Tony Blair has a piece in The Independent today1, which I viewed through the eyes of one who was never a fan of our former leader – although, reading what he has to say on the subject of religion, I gradually found myself realising that I’m still not a fan. Basically, he’s setting up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, focusing on using cross-faith ideals as a force for good in the world. Good luck. Unfortunately, I tend to see religion as a net force for ill in the world, though I am not as militantly anti-religious as I used to be (for one thing, a truly anti-religious stance is not compatible with a ‘to each their own’ philosophy). Generally, I am ashamed to say, I am prejudiced against religious people since I just can’t quite understand how they could believe in a God if they’ve truly understood the world around them. It’s a character flaw of mine which I share with some far-more-intelligent-than-me types (cf. Douglas Adams, Richard Dawkins), so I’m not too upset about it. I don’t see, as I intend to argue, what religion brings to the party which isn’t already there.

I’m not going to try a full ‘fisking’ or an examination of all of Mr Blair’s arguments (some of which make good sense, others of which don’t) since I’m sure that would become tedious, but there’s an interesting common theme with Barack Obama that I think is worth exploring. Blair says:

Given faith’s power to move people and to motivate them, it can either play a positive or a negative role. With globalisation pushing people closer together, peaceful coexistence becomes essential. And not just coexistence but active co-operation. If faith becomes a countervailing force pulling people and communities apart, it becomes destructive.

But if it becomes a means of peaceful coexistence, teaching people to live with a diverse religious ecology, to respect “the other”, to search for common values while respecting differences, then faith becomes an important power for making the 21st century work more humanely and the one shared creation a better place for all its inhabitants.

Well, sort of. While he is correct that most religions do teach acceptance of others, he fails to give weight to the fact that religions are, by their very nature, exclusive groupings. You can’t actually be a Christian (or Muslim or Sikh or any other religion) without simultaneously not being a member of all the other religions. Therefore your world instantly, and instinctively, splits into us and them groupings – Christians and non-Christians, Jews and Gentiles. When considering all religions simultaneously, as Tony Blair is doing, this doesn’t seem like such an issue – they all cancel each other out because they all claim to preach acceptance – but the big-picture view leaves out the fact that to any one believer, their world is irrevocably split along the arbitrary dividers of other people’s factions.

The other thing, and the point that brings us on to Barack Obama, is that Tony Blair appears to be suggesting that a secular world is unable to hold values and principles to account, or to judge those principles effectively. His thesis, essentially, is that interfaith2 cooperation is needed – secularists like myself would say that, by the old principle of Occam’s Razor, it is the religions which are not needed for the task – humans can cooperate perfectly well on their own, religion just defines dividing lines between them.

Obama, in the chapter on Faith in his book The Audacity of Hope, describes his mother as a secularist who kept copies of “the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology”. She’s painted as a humanist who admired the beauty of the language and the sentiment of religion, but didn’t commit, and believed in no God. Having brought to life this character of mother as a strong, assertive lady who wouldn’t let others make up her mind for her in the subject of religion, Obama then seems to go on to doubt the sincerity of her atheism:

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswervieng instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a revervence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. During the course of the day, she might come across a painting, read a line of poetry, or hear a piece of music, and I would see tears well up in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gave at a particularly spectacular moon. … She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the strangeness of life.

Granted, he does mention that she didn’t go to Sunday school, but to me the summation of the above two paragraphs would be ‘my Mother said she was a secularist, but she must have been religious really, because otherwise how come she was so kind and nice, and took so much joy in art and music?’ It’s all in those few opening words “And yet for all her professed secularism” – almost deriding her philosophical position on the basis that he doesn’t seem to understand it, as if Obama cannot see how one can simultaneously be emotional, artistic, kind and secularist3.

The issue I see is with this inbuilt assumption among the religious that matters of the heart, the emotions and the joy of living are purely religious in scope. One of my dear friends from sixth form, who recently got her Theology degree from Oxford no less, once assured me that it is impossible to love another without first loving God – a common line among the religious. The reply which immediately sprang to mind was that it may be impossible for her to love another without first loving God, but I’m doing just fine4. As I said at the top of this piece, all that time ago, I don’t begrudge other people their religion, but Obama, Blair and indeed my dear friend have all got the wrong end of the secularist stick. I believe that great artistic works – music, literature and architecture included – are worthy of our outpourings of emotion and deepest respect, not because they bring us closer to God, but because they bring us closer to ourselves. I respect and admire the natural beauty of the world that is all around us because of its unlikelihood and its temporary nature, and I don’t feel it needs explaining through a mythology. I have enormous love for my family and my dear friends because they are people for whom I care. And yes, Mr Blair, I would love to see a more cohesive and co-operative world where all people are fundamentally nice to each other and celebrate their similarities and their differences, not because my ‘faith in God’ tells me that this is a good thing, but because it is plain common sense – it’s tough to argue for a more segmented, embittered and war-torn world, by any measure.

I suppose the point I’m driving at here is that the religious seem to claim a monopoly on morality, beauty, love and peace – where in all my experience the exact opposite is true. Secularism is just the expression of these same things in human terms, which in many ways is how they began in the first place. Christians like to point to the 10 commandments as an example of the works of religion – they’ve arguably set out the moral basis for the justice system of the western world, after all. This, however, suggests that without religion we are all unable to come independently to the conclusion that murder is bad and we shouldn’t covet our neighbour’s ass.

I suppose I just have more ‘faith’ in humanity than that.

  1. For those who don’t get the obscure reference in the title, it’s from the song ‘What I Am‘  by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians (lyrics). If I ever write a post on philosophy (according to QuizFarm, I am an existentialist hedonist) I shall name it ‘The Talk on a Cereal Box’. [↩]
  2. I can’t think of a less appropriate word to use for religions in general than ‘faiths’. It seems to me that faith is not confined to faith in God – you can have faith in humanity, or in democracy, or in any number of things. Actually, I can think of a less appropriate word: sandwiches. [↩]
  3. Obama’s own religious background is kind of murky but he is most assuredly a devoted Christian now. One can be led to wonder if his Christianity is as much based in political expediency as it is in The Bible, but one would have to be a true cynic to think such a thing. I’m largely an Obama supporter nowadays but his religion is the area where he is definitely weakest, not, as everyone presumed it would be at the outset, his race. [↩]
  4. All in the spirit of intellectual fat-chewing, of course – no offence meant… [↩]