31st Corbishley Memorial Lecture

The Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust

TALKING   OR   SHOUTING?

Religion and Public Space

Lecture given by
Professor  Ziauddin  Sardar

Shell Centre

London SE1

31st Corbishley Memorial Lecture

27th November 2008

INTRODUCTION

Zia Sardar

Guy forgot to mention something else which is very important to me – which is that I am also a Council Member of the Wyndham Place Charlemagne Trust, which should not be forgotten!

Now as tradition has it, the Corbishley lectures are usually turned into a little booklet and given out to everyone, and there is a written text which I think you will either find on your chairs, or if you don’t find it on your chairs, make sure you get hold of a copy of it before you leave.  (This original written text follows at the end of this booklet - Ed.)  The reason I ran off in the direction of my overcoat is that I was looking at the people here and I said to myself, my God, if I read them this lecture for one-and-a-half hours I fear their faces will not be as happy as they are at this moment in time.  I shall try and preserve their happiness as much as possible.  So what I shall probably do is try to give a summary of my arguments rather than read the whole lecture itself. 

Now, I begin by taking issue with the title that was given to me by the Council: “Talking or Shouting: religion and public space”.  It is my contention that we have been doing neither, far from shouting, we are not even whispering.  And as a result, it seems to me that religion has totally withdrawn from public space and we have allowed something that we have not come to terms with, something we have not really engaged with intellectually, to dominate the public space if you like in its totality.  And that thing I think is secularism.  Somehow people of religion and faith communities have to tackle secularism head-on: it is something that we just cannot avoid.  I think as a result of the dominance of secularism, what is happening is that religion is not simply marginalized but in fact it exists in a kind of limbo away from public space, away from glaring eyes.  It is the kind of place where either nobody looks or nobody is allowed to look, or everybody is discouraged from actually looking.  Now this despite the fact that the last census told us that Britain is very much a Christian country.  72% of the something like 92 or 93% of people who actually fill in their census form claim to be Christians.  In fact there are comparable numbers for Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Buddhists.  Only 16% said that they had no religion, described themselves as atheists, agnostics, heathens, and my particular favourite, followers of Jeddai!  Those of you who have seen “Star Wars” will remember Jeddai and “The Force Be With You”! 

So people identify with Christianity on their census form, but religion itself seems to have no public space whatsoever.  In fact when religion is actually mentioned in public space you are shouted down.  Even if somebody like the Archbishop of Canterbury mentions something like the Shariah in a public discourse, all hell breaks loose.  You get nothing but criticism and scorn: first of all, how dare he raise a religious issue in public, as though being Archbishop of Canterbury simply meant that he should actually stay in his little hut and not make any references of any kind.  And then how dare he mention another religion and the sacred law of Islam: namely the Shariah, how could he possibly talk about Shariah in the public space, let alone call for Shariah courts in our society?

So religion in my opinion has been totally marginalized.  And one profound reason why religion has been marginalized is because secularism has become an overarching ideology.  Now, I would like to differentiate between secularisation and secularism to a certain extent.  I do believe that the state should be neutral.  But show me a secular state that is neutral.  India, for example is touted as a secular, neutral state.  If India were genuinely a neutral, secular state, then all religions in India would feel at home in India.  Clearly there are some religions in India that do not feel at home.  And in fact if all religions did feel at home with the idea of India, the secular idea of India – there would be no need to create Pakistan.  Pakistan would simply not exist.  So it is one thing to say that secularism simply separates religion and state but quite another to suggest that it creates a neutral space where in fact all religions are treated equally.

But it is as ideology that I have a problem with secularism, because as an ideology, secularism becomes the defining power of our age.  Secularism defines, and the greatest power in contemporary times is the power to define.  And it is secularism that defines, essentially, not just what is politics but also what is religion.  And it is secularism that defines religion in a very specific way.  Everything that is not religion is rational, but religion by definition is irrational, it is something that is based on belief that cannot engage with any level of objectivity, but it has to exist in some sort of private space where you can have your irrational behaviour, irrational thoughts, you can carry on with your rituals, but do not bring that which is not rational and not objective and not universal into the public space.   So in a sense secularism has defined religion almost out of existence, and unless we confront that idea I think we are not going to go very far.  Indeed, even to mention God is in fact to violate the notions of secularism in public life.  God has become the great unmentionable.  Not just God, but also evil, which has become invisible.  I mean yesterday I was watching the news, and we heard about a man who for 25 years raped his two daughters, produced 9 children, yet nobody noticed.  This is an unimaginable thing to my mind, how can a father have raped his daughters continually for 25 years?  Produced 9 children – some of these must have been born in hospitals, must have had birth certificates with the father’s name on or something.  Yet nobody noticed.  Why?  Because we have become immune to seeing evil; it has also has become a great unmentionable. In a sense what secularism has done is to have surgically removed the notion of evil from our minds, so that we can’t actually see evil or recognise evil when we see it.  There is no sense of “this is real horror”, and the real horror then moves us to do something about it.  And I think that’s what is missing, and that’s because the secular mind has become the dominant mind. 

Now there are two consequences of the total dominance of secularism as an ideology.  One is the classical Newton’s Third Law: for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction.  So if you’re going to have fundamentalist secularism, dogmatic secularism, standing up and shouting at religion, denigrating it, then of course you’re going to have the other side of the equation, you’re going to have fundamentalist religion that is standing up, shouting at secularism and doing what it thinks necessary.  It is interesting to look at the rise of fundamentalism in Muslim societies.  There were no fundamentalists in the 1950’s when independent Muslim states came into being.  There were no fundamentalists in the 1960’s, there were even no fundamentalists in the 1970’s when there was great talk of Islamic resurgence.  The fundamentalists appear towards the end of the eighties and become a major force in the nineties.  And if you look at other cultures, say the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India, again we see a similar correlation.  There were no Hindu fundamentalists during the Raj, although there were some small groups of Hindu-style fascists, but on the whole you did not have the mass phenomenon of Hindu fundamentalism that is represented today  by the BJP.  We see a similar pattern in the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America.  All these religious varieties of fundamentalisms are a product of the total dominance of the secularist ideology in the public space.  If you take religion away from public space totally, then religious communities lose hope with the public space – one bi-product of this is the resurgence of apocalyptic thought.  And it’s not just Christians and Zionists in America, with their obsession with rapture and apocalypse, but we are also witnessing the appearance of apocalyptic in Muslim society in so-called secular states. 

So that’s the first consequence, the equal and opposite reaction:  Newton’s Third Law.  Then there is a second correlation that we cannot ignore.  And that is that if you remove religion totally from public space, you create a God-shaped hole in society, and this God-shaped hole is there for all of us to see.  And its most profound manifestation of course is the current economic crisis.  If you have an economic system based on the idea that as a rational entity, human beings do nothing else but maximise profit, do nothing else but pursue greed at all costs, do nothing else but consume, then it is not surprising that you end up in the kind of mess that we have.  Now I think that the current economic crisis may have a fiscal dimension and it may have a credit dimension, but the dimension that is for us, as faith communities, the vital dimension, is the dimension of morality - which is where God comes in.  Ditto climate change and environment:  if you look at the environmental crisis, we can see that it is a product of the absolute divorce of the sacred from nature.  The idea of the sacred, and hence any notion of morality is quite absent from the kind of productivity we engage in, the kind of manufacturing we engage in, the kind of industry we produce, the kind of technology we pursue  - in all of these there is no notion of  the sacred dimension of nature, there is no notion of humility in front of nature, within that framework.  It is not surprising that this framework leads you to abuse nature with all its consequences.  And if you don’t have anything else that you consider which is bigger than you, then you worship what seems to you to be the biggest thing in society, hence the absolute worship of youth, celebrity, the total pursuit of ego at all cost.

So I think the absence of religious discourse in public life has caused a very serious crisis within our society.  And some of these crises come up in one form or another in terms of economic or environmental phenomena.  And what I think will happen is that these crises will continue to a point where essentially there will be no return, we shall have reached the tipping point or the edge of chaos or whatever you like.  And for me as a religious person, the biggest challenge is to ensure that that tipping point is not reached, that somehow we do not go beyond a point where climate change cannot be reversed, that we do not go beyond a point where the alienation that we experience and the consumerism we experience in society spell the annihilation of all that we hold dear and nothing else. 

So this kind of world where we find ourselves is very much a product of the situation where God has actually been removed from society altogether, and all we have is just ourselves and our own egos.  The question then is how do we go forward?

