Aga Khan Hospital Nairobi, Kenya March 25th 2011
If someone tells you they are going to pray for you the reaction of most non-faith people—including this one—might typically be bemusement. But if faith is not much part of your life meeting those for whom it is requires at least a respectful hearing or some pause for thought.
After 4 days alone in an African hospital with a potentially fatal illness—the 3rd in the last month—the offer to see someone of the cloth is intriguing as much as anything else.
The young catechist who enters my hospital room wears a full length white cassock buttoned to the neck. James is from St Francis Xavier Catholic Church Nairobi and tells me there is a reason why I am here: God wishes to be glorified through me. It is a simple message and is delivered with such calm certainty that I have to at least see the beauty of its appeal to humility and challenge to live up to virtue.
Mine is a post-Christian society. Less than 30% of Canadians—and West Europeans—claim that religion is “very important to them”. For most people of Christian back ground organised religion has lost relevance and to the extent they do think of it it is typically associated with strife abroad and hateful politics south of the border.
Probably the best articulated example of the post-Christian secular viewpoint was the Christopher Hitchens vs Tony Blair Munk Centre debate in Toronto last year. The topic—be it resolved that religion is a force for good in the world—left those present in no doubt they’d witnessed the defining debate on faith and reason in the early 21st century, an intellectual clash of Titans and an epochal battle of ideas at a time when, rather than fading, Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations has heated up around the world.
A straw poll at the start revealed just 22% of the audience agreed with the proposition that religion is a force for good, the line argued against by Hitchens and given weight from his recent, and brilliant, book God is not Great, and added poignancy from knowledge of his own mortality: he was ill with cancer—likely terminal—had lost all his—beautiful—hair and spoke with an involuntary cough. Nor, at this seeming moment of truth, has this man of iron will and intellectual courage been turned from the path.
That, now famous, debate has been covered elsewhere but suffice that Hitchens arguments largely won the day—they were presented with such clarity of thought and heavy weight of empirical example that Blair and the faith proposition seemed to get little real traction. There is, indeed, much strife in the world with the Utopian imperfectability of man, and the religion they organise, at its core.
It is easy to find oneself validated and empowered through Hitchens. As a teenager rebelling against organised religion in an Anglican boarding school and as an adult finding the moral and practical framework to navigate life the secular creed has always the answers.
At the moment of witnessing the triumph of these ideas—a poll at the end of the debate showed an even wider margin of dominance for the secularists—I will admit to some unease. The dissenting view is pretty main stream at this point; faith people are, in fact, such a humbled minority that they begin to find in me the appeal of the underdog and the contrarian side of the argument. In Canada practising Christians are, essentially, the only minority that can be mocked with impunity. The humility of their project, as articulated by Blair, that religion should enable us to be better people and live better lives is hard to find serious objection to.
Outside the meeting hall after this debate the one person in my group I did feel for was my friend’s mother in law, someone I know to be a person of faith and who, together with her husband, have devoted their lives to good works through their Church. According to the Hitchens argument such good works either do not make up for the harm that religion does or would be possible anyway through other societal or state channels.
After 4 months in Africa, most of it in the failed state of the Democratic Republic of Congo where Churches seem to provide so much of the services and support the state cannot, from hospitals to Universities, I am less sure that side of the argument can be so easily dismissed, or that the good works and sacrifice of so many should be so lightly valued. Among the Africans I work with faith is an uncontentious matter, its benign value as an organisational and institutional force in their lives and society really beyond serious question.
In the hospital room in Nairobi, James, in his white cassock, says that he would like to pray for me. I am not sure how to respond before realising that when someone prays for you they are not appealing to God so much as showing their love for you. I bow my head.
Just heard about your latest health troubles the old fashioned way, through the grapevine. I am sorry we can’t be of any help so far away. If only to sit through some of those Nairobi Law episodes with you! Seriously though, we’re thinking of you (if not praying for you in our own non-religious way). Get better!
Very beautifully written.
I believe Hutchen’s anger against religion has a lot to do with his mother. That is not to say that he is wrong. But the wrong or right of the argument would depend on some more scientific form of measurement. Otherwise it is just speculation.
The good or the bad of beliefs is not so much in their type as in the human use of the belief. We humans have a way of using ideas for ill. Even perfectly good ideas like “love thy neighbor as thyself”.
Religion’s main problem, as I see it, is the in-group/out-group problem. You are good if you are with me and bad if you are not. But this idea is part of the brains basic hard-wiring and can be found everywhere. Getting rid of religion will not change that problem.