituality to the extent that it had no place for rationalism ever have given birth to the technological revolution that has made India such a major player in the global IT market?
According to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, who teaches in the department of religious studies at Lancaster University, Western philo
sophers nevertheless continue to ignore Indian philosophy. He gives several reasons for this. The first is that Eastern philosophy is different; it has risen from its own tradition of intellectual practice. Moreover, it is not usually taught in departments of philosophy, but in departments of religion – which inevitably gives the impression that it is indeed irrational – or in departments concerned with studying India as an area, which gives the impression it is peculiarly Indian and so irrelevant to Western thinking. According to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Indian philosophers haven’t helped to improve matters, as many of them spend their time trying to identify the points at which their philosophy meets Western philosophy rather than promoting an understanding of it on its own terms.
If secularists were to take the Indian philosophical tradition seriously, then they might be more humble about humanity and less certain of their opinions about life and the great questions it asks. They might be a little more like Indian philosophers who, as Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad puts it, ‘agree that our ordinary life is defective; our experience is marked by suffering, our understanding is marked by severe limits to knowledge, our conduct falls short of its ethical requirements, and we live in fear of our mortality’.
And what might the humility to appreciate the limits of our knowledge achieve? A society in which reason and intuition are kept in balance. A society that has a place for the sacred, and which understands the difference between a myth and a lie. A society that is not drunk on change. A society that recognises that technology does not have answers to everything and that science has its limits. A society that appreciates the limits of rationalism and acknowledges the wisdom of these words written by Tolstoy: ‘If you describe the world just as it is there will be in your words nothing but lies and no truth.’
Humility is also a quality that many religious leaders might benefit from as greatly as the secularists. Only those religions that acknowledge that there must be a balance between tradition and the need to move on, and that welcome questioning, rejoicing in the variety of experiences of God and the traditions these have given rise to, can have any hope of remaining relevant and intellectually respectable in a secular era.
Religious leaders also need to appreciate the successes of science and to encourage an open dialogue with scientists if they are to play their part in achieving the crucial balance between reason and intuition – the balance described by Prince Charles in his Reith lecture when he said:
I am not suggesting that information gained through scientific investigation is anything but essential. Far from it. But I believe we need to restore the balance between the heartfelt reason of instinctive wisdom and the rational insights of scientific analysis. Neither I believe is much use on its own. So it’s only by employing both the intuitive and the rational halves of our own nature – our hearts and minds – that we will live up to the sacred trust that has been placed in us by our creator – or our ‘sustainer’ as ancient wisdom referred to the creator.
According to Indian thought, we have to practise ahimsa, or non-violence, if we are to live up to that sacred trust. Because we hold everything in trust, we should not do violence to ourselves, to others or to nature. In his commentary on the Mahabharata, Chaturvedi Badrinath writes: ‘There has hardly been anything in human history that has produced greater violence and killing than conflicting perceptions of what truth is.’ It is when those perceptions leave no room for doubt or questioning, when they are held too firmly, that violence follows. Of course, that does not mean only physical violence. In this chapter we have, for instance, seen examples of verbal violence.
I was once accused of verbal violence myself when I spoke to a London dining club and a member leapt up, exclaiming, ‘This is the most disgraceful rant against secularism I have ever heard!’ In case any reader should think I am violently prejudiced against secularlism, in the next chapter I am going to discuss Ireland, a country which, it might be argued, was once not nearly secular enough.
MAYNOOTH: LOSING FAITH
IN 1979, ONE-THIRD of the population turned out to see Pope John Paul the Second during his visit to Ireland, the most Catholic country in western Europe. However, a little over twenty years later the Irish theologian Vincent Twomey published a book with the title The End of Irish Catholicism?. That a theologian should feel it necessary to address such a question indicates the rapid decline in the Irish Church’s influence at the end of the twentieth century and the attendant rise of secularism. The speed with which this change has taken place is a unique example of Western culture’s tendency to discard one certainty only to replace it with another, which is the opposite of the Indian tendency I advocate in this book. Moreover, the new secular culture of Ireland represents many aspects of the Western materialism that I fear may swamp Indian culture. For these reasons, and also because I was inspired by an article I had read by the Irish Poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, I decided to go to Ireland to discuss my ideas and learn from the changes there. I wanted to find out why the Church, once arrogant in the certainty of its authority, had been humbled, and what the country had lost, and gained, in the onrush of secularism.