I think in Britain at least it is not easy for people of faith like me, Muslims and Jews, Christians and Hindus, to go forward in any way unless our Christian brothers stand up honestly and be counted.  At the end of the day, Britain is a Christian country and the Christian community has to stand up and be counted. I was very pleased for example when the Archbishop of Canterbury did raise the issue of Shariah, even though I criticised him in one of my columns, and despite the fact that I am perhaps one of the strongest Muslim critics of the Shariah, but I think it is important to actually raise these issues in a public space.  Because this is what people are thinking about.  The Muslim community is constantly thinking about Shariah, one way or the other.  If you suppress that thought, do not allow it to be articulated, it can only produce frustration and anger.  To avoid that you need to allow it some sort of public debate.  So I think the first thing is that the Christian community has to step up and come forward – and take a lead in critiquing the excesses of the secularist ideology. 

But I also think that we do not really have a level playing field.  Given the framework of secularism and associated ideology that exists, it is not easy for religion to occupy any public space because no public space is reserved for religion.  All we can do is to shout from the margins.  So we need to do something much much bigger.  And I think there are two things here that are cause for concern: there are basically two dominant structures of thought out there which we need to address and do something about.

The first of course is the structure of modernity.  By definition modernity says that all those people who are traditional are inferior.  Religion and tradition go together so by definition religion is inferior.  Of course modernity emerged out of the Enlightenment, which is itself supposed to have emerged after this great battle between science and religion.  Well, first of all I don’t think a great battle between science and religion actually took place, because it certainly didn’t take place in Islam, it certainly didn’t take place in Hinduism or Buddhism, but there was an encounter within Christianity:  if you read more recent historians of science, you will discover that in fact there was hardly any Christian theologian who did not think that Galileo was right, who did not have any appreciation of science.  I was fortunate enough to be part of a Vatican study, which examined the reactions of the Church to various scientific developments over several centuries.  I had to go down to the Vatican Observatory and listen to historians of science describing new discoveries based on manuscripts to which they were given special access.  What really shocked me was just how much propaganda we have swallowed about the so-called “battle of science and religion”. In my opinion, the recent advances in the history of science have totally overturned this.

But the Enlightenment itself, basically, was a very religious phenomenon - because Enlightenment in the West could not have existed, could not have come about without all the thought and learning of Islam.  And what bit of the thought and learning of Islam did the Enlightenment actually embrace?  Well you’ll be surprised to hear that it was what is known in Muslim culture as Adaab literature.  Adaab means etiquette, this is where and how humanism, as we know it today, was invented.  When the Enlightenment philosophers embraced the works and thinking of Muslim scholars like ibn Sina and ibn Rushd they embraced science and learning within a particular framework of etiquette which they called Adaab - and which later came to be translated as humanism.  Enlightenment actually took all the thought and learning of Islam lock stock and barrel – not just the ideas but also the institutions.  So the university as we know it today is modelled exactly on the universities of Muslim countries, even the idea of a professorial chair, because the lectures were given in the mosque and the professor sat on a chair, and the students sat around him - hence it came to be known as the professorial chair.  So the Enlightenment was hardly a non-religious thing.  It had deep roots in Islamic thought, and by definition then it must be a very Islamic thing.  But modernity as it exists today as a structure of thought, systematically isolates religion, and again like secularism, defines it as something inferior, something irrational, something traditional.  This is the first frameworkof thought that we as religious communities have to tackle. 

The second framework is equally important for us to pay attention to.  And that is the framework of post-modernism.  Now post-modernism emerged in the seventies as a reaction against modernity.  If modernity is an unfinished project as it has been described, then post-modernism is the cynicism of late capitalism, the last hurrah of a dying modernity.  Post-modernism has a number of important features that I was looking at.  I mean one of the first and main tenets of post-modernism is that all those things that we hold dear, things like science and reason and religion and rationality and history and tradition – these are basically meaningless.  These are known as grand narratives, and these grand narratives that give sense and direction to people have no meaning and in fact are meaningless.  And to show that they are meaningless, the real weapon in the post-modern armoury is essentially irony, sarcasm, ridicule, and so on and so forth.  And religion is, of course, its first target.  Indeed, the first major post-modern novel that actually undertook this exercise vis à vis religion was the “Satanic Verses”.  If you read Rushdie’s own work, he describes himself as a post-modern novelist.  And essentially the function of the novel “The Satanic Verses” is to show that Islam is meaningless, it makes no sense; to illustrate this, the life of the Prophet Muhammad is deconstructed in a very specific way to show that it is a totally futile thing for anybody in their sensible mind, worth their intellectual salt, to actually follow or respect or adopt as a model in life.  So post-modernism is a very specific contemporary intellectual construction that takes the ideas of modernity a bit further vis à vis religion.  Modernity simply said religion is inferior, post-modernism says religion is totally and utterly meaningless.  But it does not stop there, it says, we must cause pain and suffering to the people of religion and show them that it is an utterly meaningless exercise.

Well of course there are lots of other aspects of post-modernism and some of them are relatively true in the sense you can see them, that future and past and present collide together, you can see that in a shopping mall, where all variety of goods and products, from different traditions and cultures all over the world are brought together under one roof: past, present and futures of all cultures come together in a single space. Postmodernism also suggests that reality and image are often infused and confused,

it’s often the image that shapes the reality, and sometimes reality shapes the image.  You can see that in reality shows and in 24-hour television news where you can see images shaping reality and reality itself influencing the image, the two feed on each other shaping and directing each other.  So there are lots of aspects of post-modernism that one has to accept because they are in my opinion quite sensible.  Post-modernism also makes a very bold claim that it gives a voice to the voiceless, so all those people in the margins and on the periphery are given an equal status within post-modern thought and are then brought in into the centre – except if you happen to be religious.  In the final analysis, post-modernism privileges secularism and is by definition inimical to religious thought.

So we find ourselves in these two structures of thought, modernity and post-modernism, within which we are actually moving and breathing.  How is religion actually going to find a space to say something sensible and positive, when by definition it is meaningless and irrelevant and subject to ridicule in post-modernism, and by definition an irrational tradition in terms of modernity?  Somehow I think we need to go forward in a way where we confront modernity and post-modernism and dethrone it in a sense.  And interestingly, both modernity and post-modernism privilege secularism; both aim to marginalize religion.

I think we need to create our own new framework, a framework that actually produces a level playing field where we can actually stand up and be recognised as people who have something positive to say, as people who can be just as rational and objective as anybody else, as people who have something to contribute to shaping society, who have viable answers to some of the most pressing needs of society.  And to do that I think we need essentially to confront two things, one from modernity and one from post-modernism, and both things suggest that we also need to change our own perception of how we see ourselves as a religious community. 

I think the first thing we need to tackle is the whole idea, deeply rooted in modernity but it actually goes all the way back to Plato, which is that truth is the same for everyone at all times.    I think that this particular idea, that truth is the same for everyone at all times under all circumstances, has probably reached its sell-by date.  I think that we need to move forward to a new notion of truth.  We need to appreciate that truth may not be contingent but it can be seen from different lights from different perspectives at different times by different people in different circumstances, in a sense.  The plethora of religious communities we see around us actually provides us with a good example of this.  That here you have religious communities, they all worship the same God, but they have different perspectives on this God.  They have different appreciations of the truth of God.  And it is not just of course between religious communities that this is true, but also within individual religious communities.  So you take for example Islam, where we have two or three different notions of truth within Islam which are quite profoundly different but which most people don’t recognise.  You have a Sunni – like me – who says that God cannot be represented in any shape or form, the truth of God cannot be comprehended by the human mind.  But then the Shia comes along and say, actually the Imam too represents truth, they are innocents and by definition they are infallible, and they too are a manifestation of truth.  Now in a sense as a Sunni this is an anathema to me, but I was in Iran only last week and it is a living reality for the Shia.  Then you have the Sufis, for example, who have an almost totally different notion of the same God of Islam, almost a pantheistic notion – so within Islam you have three different understandings of the same profound truth.  If this is so within one religion, you can appreciate how it can be in all the different kinds of religions, and if this is the case, then I can say this as a Muslim, what it actually means is that I only have a partial appreciation of Truth. This realisation has profound consequences.  For example,  I do not have to convert my Christian brothers.  And I can tell you this is a great relief!  I am not into conversions, but it actually means that I need to appreciate that Christianity too is as valid a religion as Islam is for me; like most Muslims, Christians too have a partial appreciation of the Truth of God.  Thus we need to rethink the whole notion of Dawa (preaching to convert others) in Islam and “mission” in Christianity.  You and I can have a wonderful dialogue about faith and religion, and you and I can actually come up with a common agenda and commit ourselves to working on this common agenda, without trying to convert each other.  But if you’re constantly trying to convert me, if I’m constantly trying to convert you, or if I’m constantly stating the superiority of my truth as opposed to your truth, then we are not going to go very far and I think this is the paramount problem for faith communities.

