The first Great War volunteers thought they’d be home before Christmas. By September they were digging in. By October the entire Western front had ossified into trenches, soon to become charnel houses.
The noughties have echoed to the sound of trenches being dug.
Long gone are the confident statements about taking tea in
Religion did not role over and die, as many expected. Rather it migrated from being a fundamentally socio-economic phenomenon, which would simply dissolve when humanity finally arrived at perfect socio-economic conditions, to being a biological one, as hard-wired into us as sex or aggression. Almost irrespective of whether religious beliefs are true or false, religious identity, behaviour, and communities are here to stay.
There was no easy advance. In its place, trenches were dug and shells fired. Some, tragically, were real. The noughties have been lived in the shadow of falling towers, exploding trains, burnt out nightclubs. That violence may have been limited to a tiny number of religious believers, but it has marked everything and everyone.
For the most part the explosives have been verbal. On the one hand we have encountered placards telling us the Islam will dominate the world and freedom can go to hell, and Christian faith that is able to move mountains of evolutionary evidence. On the other, we have heard of how faith is a virus to be eradicated, and how the Muslim community should be subject to discrimination until it “gets its house in order”.
The middle ground has slowly been churned into a no-man’s land, those remaining there risking the “Neville Chamberlain school of…” insult with which we have become wearily familiar. (Religious people are basically no better Nazis, geddit?!?!)
We are not there yet. There are still plenty more people talking between the trenches than shouting from them. But if the noughties have taught us anything, it is that we cannot guarantee this will always be so.
Europe stumbled into the Great War through a kind of inadvertent positive feedback loop, as aggression was met with aggression was met with aggression. The last thing the 21st century needs, faced as it is with the prospect of resource shortages and environmental degradation, is contention between “faith” groups, among which I would include atheists and humanists, descending into conflict.
The challenge before each group is to affirm what is of worth in the thinking and traditions of others. As Jonathan Sacks remarked recently http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/LordSacks2009.pdf, “religious groups in the liberal democratic state must be prepared to enter into serious respectful conversations with secular humanists…about the nature of the common good and the kind of society we wish to create for our grandchildren.”
More specifically this will mean Christians affirming aspects of secularism http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/TalkingGod1.pdf, Muslims affirming the principles of Western democracy http://campaigndirector.moodia.com/Client/Theos/Files/TheosFaithandIdentity.pdf, and atheists affirming the enormous contribution made by churches to civil society.
This does not mean criticism is impermissible. Nor is it an invitation to some kind of insipid greywash. Atheists, Christians, Muslims and others believe different things and will rightly wish to persuade others to think likewise.
It is, rather, a response to the hostility that the noughties have seen grow up around the issue of religion. The next decade will not see anyone with their feet up in a Berlin café, but nor need it witness an exodus to the religious trenches
