Tolerance has to start somewhere
This season, as Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, is as good a time as any to pause and consider what is arguably the greatest moral and political blight of our time — fundamentalist religious sectarianism — and the remedy to it.
For there is a remedy. It’s more than a little astonishing, given the carnage wrought by extremists historically and now, that it isn’t more often discussed. It is, simply, ecumenism — the notion that people of faith, and indeed agnostics and atheists, have far more in common than they sometimes wish to believe.
I come to this subject as someone who spends lots of time watching politics. It seems, when examining the messaging of religious organizations throughout history, that the partisanship of politics is not at all new. It is rooted in tribalism, also reflected in common attitudes toward faith. Very simply, it is about belonging. If you belong to a tribe, just about any tribe, you are — or feel you are — safe. Or safer.
What’s more remarkable is the commonality in the religious experience. The American philosopher and psychologist William James noticed this and wrote about it more than a century ago in his seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Numerous scholars, teachers, theologians and mystics have made similar observations since.
There is something in the human condition that gravitates to spiritual experience. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably similar, regardless of culture, historical period or faith system. The American geneticist Dean Hamer theorizes this has a biological source, in human DNA. He calls it the “God gene.”
Whatever its cause, the synchronicity extends beyond belief into the realm of ethics. Ethics — strategies for living in peace with others, more or less — are truly universal. The vast majority of North American agnostics and atheists, like the vast majority of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or Shamanists, try to live according to some version or other of the Golden Rule. As Jesus puts it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” Islam holds: “Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you, and reject for them that which you would reject for yourself.” From Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the law: All the rest is commentary.”
And yet: In many religious and some explicitly non- religious traditions, even now, there is a cluster of belief that insists on exclusivity: That is to say, the notion that Jesus is the only path to salvation, or Muhammad, or Buddha, or Moses. For biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the 2006 best- seller The God Delusion, every way of understanding reality but his own is wrong. His tone and the zeal with which he propagates his message offer hints of early orthodox religious training.
To my point: We have in language and the study of language, linguistics, a model of how we might come to a more constructive, and far less politically volatile, expression of sectarianism — one that respects cultural differences but celebrates commonality.
This would be to accept that religious systems exist and evolve much as languages do, and with as much claim to owning exclusive rights to the truth, which is to say none. Up to the 20th century most human beings adopted the faith system of their par- ents, whether in India, China, Canada or Portugal. Today, with Facebook and the rest of the Internet extending communities of interest and belief worldwide, personal choice plays a much greater role.
Many of us nevertheless still gravitate to a belief system rooted in the culture in which we were raised. It’s not a great leap to think that, if there is an Ultimate Reality or Source or Deity, He, She or It is conversant with more than one human belief system and culture, as is the case presumably with language. In fact it’s difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise.
If I choose the Old and New Testaments as my preferred scripture and someone else chooses the Buddhist sutras or the Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita or the writings of John Stuart Mill, I suggest God will understand the nuance.
Much interesting modern scholarship supports an ecumenical view of belief. There’s Canada’s Tom Harpur, whose The Pagan Christ caused a stir when he published it in 2004. There’s the classic of the genre by former Roman Catholic (now Episcopalian) theologian Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells ( 2000). There are any number of books by John Spong, also an Episcopalian. There’s the intriguing 2008 treatise by Toronto United Church Minister Gretta Vosper, With or Without God, which holds that “the way we live is more important than what we believe.”
“Ah, but what of radical Islam? It will never, ever accept ecumenism,” I hear some say. That’s true. What of it? Surely the end state of universal religious tolerance must take root somewhere. Canada, arguably the world’s best example of cultural pluralism, seems as good a place as any — and better than most. Happy Christmas, all.
‘ There is something in the human condition that gravitates to spiritual experience.’
— Columnist Michael Den Tandt