I used to be very actively involved in Christian-Muslim dialogue, and I gave up almost ten or fifteen years ago because everybody was trying to convert me, and my Muslim brothers were trying to convert everybody else, and that was supposed to be dialogue: in a sense it was essentially a dialogue of the deaf!  So I think we need abandon the urge to convert, the urge to state the supremacy of our truths, and this could be a very painful exercise.  And just to show how painful it can be, let me mention that the Chief  Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks said something similar.  He did not go as far as I am going, but he said something very similar in his book “The Dignity of Difference”, the first edition, a copy of which I have.  A few years ago I had to go and interview him for the New Statesman, and I could not find my original copy of “The Dignity of Difference”- actually my daughter had stolen it, so I went and bought a new one and was shocked to see that all the bits that I had marked in the first edition had been taken out from the second edition.  During the interview I asked him what happened, and he said well, they are there, but you did not read it carefully enough – he tried to get out of it - but of course he was sat upon by the hierarchy in Judaism.  Monotheistic faiths find this assertion to be very painful.  But I think that is the kind of pain we have to endure if we are going to go forward.

The second thing that we need to tackle is to basically argue that the grand narratives may not have universal acclaim, but they provide meaning and relevance in particular frameworks.  And they are important and life-sustaining for the community that holds them to be true.  Islam for example is important and life-sustaining for me, so my grand narratives have meaning and relevance to me, just as your grand narrative as Christians or Jews or Hindus will have relevance to you.  And we need to appreciate that grand narratives are not meaningless, but that they have meaning.  But the meaning is contextual to the particular framework within which they exist.  So in a sense, the corollary is that we ought not to make universal claims for our faiths - not just that we should appreciate that there are different perspectives on truth, but that we also ought to say, look, there is nothing that says that Islam has to dominate the globe.  There is nothing that says that every person on this planet should become a Christian or a Hindu or follower of a single faith.  So that’s a second corollary.  Now again that will be very painful for us, but given the dominant structure of thought in which we find ourselves, we need to make these adjustments.

I call this framework trans-modernity.  Essentially what I am arguing for is that in a sense, it provides us with a level playing field.  What applies to religion also applies to secularism also applies to those who follow modernity.  So modernity may work as a grand narrative for some but it cannot be imposed on all others in the framework of trans-modernity. In fact what the trans-modernity framework actually says, is that there is more than one way to be human.  And each way of being human is equally valid.  Moreover there is more than one way to be modern.  And religion and tradition can create their own modernity, in a sense.  That’s the kind of framework that I’m actually looking for.

And I think without that kind of intellectual level playing field, religion will never create a space, a public space.  So what I am actually saying is let us be proactive and go out there and create a space for ourselves by dethroning modernity and post-modernism and creating a new structure of thought where every thought, every grand narrative, every way of being, doing and knowing has validity and equality and there is some sort of fairness if you like.  And if we can do that, then we don’t have to shout or scream and we will simply be heard whenever we speak.

So let me conclude then, and here I will actually read the last two paragraphs of my paper, so I apologise for that.  We begin the journey towards trans-modernity by speaking out clearly and publicly on issues of poverty, human dignity and human rights, equality and community relations, freedom and fairness.  We need to stand up against structural injustice, naked greed and conspicuous consumption, the politics of corruption and class division.  We need to champion the cause of the disadvantaged and the marginalized.  This to me is the definition of religion.  There is no injustice out there which does not have an ethical or modern dimension and about which the religions can be complacent.  We need to create the public spaces where faith groups can engage in social action for and on behalf of not only sectional communities, but for all society.  To arrive at the trans-modern situation we have to find ways to enable open, mutually tolerant and respectful debates among and between the diversity of voices of faith in British society.  Such debate does not and cannot belong solely to the religious professionals.  It has to become an engagement at the level of the generality of ordinary people.  To be trans-modern we have to prepare the groundwork and not inhibit the interest ordinary citizens have in what makes them different, so that they can discover how alike, co-operative and collegial they can be, how common the ground is in terms of basic values they share, while ultimately making Britain a society where religions must talk together about their ordinary lives must be a task for the mass of ordinary people.  It is as institutionalised and organised religious communities we bear the responsibility of leading the way and opening up public spaces for dialogue.

We needn’t shout or whisper but we do need to talk in earnest among ourselves and we have to assert the fact that religion has a vital part to play in shaping public debates.  As people of faith we’ll have to try hard to be heard on the plethora of issues about the moral status and ethical actions of British society, but it is time for all people of faith to show that their voices are clearly heard for the cause of human betterment, now and in Britain.

Guy Wilkinson

Well I think we owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Professor Sardar, to Zia.   He has given us two fundamental challenges to contemplate in the midst of much else.  Firstly, the challenge to the hegemony of a modernist or a post-modernist secularist kind of approach, a challenge to that over-arching narrative as the only possible rational way of understanding or giving meaning.  But of course also you’ve given us, those of us who are of religious communities, faith communities, a further substantial challenge, as you said, the notion of giving up claims to universal truth and to accept that there are multiple ways of living in the midst of multiple truths.  That is indeed a challenge and perhaps a challenge particularly for Christianity and Islam more than it is a challenge for many of the other religious communities.  I think you avoided quite saying that there no objectivity, no one truth, i.e. that truth is contingent, so you were speaking at another level, that of interrelationship.  But clearly you’ve given us those challenges and these are important challenges.  I may put a question to you later on which is about your own role within the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the religions strand within that whole area which may well be symptomatic of some of the changes that you hope to see.

So we are truly grateful to you.   Professor Sardar has offered to give us half an hour or so before we break, of opportunity to raise questions, to make comments and to offer reflections. 

Thank you very much Professor Ziauddin Sardar.  As usual, not only thought-provoking but also you have given us something to think about ourselves and the future as well.  I do agree with your analysis, your thesis, your conclusions but have a little problem in understanding what it means in real terms.  What are you asking religious communities or the people, the individuals we are talking about or what are you asking for modernists or secularists - in terms of what to change, how they can change in the present situation in which we are in, have we become too greedy or too godless people in terms of our consumerism?  Are you saying that all truth remains with the people who are religious or does all truth remain with the people who are godless people?  So that is really a problem I have in one way.

But then coming to another aspect of it which really for me is very central.  Faith in secular society as it exists today is a private matter.  It has never been accepted in modern liberal democratic societies to be a public affair.  Do you want to bring back the medieval ages where faith should become central in our public life and, as you started by saying, you do not want and I do not want the state to be religious.

 I’ll leave it there and await what you have to say about these things.

********

Some of my questions were addressed by the previous speaker.  I have several questions but I will just ask one of them at this stage.  You say that a godless society has lots of problems and so on and so forth.  My question is that if you do have God in any society, whose God is it because as we know there are several Gods, even within a faith there are different ways of recognising God and so on.  So don’t you think that in itself inherently has problems and creates problems.  Then going back to the idea of secularism, a secularist society actually guarantees that we don’t have those problems!

********

I only heard about this event a day or two ago and I came rather afraid that I was going to find that it was going to bore the toenails off a tortoise!  I have to say that I am 87 next week and I think have had the privilege of listening to one of the most riveting discourses in my entire life and I’m most grateful almost to the point of tears for what I’ve heard!  But a practical problem: I edit two magazines, one’s an international one and the other’s a local one, but I’m always conscious that the secular society is sustained by one major fact and that is the power of advertising.  The advertising industry spends over 20 billion pounds a year in the United Kingdom on advertising.  All advertising is an invasion of consciousness and it’s a tempting invasion and it’s capturing consciousness.   I just wonder how the speaker envisages we can cope with that.  But the other small point is this concept of God.  You know we have to think of a flea on a goal post trying to understand what a game of football is all about to see where we are when we’re trying to envisage God.  I think we have to take on board that faith is not something static, it’s a constantly growing thing, and in our lifetimes it’s expanding enormously and taking on an enormous variety of different wavelengths and other beliefs and having to accommodate them, and this is why I find the discourse so valuable indeed.

