The philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamer (1900–2002), in his last essays when
he was close to 100 years old,
said that what will save us is a conversation between religions and that it
will focus on transcendence, on the ineffable. That is the only way of peace.
Being part of a tradition we are both circumscribed and open at the same time.
Religious tradition brings finitude and the eternal together. Tradition is
reiterative. It is not repeated, but the very event again, and again, the
inaction again. 

The organizers
of “Building World Peace: The Role of Religions and Human Rights” have
suggested that the theme “Holy Books: Is Religion the Problem?” “serves to
highlight the differences between sacred religious texts and the political
practice of their teaching. Since September 11^th, 2001, especially,
there has been great debate about the role of religious texts in acts of social
and political violence. In order to preserve respect for the diverse religions,
cultures, races, and ethnicities throughout the world, we ought to focus on the
message of peace shared by a majority of peoples.”

If I had my
own way I think I would have framed this question differently: “Holy Books: Is
Religion the Answer?” This reveals my presuppositions just as the title that I
was given does for those who framed it. I think I would have begun with a suite
of stories about how those informed by their treasured holy book have behaved
in this part of the world. Many behave well, but some behave badly some of the
time. I have spent thirty years doing field research work in the religious
communities of Alberta, seeking always to understand how others understand.

The people in these
communities have taught me, just as my own formation and tradition have done
throughout my life, that a large part of a life of faith calls one to, and
gives one the capacity for, spiritual friendship. It does so beyond the borders
of one’s own tradition. 

I would have
told you the story of introducing the Imam and the Rabbi in the public space of
the first exhibition ever presented in Canada by a public institution on the
religious life, and of how, after initial resistance and the intervention of
another Imam born in Western Canada (Salem Ganam of blessed memory), they took
each other’s hands and repeated “Salam” — the Imam saying “so you are from
‘Beth Salam’ (in Hebrew “Shalom”) synagogue not ‘Beth Israel’.” I would have
told you about how an ecumenical arsonist burned eight houses of worship in Edmonton during a late night spree and I went in the morning, after I heard the news, to the Rabbi’s house and held him in my arms as he wept.

When he finally regained
control of himself he said that something extraordinary had happened. Before
dawn the two Imams to whom I had introduced him some years earlier in the
public space of my exhibition Spiritual
Life / Sacred Ritual, a museum exhibition that affirmed both Jewish and
Muslim pathways, had come to his door. The firefighters were still trying to
ensure the smouldering ruins did not flame up again. “We have come to offer the
condolences of Dar al-Islam [the House of Islam], for a house of God has been
destroyed. Come and bring your people and meet in the basement of our mosque.”
The two Imams who stood in the entryway of the Rabbi’s house responded out of
the teaching, sensibility, and courage born of the Glorious Qur’an and the
struggles for faithfulness. 

I would have
told you of a conversation in the Sikh Gurdwara after a Sunday service where we
remembered with joy the birth of Guru Nanak. I was told about the free kitchen
that is part of Sikh spiritual discipline and how tragic it was that this
discipline that provided the poor in India with a day’s sustenance, no matter what their faith, had turned, in Canada, into an
occasion where only Sikhs ate together. “How about my going to 97th Street, our derelict district,and telling them they can get a meal here?” I said. A
chorus rang out almost before I finished the question: “Will you, please!” It
was the Guru Granth speaking out of the heart of the faith.

I would have
told you of the biblical impetus for self-defined fundamentalist Christians who
work seven days a week with the poor and bereft of our city, and of the liberal
Christians who work diligently at an analysis of the systemic ways human beings
around the world are deprived of the necessities of life. 

Indeed, if you
care to look you will see that the first responders to disaster virtually
everywhere in our fragile world are not humanist organizations or governments.
Government and humanist aid organizations eventually come but they are never
first and are rarely quick. Look at New Orleans, Palestine,  Lebanon, and the places of earthquakes,
tsunamis, and other catastrophic events around the world. It is women and men
who have a faith that has taught them to respond to the life of the world
directly, immediately, and without our usual cautious attitude who are there
first. It is only in our civil culture that we continue to try and separate,
and for good reasons, the religious life from much of what constitutes the best
in the political and civil life. The history of this habit of separating
religion and public life is a three-hundred-year-old story and, in Canada, it has been writ large for the last fifty years. However our ways of trying to do this are now very frayed and it is foolhardy to pretend we do not need to rethink them.

“Holy Books:
Is Religion the Problem?” This is an awful question to have on the table if
your goal is to find new ways to engage those with a strong religion who care
deeply about civil life and what is happening in our fragile world. It tells
them that they are not welcome, that they and their deeply treasured beliefs
and foundations for action are the problem and the only problem. Many people —
Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Native American — have a strong
religion. For many of them it has provided a language of meaning that has
illuminated their experience. It has given them a community and a way of
viewing the world beyond their self-interest. If you ask them they will quickly
tell you that it gives them something to live for. In all too many cases that
are spattered across our newspapers, it gives some of them, some of the time,
something to die for. They care about how their own society is unfolding and
about the destructive ways global politics and various cultural and economic
issues are reshaping their life, the life of their children, and the life of
the world. 

