CLASH OF THE CULTURES

The United States breathes fire against Iraq and the "axis of evil" states, a Christian hospital compound comes under attack in Pakistan, the Holy Land descends to new depths of bloody conflict, Sudan is involved in a bitter inter-religious and inter-tribal conflict, and there is tension in Nigeria between those who want to establish Islamic Shariah law in the state law code and those who do not. In the UK, there are racial tensions, there are campaigns against forced marriages and female circumcision. Young Muslims devour material on Jihad and young whites join far right organisations. What is happening in our world?

What is happening is a clash of cultures. So much most people will accept, but what are the competing cultures? Many will categorize this as a religious conflict (Christian v Muslim), but while some committed Muslims may well be represented among the contenders, many are not, and few committed Christians are. Muslims feel their right to practise their religion is at stake. How many Christians feel the same?

Others will see the clash as a clash of ethnic groups, but different ethnic groups seem to act in a similar way. The response of Arabs is matched by the response of black Africans, and the same trends can be seen in Germanic and Latin Europeans, in Slavs and Turks, as well as in the United States. There must be more to this conflict than either religion or ethnicity - even though both these factors play their part. So what are the competing cultures? I believe there are only two: the scientific and the non-scientific

  This is admittedly an unfashionable thesis, but I believe it is the only one that fits the facts. What unites Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea? They are all poor countries where the educated and wealthy population is a tiny minority, whereas the majority are poor with little experience of the world outside. Because of this, traditional values prevail and funadamentalistic religion appeals, especially if the leaders of the nation are seen as betraying the traditional values. They all have got the idea that the "big countries" have got it in for them and that they have nothing to lose.

They have much in common with embattled communities within larger, more wealthy countries, such as: Palestininians in Israel, more recent or poorer Pakistani immigrants in the UK, young Muslims in the Western world or in former colonies like Nigeria. Nigeria is a very interesting case indeed. Strong moves toward the establishment of Shariah law are matched by a revival of the Christian religion. Both are classic marks of a society where people feel themselves, and their culture, to be under threat.

  But it is not only poor blacks and Asians who feel under threat. The United States collectively believes itself to be under threat. This is most obviously so since September 11th 2001, but it was arguably the case for long before. Before the Muslims and the Arabs were a threat, it was the Communists. I doubt there has ever been a phase of American History when the world's most powerful nation has not felt itself to be under threat.

And even within the USA there is an endemic feeling of insecurity. Christian believers in the United States feel threatened, hence the battles against the teaching of the Theory of Evolution in schools, the growth of "Christian Schools" and of homeschooling. The Moral Majority was a manifestation of this phenomenon, and even though the erstwhile leaders of that movement are now discredited, there is still a market for their kind of message. For that reason we see "revivals" in the United States, especially in the southern "Bible Belt". But one hears less of this in the North and East of the country, and nothing at all of revival in the UK. Why is this?

  The reason, I believe, is that the "scientific" view of the world has been largely absorbed by the majority of the public in the North and East of the USA, in the UK, and in most of mainland Europe. The "revivals" in Eastern Europe have now largely burned out now the threat of Communism has retreated, because there too, the "scientific" world-view prevails. But the "Bible Belt" of the USA has doggedly adhered to its traditional beliefs, and set its face against what it sees as "modernist" teaching (e.g. Evolution). Many ordinary people in these places still maintain the old medieval "religious" view of the world, which suggested if you pleased God all would go well with you and if you did not, so much the worse for you.

Traditional religious attitudes persist in many Islamic countries. The leadership and the intelligentsia of these countries do not necessarily believe these things (though some do, like Osama bin Ladan). These attitudes also continue in poor, oppressed, and minority communities throughout the world. Even when that community lives in a sophisticated modern society like the UK or USA, if it believes itself to be an embattled minority it can persist in beliefs which run completely counter to its actual experience. The more intelligent members of these communities can see the folly of this stance, but they know they face complete ostracisation (or worse) if they speak out. So they remain silent. Intelligent rulers of Muslim countries are aware of the follies of fundamentalism, but find traditional religious attitudes very convenient in keeping their people under control.

And if your people are under attack (as the Palestianians and Isreali settlers are) you have to stand by your people, right or wrong - don't you? So the traditional values and the traditional religous world view they presuppose gains the upper hand. And who would say nay? The Churches? In the Methodist Prayer Handbook for 2001-2, issued by the Methodist Church in Great Britain, we are called on Day 25 to pray for Tonga, and to pray "for all who teach and lead young people that they may encourage them to hold on to traditional values". We are being asked to pray that both educated and educators will remain fixed in the Middle Ages, and to ask God to hold back the intellectual development of this country, so that religion may continue to increase, so that society may remain stable, and so the island may remain the pre-enlightenment idyll the Western missionaries and traditonalist church leaders believe it to be.