Zia Sardar

I think some interesting questions have been raised.  Let’s just unpick certain things.  Religion and state do not go very well together.  I only need to give some examples of Iran or Saudi Arabia or much of pre-modern Christian history.  I am not saying that religion should become the governing force, the political force in society.  That’s one thing.  But for me, religion has to be out there in public space.  There is nothing out there that does not concern us as communities that take ethics and morality seriously.  Whether it is advertising, the creation of desire, people’s consumption, whether it’s supermarkets coming in Colindale and killing all the local shops, or how we manufacture our clothes, you know, how Primark can sell trousers for £3 – I mean almost everything out there has an ethical and moral dimension.  And therefore it is incomprehensible for me to say that religion does not belong in public space.  It belongs in the public space in the absolute sense, in every nook and cranny of the public space religion has to be there standing up for the great moral and ethical issues of our time.  I mean we are now in a situation where we are redefining what it means to be human, we are redefining what is death.  When we are dealing with such issues, to say that religion ought not to be in the public space sounds to me ridiculous.  For religion to speak out on the great issues of our time, is not the same thing as religion interfering with state. What normally happens is this, that every time that religion makes an appearance in the public space, the secularists then instantly re-activate all the nasty history that has happened as though religion only consisted of nasty histories.  When people talk about religion and war they say, look, what has religion ever done?   It has done nothing but wars.  They recall the crusades, and other wars of religion. But if you look at the 20th century, all the wars of the 20th century have been wars of secularism.  It’s secularism that gave us the holocaust.  There’s a brilliant book by Zygmunt Bauman called “Holocaust and Modernity”, in which he argues that the holocaust would have been impossible without modernity, not just as a structure of thought but also that the kind of technology and administrative skills that were necessary to carry out that kind of genocide could only have come from modernity.  When people had to kill someone in medieval times they had to look them in the eye.  The idea that you can kill from far away, anonymously is a very modern idea, an idea of modernity.  Holocaust, Stalin, Khmer Rouge, Mao, the genocide in Rwanda, all these have nothing to do with religion, these are all horrors of secularism.  But  secularists never stand up and openly say in public space what horrors have been committed in the name of secularism during the last hundred years.  But the moment a religious voice is raised in the public space, all the nastiness of religion is instantly invoked.  That’s the first thing.

And the second thing that I think John pointed out is that religious communities are almost always seen as a static.  It seems that everything changes but religion does not change, religious communities do not change, and that to some extent is also what tradition means to certain people and how tradition is actually defined as an unchanging static phenomenon.  In fact, tradition re-invents itself.  In “Balti Britain” I show how the young generations are re-inventing the tradition of arranged marriage, so that it has all the traditional parameters but also something quite profoundly totally different.  And Father Christmas as a tradition has only been there for 80 years for God’s sake!  So traditions are invented all the time.  Religious communities are not static, morality evolves, there has to be evolution in morality as well.  The morality of religious communities two or three hundred years ago is not the same as it is today.  So religions change as well and we need to actually stand up and point that out to a certain extent.

Now, to the question of change.  In reality things change, they will continue changing, nothing stands still.  But they won’t change to our advantage, they will change to our disadvantage, they will change - because of the structure of thought that is there - they will change to marginalize us further and further so that we become an endangered species.  In fact, to my way of thinking, religion is already an endangered species in the public space.  Except not quite – because the endangered tiger has lots of people trying to save it, but there’s nobody out there trying to save religious people, so we are even worse off than an endangered species!  What I am saying is, don’t wait for things to change but go out and change things as religious people, as religious communities, go out and claim public space and say that we have a right to this public space.  But I think that I am also saying go out and change the structure of thought because the kind of structure of thought that exists, does not actually allow you to make a positive contribution and you need to do that as well.

Well, whose God is it?  That’s precisely the point I’m making, that within a trans-modern framework you could say, I as a Muslim, I believe in absolute truth.  But that truth is absolute only for me and my community, in that sense.  So there could be as many claims to a perception of God as possible: I personally do not feel threatened by them.  I think that’s the kind of place that the religious communities have to be in, that they do not feel threatened by other claims to truth, that they accept them.  Even the secular or atheist notion of truth - whatever that is - is one particular perception.  Even though I would reject it, I would accept it as one particular perception of truth.  After all, the statement “there is no God” is still a statement of belief.

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Could I ask you about faith schools?  Do you think they contribute to religion in the public space?  Or on the other hand do you think that they are more inclined to compartmentalise religion and compartmentalise the different religions and therefore work against religion in the public space?

Zia Sardar

Faith schools – I think perhaps the best way to answer that question is to give a personal example.  I happen to be a public intellectual so when an Islamic school was being set up not too far from where I live, I was approached to help, and I was also approached as a writer and as a journalist by numerous other Muslim organisations who were setting up Islamic schools.  So I actually sat down and thought about it, whether I am for or against Islamic schools to begin with.  I came to the conclusion that I am for Islamic schools simply because there were Christian schools and there were Jewish schools and there is now even a Hindu school not very far from where I live in Edgware, and I thought in a fair and equitable society, if you have the schools of other faiths then you should have Muslim schools as well.  So I supported it, and I wrote a couple of articles supporting it, and I raised funds etc etc. 

However at about the same time my young son – who is now 21 – was about to go to a secondary school.  So the people who I supported came to me and said, clearly you will be sending your son to an Islamic school.  So I stepped back and said to myself, am I for Islamic schools or not?  This time I came to the opposite conclusion.  I came to the conclusion that I was not for Islamic schools, so I did not send my son to an Islamic school.  I was not for an Islamic school for a number of reasons.  Most of the Islam that my son needs to know and learn is actually taught to him at home, and that is the function of grandparents, and most of the Islam that I know was taught to me by my mother and my grandparents.  And at that time my father was alive, my mother is still alive, and I thought, if I actually send my son to an Islamic school, what am I doing?  I am doing an injustice to my parents, who are eagerly looking forward to transmitting culture to their grandchildren.  That’s what grandparents do in an Asian community, and in fact that’s what happened, they taught him Islam.  I also thought that as my son was growing up in a Christian country, the religion he really ought to know something about was Christianity.  So I decided to send my son to the local Catholic school called St James!

Now this is precisely what happened: when we applied to St James, the lovely deputy headmistress wrote us a letter saying, you may have noticed that to come to this school you need to be a Catholic and you need a letter from a priest!  So I replied to her saying – well, I am not a Catholic but I can have a letter from my Muslim priest, from the Imam!  Then they replied saying no, that was not good enough because this was basically a Catholic school and you needed essentially to be a Catholic to actually come here.  So I wrote again pointing out that the school was in a very multicultural area, the community around the school being basically Muslim and Hindu.  Anyway they totally refused.  I even remember writing a letter, saying, listen, I have done some research, (and I put some research papers in with it), and according to my research 80% of the people who go to a Catholic school, come out atheist.  I can guarantee that my son will go a theist and come out a theist.  Now that’s a better guarantee!  The school got rather angry and said, you can only get in if you get a letter from the Pope.  It just so happens that I had a few contacts at the Vatican Observatory.  So when I replied saying that it could be easily arranged, the deputy headmistress was on the phone straight away.  “We have found a place for your son after all”, she said.

Now this is the interesting thing.  They were so pleased with my son that the following year they asked me to recommend some more Muslim children.  And the year after that I even recommended some Hindu children.  By the time my son left St James it had a sizeable population of non-Catholic pupils. So faith schools can be good if they are not faith schools but faiths schools.  I think some of the Islamic schools I have seen are pretty narrow places, I would not want to send my son there.  I think it is essential for these Muslim schools actually to have Christians, Jews, Hindus, secular students there and a much broader curriculum.   In this way even faith schools can change.  And religions can and should change.  Secularism can change too.  But we have to be proactive, strive for goodness, to ensure that things really do change for the better and for all of us, believers and non-believers alike, work together to promote justice, equality and fairness for all.

Now I have one other problem: if you are teaching a young child, of 3 ,4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, teaching religion, it is automatically assumed - or the secularists tell you -  that you are teaching propaganda, you are brainwashing your child to become a religious person. First of all I don’t know how you instil the notion of love, reverence, humility without teaching this.  But when the same child is taught a secular curriculum, nobody says that you are brainwashing him.  In fact you cannot even teach mathematics without brainwashing.  What is mathematics all about? it is all about propositions, mathematical formulae have to be drilled into young minds.  Why is it that in our multicultural society we can teach anything, and that is seen as fair and fine, but the moment you teach religion it is automatically assumed that in fact you are now brainwashing the child to become a Christian or a Muslim. I find that very troubling and I do not accept that. Even if you do A-level religious studies, you don’t do religion at all.  Have a look at the A-level syllabus, because my son was going to do A-level Religious Studies and I looked at it and I was appalled.  It is in fact pretty good if you want to do morality and ethics and philosophy and epistemology, but it’s absolutely no good if you want to do religion - it tells you absolutely nothing about religion.  We are scared even to teach Religion at A-level.  I think faith schools can play a very important part in creating public space for religion, but not if they continue to be narrow, inward-looking institutions,  they have to be open, outward-looking institutions and  embrace faith communities as a whole and basically prepare their charges, their students to go out and change and transform society and engage in moral and ethical debate out there.

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I’m a law student.  I’d like to address your points about values, and also you mentioned evil.  I worked at the London Central Criminal Court processing murderers and terrorists and the worst of society, committing the worst crimes so I have seen evil  I would like everyone here to know that what we are seeing in the press is not nearly a tenth of what really goes on and I would posit that what we see is really an entire breakdown of the moral fabric if not in Britain certainly in London.  What kind of society basically have we got if people aged 18 are already in jail for committing murders ,or children of 16 years old  are being jailed for terrorism?  If we do have a breakdown of society your solution was that religion should step up.  What sort of stepping up should that be? Should that be a cacophony of voices so we have a Northern Ireland situation or division of an innocent ?? for one man’s vanity?  Or should not religions come together and discover what they have in common and perhaps creating a new value system appropriate for the British context, the European context and the global.

