Rooting Soceity: secular does not equal neutral

Sermon preached at St Mary's Church, Whitkirk, Leeds

Lent 5 (Year A) - 9th March 2008

Back in January I was at a school governors’ conference for Temple Moor.  We were given an exercise to help us look at what the world might be like in 2022.  Apart from being the year I will be 60, it is also the year that someone in their first years at primary school will be leaving education.  So the underlying question was about what kind of education will be needed to prepare for that world.  When I think back 15 years ago, I was using an Amstrad PCW computer which measured memory capacity in a few hundred bytes.  Now we talk of gigabytes and I can type, receive emails and listen to the radio online while another member of the family can use the same phone line to make calls - all at the same time.  I can even catch up with TV programmes I’ve missed through the BBC iPlayer.  That was all unimaginable a mere 15 years ago, so how can we predict the next 15?

Interestingly, the imaginary girl of our case study was said to be spiritual, but not belonging to any specific religion.  This is probably pretty much a projection of where we are now for many, so not that far out.  The question it raised in my head was what is this spirituality rooted in if it floats free of any formal structure or narrative?  Where is the critical assessment of herself and her faith coming from when there is no identifiable structure or story in which to set herself?

This is not a merely academic fantasy.  It takes us to some sharp questions that we face now.  Much social thinking of the last couple of decades has been concerned with what shapes and holds together a sense of community in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society.  Ten or more years ago the buzz word was ‘communitarianism’, a philosophy that looks at the role community plays in shaping individuals.  Out of this has come all that stuff about stakeholders and how we encourage people to have some ownership in the organisations they have a stake in.  You are all stakeholders of this church.

Enter stage left a scholarly Archbishop of Canterbury, possibly the most scholarly for 35 years since Michael Ramsey.  It is in this context of questions about social cohesion and rootedness that I found Rowan Williams’ lecture to the lawyers in the Temple in London so interesting.  Clearly there was a PR blunder around this, but when you analyse what he actually said all of his critics are silenced by the text of the lecture itself.  So it is not the media fuss I want to concentrate on.

There is an assumption about, particularly among national and local governments, that secular equals neutral.  The religious is relegated in their script to the private sphere.  This is something that the Archbishop has questioned on a number of occasions.  His lecture needs to be read with this in mind.   Secular does not equal neutral.  It is a particular way of seeing the world and those with an active faith can’t go along with it.  The created world is not the sum total of everything to us, there is a spiritual dimension and we are created for God not ourselves.

There are many occasions when the assumptions of our secular administrators are in total agreement with where we come at things from.  That shouldn’t surprise us because our culture is the product of the Christian ethos of this Country’s past.  What is more, there are times when I pick up the benchmark of good practice from being a school governor more than I do from how the church operates.  So we are not always on strong ground and our position sometimes has to be informed from elsewhere.

What I understood the Archbishop to be saying was that we need to be accommodating in how we shape our society so that there is scope for the religious and for the different religious voices that now make up our diverse culture.  On issues such as Muslim mortgages, one of the examples he gave, this is pretty easy to accommodate and doesn’t bring any serious conflict to the fore, though some special provisions and checks have to be included.  It clearly does become problematic when we get to the deeply ethical views.  Questions over when we regard life as beginning and what status should be accorded to the unborn require a dominant view that will carry the day.  The government view, which is backed up by the Church of England, is that life emerges rather than starting at conception and so abortion and embryology, IVF and certain forms of contraception are permissible with various qualifications and ethical constraints.  Fourteen days have been taken as the ethical benchmark for embryology because that is when it is possible to distinguish the cells that will become the person from those that will be ancillary.  Roman Catholics and some other faiths take a very different line regarding life as beginning fully at the moment of conception.  Here we have to decide what is going to be the arbitrator of society’s morals.  The Archbishop has put down a marker that secular does not equal neutral.  We have to look at the assumptions that lie behind a given stance and what these say about what it means to be human and therefore how people are treated.

The easiest way to handle these is to be totalitarian about it all – to say that there is only one view that is acceptable and everything else is to be stamped out.  That view just can’t be held the moment we allow democracy and decide that diversity will be possible.  The wars and social disruption of the 16^th and 17^th centuries showed just what a disastrous policy lies that way.  Balancing conflicting convictions is not easy and it requires constant vigilance to defend the liberal democratic freedoms that have emerged to give this country its world beating character – which might be one reason there was such an angry reaction to what people thought the Archbishop was saying.  As Private Eye put it, “now these three abideth: faith, hope and clarity; but the greatest of them all is clarity”!

Whether the Church of England will still be the established church in 2022 I don’t know. Part of me thinks we can’t really defend it.  Why should one religion, or none for that matter, hold the normative position?  But then I feel the same about the monarchy.  Hereditary monarchy is an utter nonsense.  But then again when you look at the presidential system it doesn’t present a completely convincing argument for the effort involved in doing away with hereditary monarchs.  It seems better to leave it alone and get on with life.  For the Church of England our real establishment rests in our presence in the parishes and the responsibility this brings to give voice to the voiceless.  We are in touch through the parishes with people in ways few other groups are – including politicians.  We stand for the other side of the secular state, the religious one and if the case study I began with is right there will still be a spiritual dimension that needs focus in 2022.

There is nothing that has been proclaimed dead as often as God and yet has refused to die.  Both of our readings this morning talk about new life where it looked completely exhausted and beyond repair (Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45).  From Ezekiel we had the image of a pile of bones becoming the skeletons for living beings again.  New structures on an old frame.  That is how the church has continued down the ages and the frame is the gospel of Jesus Christ.  The packaging changes with each generation – sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically as it relates to the culture of its day.  So like the world of education we have to think how do we engage with a world that is radically different to a few years ago and will be different again in the next 15 years, but will still ask spiritual questions.  The message from our Archbishop is that secular does not equal neutral.  What we need to do is ask searching questions about what vision of humanity is being presented in any given policy and what does that mean for human lives.  To that we will bring the religious perspective of our faith.  Do that and the church has a validity and future.  Fail and we become Ezekiel’s pile of bones, and deserve to be.

© Ian Black 2008