Is anybody there?
David Boulton welcomes a new history of religion
There are few writers on religion whose books are guaranteed bestsellers. The former bishop of Edinburgh and head of the Anglican church in Scotland is one of them. From Godless Morality in 1999, through a series culminating in A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway’s deep affection for religious tradition, coupled with intellectual honesty and clarity of expression, has won him a host of avid readers among the faithful and the faith-less, those who struggle between belief and doubt.
No stranger to controversy, he plunges in by stating in the very first line of his opening chapter that ‘Religion comes from the mind of the human animal, so it comes from us’. We can’t help asking big questions, like where did the universe come from, is there somebody out there who made it, why are we here, and is there life after death. ‘What we call religion,’ he says, ‘was our first crack at answering these questions.’
Prophets and sages appeared, claiming direct experience of ‘the world beyond’ and a mission to proclaim the message they had received. They attracted followers, and through them new religions were born. Their names are familiar to us: Abraham, Moses, Daniel, but also the Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, and Muhammad. Holloway writes respectfully and sympathetically of all of them, though his main focus is on the Christian tradition – from Jesus and Paul to Mormons, Moonies and even Quakers.
Holloway spares his readers nothing in his relentless accounts of how inspirational messages were so quickly co-opted and perverted by power. In a key chapter on ‘holy wars’ he discusses whether religion is the main cause of violence in human history, citing the Jewish slaughter of the Canaanites as recorded in the book of Joshua and the murderous conflicts both within and between Christianity and Islam.
He is not satisfied with the conventional answer of many religious believers that religion gets drawn into violence which is not of its own making, rather than being the actual cause of bloody conflict. Unfortunately, the very scriptures that are claimed to be the word of God quote God himself as commanding the killing of unbelievers and heretics. Some say that ‘since it was God who commanded the violence that has been such a curse to humanity, the best way to save humanity from its curse is to get rid of God. It’s a powerful charge, and one we can’t ignore’, says Holloway. ‘It turns out that religion may be a greater enemy of God than atheism… So we arrive at the conclusion that though religion claims to reveal the true nature of God to the world, a lot of the time it is actually hiding God behind the thick fog of its own cruelty.’
Given the emphasis on religious violence, it is perhaps surprising that in a short chapter on Quakers nothing is said about Friends’ historic peace testimony. Holloway finds George Fox ‘one of the most attractive figures in the history of religion’, not because of his post-Restoration pacifism but because he and his comrades smashed the conventions requiring inferiors to bend their knees and doff their hats to superiors, and to address them as ‘Your Excellency’ and ‘Your Grace’, ‘thee-ing’ and ‘thou-ing’ them as if they were all equals. No minor matter this, since it arose from Friends’ ‘outrageous claim that all human beings were of equal worth, male and female, slave or free!’
The testimony to equality led to their campaigns for the abolition of slavery. This challenged not only the social order but the Bible, since – as Christian slave-owners were not slow to point out – the Old Testament commanded slavery and the New Testament condoned it. So, said Friends, the Bible must be wrong – and not just the Bible. ‘Since they believed it was God who had alerted them to the difference, it followed that God had reservations about the Bible as well… Maybe we’ve been reading it in the wrong way for centuries. Maybe it needs to be interpreted and read more intelligently.’
Holloway concludes by asking whether religion has a future now that even the secular humanist believes that kindness is good, cruelty bad, and you don’t need religion to tell you that loving your neighbours and treating them as you would like to be treated makes sense.
A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway is published by Yale University Press at £14.99. ISBN: 9780300208832.
