Faith line, Color line, revisited

Since writing my last post about the faith line and the color line, I have been to a secondhand bookshop! Now I absolutely love secondhand bookshops. I simply cannot pass any sale of secondhand books without stopping to browse, and I almost always find something I cannot resist, to add to my burgeoning bookshelves at home, or to increase the height of the pile of books waiting to be read by my bedside. I guess it’s an addiction in its own way! Although perhaps it’s not a bad addiction to have!
The other day we went out for the afternoon to view part of our wonderful national heritage – a splendid Jacobean house and garden open to the public. And there beyond the back of the gift shop selling all those manner of new and over priced items that we simply do not need, was a small room stuffed with old and not so old books of every shape, size, genre and condition, simply begging to be bought; and all for a good charitable cause. What was there to lose?
So I just had to buy Comparative Religion, by A C Bouquet. Born in 1884 and an expert on the history and comparative study of religions, Bouquet wrote this paperback during the Second World War to provide what he described as a “plain tale, inspired by scientific method”… of the “religious quest of mankind, its fruits, its failures, and its future prospects…” This is a Pelican Book, an imprint of the famous Penguin Books, and I bought the fourth revised edition of 1953. How could I not buy it as part of my current research into the Wisdom of Religious Tolerance!?

I havn’t read very much yet – I’m on holiday after all – but there are some very wise words. “No doubt the study (of comparative religion) has its dangers,” he writes. “It may sink to the level of collecting dead insects or pressed flowers, which in the process lose all their colour and reality. Collecting religions is no better. The only tolerable way of engaging in the work is to let one’s self be enthralled by man’s ceaseless quest for something supernatural and eternal which the ordinary life of this world will never give him, and to try to put one’s self into the place of those who are obviously enthusiasts for a religion which is not one’s own” (my emphasis). Now I have mentioned John Sentamu’s call for religions to celebrate their differences and unique perspectives before. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, explained on his visit to the new Hindu Temple of Shri Venkateswara (Balaji) in Birmingham on 15 November 2008, ‘interfaith dialogue is not a way of obliterating our differences, it's a way of living creatively with them. A way of living gratefully with them, so that our compassion, our love and our fellow feeling do not stop simply with those who are like us.’ Only with all the facts, Bouquet wrote all those years ago, can we “make comparisons with justice and fairness.” Oh so true, and surely today so much bigotry and aggression and intolerance and ridicule arises from not appreciating the full facts, from much crass ignorance, although many suddenly seem to claim huge expertise when they can hide behind the relative anonymity of the Internet!

Dr Bouquet was himself an Anglican priest, but he was very clear of his responsibility to write an entirely objective account – to write as a scientist, he said, not as an advocate. “I believe,” he wrote, "that truth shines by its own light. I have faith that if my own creed is in any true sense absolute, it cannot suffer from an unprejudiced and dispassionate exposition of the history of religion.”
It is curious to see his use of the word science as well, in the study of religion, since of course in this twenty first century many seem to believe that science and religion are entirely incompatible, at opposite ends of the spectrum of understanding.
But science was after all originally called the natural philosophy. It is only relatively recently that it’s meaning has been hijacked by the reductionist and materialistic scientists and the angry atheists for their own agenda.
Talking of which, there is another little gem in the book that I have not yet had time to look into any further. A certain Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who died in 1648, is noted by Bouquet as asserting that there are no real atheists, “but only so called atheists, who object to the false and inappropriate attributes which are assigned to Deity, and will rather have no God than one who is unworthy of belief.” An interesting thought.

The color line - the faith line

More than one hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois warned in his book The Souls of Black Folk that the problem of the twentieth century would be the racial segregation that existed after the abolition of slavery, in ‘the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.’ He called this ‘the problem of the color line.’ With the election of President Barack Obama to the White House and only a short while before that the inauguration in the Anglican Communion of John Sentamu to be their own first black Archbishop of York, the hope must be that this color line is well on the way out.
But what about the Faith Line?
This, the American Indian Muslim Eboo Patel has pointed out, is no less divisive and no less violent than the color line. The faith line does not divide different faiths, or separate the religious from the secular. This line is divisive between the values of religious totalitarians and the values of the religious pluralists. The former believe that their way is the only way and are prepared to convert, condemn or indeed kill, those who are different, in the name of God. It is this side of the faith line that gives religions a bad press in the eyes of the secular public. The pluralists on the other hand hold that ‘people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.’ Pluralism is the belief, Patel explains, ‘that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its own unique contribution.’

We are desperately in need of a universal religious tolerance. We can all play our part, to work hard at that faith line and support in any way we can all those organizations and individuals who are striving to achieve harmony between the diverse religions of the world. Many of us are apparently blind to the fact that all the great faiths share a love, compassion and respect for all beings, sentient or not. May we all in the years to come learn to celebrate our differences and our unique perspectives in an atmosphere of tolerance, understanding and humility. This is a vital message for our future, the need to heal the rifts between religions and faiths so that we can all be a part of that great global healing, all be catalysts for healing change at society and global level.
‘…I would urge people who are judgmental and moralising,” said John Sentamu in 2005 in his inauguration sermon in York Minster,

"as followers of the Prince of Peace, the friend of the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable, I bid you all by the mercies of God to go and find friends among them, among the young, among older people, and all those in society who are demonized and dehumanized; and stand shoulder to shoulder with them.
Christians, go and find friends among Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, agnostics, atheists – not for the purpose of converting them to your beliefs, but for friendship, understanding, listening, hearing…
Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, agnostics, atheists, go and find friends amongst Christians, not for the purpose of converting them to your beliefs, but for friendship, understanding, listening, hearing.
God is working in the world today quite beyond the limits of our budgets, structures and expectation. His gospel, lived out in corporate-discipleship, has the power to transform our individual and corporate lives, our families, our communities and our nations. It has the power to break beyond our timidity and insufficiency."

The color line took a great deal of time to transcend and the work is not entirely finished. Can we dare hope that the faith line will follow the same path towards tolerance and respect for all, blessed as we now are with greater global information, communication and education? May this lead to a better understanding if we will only allow it in our hearts and minds. There are many organizations that work tirelessly to keep the principles of religious pluralism alive. They need our support. Are we ready for that challenge?

See Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: the Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, Boston: Beacon Press,
And “Building the Beloved Community; Values of Religious Pluralism” in Frank, the magazine of the Clinton School of Public Service (Winter 2007b), p. 58.