Richard Holloway - Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity

Some years ago I copied into my note book an aphorism from a Russian writer called V.V. Rozanov: All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. I would like to reverse Rozanovs claim and suggest that religion will remain as long as we sit in that chair looking in the distance. Another way of expressing the same thought is to use the vocabulary of the German theologian Paul Tillich, who did his greatest work in the United States after the Second World War. Tillich said that, in addition to the ordinary matters that preoccupy us, our humanity asks deep questions about the meaning of life. He called this our ultimate concern and the way we respond to it is what we call religion, even though that word has become exclusively associated in peoples minds with the supernatural answer to the question. Even if we reply that life has no final meaning, we are still offering that as an answer to our ultimate concern. In fact, this is the reply that is given by the scientist Richard Dawkins: Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose. but the idea of the ultimate meaninglessness of the universe is itself a response to our concern. Whether it is paradox or irony, the discovery of non-meaning or nihilism is itself a kind of meaning, if only because it means something to us, is something we ourselves read from the reality that confronts us. Just as interesting as the answers that Nietzsche and Dawkins give is the fact that they themselves are so passionately engaged in wrestling with the question. It is in the nature of humans to do this; in us, life has started to ask questions about itself. The religious quest is the deepest passion of our nature, because it is prompted by our ultimate concern. Unfortunately, like many aspects of our history, religion has been dominated by special interest groups who claimed that only their answers were true and that everyone else was in error. It is not surprising that this has happened: it is just another example of how the world ran itself for so long. Those in authority not only organised things to suit themselves, they interpreted things to suit themselves. It didnt matter what the system was, as long as they called the shots.

The folly of subjecting the religious passion to the politics of power is that it cannot be controlled in this way and refuses to be subject to external direction. I suspect that this is what the writer and film-maker Dennis Potter meant when he said just before his death: Religion to me has always been the wound not the bandage. get very agitated about religion and politics, because it is impossible to establish their incontrovertible truth.

The fascinating thing about our own day is that our attitude to these matters is beginning to change. If I can use the Rozanov metaphor one last time: today we positively revel in and celebrate the fact that there are almost as many chairs for distance-gazing as there are people to sit in them. Today there is no universally accepted answer to the question posed by our ultimate concern. The dominant characteristic of what is called post-modernity is the absence of agreement on the core meanings and values that undergird the human experience. Scholars call these underground streams of value and meaning metanarratives and they tell us that the main characteristic of our society is its lack of agreement on how to understand and order human communities. In their language, we have no common metanarrative. We describe our society today as multicultural and its values as plural. The leaders of most religious institutions deplore this situation, for fairly obvious reasons. They talk contemptuously of pick and mix Christians or cafeteria Catholics who take what they want from traditional religious systems and ignore what is not congenial. While unattractive, their dyspepsia is understandable. After all, if you are invested in the proclamation of a particular system of meaning and value, which you believe to be not one among many, but the only true and saving one, then you are bound to be disturbed by the new plural culture. Religious officials feel the way all monopolists feel when competition invades their market place: they resent it, precisely because it threatens their dominance. Another important characteristic of post-modernity, which is reflected in effective business ventures, is the flattening of hierarchies and the sharing of patterns of governance. Though still more honoured in theory than in practice, there is also a commitment to equal treatment for women and sexual and ethnic minorities. All of this is in marked contrast to life in traditional religious systems, such as Christianity.