The word ‘faith’ has been hijacked by those unsettled by ‘religion’
Leafing through a newspaper last week, I noticed two headlines above two news reports. The first was about Christian and Muslim schools and the government’s proposed new measures. It was headlined ‘Johnson U-turn on faith schools’. The second was about Islamist rioting and ways in which the police might seek to control such situations. The headline was ‘New powers to control religious riots’.
Ho-hum. Shouldn’t that second headline have read ‘New powers to control faith riots’? Why is it ‘faith’ for a school but ‘religious’ for a riot?
You know the answer. Some of the things religions do are more fashionable than others. The newspaper reader is being invited to approve of the schools, disapprove of the riots, and overlook the possibility that both might spring from the same source. That is why different words are chosen. Though what we call ‘faith’ is in some circumstances quite capable of inspiring a riot, and though what we call ‘religions’ can and do run schools, and though most of us would be hard put to define the difference between a faith and a religion, we would prefer to avoid awkward questions by calling the tendency one thing when we approve and another when we’re not so sure. ‘Religion’ turns into ‘faith’ when it runs a good school in the way that a pig becomes pork when we are being invited to eat it.
Thus we are enabled to think two contradictory things before breakfast: pigs yuk; bacon — yum. Religion — hmm; faith — yes please. A coin may have two sides, but by choosing distinct words for each we make it easier for ourselves to forget they are two sides of the same coin. Parallel vocabulary helps split the mind, hermetically sealing the logic of one situation lest it leak into another.
‘Faith’ is doing sterling service in the lexicon these days. The term has permitted the rise of the expression ‘the faith community’. (As distinguished from what, one might ask — the faithless community?) Concealed within the expression ‘faith community’ is a means of getting liberals who want to be multiculturalists too off the hook. If there is a faith community then it must follow that what the adherents of (say) Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity share must be more important than what divides them. There is therefore no need to take sides: it is possible to be on the side of all of them — the ‘faith community’ — at once.
Does this community exist? Many adherents of rival religions show an inconvenient disinclination to behave as though they were all part of the same community. Sometimes they even wage something that (you may note) we do not call ‘faith wars’ against each other. Instead we call them religious wars. There are no ‘faith’ massacres. We do not describe the Crusades as an internal quarrel within the faith community. We do not call the modern history of Ireland an almighty bust-up within the faith community. Neither the Christian legacy of anti-Semitism nor the Arab-Israeli conflict is commonly referred to as a ‘faith-based’ hatred.
No: at this point the objects of our concern cease to be called faiths and are redescribed as ‘sects’ or ‘religions’. We fly from the f-word to the r-word: a useful standby when the atmosphere sours. ‘Religious’ intolerance, ‘religious’ persecution, ‘religious’ dogmatism and the ‘religious’ Right trip more comfortably from the tongue than might faith persecution, faith intolerance, faith dogmatism or the faith Right.
And of course there’s always ‘sectarian’. The ‘faith divide’ just doesn’t sound right for Northern Ireland, where (curiously) children do not (according to politicians and the news media) go to faith schools at all, as they do on the mainland of Great Britain, but to Catholic and Protestant schools instead, which are somehow not the same thing. If the wording of news reports is to be believed, there are no faith schools in the one part of the United Kingdom where religion dominates education: Northern Ireland. Note too that there are no ‘faith fanatics’ anywhere in the world. Nor are there any ‘faith extremists’. There are religious fanatics and religious extremists.
If ‘religion’ or ‘religious’ were dirty words, one could hardly object when people sought less pejorative language in their place; but according to my own understanding of the term, ‘religion’ is a neutral word, implying in itself neither approval nor disapproval. It is what you might call a generic term, denoting those human organisations inspired by a metaphysical belief system which usually, but not always, involves the worship of one or more divinities.
‘Faith’, however, is not a neutral word. It is a beautiful and moving expression so shot through with connotations of goodness that the noun simply cannot be used — unqualified — in anything but a positive sense. Even qualified (as in ‘blind faith’) it still conveys something admirable, however tragically. ‘Faith’, as used in English for a thousand years, connotes two esteemed human qualities, loyalty and trust, and has been used far more widely than to describe religious observance alone. When Jesus said ‘your faith has made you whole’, he did not mean ‘your religious observance has made you whole’. He was talking about a human quality trust — not a human institution.
Propagandists, however, adopt a slashand-burn approach to the use of language. They seize a word rich in associations with honesty or virtue, shackle it to their special uses, flog it to death, then cast it aside, a spoiled thing, discredited, a husk. Over time a word will take the colour of the thing it is used to describe, not the other way round. ‘Cripple’ is discarded in favour of ‘disabled’, which in turn is discarded in favour of ‘differently abled’ which is then discarded in favour of ‘challenged’ — until in time ‘challenged’ begins to sound rude. For a while the new word may seem to change attitudes, but in the end the attitudes change the word. Thus has ‘gay’ become an insult among the unenlightened.
‘Faith’ will enjoy — is enjoying — its mayfly summer as the joyful new word to describe old tendencies whose reputations have been dirtied. It may distract us from the dirt for a season or two, until it is itself sullied. Then ‘faith’ will acquire a slightly obsessive, intolerant quality, and we shall have lost a good word — and gained nothing.
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