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Basically I am a community worker in the inner city and I see the new religious resurgence and its consequences around me. I see interesting little gangs with different religious affiliations and things like that, so clearly something is happening. But in Britain really I think I see it from the other end of the telescope because I think it is secularism that actually needs to make a new sense of religion and Britishness, how we bring religion into our diverse British public spaces in all their  idiosyncrasy and contradictions.  It is true, young people are hungry for values within our crass commercial society which is why one consequence has been a resurgence of apocalyptic discourse. Our duty as a community is to refashion our notions of Britishness and  incorporate, challenge and redefine these new spaces  that religion provokes.

Zia Sardar

Yes I certainly do think that society is breaking down in many respects. This is true not just about Britain, I think this is happening all over the world.  I think it has a great deal to do with the creation of desire. Advertising creates desire but  it doesn’t just create desire, it creates  perpetual desire that can never be satisfied so every quest is a  perpetual quest for fulfilment which can never be realised, it has no end.  Even our basic concepts such as  progress and modernisation have become perpetual quest.  We are always constantly supposed to have 3, 4 or 5 % growth.  Why?  Things do not continue growing.  A tree does not carry on growing. A tree grows then it reaches a certain stage and it stops growing.  It knows that if it continues to grow it will destroy itself.  I think the idea of perpetual progess is destructive. The same can be said about  modernisation. Iagine the kind of obnoxious things that have been done in the name of modernisation, everything is being modernised in a sense.  I think most of these concepts are not just pure concepts, they have a moral and ethical dimension.  The idea of progress for example to me is a very strongly a moral and ethical idea first before it is an economic implication and therefore we need to reclaim it.  I think in Britain specifically the faith communities have been too segregated, they really do need to come together with one voice, to really discover a common way of speaking, a common way of addressing the contemporary problems of society.  If there is an ultimate breakdown of society, at the end of the day the people who I will blame are the religious community because I would say that at least the religious community had some sense of morality and ethics and could have done something about it.  And so I agree with you, I think religious communities need to come together and learn to speak with a common voice and develop a common framework of values and morality, reclaim the ethical dimensions of such notions as progress and modernisation and actively intervene in public space.

I also think that religion is becoming a badge of identity in a sense - that is very problematic for me.  And that’s one of the reasons why I’m saying we need to re-examine this notion of truth and universality.  For me religion is about shaping your own life, giving your own life a sense of direction. And then working to fight the injustices of the world and giving some  moral sense of direction to society as well. That is what religion is all about as far as I’m concerned, and religion is an essential force for shaping a viable civic space.  If you want to create a viable civic society I think religion can be one of your main instruments for actually doing that.

Conclusion – Canon Guy Wilkinson

Well ladies and gentlemen I think we will probably have to draw to a close now although there will be  time during the reception to share further conversation.  I shall go away with many thoughts and challenges in my mind, perhaps most of all though I shall go away with the image of the unwise deputy headmistress of St James’ school who entered the lists clearly not knowing what she was likely to encounter in your persistence and as we heard, she came to a very different view not only on what was possible but what was desirable.  And perhaps that little story captures something of all that Professor Sardar has given us here tonight which is to say that separations – whether between religions or between religions and secularised communities, secularised communities – always lead to the conflict of words if not other kinds of conflict.  It is the mutual engagement – and particularly the mutual engagement around ideas - that Professor Sardar has commended to us tonight.  So I do want on your behalf really warmly to thank you for such a challenging and stimulating address and for answering our questions in the very frank and open manner that is characteristic of your style!

Talking or Shouting?      Religion and Public Space

Ziauddin Sardar             (written text of the lecture prepared by Professor Sardar)

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel honoured to be invited to deliver this year’s Corbishley Lecture. I must begin by taking issue with my assigned subject. Far from talking or shouting, it seems to me organised religion is in retreat in Britain’s public space, reduced to a muffled whisper if not exactly a dying whimper. This may seem a strange judgement from a member of a faith most associated in the public mind with bangs! However, I am clear in my own mind that bomb o grams of perverted faith are political acts. They are political acts of desperation which testify to the failure of the Muslim mainstream to join a relevant conversation of faiths. In this Muslims are part of a more general collective failure whose result is the marginalisation of the true purpose and activity of religion in the public domain of British society. As people of all faiths conjointly and alike none of us are succeeding in raising our voices to talk and educate the public sufficiently or appropriately in the meaning of our faiths. The void this creates is only too evident. As the entire world was seduced by the ethics of ‘Greed is Good’ where was our duty of care? Were we talking, indeed shouting, of camels and the eyes of needles? Or, as I would say, shouting about the need to purify wealth by delivery of social justice and real resources to the poor. As the globalised economy reaps what has been sown where are our voices demanding that the first priority is the option for the poor and detailing what in conscience must be done to protect the least of those in dire straits? We have a great deal we ought to be shouting about – but we are not even whispering because we have no secure handhold on the public domain. We have ceded our place, and that is a common predicament for all religions, all people of faith here and now in Britain.

My concern then is with the mainstream, not extremism. I believe the most secure route to eradication of the seduction of the extreme is ministering to the God shaped void in the daily lives of the mass of the population. Our task is to become relevant to the issues, concerns and circumstances of the society in which we co-exist, asserting the need for an acknowledged role for faith, whatever that faith maybe, in the public life of our society. This challenge raises its own questions. What part in the oHow HHactivity of the faithful, or even the mildly interested, should religion fulfil in public life? What does society gain, what has society lost by the retreat of religion from public life? What can and should religion contribute to the life of society? Are the religious a reliable, safe pair of hands to be entrusted with a role in public life? In what ways can and should the religious and various faith communities contribute to public life in Britain? Of course, we also have to confront the elephant in the room. How can religion occupy a place in the public space of a multi-faith and genuinely multi-cultural society? If our only answer to the last question is, in effect, to throw in the towel and agree to remain as quiet as church mice for fear of something worse, then we the religious are the architects of our absence in the public space.

As people of faith we have much to talk about together. We live together at a time when our social fabric is unravelling and unprepared to confront the hardships that await us. Generations have grown up knowing only ever expanding material horizons. These generations have been abandoned to the untender mercilessness of a system of values which equates human worth with what material goods we have and display. We live in a consumer culture where personal identity is shaped by the advertising glitz that gives a lifestyle profile to the brand names of the products, goods and services one selects and owns. The xyz alphabet of the me generations must now face hard choices not only of economic recession but of saving the planet from our history of extravagance, finding solutions for the obscenity of entrenched national and global poverty and inequality that blights the lives and confounds the hopes and opportunities of billions at home as well as abroad. Then there is an abundance of moral and ethical conundrums we have accumulated through the exponential growth in our knowledge and ability to manipulate the processes of the life of humans, animals, plants and the very substance of our planet. With knowledge we have amassed accompanying ignorance not least of how to reason in conscience with the difference between what can be done and what should or ought to be done, whether our power to know and to do is applied for true betterment of the human condition or contributes to debasing our humane capacities and indeed could even end by making us less human. It is not merely nurturing the development of and concern for conscience which is the proper duty of religion. Our religions are in many ways the last bastions of the language and terms in which to reason with and think through the dilemmas that become ever more common in our daily lives. What do generations bred to endless possibilities know of sacrifice, endurance, acceptance, self denial, duty of care and prudential considerations? These are our issues. It is our responsibility to present them as positive contributions to sustainable humanity so that those who have no religious formation are not conned by the ethos of the marketplace or left with the erroneous impression that all we have to offer them are joyless ‘thou shalt nots’.  We cannot leave unchallenged the dominant philosophy of our time that all life amounts to is individual and personal satisfaction, the fulfilment of self. We have to offer alternatives to all whose journeys of personal indulgence leave them asking ‘is that all there is?’

Before considering the complex challenges we, as people of faith, face I want to begin with some commonplace details. According to all measures British society still considers this to be a Christian country. True, church attendance has been in long gradual decline. Yet a majority of British people consider themselves Christian irrespective of whether they participate in formal organised acts of worship or not. Of the 92% of British people who answered the voluntary religious affiliation question on the 2001 census nearly three quarters (72%) declared themselves to be Christian as opposed to 16% who stated they had no religion. The no religion category included atheists, agnostics, heathens and self proclaimed Jedi.  And I would make the point that the general presumption that minority non Christian religions fare better in maintaining the affiliation, attendance and practise of their adherents, is a generosity too far. The truth requires unpicking the distinction between cultural identity, faithful practise and informed educated participation in the fellowship of an interpretive community. The distinction is a complicated manoeuvre, but one which would reveal a situation comparable to that among the generality of the Christian population. There are comparable numbers of what might be termed latent Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists as there are latent, or should that be residual, Christians. To presume that all those who self identify as believers know the meaning and potential of what they claim to believe in is, we should all accept, a gross overstatement.

