Larvor, Brendan

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TU QUOQUE, ARCHBISHOPBrendan LarvorBrendan Larvor finds that the Archbishop of Canter-bury's recent arguments about religious education area curate's egg.On 8 March 2004, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Can- —iterbury, gave an address at 10 Downing Street called 'Belief, 5*unbelief and religious education'. In it he considers the future *"of religious education in schools, with particular reference to cthe suggestion that atheism might be taught in RE along with 3the principal world religions. Atheism cannot be taught, he 3claims, because it has no content of its own, and in any case -1the current type of religious education is defective because it otreats each faith as a finished system of doctrines and festivals 2rather than as a living tradition. Politely and with his character- •istic erudition, he squeezes humanism out of the picture, until ^he is able to conclude that the main job of religious education —•is to show how religious faith is able to stand up to the chal-lenges of modern life. His argument touches on some verydeep themes, including the nature of rationality itself. First,though, he argues that atheism is parasitic on religious faithbecause it is defined by that which it denies. This seems tobe at the bottom of his attempt to exclude humanism fromreligious education. A mere nay-saying, he suggests, cannothave the intellectual, personal and educational interest of aliving faith.To illustrate this view, the Archbishop offers a mixed bag ofmodern atheists, including rationalists like Bertrand Russelland Karl Marx, romantics such as Shelley and Blake, andthose twentieth-century linguistic philosophers who deny theintelligibility of religious statements. Of these rather antiqueatheisms (and Philip Pullman), he says:All these modern phenomena are reactive, in thesense that we cannot understand them except in thecontext of a specific set of arguments or conflicts.This observation is at least part of the truth about all intel-lectual and cultural currents, including religions. In the caseof atheism, however, the 'specific arguments and conflicts'are not all, or even principally, about religion. Russell, Marx,Shelley and Blake were not arguing against or in conflict withChristianity only, as even a cursory glance at their works willdemonstrate. None of these thinkers was merely reacting toCN religion; each found his atheism within some larger positive2 view. The twentieth-century linguistic philosophy that the• Archbishop mentions originated in a crisis in the relationQ. between nineteenth-century post-Kantian philosophy and_c natural science, a crisis in which the intelligibility of religion••£ was a side-issue.-C On the other hand, contemporary religious movements arej - all reactions to modernity (specifically, modern science and" ; moral sensibility) of one sort or another. Either they go for a^ fundamentalism that makes sense only as a bulwark againstD" contemporary ethical thinking (think of the religious right§ in the USA, or the Taliban, or the Rev. Ian Paisley) or theyD" retreat onto safe ground and insist that religion has never^ said anything about the physical universe and didn't reallyQ mean the stuff about women obeying their husbands and£ homosexuality being an abomination. This, though, amounts_2 to misrepresenting the history of religion in order to accom-modate it to the present.Historically, Christianity did have a line on the age of the uni-verse and did mean the stuff about wives and homosexuals. Athird option is to keep pace with modern ethical sensibility, butpretend that such changes are driven by evolving theologicalinsight rather than external pressure. (I remember watchingon television the General Synod debate on women priests.Both sides used rhetoric and wore clothes recognisable fromfeminist struggles elsewhere in the British establishment tenor twenty years earlier, but everyone present persisted in thefiction that this was theology, not politics.) Science and religion,the Archbishop insists, are not in the same business. Insofaras this is true, it is because natural science forced religion toabandon what had been part of its terrain. In any case, hiscreationist co-religionists seem to think that science and reli-gion do address some common questions. Either way, religionfinds itself reacting to scientific developments. Turning to eth-ics, if we look where the churches direct their energy today,they seem to spend most of their public effort reacting to aworld with which they are endlessly out of step. The AnglicanChurch is in turmoil over women priests and gay bishops asit struggles with questions that the rest of us settled years —iago. Atheists may have reacted against religion, but religious 5*believers do plenty of reacting too. If atheism is too reactive to *"be suitable for RE classes, then so are all the major faiths. cThe Archbishop further complains that the variety of athe- 3isms is too diverse to be taken seriously in religious educa- 3tion: ->oIt is difficult to see them as a system; they share the 2denial of a transcendent agency but little else. •OIndeed. Here again, atheists can