In praise of "argumentative grit"
Rowan Williams argues that "the worshipping mentality" helps us see beyond the zeitgeist.
Why should you endorse religious freedom if you’re not religious? Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, gives a pretty good answer in his recent Reith Lecture. It’s part of a series on what President Franklin Roosevelt described as four freedoms that are “fundamental to democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.” Delivering the lecture on freedom of worship, Williams opened with the example of environmentalist nuns:
A private oil company has seized some farmland to built a natural gas pipeline. The landowners are not happy and have gone to Court. So far, so familiar, but here’s what’s unusual, the farmland belongs to a Catholic women’s religious order, and the nuns have argued that the pipeline violates their rights to liberty, specifically religious liberty. “Every day since October 2018,” said one of the sisters, “as fossil fuel and gas flows through our farmland so also flows Transco’s blatant disregard and trampling of our religious beliefs.”
The nuns’ environmental beliefs aren’t obviously religious, at least according to common understandings of religion. But this is where the common understanding is wrong—religion, says Williams, isn’t simply a matter of intellectual assent to a set of ideas but something much more visceral: “Part of what you believe is that your purpose as a human being is to make visible something of who God is and what God has done. … Something has to change in your visible behaviour in the rhythms and habits of your body.” He goes on:
manifesting belief it seems is not just about being able to say what you think in abstract terms, it’s not even about your sacred rituals being more or less tolerated; it’s about the freedom to conduct yourself in a certain way, understanding your pattern of life as communicating something more than just your individual wants or feelings because it’s answerable to something more than just your own judgment or just the prevailing social consensus. And it may indeed be challenging for that consensus or majority opinion as it is challenging for your own individual comfort or preference.
So far, so annoying for Transco, their shareholders, or anyone who’ll benefit from cheaper energy thanks to the pipeline on the nuns’ land if those beliefs are allowed to manifest in real-world consequences.
So why should society at large respect those beliefs and their consequences when they may be “challenging” at best and the subject of outright disapprobation at worst? Williams’ interesting answer has two parts to it: first, as we’ve seen above, that religious belief is an embodied allegiance to something beyond oneself, beyond society, beyond the zeitgeist. Second, that religiously-inspired resistance to prevailing ideas and intellectual fashions ensure that those beliefs can’t simply be assumed or taken for granted—they are made the subject of debate, of moral argument, and must be justified:
the presence within a society of people with strong commitments about what is due to human dignity puts a certain kind of pressure on the whole social environment, a pressure to argue for and justify what society licences or defends in terms that go beyond popular consensus alone. In other words, it helps to guarantee that argument about issues from environmental responsibility to sexual politics will have an element of real moral debate, debate about the kind of beings human beings are.
This may not be welcome, convenient, or even polite and yet it provides an essential restraint on what could otherwise be a raw exercise of power. Williams quotes Lord Acton, best known for “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” who also said that “religious freedom was the cornerstone of all political freedoms.” This means, says Williams, that:
religious freedom rested on the conviction that human beings have a nature endowed with intrinsic dignity, intrinsic qualities, a location in the world and a responsibility to something more than what existing forms of power might find convenient. And [Acton] implies that this conviction is what allows the very idea of political argument about the common good and open debate about whether certain forms of governance adequately respect human dignity to get off the ground. Very simply, it guards against absolutizing the status quo. Conscientious dissent and ongoing public moral debate are part of the lifeblood of a viable and critical society.
Thus Williams argues that the “repressive tolerance” usually accorded to religious freedom is insufficient. This tolerance is characterised by a grudging acceptance that simultaneously undermines faith by confining it to the private sphere. This isn’t just impossible for believers, who understand themselves to be engaged in something transcendental and not merely private. It’s also self-defeating because it denies society “the argumentative grit of the worshipping mentality” which provokes it “to keep … asking moral questions and not reducing those questions to issues about majority opinion.”
Religious freedom is therefore one of the safeguards that keeps us from “a majoritarian tyranny whether religious or secular.” Whatever any of us makes of religious beliefs and their periodic clashes with the way of the modern world, and whether we hold those beliefs or not, Williams shows us that the existence and faithful manifestation of those beliefs can serve us all.
Great thoughts - thanks for sharing Alex.