by William Whyte
Religion – let’s face it – is, as much as anything, about control. Just look through the books of the Bible, or the verses of the Koran, or even the precepts of Buddhism. To be sure, religion is not just about control. It’s about the transcendent, the numinous, the divine. It’s about encountering God. But, when all’s said and done, it is also about control. That’s why so much of the Torah – the Old Testament – is about dietary laws. That’s why Orthodox Jews can’t eat shellfish; why Muslims avoid alcohol; and why Mormons have special underwear. Now, there’s a tendency to think that this is all rather silly or even a little bit creepy. It is hard to see the link between avoiding lobster and worshipping God, or to understand why certain clothing is intrinsically good or manifestly evil. And for that reason it’s worth asking why religions do this – and whether it’s a good thing in the end.
I suppose there are three ways in which religions control people. Two of them seem to me very bad indeed. The first is that specific dietary rules and particular ways of dressing, grooming, or treating the body, are often used to distinguish the religious from the heathen. This is evidently the explanation for the lengthy list of laws we find in the Bible books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Clearly, the distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised, the pork eating and the pork avoiding, is driven by a desire to institute ethnic differences. This doesn’t mean that it’s not also a religious distinction (after all, the Torah is the story of God’s Chosen People – and for the story to work it has to be clear quite who they are). But arguably, this is more to do with human difference than it is to do with anything divine. Indeed, I want to follow Jonathan Swift in seeing such human distinction as fundamentally anti-religious. Remember the violent disputes between the Big- and Little-Enders in Gulliver’s Travels? There the argument was about which end of the egg to break before eating it. It’s hard not to see many of the rules that religions enforce as variations on this theme.
Far more pernicious, though, is the second sort of religious rule. This is not just about group dynamics or ethnic identity – and it’s certainly not about God. This is about power: raw, naked, all too human power. It doesn’t need me to point out the way in which religion has been used to legitimate the most appalling crimes: from the Crusades to 9/11. Nor is this the most worrying aspect of religion; after all, any ideology can be perverted by the unscrupulous. Far worse is the fact that the religious themselves – both religious leaders and sincere religious believers – have often re-interpreted their religions in such a way that they become instruments of persecution and of hate. As a Christian I cannot fail to be shocked by the way in which some other Christians are willing to argue that our religion justifies anti-Semitism or supports the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. Of course, Christianity cannot do any such thing. But as the Church’s continued persecution of gay people in particular shows, many sincere religious people are only too willing to map their own prejudices onto their religion. This process – this making a god in our own image – is, as any fool knows, simply blasphemous. Indeed, it’s idolatry.
So, where does this leave us? On the one hand we have religion as thet of social control that tends to create sharply distinct and often aggressive groups, defined by their different patterns of behaviour and belief. On the other hand we have religion used to legitimate social and political prejudices; to control and repress the behaviour of the marginal, the outsiders, the powerless. This is precisely the sort of critique that religion has faced throughout the last few generations – and it’s certainly one that anybody who calls herself religious has to face. The great world religions have all been guilty of persecution, of exclusivity, of putting particular human needs (and especially the needs of the powerful) above the worship of God or the search for authentic self-fulfilment. But even so, I would want to argue in defence of religion, and particularly that there is still a need for the sort of control – the sort of order – that a religious tradition provides. It must simply be an order or control that is continually questioned. After all, as the great modern day martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously observed, the Church can become the Antichrist, and it becomes the Antichrist exactly at the moment when it denies that such a thing is possible.
The third way in which religion provides control is through the provision of an ethical and spiritual framework. We all, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has shown, exist within these sorts of frameworks – even if we’re inclined to deny such a thing. What religion should do is force us to reflect on these frameworks, to examine these ethical assumptions, and to change them too. The core Christian teachings, for example, are profoundly counterintuitive: love your neighbour; love your enemy; blessed are those who mourn; if a man steals from you, you should give him more. We’re not born believing this – quite the reverse. What the Christian tradition and what the great religions offer us generally is an external checklist, one that requires us to re-examine our attitudes and our behaviours. And I think I’m willing to go even further. Without this control – without this ethical framework – we’re lost. Not only are we left adrift as individuals, but our society simply cannot function or cohere.
In all fairness, it does not take a religion to force this sort of reflection and it is not necessary to be religious in order to possess some sort of ethical framework. Nor are the religious uniquely successful at the sort of reflexivity that I’m describing. As I’ve also suggested, they too can be trapped by the human desire to discriminate and dominate. Nonetheless, I do think that religion gives us a special access to ethics and particular purchase on personal behaviour. The same tendencies that can lead to a ludicrous obsession with what eat, what we wear, and who we talk to, can also produce a profound engagement with the divine. Traditionally, each morning nuns clothe themselves in their habit: putting on tunic, scapular, wimple, veil, girdle, and so on. The habit as a whole marks their vocation; it identifies them as specially set apart to pray and live in obedience. And each item of clothing has its own particular meaning. More than this, though, as they put on each item, they say a prayer – a different prayer for piece of clothing. Naturally, this could be purely ritualistic; it could even become fetishistic. Yet in fact what it shows is the way in which religion has ordered their lives, the way in which they allow it to control their lives. And, above all, it shows the way in which they find the divine in the ordinary. Even the ordinary clothes they wear have become a way of encountering God. That, I suppose, is the goal of all us – to find God in the everyday. But, just like them, we need the structures and the controls that religion provides in order to do it.