My point, however, is that the figures for self identification with religion endure while the public acknowledgement of religion gets further and further marginalised. When I was a lad the Sunday morning television programmes for Asians - all geared to encouraging us, especially women,  to learn English - were always followed by a televised act of Christian worship, which I understand were allocated proportionally among the various denominations over the course of each year. The Radio Times reserved two front covers per year, one of which was invariably Easter, for religious imagery and plugging religious programmes. Radio 4 broadcast a daily act of worship to all permutations of band widths or frequencies and audiences. As I understand it, according to the original charter of the BBC there were only three persons who had to be employed by the corporation and one of them was the head of religious programmes! Good Friday saw a reserved place for a televised act of observance between noon and 3pm. It reflected the fact that I can even remember a time when banks closed between noon and 3pm on Good Friday. Christmas stamps used to reflect the nativity story, rather than Santa appearing to poo down a chimney. Television schedules gave prominence on Christmas Day itself to acts of worship and a number of programmes with explicit religious themes. These are just a few of the signs and symbols that occur to me whose disappearance represents the retreat of religious observance from the public space. They are harbingers and consequences of a general shift in the temper of society.

The process which gradually but ineffably has carried religious observance to the margins is a product of radical secularisation. A great deal of the spiritual, over the course of centuries, was transferred to temporal control without noticeable effect on public acknowledgement of the importance of organised religion. But for some time now we have passed the point of critical mass. Secularisation has become synonymous with something quite distinct: secularism. Secularism is an organised philosophy even when not an outright ideology. It has claimed the centre ground because it has persuaded many of its superior ability to serve the real needs of society. Allegedly, it is the neutral, dispassionate and disinterested outlook which alone is capable of maintaining a peaceful conversation between all the competing voices, factions, interest groups, ideas and ideologies contending in the public space of an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society. What fits secularism for a dominant role is its trademark: doubt, perpetual doubt that debunks, over turns and interrogates all grand narratives claiming to explain the human condition. The clear implication of secularism is that conviction, convincement of almost any kind, is the product of a closed, unreasoning and potentially irrational, not to say fanatical, mind and hence by implication bad and most certainly a limited and inferior outlook.

The consequence is a severe God problem in society. God has become the great unmentionable. For the faithful, God is an absolute reality, whether found through mystery and clouds of unknowing or revealed in lucid clarity. This defies the uncertainty principle that is the essential feature of secularism. Religion in any and all its manifestations can be only a subject for scrutiny, interrogation and tests of justification and legitimacy but never simple affirmation or mere acceptance. Under such a dispensation religion is best understood and treated as a quaint personal and private predilection. Its claims on the public space are at best traditional, purely ornamental and ceremonial, getting a polite indulgence on the margins for a few high days and holidays but not given routine prominence, the kind of educative exposure that would unduly impact on popular consciousness.  So Songs of Praise endures, because God can be allowed to have a few good tunes. For the rest religious programming becomes comfy sofa magazine shows of unbearable niceness and a complete absence of anything challenging or argumentative, let alone disturbing to the conscience of the times and virtually never mentioning God. Alternatively, it may appear in investigative trawls through the perverse and perversions advanced in the name of religion by the extremes. The perception grows in society that true and authentic expression of religion is to be found among the extremists, making the plaintive whimpers of the mainstream ever harder to hear and more subject to equivocation and outright incomprehension. 

The result is not only an absence of religion in the public space but also the growth of a profound religious illiteracy that spreads like a virus through society. Fewer and fewer people become acquainted with what religion actually says and does. Religious education by the faithful is something children must be shielded from because it is tantamount to brainwashing, a foreclosure of choice. Though how one learns anything without education is a question best not asked. And why education in the doubt of secularism, or its curriculum surrogate comparative religion, is not merely another form of indoctrination that prejudices the capacity for belief and commitment is again a question that dares not state its case. We exist in a climate where all religions must struggle against the tide of inquisition which usually focuses on monumentally irrelevant questions and miss the salient points of what genuinely matters to people of faith. Self description, self portrayal by the faithful becomes more and more difficult further compounding the rise of general religious illiteracy. We end with a situation where those who do not believe assume the right to define what is authentic in religion and therefore who and what is typical, representative of religions belief and believers. While this is an acute problem for minority non Christian religions, and I speak as one of the sorest afflicted, it is by no means exclusive to us. I would suggest it now affects what passes for common knowledge of Christianity itself.

Society has accumulated both a distorted and reductive idea of what constitutes religion, any religion. It has only a minimal understanding of the beliefs, practise and contemporary interpretations of any and all religions. And all religions are best known through their least appealing historic failures. Religion has gone beyond being what believers say and do in the name of religion, the sociological reformulation of the comparative religion explanation. It has become identified by the very worst believers have ever done to themselves and others in history. In which case it is little wonder we are not exactly welcome in the public space - for none of us, or only the most select few, can claim to be without taint, to be entirely innocent of grievous faults, always to have lived up to our best calling either in the practise of our own faith or in relations with those of other faiths.

The generalities of the conception of religion, any religion, at large in Britain today present us with a bleak and depressing picture. Before we can consider what is to be done we need to take stock of what is left of the presence of religion in the public space. The reductive redoubt falls into two categories: religion is ritual; religion on its best behaviour is about niceness, a vague, non specific woolly sense of some sorts of moral and ethical parameters. 

Ritual is the most obvious relic of religion and not surprisingly has come to be seen not only as what religion is about but as the prism through which it is best understood. Ritual observance is about high days and holidays and the rites of passage of human existence: the occasions marking birth, marriage and death. Individually this is how people make the significance of major events in their lives memorable, utilising the facility of formal religion as an integral part of the opportunity for ‘a bit of do’. I am not one of those who spurn this kind of encounter. I would argue it can be one of the few occasions when religious out-reach is possible. And there is another face of such ritualised religious observance I find myself supporting more and more. It seems to me grand state occasions, which integrate or revolve around acts of religious observance have become increasingly important in the bleak landscape we face. I think of things like the funeral of the late Queen Mother – vicariously the memorialising and laying to rest we would all like to give to a beloved grandmother and expressed through the solemnity of religion where we hear the words that signify what belief is about, even if we do not necessarily grasp the fullness of their meaning. Ritual is not redundant, ritual is important as occasion for collective shared meaning if we can learn how to use it constructively. I remember, for example, being in Malaysia at the time of the Dunblane school atrocity when a gunman shot and killed children in their primary school. I was deeply impressed and moved to find that BBC World Service television broadcast the entirety of a church service from Dunblane. One could pick out other such instances. True we can complain such instances are reductive, religion is not solely about celebration or consolation. However, both are significant starting points, points of entry on public consciousness. If state occasions and public memorials are the only time we get to acknowledge the existence of something beyond the material, so be it. Our challenge is how we find a way to go further.

If religion as ritual is a reductive relic, the growth of the presentation of religion as niceness is what I would term a disaster.  It is little more than a placebo for a society that no longer either understands what religion is or knows how to cope with what religion should or ought to be. All those dread magazine programmes which are about the nice things religious people do but run a mile from engaging with why, what these actions signify and how they have meaning and implications for the whole of one’s outlook on life the universe and everything are a sad reflection of what vestigial religion has become.  On the one hand it suggests that religion pertains to morality in the broadest sense without ever seriously engaging with why or how such moral behaviour derives from or relates to religion. And, of course, niceness precludes asking any kind of tough questions to disturb the composure of the religious, the latently religious or the openly non religious.

Religion as moral reflection is the Thought for the Day factor. It is the fiendish challenge to be engaging, personable, relevant, pithy and profound in less than four minutes. The considerable constraints of the medium mean a general acceptance that mention of God is, by and large, a switch off for the audience. The thought that occurs to me is while this vestigial and truncated nod in the direction of religion testifies to a thirst for moral consideration, what is actually offered to the audience is morality without context. For people of faith moral reflection is rooted in its only proper context, the belief we are all answerable to a power far beyond the human. It is God consciousness alone which makes moral imperatives important in our individual and social life. Being witty and wise, a good raconteur, may make the population think more kindly of the religious on a daily basis. It does not amount to a bridgehead for spreading education and understanding of the content and meaning of any particular faith. The rotation of multifaith voices which is now the order of the days makes its contribution to the identikit interchangeable world religion gloss that is little different from the new age eclectic make your own religion for your own personal world philosophy. The message gets us little further than the proposition: be nice and be good if you can, should circumstances permit. Most of the thoughts I hear on such daily outings leave me with an enduring feeling of sadness and remorse, however wise and apposite their content.

