THE DEVIL HAS A HUMAN FACE
If Christianity hopes to survive in the new
millennium, argues Edward Norman, it must renounce humanism AT THE END of the 18th century it rather looked as if Catholic Christianity was approaching its demise. Its institutions were ransacked by the revolutionary forces released by France, the Pope himself was to be carried into exile, and the intellectual rationalism of the age appeared set to demolish the concept of revealed truth. In England the Protestant Establishment looked more secure: the Church enjoyed a fixed relationship with the state.
But then, in 1828 came the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, a sensible recognition of the civil liberties of non- Anglican Protestants which was not con- troversial. Yet it unexpectedly opened up the constitution to further changes and, in the following year, opponents of Catholic Emancipation believed that it spelt the end of Establishment. For the state Church was rendered an anomaly, to be governed henceforth by a Parliament no longer com- posed exclusively of Protestants.
A period of hostility to the Church of England had begun. Anyone observing from the middle decades of the last centu- ry, therefore, could reasonably have pre- dicted a bleak future for the Christian Churches; some, indeed, did exactly that. `Destroy the Church of England?' exclaimed the Radical Charles Buller in the 1830s. 'You must be mad: it's the only thing that stands between us and religion.'
Yet with the triumph of Ultramon- tanism, and consequent centralisation, the Catholic Church was to enter a century of growth and confidence. The Anglicans, too, were to replicate themselves overseas, and to respond with astonishing enterprise to the problems of social dislocation at home. Christianity became the vehicle of the moral seriousness of the middle classes everywhere. The Victorian boom in reli- gion was actually quite modest numerical- ly, and the new churches and schools funded by the bourgeoisie were never capable of keeping pace with the speed of population increase. But dynamism was inspired by a successful entrepreneurial class and, in varying degrees of effective- ness, it took place all over Europe and North America.
Through contact with liberal and Chris- tian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incin- erated alive on their husbands' funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the West- ern idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums.
The lesson is that for religion to thrive it requires to be attached to non-religious social or cultural forces; either to a social class or a ruling elite, or to a great ideal which expresses their enthusiasm, or to the passions of national self-consciousness. The strength and vitality of modern Islam, for example, are in part a simple reaction to the preceding Westernisation of its val- ues, but in part also a series of nationalist reassertions. Christianity, too, is finding that in the developing world it can associ- ate itself with emergent cultural national- ism — in African countries especially and scoop considerable rewards.
The difficulty for religion in a country like England is that the population never has been markedly religious. Just as in a general sense religion has ridden on the backs of national and cultural forces, so it has also been through family and local cus- tom (rather than the efforts at teaching Christianity by the institutional Church) that Christianity established a presence. It took care of rites of passage, and didn't bother much about the details of belief.
Today the moral details of individual lives are falling more and more under the regulation of bodies set up by the state: all in the name of welfare and humanity. Christianity hardly comes into it; it is a matter of ordinary decency, in a collec- tivised form, delivered in a manner which does not apparently require any philosoph- ical or theoretical definition. The Church- `I only live a short drive from here.' es themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism — the 'caring society' — as the very essence of Christian- ity. But it is actually quite pagan, concen- trating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an aca- demic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humani- ty as basic Christianity — the love of neigh- bour — they are in reality acclAming and legitimising their own replacement.
Today in Western societies men and women are treated by the agencies of the state, and treat themselves, even more rig- orously, as material creatures with material rights, rather than as aspirants to transcen- dence. The possibility exists that in a centu- ry or so the Christian Churches will in large measure have been replaced by a kind of secular moral tyranny, the caring agencies of welfare, and that what is left of organ- ised religion, at least in the West, will have reinvented itself as a warm, sympathetic adjunct to material needs.
Multiculturalism is an agent in the pro- cess. Whatever its practical merits in recog- nising the differing values that are dispersed through society, the effect is cul- tural relativity — including religious values. The strength of Christianity once lay in its capacity to assist social identity; people looked to religion as a means of expressing their place in the cosmic scheme. Religion was a set of obligations owed to God. Today people regard religion as a species of therapy; a dimension of individual self- consciousness, individual meaning and reaffirmation. Religion is about what God owes them.
The real religion is now the Religion of Humanity, just as the rationalists at the end of the 18th century had always said it would be. Once again, Christianity has attached itself to the ruling idea of the age, Unfortunately for its survival as a distinct entity, however, the present mode of humanism is deeply secular.
A prediction of the future of religion made now will depend for its reliability on how the Religion of Humanity develops, and the extent to which the Churches per- sist in acclaiming their own replacement as an authentic version of themselves. In the end, of course, humanism will come a crop- per. Humanity is not very nice, and certain- ly not worth worshipping. We keep talking about the 'sanctity' of human life, but there is nothing very sacred about men and women. It is the life which is a sacred gift, not us. In the conditions likely at the last screaming chaos of the end of the world even the Church of England might begin to have its doubts about the values of humani- ty. And that, as the Radicals said, really will be the time to start getting worried.
Professor Edward Norman is Canon Treasurer of York Minster, and a former Reith lecturer.
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