  In a sense this analysis sounds very old-fashioned. It sounds like I am saying that Western scientific thinking is best for the world and that progress is inevitable as long as we spread that way of thinking. Have I not learned the folly of such thought from two world wars and many other conflicts beside, from the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, the "ethnic cleansing of the Balkans and of Rwanda? I have indeed learned from these and other events that the transition from a non-scientific world view to a scientific world view is not progress in every sense of that word. Much has been lost in the throwing off of traditional values. Not so much in the throwing off of the old world view, as in the all-too-human habit of throwing babies out with the bathwater. But it remains the case that the same enlightenment which brought us spectacular advances in medicine, communication, and travel, also brought the holocaust, acid rain, and nuclear bombs. But as Frank Sinatra once sang "you can't have one without the other". The very advances that promise food for the hungry, healing for the sick, and the lifting of people out of poverty, are going to wreck communities, destroy traditional morality, and extinguish mature and significant cultures. All this has happened in Europe, and it is now about to happen in Africa, in Asia, in South America.

  But does it have to be? Can't we find a way to pass on to our neighbours in this world the benefits of modern science, while sparing them the downside? This is the real paternalism. It is exactly the attitude of a parent who wants the child to grow up and become confident and mature - but without ever being hurt or disappointed and without ever taking any risks. It isn't possible. And in the case of the "clash of cultures" it is particularly impossible because modern science is based on the modern scientific world view. If one truly believes that everything depends on the whim of a deity, one cannot get serious about scientific theory. And if you think the world is largely governed by the laws of cause and effect you are not going to take traditional religious claims very seriously.

Unfortunately, traditional religious societies depend on everybody sharing the religous point of view. If so much as one person in a community thinks divergently, the god (I put things this way because this is not a specifically Christian view) may well vent his spleen on everybody. Such an attitude has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus, but it is a common feature of "traditional religion" in many societies, including Christian societies. This means that if so much as one person in a society thinks "scientifically" (Americans might say "freely"), the whole traditional-religious edifice begins to crumble. At first those who think differently might keep quiet so as "not to frighten the horses", but the hypocrisy that arises cannot be borne forever, and the "new thinking" leaks out into the public domain.

  Remember the cause celebre of the 1980's, when the King of Saudi Arabia had his granddaughter put to death for daring to want to marry the wrong person. The old King knew that if that news had got around his kingdom, young women all over Saudi Arabia would be defying their fathers and the traditional society over which he presided would be brought crashing down. The unfortunate thing is that you can only hold back the floods for so long before they break through. When they do, the first reaction is a fierce backlash from the forces of conservatism - the fundamentalists. Christian revivals are often part of this process in countries where the Christian religion is strong. In Islamic or Hindu societies there are movements to tighten up on the Shariah law or Hindu customs. But the new conservatives are not like the old. They are educated. They think "scientifically" and use their new way of thinking to devise a kind of religion which is conservative, but at the same time very different from the traditional "folk-type" religion. Thus we find Christian fundamentalists who are far more thorough and unbending than their pre-Reformation counterparts, young funadmentalist Muslim scholars whose teachings horrify the old "conservative" imams, and Hindu extremists who take their faith to much greater extremes than any ancient monk would have done. But these are the death-throes of the "old order". After this stage comes the stage of total relativism and secularity we now experience in Europe. After that, we then have to discover we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, and that we do need to believe in something, even if not in all the fundamentalists would have us believe. I am convinced this process, which happened in Western Europe between 1500 and 2000, is happening in the rest of the world. But it will take its time, and it will be hairy - as it was for Europe!

  But given all of this, it may be asked: "What future is there for religion?" I have suggested that the traditional religious world-view has to die. It conflicts with reality and cannot be entertained with any honesty by any educated person today. How then can I continue to be a minister of the Church? What future is there for the religion I preach? A bright one, I believe. Because, as I said above, I believe the traditional religious world-view has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus, or with true religion of any kind.

  Carefully read, the Bible from its earliest strata onwards shows God leading his people stage by stage further away from traditional models of religion and the traditional religious world-view. Ancient cultures worshipped many gods: Israel only one. Ancient cultures believed it did not matter too much how one lived one's life, as long as one performed the necessary sacrifices and rituals: Israel taught an ethical religion. Wisdom writers and prophets in particular emphasise that God wants his people to live righteous lives and treat people justly. Ancient cultures taught gods defended their people right or wrong: Israel had this concept of a God who punished his people if they disobeyed - even to the point of allowing them to be taken into exile.

  Jesus went much further. He taught that human need takes precedence over sacrifices and rituals. He sets himself, as God's Son, up against the traditional religious teachers and the guardians of the nations' faith. He calls people to a personal discipleship, to a new covenant between God and the individual. In the sense that any nation is involved, it is a nation composed of people drawn from every nation under heaven. Where traditional religion is based on family groups and ethnic groups, Christianity from the beginning has been in the business of creating a new community out of people who were never a community before!

