Faith doing Justice

A Missed Opportunity?

For the first time in its 73 years the Couchiching Institute has studied the influence of religion in public affairs. The provocative title of its summer conference was "God's Back -- with a Vengeance: Religion, Pluralism and the Secular State." This indicated a bias of conference organizers who saw revitalized religion as a threat to the secular state. Several speakers - and especially one - disagreed.

British author Karen Armstrong cautioned against too quickly correlating terrorism with religious fundamentalism. Modern secularism under leaders such as Stalin, Hitler and Saddam Hussein were just as lethal. Robert Orsi of Harvard questioned "the narrative assumed and authorized" by the conference title. He rejected the notion of religious terrorism, seeing the roots of terrorism in the lives and histories of people, not in their religion. "The real question," he said, "is whether or not alternative modernities can coexist with capitalist modernity." American Southern Baptists led by Richard Land made a strong defence of freedom to practice and express religion in the public forum, including rejection of abortion.

Among Canadian speakers, Peter Beyer of Ottawa University said history teaches that religious revivalism has transforming power. Like globalization, religion is both locally rooted and universal, and so can be as contemporary and modern as any secular ideology. Toronto Rabbi David Novak argued that members of a religious community that defines itself with a transcendent orientation are "safer than in a society that begins with a metaphysical vacuum that is then filled with some ideology." Two Muslim women, BC Liberal Senator Mobina Jaffer and Toronto sociologist Jasmin Zine, told of trying to build bridges to restore charter rights for Muslims who were instantly "demonized" after the planes hit the New York towers. Patrick Graham, a Canadian journalist in Iraq, made a compelling plea that we overcome our pitiful media-shaped ignorance of the people and things on the ground in Iraq. Others at the conference discussed our preoccupation with same-sex rights, and some expressed a certain glee that polls show Canadians are less "religious" than Americans.

Interest centred on charter rights with minimal attention to widespread neglect of socio-economic rights related to poverty in the world. So, it was not surprising that participants did not or could not recognize another message that was a direct challenge to today's correct secular thinking in Canada. It came, unexpectedly, from Katherine Marshall, a senior World Bank officer. (Marshall is co-author of Mind, Heart and Soul in the Fight Against Poverty, just published by the World Bank. Later, I hope to say more about this work, a hopeful sign of the times for those who treasure the values that underlie the social teaching of our own church and other world faiths.)

At Couchiching Marshall did not cite her dozens of case studies on faith-based groups that are significant actors in the war against poverty, disease and conflict -- increasingly in partnerships among themselves, and with secular international agencies such as the World Bank. Rather, from her vast personal experience, she quietly insisted it is unrealistic and untenable to separate the secular and spiritual worlds in development work. "Until recently development work has been consciously very secular," but concern to improve the lot of the poor and excluded is "near the centre of virtually every spiritual tradition…. Religion is such a pervasive and vital force, at both the individual and community level, that the tendency to ignore it has had important, even grave consequences. Blinkered visions have left large areas of human endeavour -- some very tangible, including religious provision of social services and religious roots of social tensions -- largely unexplored." It is therefore important to open eyes and ears "to the complex ways in which the worlds of faith and development intersect and can engage together."