 I think it is
fair to say that in Canada, and most other liberal democratic societies, the goal for the last fifty years,
when it comes to the intersection of religion and public life, has been
anything but engagement. We have a fifty-year history in this part of the world
of doing precisely the opposite. The academic study of religion has also spent
far more time cultivating the hermeneutic of suspicion than it has teaching
students how religious traditions work and why they endure. The consequence of
this is that we are not well prepared to understand, much less address and
engage, either the question that the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human
Rights has placed before us or most of the other questions that stand behind the
other sessions of the conference. Yet we must begin to try. The issues are too
grave to be left in the hands of those who have refused to seriously consider
them for the past several generations.

What is behind our asking of this
question?

Most of us who
have a liberal cast of mind, who have come to treasure the hard-won values of
human rights, who respect the dignity of all at all costs, who work for peace
in our fragile world, have little patience with men and women who have a strong
religion. This is not new. The impatience is rooted in the European literary
and philosophical movement of the eighteenth century called the Enlightenment,
which is itself rooted in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and the
ideas of Kant, Locke, and Newton.   

 Its basic belief was the superiority of reason (technical reason) as a guide to
all knowledge and human concerns. From this flowed the idea of progress and a
challenge to traditional Christianity and all other forms of religious
authority and wisdom. Scholars often distinguish between the various national
contributions to this movement of transformation in Europe:the materialism of the French encyclopédistes (d’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire);
the Scottish interest in political economy (Hume, Smith, Stewart); and the more
cultural concerns of the Germans (Goethe, Herder, Lessing, Schiller). A similar
invigorating freedom of ideas affected writers as far apart as America and Russia, while the Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe also experienced a new dynamism in the mid nineteenth century.

The French
Revolution marked the end of the Age of Enlightenment, its proponents having
been an important catalyst for change that continues down to our own day. Of
note, of course, is that this is also the age of European expansion and this
movement was taken, often as the orthodoxy, to all corners of the world. I
mention this because we are struggling to address its legacy and doing so while
largely unconscious of how it shapes our attempts. 

Let me put it succinctly and
simply. In this country and much of Europe, we are children of the Enlightenment, inheriting its understandable fear of
religion. We have experimented with replacing traditional religious worldviews
(which are the centre of all traditional cultures) with the civil values of
individualism, progress, and reason. This has given us modern civil societies
most of us treasure. Part of the cost of this, though, is a long period in
which our marginalization of religion has made it difficult, if not impossible,
for us to think about the place of religion. The fear born in these early
European culture wars has made us impotent in the face of our current
challenges.
 

Why are we unable to engage
strong religion?

I want to
highlight only one of the reasons we are unable to engage strong religion and
use this to propose how we might move past the fears that paralyze us in the
face of strong religion. Central to our inability is how the Christian Bible
came to be understood in North America over the last hundred years or so.

The debate that filled churches for several
generations, and still rattles around and spills over into the public square,
has provided the template for most of our considerations of the relationship of
religion to public life. We are now busy exporting this template into other
religious cultures, often convinced that it is the necessary antidote to their
religious diseases. For example, one of the keynote speakers in this conference
argued the need for all religion to adopt the hermeneutic of suspicion because,
in his view, “religion is the problem.” Until a few years ago we were largely
convinced that our antidote had worked, that religion was fading away and that
the human family could get on with living the rational life. Whole schools of
thought developed to argue and promote this perspective. 

The “end of
religion” or the “age of secularism” was the clarion call of my generation, and
there are still many sociologists, religious studies scholars, and other
intellectuals who lead the imaginary charge in the final dethroning of faith
perspectives and religious traditions. Most scholars and journalists my age and
a bit younger were shaped by these perspectives and went about their work
unconscious of what they were actually doing. This is how the culture of
amnesia developed. We do not know the religious sources of the West so we have
little or no capacity to understand or engage the religious sources of anyone
else. We have little to draw on to combat and hedge in religious extremism. We
have few ideas worthy of the name that have the capacity to hold together
difficult questions and complex answers. We have virtually no way of making
this kind of depth and texture a part of public discourse. Let’s look briefly
at where this last chapter originated.

Co-dependent twins

Two opposing
views — the evangelical-literalist perspective for the understanding of the
Bible and the liberal-modernist perspective for the understanding of the Bible
— have shaped public discourse in North America almost entirely and still largely do. They have influenced, although in not as
marked a way, European public discourse as well. What seems to have escaped
most of us is that they were born together. They are co-dependent twins. They
need each other for their own identity. It is so with all neuroses. Literalists
like to see the modernists as the firstborn. They must battle with them for a
recovery of a living, engaged faith. Modernists like to see the literalists as
the firstborn. They must battle with them for a recovery of reason. My sense is
that each of them sees the other as a scapegoat for the problems of modernity.
Here is one of the taproots of religious fundamentalism and secular
fundamentalism in North America.