Writing in the Irish Times, John O’Donohue had described the decline in the Church’s influence as ‘a free-fall away from religion’. He went on to say that ‘the dominant thought-frame is now the economic one. The demise of religion means that there is nothing to counter or critique the awakening of such avarice.’ O’Donohue called for ‘prophetic reflection’ to understand the depth of what was happening in Ireland, and for ‘quest and question’. I too believe in the role of quest and question, and in particular in the need to question the role of economics – the new ‘dominant thought-frame’, the new Irish certainty.
My own memories of the heyday of Catholic Ireland date back to 1960, when I spent my honeymoon there with my wife Margaret, from whom I am now separated. As an Anglican alarmed by the decline of my own Church (which was underway even before the onset of the secular revolution of the sixties), I had been fascinated by the Roman Catholic Church’s power in Ireland, the prevalence of worship and the prominence of the clergy there. However, when the proprietress of the Butler Arms Hotel showed us to a table at which two black-suited priests were already sitting, I thought to myself, ‘I know I’m interested in the Church and theology, but it’s going a bit far to have to spend a holiday with priests!’ But the proprietress was a formidable lady and her dinner guests sat where they were told. Anyhow, it would have been difficult to find a table at which there were no priests. In those days priests had to say Mass every day, and there were so many priests dining in the hotel that the proprietress went from table to table allocating different times for each one to say Mass next day in the local church.
As it happened, we were in luck – Father Delaney and Father Kelly turned out to be excellent company. Father Kelly was a Benedictine monk from a monastery in Scotland, while Father Delaney’s career was typical of many of the Diocesan clergy who served in Irish parishes in those days. He had studied at the most famous Irish seminary in Maynooth, near Dublin, for six years, with as many as 600 other future priests, and had been ordained in the Dublin Diocese. Although Father Delaney was in his fifties, there were so many priests in the Dublin diocese that he still didn’t have a parish of his own but was only the Senior Curate, or assistant priest, in a church that was a landmark for passengers arriving in Dublin by the short sea route. (In fact, Ireland produced such a large number of priests that the Church couldn’t find jobs for all of them and many were sent overseas.)
As we kept them company, Father Delaney teased his friend about the vow of poverty he had taken as a monk, saying, ‘Father Kelly doesn’t have any money so his mother pays for his holiday, including a car. As a parish priest I have to pay for my own holiday and I can’t afford a car.’
The discipline of the Church in those days was so strict that Father Delaney wasn’t even allowed to take off his clerical collar and black suit on holiday. But his uniform commanded great re
spect. Several times while I was with him elderly women knelt before him and asked for a blessing.
Nevertheless, Father Delaney didn’t take himself too seriously and delighted in telling jokes about the Church. He was a big, slow-moving man, with a face and figure that spoke of his enjoyment of good food and a glass or two of whisky rather than any inclination for physical exercise, and so he took a particular delight in telling me a joke about an elderly priest in a remote country parish who was surprised to find that his new curate was commended in his seminary report for gymnastics: ‘“What’s this gymnastics?” he asked irritably. “We never had such a thing in my days at Maynooth.” So to explain gymnastics the curate did a series of somersaults down the aisle. In the middle of this demonstration of his skill two elderly ladies entered the church. Horrified, they crossed themselves fervently and one said to the other, “Glory be to God, look at the penance for today – and me without my nicks on too!”’
I arrived in Ireland forty-six years later to find the Church and the clergy were no longer held in such respect. Priests told me they did not wear their black suits and dog collars on the streets of Dublin for fear of being jeered or hooted at. The seminaries were empty, and in most parishes there was no question of the church having curates – they were lucky if they had one priest.