  Christianity lost that vision. It was perhaps a little too advanced for its day. While the church remained a persecuted minority, however, some semblance of that vision remained. Christians were persecuted by the Romans for "anti-social activities", i.e they refused to offer the sacrifices the Romans required and thereby put the whole community in danger of the ire of the gods. But once Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman empire, they became the "traditional religion", and persecuted others on grounds similar to those on which they themselves had been persecuted (i.e that the "heretics" were endangering the community by bringing the ire of the Christian God upon all of them - despite the fact that this runs completely contrary to the teaching of the Bible). What followed was a gradual merging of Christianity with traditional religion, to the point where it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

  This was where the Reformation came in. It tried to untangle Christianity from traditional religion. The opposition to the power of Rome and of the clerical establishment was at heart the opposition to an attitude that dissent threatened not only the dissenter, but also the whole community. Unfortunately, things did not stop there. Babies were thrown out with the bathwater, all authority was questioned, so many questions were asked that the very foundations of faith were undermined for many. And, in horror at the Pandora's box they had opened, some of the Reformers became as oppressive as the authorities they were trying to reform.

The Reformation led to the Enlightenment, renewed faith led to loss of faith, freedom from religious obscurantism led to complete secularisation. But Galileo's battles with the religious establishment opened the door to free scientific enquiry which has delivered undoubted benefits (and some curses) to humankind. The Protestant Reformers' emphasis on every person reading the Bible for themselves led to widespread education among the populace in general, which greatly accelerated the advances of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the improvements in living standards and human rights. All these advances have their dark side, of course, but the fact remains that if the West leads the rest of the world in terms of material well-being and education, it is because the "scientific" world view took on the "religious" world view and won, in the hearts of the majority of the population. Where the "religous" world view holds sway over the majority of the population (even if the leaders have a different view), poverty and oppression remains.

  The problem now is that those societies which first took on board the "scientific" way of thinking are realising its inadequacies - and it has plenty. "Scientific" thinking is no more God's goal than traditional "religious" thinking was. Both are the product of fallible, fallen human minds. But "scientific" thinking is an advance on "religious" thinking. But may there not be an advance on "scientific" thinking? There may well be, but no-one quite knows yet what it might be. One thing, however, can be said with certainty. Going backwards is not the way forward. "Religious" thinking has had its day. If "scientific" thinking is to be replaced, it must be by something that makes better sense of the world we live in, not by a model that has already been tried and found wanting.

  But what of those societies where the majority still have the old "religious" world view. Can they not be spared the pain and the mistakes we have made in the West? Could they not pass straight from their traditional world view to the one that will replace the "scientific" one? One may as well ask if it is possible for a person to pass from childhood to adulthood without passing through the trauma of adolescence. The answer is "No". Adolescence is a necessary bridge between two stages of human life. Unless the child has passed through the stage of adolescence he/she is not equipped to deal with the status of adulthood. Were anyone to attempt to do this, they would find that the processes of adolescence would merely play themselves out at a later stage in the person's life, when it would be less socially acceptable. Those who do not have a "normal" adolescence are more than likely to have a mid-life crisis.

The "enlightenment" as it will be experienced in Arab countries and Africa will, of course be different to what it was in Europe. The exact course it takes depends to a large extent on the individual free decisions of many people. But it is impossible to conceive that it will happen without great trauma and bloodshed. The issues at stake are literally issues of life and death, and people do not take revolutions of thought in such areas lying down. The more we try to keep the lid on things, the more we stretch out the process and increase the pain. We need to help people make the change and make the break with the old world view.

  But what place is there for religion in all this? There is a place, I believe, if only religion can break its tie to the traditional religious world-view. If we can begin to preach the God that breaks all the rules of "traditional religion" and calls people into a living, personal relationship with himself, and into a community of people called out of every nation under heaven. We have to speak about a God who appeals to people to respond in love to his love towards them, who seeks people who respond to him freely, and who gives us our minds so we can use them in understanding him and the world he has made. He is a God who rules heaven and earth, and therefore there must be a judgement for those who refuse to live according to the rules he has made for the good of all. But that is a judgement which will come at the end of time, not one which is meted out to people in terms of misfortune in this life. And God has provided a way out of even that judgement by means of his Son's death on the cross. And we need to take on board the fact that if, as we believe, God created the world, He has also created the human mind. That means that the "scientific" way of thinking produced by that human mind, can be used for God's purposes as much as for the devil's, or those of human beings. "Scientific" thinking may not be able to prove God, but neither can it disprove God. It can help us understand and appreciate better the ways God works. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, maybe it will be God's people who come up with the successor to "scientific" thinking.