I would suggest this prevalence of niceness is a feature of another problem, the real dilemma we need to consider. The placebo effect is a function of what society considers the intractable problems of how to placate the greatest number in what is now a multi faith rather than just a multi denominational society.  It is that very British response of being polite. It seeks out the lowest common denominator by which everyone seems to have some mention while leaving all the big issues determinedly ignored.  I happened upon an instance recently which illustrates the point. On a Sunday morning magazine programme I watched a film report in which one nice white English family was despatched to spend one day sharing the Ramadan fast with an equally nice Muslim family. The two families clearly had never met before, a certain reticence and stiffness was evident all round. Other than the fact that Muslims do not eat – though even the exact specifics of this rather significant element managed to be glossed over – we learnt little apart from the fact the children of the white family did not fancy the idea much. Virtually nothing of what it means to fast, not I agree a very visual subject, was included. And no sooner had they arrived than the white family departed laden with packages of cooked food – what that has to do with fasting not being explained either. This, I am sure, is what the producers of the programme considered doing their bit for cross cultural understanding: let niceness prevail and we will somehow muddle through. Let me state clearly I am of the opinion it is precisely what will not do at all.

It seems to me we are toying with the thin edge of the wedge that is the American solution. In a country awash with religion Americans have a public space where all religions can participate and be noticed –within caveats and reason – but only on the basis of being minimised. So, one can publicly wish people ‘happy holidays’ but for goodness sake don’t mention Christmas. Thus the entire basis from which Christianity derives can only be privately understood and represented in the public space only in the secularised form of a mass excuse for questionable un-Christian consumer excess. American houses are dressed up, illuminated with Santas, reindeer, snowmen, helpful elves and even the occasional angel doing who knows what damage to the global environment all for the sake of a religious celebration. Meanwhile people dedicated to secularism under the guise of the separation of church and state determine that display of nativity scenes in public spaces will cause offence to non Christians and should not be permitted. It is not only a Martian who would find it impossible to understand what’s going on. Put me down as totally befuddled! The cultural influence of America is such that similar lunacy is on the rise here in Britain.

And so, at last we need to consider the elephant question. Is it really the case that Muslim, Hindu or Sikh are or would be affronted by public display of nativity scenes? Or indeed would they be offended by more robust and abundant public reference to and acknowledgement of Christian worship and observance. My assessment, from all I know and have experienced, is certainly not. It would be taken as an encouraging sign by minorities that religion matters and would invariably lead to pleas for ‘me too’ – and that is the elephant we need to hunt down. What afflicts religion in the public space in Britain begins with what afflicts Christianity in a Christian country. The dilemmas of the public space have not been created by the arrival of non Christian faiths – that is an excuse, a rationalisation after the fact. But while Christianity is in retreat in the public space there is no hope that the question of how the public space can should or ought to be made available to minorities, to non Christian faiths will be sensibly discussed let alone resolved. All faiths, therefore, face a common shared dilemma. For the public space is important in establishing balance, setting benchmarks that affect the teaching of what religion is, what it requires and most importantly what it neither requires nor permits among its followers. The public space is vital for the self representation of religions to ensure there can be informed public debate about how we construct an equitable, just and honourable mutually respectful society that is good for welcomes and includes the best contributions of all its citizens. I would argue we all have a great deal to gain from mutual support in finding answers to problems that already do and will continue to affect us all, though perhaps in different ways.

Let me briefly explain why the arrival of non Christian faiths is not basic to the problem. The popular image of the inability of various religious to get along with one another does not start, as a lived experience here in Britain, with Christian Muslim relations, though the history of Christian Jewish relations is a different matter, it does not begin with Christian Hindu or Christian Sikh or Christian Buddhist relations. In honesty we have to recognise it begins within Christianity itself. Intolerance, religious wars and persecution are internal to the history of Christian religion in Britain. The question of tolerance, mutual tolerance among Christian denominations is a long struggle not entirely ended. We all have a great deal to learn from that history: first how not to repeat it ever again; second how to extract from it constructive elements that can create a route map to a genuinely tolerant society where faith is mutually understood and mutually respected and where religions are collectively strengthened to portray themselves in their own terms and take on an active role in the public life.

Tolerance is a virtue, but it is far from easy. True tolerance is not being nice; it is making the difficult choice to respect and give access to beliefs and practises you are sincerely convinced should not exist. If indeed the religious can achieve this task we can truly lead the way for the rest of society. What we are seeking is not an abrogation of the identity and distinctiveness of each religion, not a melange, the all religions are the same option - clearly they are not. What I am seeking and hoping can come to pass is something much more taxing, but ultimately rewarding. I want to consider the possibility that we transcend not our distinctions but our faulty understanding and application of exclusivity.  If religions can overcome this propensity and envision an inclusive public space of informed respectful mutual coexistence I believe they can lay the groundwork for what I call transmodernity.

So what is the job the religious should set as their prime target? Simply put, and with such profound complexity as the idea of ‘simple faith’, the return of a respect for sacredness as the underpinning of social values. And the commitment to social values as the necessity for ensuring human dignity, social justice, equity and the opportunity for all to fulfil their God given talents and be included in the project of bettering the condition of our society and the whole world for all people. The betterment we seek can only be found through efforts to build sustainable peace and mutual tolerance. It is our task to explain how God consciousness is what I would term the secure handhold that should lead us on this path and help us to make better choices, to assess and make judgements about how we are progressing in the right direction or not. It is no small task. But it is quintessentially the religious task. What we share, in all our diversity, is the common sense of our createdness. We are not merely sentient beings in charge of our own destiny. We are agents of a Creator beholden to the source from which we receive the great gift of life, beholden for how we use our endowments and talents, beholden for how we exercise the responsibilities of the freedom of our existence, beholden for how we treat all others who are equally created beings, beholden for how we make use of the material world into which we are born, beholden and answerable beyond this life and this world for all our actions in this life. For people of faith all things are not relative, not endlessly open to the dictates of circumstance or human fads and fancy. The questions of life, about how we live, individually and collectively, are questions of choice and accountability to be weighed and reasoned with on scales of judgement: good, better, best as compared with bad, worse, and worst selecting as best we are able the options which promote and sustain human betterment for all and the earth we share. This is meaning of religion.

The substance of agreement that unites us is considerable. However, these basic propositions come to us through diverse histories, different founding texts, and different traditions of human interpretation, both within and between different religions. We have different terminology and ways of saying what we mean on the same subject. Moreover, shared values come in different guises, analogous yet often so differently expressed, differently structured and bound into different cultural systems that the commonalities are not immediately obvious. And culture is not the meaning of religion, only its flawed man made vessel, so culture can become a byword for distorting religion into customs and practises which in effect countermand the teachings of religion and the delivery of religious values. Not everything that comes down to us through history makes finding commonality and common cause easy. The commonalities are things we have to search for through and beyond the human history which divides us into distinct identities and groupings. Values, morals and ethics are where we can meet, if we make the effort to find our common ground. Values, morals and ethics matter because they are our road map and compass bearings for living a God conscious life. They are not endlessly flexible, but they are ways of asking questions, reasoning with and determining how to negotiate the circumstances of our times in the best possible way.

The very diversity which appears to divide us provides an important lesson. All our differences substantiate that there is more than one way to seek righteousness. At our best we all have diverse, multiple ways of organising and delivering shared values. We each have to find our own way to be relevant to the circumstances and conditions of contemporary times, to be modern. In our different ways the process of reasoning with our times to find the common ground of shared values can be a positive force. In a dialogue, or more correctly now and in Britain, a polylogue among our differences has the potential to illuminate new possibilities for us all. In our separate yet mutual efforts to be relevant we can learn from each other and come to find and apply new insights on our own understanding of our own beliefs. Living together confronted by shared circumstances we have much to learn from each other. I do not mean by this that we embark on a process of becoming each other, that we negate the differences among and between us. I mean we can find ways in which we can transcend our differences by using our religious and cultural values to enhance our capacity to live peacefully together with mutual respect and tolerance. Such transcendence places its emphasis on how we put our faith in action rather than focusing on our theological differences. I am not saying such differences become irrelevant but I am suggesting they are not insuperable obstacles to collective effort. I am certain they could, should, and ought to help us all, each in our own way, to rise to the very best that we are called to be. Instead of obstacles, we have to make them hurdles we surmount to achieve peaceful coexistence and mutual promotion of harmonious community through diverse fellowship of faiths. This is the condition I call transmodernity.