Both these
perspectives, born together as they were, are tired and worn out. I think they
are all but spent. Why? Because both of them have an important concern, faith
and reason, but both of them have shaped a hundred-year battle in such a way
that they have lost their own capacity to do anything but circle round again in
the neurotic fashion to which they and the public have become accustomed.
Instead of revisiting their own sources of meaning, their deep ideas and
complex and textured ways of thinking, they have habitually let their enemy
define the terms. It is a kind of spiritual and intellectual anorexia with a
complete loss of proportion, purpose, and goal. My sense is that their day is
over. These co-dependent twins have brought us to the advent of the
twenty-first century but we have the twentieth century as the witness of how
effective their unconscious cabal has been in shaping a regard for culture and
the religious life and a life of service. At best it is a mixed story with many
remarkable and good things on both sides of the battle lines, but it is the
deep diseases they have bequeathed to us that we must begin to heal. 

Pathways of conversation,
understanding, and transformation

I have
suggested that we have a problem even thinking about the themes and issues on
the table at this conference because we participate in the language of the
co-dependent twins born in the debate over how to understand the Bible in
Protestant North America. The liberal-modernist notions within Protestant
culture and within its secular counterpart spend all their time critiquing
women and men who, by their own definition, were seeking to be faithful. On
both sides of the divide — evangelical-literalist and liberal-modernist — they
argue about the facts present in sacred texts and the principles of
interpretation. It is a one-hundred-year-old sad story and, while it persists,
it increasingly rings hollow, and offers no insight, value or person who can
call the serious minded to a life of service. 

My first
response to the question “Is religion the [or a] problem?” is, of course, yes.
Religion is a problem because it is like sex. Both are powerful, both are
capable of the highest expressions of love and self-giving service. For that
very reason, like sex, religion is capable of being polluted and dealing death.
We all know this and I do not see that repeating it endlessly, as the secular
fundamentalists insist on doing, gets us anywhere on what is the real need.
What is the real need? We need to learn how to engage those with strong
religion. Not one was invited to this conference nor was there any attempt to
consider how they might be engaged. This is not unusual. It is typical. Both
liberals and conservatives in the religious life, as in politics, circle the
wagons and consider themselves virtuous by exclaiming truths and critiques to
their fellow travellers. However, for those of us who care about human rights
and their awful abuse at the hands of religious leaders it is simply not good
enough to continue to preach to the choir. We have done that for the first
generation of work on human rights, indeed for the first fifty years. We now
enter the second generation of work. It had better be characterized by a new
approach if we are to have any effect as we address the use of religion against
human dignity. 

We need to
break up the cabal, conscious or unconscious, of the co-dependent twins:
religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists. We need to bring forward
the depth and texture of ideas, as well as the limitations, that are part of
the sources of both religious culture and civil culture. We need to bring
forward those values that the co-dependent twins of the past hundred years have
sought to hide or ignore. This requires an enlarged regard for religious ways
of being and a much-improved knowledge of the sources within both holy books
and religious tradition. This requires an enlarged regard for the sources of
civil values, a revisiting of the Enlightenment, and an uncovering and pulling
forth of its ideas that can help us move beyond the experiment with banishing
religion from the public square which has led us to our current crisis. This
effort will lead us onto new ground, the ground of content-leavened pluralism. 

The
colonization by the co-dependent twins, secular and religious, of how we
understand and talk about religious tradition and the landscape of meaning is
an enormous problem. It is a civil problem first and foremost. It is a problem
for religious communities as well, but that is an issue for those communities
to address. The fear that animates the secular partner in this cabal bears a
large responsibility for reifying religious fundamentalism and that is the
responsibility of all of us, be we public intellectuals, politicians or
religious leaders, who care about civil life. When the depth and texture of a
life of faith and religious tradition becomes part of the common knowledge of
the faithful, and a portion of it becomes common public knowledge, strong
religion will no longer be the problem. When the depth and texture of the
sources of liberal democratic society becomes part of the common knowledge of
all citizens, including those who hold to strong religion, secular
fundamentalism will no longer be the problem. The antidote to what many have
seen as the problem of religion has clearly not been found in attempts to
banish it from public discourse and the public square. The twentieth century
has provided us with the results of that civil experiment.

David
J. Goa is the Director of the Chester Ronning
Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life.

An
earlier version of this paper was given, at the invitation of the John Humphrey
Centre for Peace and Human Rights, as part of the international conference
“Building World Peace: The Role of Religions and Human Rights,” in Edmonton, Alberta, Oct. 20-22, 2006.