Religious liberty

The Prime Minister and others made some encouraging noises about religious liberty a few weeks back - supporting freedom of religion at home and abroad.  But I wonder if he knows what religious liberty really means?

I think freedom of religion is not regarded as any great thing in our culture, because religion itself is so badly misunderstood.  If religion is just the Sunday (Friday, Saturday) hobby of a minority of people; if religion is merely the private beliefs of a limited number of individuals; if religion is just a mythical underpinning for a moral framework which could in principle be separated from those mythical roots - well, in that case religious liberty is not much more of a big deal than freedom to follow the football team of your choice, or freedom to read the novels of your choice.  This sort of thing seems like it shouldn't be difficult or costly for society to grant; nor does there seem to be any reason why any particular clamour should be made about it, particularly as the number of people wanting to exercise this right seems so small.

But in fact freedom of religion means freedom to live in a completely different world from society at large, with entirely different values springing from an entirely different view of reality, and yet still to be included in social institutions and events without discrimination.

Put it like that, and I think it's a big deal.

Picture the late Roman Empire - religion here is not about private beliefs or occasional rituals for a minority; it is the whole shared world.  The reason the Roman authorities are anxious about Christians - the reason they refer to them as 'atheists' - is because they seem to be threatening to tear this whole social fabric apart.  They are opting out of the whole cultic-social-political complex, and the more people who go in this direction the more likely it is that the whole thing will collapse.  In that context, to issue an edict of toleration is a brave and testing thing to do.

So, perhaps we wouldn't call it 'religion', but I think our situation is pretty similar.  There is an assumed framework of morals and values ('British values'?) based on a particular reading of history and reality.  To opt out of it is dangerous - you might be a terrorist; you are surely a bit weird.  It's not the going to church or the beliefs that society objects to; just the fact that people insist on acting as if these beliefs were really true, in the real world.  Hard to take.

The easy and natural social response, and the one which our culture typically pursues, is exclusion - of course you're free to hold these views (we're Western, after all, and believe in religious liberty), but you can't come into the public sphere with them.  This is not genuine freedom of religion.

I wonder if our society can be, or wants to be, brave enough to have the real thing?

On denying God

In The Christian Life (p185ff.), Barth notes that there are three ways of being ignorant of God, all of which are to an extent wilful, incur guilt, and are bad.  However, "within the badness proper to all of them we can think and speak of the bad, the worse, and the worst."

The merely bad, "the most primitive form of the ignorance of God in the world", is theoretical atheism. This atheism has always existed - it is not a unique fruit of modernity, not is it essenitally related to the growth of scientific understanding.  It is, as the Psalmist notes, foolish.  For Barth, the interest of atheism lies in the fact that it brings into the open the world's denial of God, which is concealed in the other forms of its ignorance.  It is also interesting because in atheism we see that the world cannot state its denial of God with nearly so much seriousness as it would like.  "The atheistic negation applies to a "God" who, if he exists, must do so in the same way as the data of other human experience or the contents of other human reflections exist for people."  (Think of Dawkins: God is a scientific hypothesis or nothing).  But such a negation does not touch the true and living God, who "is not a 'datum' of ours.  He is his own 'datum'."  So much for atheism.

The worse form of ignorance of God is religion.  Religion is worse because it conceals what it is really about, masking the denial of God with a "positive substitute".  Religions may be theistic, or they may be avowedly secular (there is no reason why secular things should not be venerated, promoted, in a religious fashion); either way, they represent a denial of the true God.  "In all religions, even the highest ones, or what are usually called the spiritual ones, we simply have surrogates in whose invention, use, and enjoyment the world thinks it can help to safeguard itself against, and to offer satisfaction to, the present God who is not known to it."  Religion represents ignorance, not knowledge of God, because it is always an attempt to avoid his self-revelation.  Idolatry is the essence of religion.

The worst form of ignorance of God, however, is "the attempt of the world to exalt its own cause as God's or, conversely, to subject God's cause to its own, to make it serve it."  Barth calls this the "nostrification" of God.  Rather than deny God, as in atheism, or seek to serve and thus avoid him, as in religion, we can identify ourselves with him, and therefore him with us, so thoroughly that we can throw ourselves into life with absolute zeal, confident that whatever we will, God wills, and whatever we do, God does.  "When the world is really shrewd, as it is not in atheism or idolatry, it tries to help itself in this way over against God."  The world finds itself much more secure here, having, if you like, co-opted God.  Objectively, of course, God stills stands over against the world, but subjectively he is subsumed within it, the world-God.  And so he is safe.

I would only add to Barth's analysis, that the most terrible thing about the nostrification of God is that it is the most prevalent form of God-denial, of the unhallowing of God's holy name, to be found within the bounds of the church.  And for that, we can only repent.