Transmodernity is a concept designed to address the positive element of self-renewal and self reformation that exists in all diverse world cultures. I should explain that initially I developed this concept to address the global problem of dominance, the dominance of perspectives derived solely from the history of western civilization. Dominance is a fact of history, but one which has had a pernicious effect on our world. It constrains non-western cultures and identities, shackles them with the slur of inferiority and in consequence deforms the possibility of a genuinely plural world, a world that liberates and includes the constructive contribution of all communities and human imagination. Dominance is a doctrine of exclusivity that insists those who do not subscribe, align themselves with and conform to its strictures are marginalized. As I have tried to make clear the dominance of our day is a secularist ascendancy which has turned its back not just on the cultural diversity but also on religious diversity within western civilisation itself. If, and I am by no means sure it has, this has been accepted by British society it ill suits the worldview and cultural formation of minority communities in Britain. It inhibits them by disorienting their commonly accepted lifeways and social antennae. It works to make genuine inclusive, full participation in British society an intractable problem. It makes difference the only function of multiculturalism. Whereas what we need to locate and bring into the mainstream is what culture, the extensive expression of religious identity, is actually for – an adaptive mechanism that enables cooperation and collaboration in mutually shared effort to make society as a whole a better place for everyone. It is for this reason that I think we need the idea of transmodernity to help us transcend the limitations of the multiculturalism we have practised to date.

Dominance is also inherent in our own religious outlooks. The missionary zeal of monotheistic religions leads to an aspiration to convert or conqueror the world. Each faith – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – not only has an exclusivist notion of truth but insists that truth is the same for everyone and at all times. Transmodernity means we transcend such conventional notions of religious truth and traditional ideas of religious dominance. I think monotheistic faiths need to move forward and recognise that each faith is true in its own terms and Truth is so complex, so Infinite, that it cannot be totally enclosed within a single religious outlook. Truth may not be contingent but it can be seen in different light, at different times, by different people, with different perspectives. There are different truths; but each truth is important and immutable for those who hold it. Everyone must be allowed to live by the worldview which seems true to them. This will be a painful realisation for certain religious communities but it is an essential step forward if the monotheistic faiths are to transcend their history of antagonism and conflict.

If the problem is dominance then transmodernity is arriving at a social compact which does not privilege any one standpoint including religion, secularism or liberal humanism. This will seem a troubling prospect for some. A statement of faith is the ultimate privileging of one way of viewing the world. But there are none among us who in conscience would not acknowledge that our faith includes, demands and requires a duty of care, extending the benefit of our values enacting our moral and ethical framework on behalf of all humanity whether of our faith or not. We are all called to care for humanity as a whole as they are. We are all called to care for the wellbeing of all God’s creation, human, animal, vegetable and mineral. What transmodernity asks of religion is perhaps more even than it asks of secular liberal humanism. Yet what it asks is already inherent in the faiths we profess. And that is why if the religious can make this transformation they can lead the way to a better human future for all. What transmodernity asks of us is to give to others our very best; but to offer our best according to the needs of others in such ways as they can truly receive it greatest benefit; to do what is right according to our faith and understanding not irrespective of what other people believe but irrespective of whether they believe as we do. It is a considerable distinction. And it can only be achieved by a negotiation through difference; it requires a search for consensus across and respecting our differences. It is a negotiation about how we live together in the world as people with different identities, identities derived from faith which remain distinct yet find their truest meaning in creating a peaceful, harmonious, sustainable society that is just, equitable, concerned with meeting the needs, realising the potential and including the contribution of all. In making such a society we may all be changed. My argument, however, is that we will all be changed into better representatives of our different faiths. What will change most is the society in which we live together. We can create the opportunity of remaking it more in the image and according to the dictates of faithful conscience. If we open ourselves to such a future we construct the possibility of more open futures grounded in the example of living faiths. We offer society the potential of realising the main product of transmodernity: mutually assured diversity.

In many ways I think I am asking us all to consider that religion has lost hold of its place in society by seeming to be more concerned with the claims to exclusivity and dominance of our theology, the particularities of our doctrine than with working for what we are called to bring forth as a result of faith. Instead of ‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ we have given too much attention to making my kingdom as I say it should be on the human authority of my religious interpretation. In this insistence on orthodoxy we have encouraged secularisation as the way to make the peace among and between us. Thus we jettisoned both baby and bath water! Religion has played its part in empowering a society that no longer knows the meaning of faith and struggles to define any parameters or limitations to constrain, guide and counsel individual human desires. Together we can bemoan that condition. The question before us is can we transcend our insularity to achieve a transmodern society infused with the open and shared example of living faiths?

For all the energy expended in the search for exclusivity the truth is there never have been successful monocultures. Our societies have always been diverse and complex. Culture and society have never been discrete, exclusive, static, bounded, uniform, orthodox entities. Internally all cultures and societies have always been heterogeneous, speaking with multiple voices. They have been and are interpretive communities. What I am suggesting is that we turn away from the historic fact that it is easier and less demanding to sit on pinheads defining what pure faith should be than to plunge into the complexities of the world searching conscientiously for right action and righteous workable solutions to actual human predicaments. It is certainly more difficult to take the option for society when we have to acknowledge and find consensus with people with whom we do not agree. I simply make the case society is now in such a dire state, so imperilled by the absence of faiths in the public space that we cannot in conscience stand aside, no matter how difficult we conceive the task to be.

Theory is one thing. What can and should we do in practice to revitalise our faith and usher it back into the public space of British society? Here is one thing of which I am certain. Unless Christianity in all its diversity reclaims its place in the public space there is little chance for minority non-Christian religions to advance their claims. However, defiant some voices among minorities maybe, in my experience people like me, members of minorities, feel the lack of a vibrant Christian presence in public life. We think if Britain is a Christian country it should continue to be so, demonstrably and publicly. Our concern is that we too, as minorities, are then permitted and welcomed to public notice of our high days and holidays, to express our conscientious beliefs as a motive force for engaging in British society and to be part of inclusive ritual commemoration and observance on occasions that speak to the collective identity of the Britain we can build together.

On the symbolic level there has been progress. Prayers offered by representatives of various faith groups has become part of certain state occasions. We have established the principle of state funding for faith schools for a diversity of faiths. As the father of a son who attended a Catholic secondary school I can attest how appreciative of the ethos and unafraid of the concept members of minority communities are. But faith schools are not unalloyed benefits, nor the only possible answer. I think of a project in Liverpool to establish a mainstream state community school with an Islamic ethos. As the project unfolded, with cross party and multifaith support, it became evident that the principles of an Islamic ethos in action in our education system delivered values that won the endorsement and support of non-Muslim parents too because they expressed shared values that can coexist and serve everyone in the mainstream. It seems to me entirely healthy that state funded state schools should be required to diversify their intake. Is it really the case that I am more prepared to entrust my son to a Catholic school than other British parents would be to send their children to an Islamic or Hindu state funded school? It would be the transmodern thing to do, it would set benchmarks, standards and oversight for Islamic and other schools I am anxious should be enforced. If it is an option few can imagine, then it defines a serious problem we need to work together to address. I can tell you my son, the only Muslim in his school, won two prizes in his first year: one for the Christmas and the other for the Easter religious quiz. To live in Britain as an active and engaged British citizen I and my children must be informed and aware of the beliefs and history of religion in Britain. It has not made my son less a Muslim, but I feel, it ensures he will be a better informed, more thoughtful and conscientious Muslim who is a better partner to his non-Muslim neighbours and fellow citizens. The symbolic presence of multifaith representatives at state occasions leads me to point out that unless we reclaim Christmas and Easter and Christian festivals there is little chance we can offer public recognition to minority communities. I would like to see public recognition of Eid ul Fitr that marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, of Divali and Guru Nanak’s Birthday or Wesak Day (marking the birthday of the Buddha) and so on.

Acknowledging and providing public recognition of diverse celebrations of faith is a beginning. Beyond that, we need to be clearly heard on issues of poverty, human dignity and human rights, equality and good community relations, freedom and fairness. We need to stand up against structured injustice, naked greed and conspicuous consumption, the politics of corruption and class division. We need to champion the cause of the disadvantaged and the marginalised. There is no injustice out there which does not have an ethical or moral dimension and about which the religious can be complacent. We need to create the public spaces where faith groups can engage in social action for and on behalf of not only sectional communities but all of society.

To arrive at the transmodern situation we have to find ways to enable open, mutually tolerant and respectful debates among and between the diversity of voices of faith in British society. Such debate does not and cannot belong solely to religious professionals: it has to become an engagement at the level of the generality of ordinary people. To be transmodern we have to prepare the groundwork and not inhibit the interest ordinary citizens have in what makes them different so that they can discover how alike, cooperative and collegial they can be, how common the ground is in terms of basic values they share. While ultimately making Britain a society where religions and the religious talk together about what is relevant to their lives must be a task for the mass of ordinary people it is as institutional and organised religious communities we bear the responsibility of leading the way, opening the spaces.

We don’t need to shout or whisper. But we do need to talk in earnest with ourselves; and we have to assert the fact that religion has a vital part to play in shaping public debates. As people of faith we will have to try hard to be heard on a plethora of issues about the moral status and ethical action of British society. But it is time for all people of faiths to ensure that their voices are clearly heard for the cause of human betterment now and in Britain.