reply 'tu quoque' (you're coanother). Sea of Faith Christians share pews with biblical lit—eralists, but that's about all. David Jenkins, the former Bishopof Durham who once described the Resurrection as 'a conjur-ing trick with bones', is a quite different sort of Christian fromthose who insist on the literal truth of the gospel stories. Theseare not only two different beliefs, they are two quite differentsorts of belief, yet they both count as Christianity. Perhapsthe Archbishop would reply that this only shows the healthydiversity of Christianity — but then his own argument suggeststhat atheism has a healthy diversity of its own. If atheism istoo diverse and unsystematic to be suitable for RE classes,then so is Christianity.A little later, the Archbishop collects these thoughts to-gether:As an 'ism', atheism does not present a single face.Needless to say, this does not settle the validity ofatheistic arguments; but if we are to think about themsensibly, we need to be clear that they necessarilybegin from various aspects of religious doctrine and aredetermined by what they set out to refute. To speak asthough 'atheism' were a belief system alongside varie-ties of religious belief is simply a category mistake.What is the argument here? From the fact that there aremany atheisms it does not follow that these atheisms are^- wholly defined by what they deny. Quite the reverse; the va-2 riety of atheisms arises partly from the fact that atheists have• other interests besides refuting theism. Certainly Russell,Q. Marx, Shelley, Blake and the linguistic philosophers had far.c wider concerns. To pretend that their extraordinary intellectual•^ achievements were nothing more than so many wilfully diverseJZ attacks on religion, is to abstract these atheisms from theiri- proper contexts, which is just what the Archbishop insists we. ought not to do (and in another version of this argument he^ seems to recognise this). There is, however, another argu-D" ment.§ Suppose we accept, for the sake of argument, that atheismO" is defined by the faith it denies. So what? Consider anti-racism.j2 Anti-racism is defined by what it sets out to refute. It would beQ extraordinary to leave it out of a discussion of attitudes to race£ on the grounds that it is reactive and responds differently to_2 different forms of racism. To speak of anti-racism as if it wereyet another kind of racism would be a category mistake too,but this is hardly a reason to leave it out of the picture, thoughno doubt racists would be more comfortable that way. So evenif we were to grant the Archbishop his reading of atheism, hisargument would not supply the conclusion he wishes.Later in his talk, he falls into the fallacy of guilt by associa-tion:The attempt to 'teach atheism' as a system is a deeplyconfused aspiration; the history of museums of athe-ism and courses in 'scientific atheism' in the old SovietUnion should be a warning about this.Here again we may reply tu quoque. When Christians pointto the Soviet Union, atheists can point with equal if not greaterjustice to the centuries of grisly efforts to enforce conformitywith Anglicanism in England and other forms of Christianityelsewhere. The joint lesson of the gulags and the wars ofreligion is not about atheism specifically but about any at-tempt to teach an official truth by which people should live.In any case, no-one is suggesting that atheism be taught in - ithe way that faith-schools teach religion. It could not be done, 5*not quite for the Archbishop's reasons, but rather because *"British atheists and humanists do not have authority figures cwho could supply definitive doctrine to the curriculum. The 3pre-democratic hierarchies of the major churches have no 3equivalent in contemporary British atheism. Perhaps the head -<of an established church has more to learn from the Soviet oexperience than humanists who have to struggle for official §recognition. •Let me move on to the argument about the nature of ra- ^tionality, where I agree with the Archbishop's main point, but ennot with the corollary he draws from it. Rationality, says theArchbishop, is not exhausted by scientific method, that is bythe use of neutral procedures to test and establish theses.We can also do humane scholarship; we can examine humanpractices from the inside using literary fiction and sympatheticimagination, among other approaches. Praying, he suggests,is one of those things people just do, without needing a reasonto do it, much as they 'sing, swear, tell jokes, bury their dead,do pure mathematics or write plays'. The Archbishop has apoint here. It is unlikely that ethics, art, sport or humour wouldmake much sense to an enquirer situated entirely outsidethese practices, so if we want to examine them seriously, wehave to engage with them sympathetically, as it were from theinside. Once this point is granted, there is no reason not toextend the same approach to the study of religion. I do havesome reservations about the way he makes this point. As amatter of rhetoric, his list is excessively benign — people seemto engage in nepotism, violence and the scapegoating of vul-nerable and marginal people in times of social stress withoutneeding scientifically-established reasons to do it, in additionto praying, singing, etc. Also, he sidesteps the objection thatChristianity says something about what the world is like, andis therefore open to objective evaluation. The fact that peoplecome to religion as part of a personal effort to live well is ir-relevant. To pick up one of his examples: we may not need ascientifically respectable reason for doing pure mathematics,NO but we had better make sure that the mathematics we do is2 scientifically respectable.