The Invention of Modern Religion
Talk at St Bride's given on 11th May 2014 by Jonathan Clatworthy
According to all the surveys, religion is losing popularity. Most people are happy to call themselves spiritual, but not religious. So what is it about religion that puts people off?’
Scholars have shown that what we today mean by ‘religion’ is a modern invention, a product of the history of western Europe. We’ve created a kind of taboo. It has become unacceptable to talk about the main themes of religion, except when talking specifically about religion itself. Because we are all used to it, we don’t notice it.
So let’s imagine what it would be like if the same taboo was imposed on something else. Suppose you are my doctor. I arrive coughing and spluttering, you have a look, poke me in a few places, and tell me I’ve got a virus. I say ‘Oh. Virus. We did viruses in school. In biology. I wasn’t any good at that. I don’t want to talk about biology now, I want to talk about my illness. Can you stick to the subject please?’ What are you going to say now? You are going to say something like ‘Buy your illness is a virus’.
Another one. Cate says to Rachel, ‘What did you buy in the shops?’ ‘Rachel says ‘I bought a red dress.’ Cate says ‘Red? You’re talking about colour now. I didn’t know you were a colourist.’
She wouldn’t, would she? It’s ridiculous. What I’m describing is a taboo; in the first case, a taboo on talking about viruses, in the other a taboo on talking about colour.
The modern taboo on religion is like that. It’s acceptable to talk about religion when the topic of conversation is specifically religion, but not otherwise. Most of us don’t notice it, but immigrants often do. A few years ago I was at the Royal Hospital, with a tube being pushed further and further up my nose. The doctor explained: ‘God has given us sinuses, but he also lets us create technologies to look inside them.’ My immediate response was to assume that this doctor must be a Muslim. Most of us have learned not to talk about God like that.
How it happened is well known. Before the seventeenth century God, prayer and life after death were just normal parts of the way people understood reality. Like that doctor people could talk about God without thinking ‘Ooh. Now I’m being religious.’ But by the time of the English Civil War Europe had been in turmoil for over a hundred years because of different beliefs about what is the true Christianity. What kept the wars going was a dilemma about public and private issues. They inherited a traditional belief that the nation would be blessed if the state was governed the way God wanted, and they interpreted it to mean everybody had to attend the right kind of church service. However many of them also believed that if you belonged to the wrong church, after you died you would be punished in hell for eternity. If you believed that, it was worth being burned at the stake rather than belonging to the wrong church. The result was war after war. I for one hope we never go back to those days.
The solution that emerged was to separate these two matters. Allow individuals to decide for themselves about their eternal destiny, and choose governments according to the consent of the people. The main proponent of this solution was John Locke. Here are some quotes from Locke:
The care of Souls cannnot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force; but true and saving Religion consists in the inward perswasion of the Mind.[1]
A Church… I take to be a voluntary Society of Men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls. I say it is a free and voluntary Society… The hopes of Salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that Communion, so it can be the only reason of his stay there.[2]
In other words Locke was responding to the obsession of his day. People were genuinely worried about whether they would spend eternity in hell. It was that worry that drove people to join one church or another. Locke’s solution was to separate it out from all matters of government, so that what you believed about God, the church you belonged to and the way you worshipped were all separated out from matters of government, so that they could no longer cause wars. From then on religion was on principle to be private, inward and other-worldly. Religion in its box.
A century later, in 1791 the First Amendment of the United States Constitution stated that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, established in 1948, states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.[3]
The European Convention on Human Rights is similar. They wouldn’t have insisted on freedom of religion if they had thought religion included opposing capitalism, let alone becoming a suicide bomber. They wrote those things because they thought of religion as something which didn’t affect public life.
There was a famous interview when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, and he got asked about his religious views. Alistair Campbell was there. He interrupted. ‘We don’t do God’. He was determined to make sure that Tony Blair would not let the side down by saying something about his religious faith.
Would he have interrupted today? That conception of religion in its box is declining. Most people no longer worry about whether they will go to hell. If your beliefs about God and life after death are on principle completely disconnected from everything else, what’s the point? Why believe them at all? People either decide that religion is an optional extra they can do without, or they look for something which relates to their lives.
To summarise. Before the 17th century people used to talk more freely about God, the purpose and meaning of life, and how the life we are living now relates to whatever other life there may be. 400 years ago that changed. Europeans were so anxious about life after death that they redefined religion to mean something private and individual, a system of personal belief completely disconnected from everything else. The long term result of that change is to separate out the why questions from the how questions. As I see it, we have become a society which knows more and more about how to get things done, but less and less about what is worth doing.
Questions
What does ‘religion’ mean to you?
Does your spirituality, or religion, help you think through how you should live, or is it completely separate?
[1] Nongbri, Before Religion, p. 101.
[2] Nongbri, Before Religion, p. 102.
[3] Graham, Rock, p. 25.