• These reservations aside, I wish to grant the basic claimQ. that the practices by which we give order and direction to our_c lives are better understood through humane scholarship than•JS by some approach modelled on the natural sciences. Read-.c ing Rumi, Donne, Suzuki, Dostoevsky, Camus or Pullman (toy take the Archbishop's list of authors) will indeed grant more^ insight into the human significance of religion than an objective^ study of doctrines and festivals. The Archbishop suggests thatD" religious education should use biography, autobiography and3 the arts to explore the way people struggle with their faithsO" and sometimes convert from one to another. It is on this basisj5 that the he reaches for his conclusion:g That religious education should include serious examination£ of what loss of faith involves and what are the elements of5 belief that provoke doubt and conflict is surely axiomatic. Butit is in showing how religious beliefs sustain themselves insuch circumstances that we best educate students in a criticalunderstanding of their own faith and a critical understandingof faith in general.In other words, the main business of religious education isto show by examples how faith can survive criticism. As heexplains earlier in his talk, atheistic arguments are includedprincipally as a means of clarifying and fortifying faith. Thepossibility that their conclusions might be true is not to beseriously entertained. Humanism is simply absent from thisvision, as are students with no faith.My objection to this conclusion is simple: atheists andhumanists are people too. Our efforts to give meaning anddirection to our lives are no less interesting and morally seriousthan those of believers, and these efforts are also well repre-sented in the arts, so there would be no shortage of teachingmaterials if we wish to explore them in schools. The absenceof humanism (and more nihilistic kinds of atheism too) from theArchbishop's educational model is ungrounded (since I haveshown above that his criticisms of atheism tell equally wellagainst Christianity). The Archbishop wants religious educa-tion to include consideration of conversion experiences into —ifaith and from faith to faith; further, he concedes that it should 5*explore the loss of faith. It is simply arbitrary not to include *"the fourth possibility: conversion from one sort of atheism to canother (think of the atheist who discovers humanism, or the 3humanist who lapses into nihilism; or the Marxist who aban- 3dons Marx for Nietzsche). When we remove this arbitrary ->restriction, an exciting possibility beckons: the exploration, ousing humane scholarship and the arts, of all human efforts to 2give shape and direction to life, of all human efforts to orient •oneself with respect to the world, whether they be religious or ^not. As the Archbishop insists, the value and interest of such ^efforts is to be found in their inner struggles and tensions ratherthan in static bodies of doctrine. But this is true of all humanstriving after meaning, not just the religious subset. In short,the natural conclusion to the Archbishop's reflections on thenature of reason and the shortcomings of current RE — theconclusion that he might have reached had he not been anArchbishop — is that religious education should be replacedby philosophy.Dr. Brendan Larvor is senior lecturer in philosophy at theSchool of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire.ReferencesThe two talks by the Archbishop referred to are:'Belief, unbelief and religious education.' www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/040308a.html'Analysing Atheism; Unbelief and the world of Faiths.' www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/040329.html00o0)The bigger picture,the biggest namesing up-to-date withphilosophy is now easier thanever. Four times a year, ThePhilosophers' Magazineoffers unrivalled coverageof what's happening inthe philosophical world,including:• Interviews with the world's top philosophers, suchas Richard Rorty, John Searle, Peter Singer,Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams.• News and reports from the philosophy world,providing a range of reportage not found injournals.• An extensive review section,featuring many just publishedbooks• The lowdown' providingaccessible introductions• A 'Forum' in each issueproviding a range ofperspectives on a singletheme• Essays and debate on all aspects of philosophyTo subscribe, phoneIn the UK (01442) 879097In North America 1 -800-444-2419www.philosophers, co.uk

Tu quoque, Archbishop

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Tu quoque, Archbishop

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