In Bad Faith
By Salman Rushdie
15 March, 2005
The
Guardian
I
never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion
came after me. Religion was a part of my subject, of course; for a novelist
from the Indian subcontinent, how could it not have been? But in my
opinion I also had many other, larger, tastier fish to fry. Nevertheless,
when the attack came, I had to confront what was confronting me, and
to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously,
repressively and violently stood against me. Now, 16 years later, religion
is coming after us all, and even though most of us probably feel, as
I once did, that we have other, more important concerns, we are all
going to have to confront the challenge. If we fail, this particular
fish may end up frying us.
For those of us
who grew up in India in the aftermath of the partition riots in 1947,
the shadow of that slaughter has remained as a dreadful warning of what
men will do in the name of God. And there have been too many recurrences
of such violence, in Meerut, in Assam, most recently in Gujarat. European
history, too, is littered with proofs of the dangers of politicised
religion: the French wars of religion, the bitter Irish troubles, the
"Catholic nationalism" of the fascistic Spanish dictator Franco,
and the rival armies in the English civil war going into battle, both
singing the same hymns.
People have always
turned to religion for the answers to the two great questions of life:
where did we come from? And, how shall we live? But on the question
of origins, all religions are simply wrong. No, the universe wasn't
created in six days by a superforce that rested on the seventh. Nor
was it churned into being by a sky-god with a giant churn. And on the
social question, the simple truth is that wherever religions get into
society's driving seat, tyranny results. The Inquisition results. Or
the Taliban.
And yet religions
continue to insist that they provide special access to ethical truths,
and consequently deserve special treatment and protection. And they
continue to emerge from the world of private life, where they belong,
like so many other things that are acceptable when done in private between
consenting adults but unacceptable in the town square, and to bid for
power. The emergence of radical Islam needs no re-description here;
but the resurgence of faith is a larger subject than that.
In today's US, it's
possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews -
to run for, and be elected to, high office. But a professed atheist
wouldn't stand a popcorn's chance in hell. Hence the increasingly sanctimonious
quality of so much American political discourse: the president, according
to Bob Woodward, sees himself as a "messenger" doing "the
Lord's will", and "moral values" has become a code phrase
for old-fashioned, anti-gay, anti-abortion bigotry. The defeated Democrats
also seem to be scurrying towards this kind of low ground, perhaps despairing
of ever winning an election any other way.
According to Jacques
Delors, ex-president of the European Commission, "The clash between
those who believe and those who don't believe will be a dominant aspect
of relations between the US and Europe in the coming years." In
Europe, the bombing of a railway station in Madrid and the murder of
the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh are being seen as warnings that the
secular principles that underlie any humanist democracy need to be defended
and reinforced. Even before these atrocities occurred, the French decision
to ban religious attire such as Islamic headscarves from state schools
had the support of the entire political spectrum. Islamist demands for
segregated classes and prayer breaks were also rejected. Few Europeans
today call themselves religious (just 21%, according to a recent study);
the majority of Americans do (59%, according to the Pew Forum). The
Enlightenment, in Europe, represented an escape from the power of religion
to place limiting points on thought; in America, it represented an escape
into the religious freedom of the New World - a move towards faith rather
than away from it. Many Europeans now view the American combination
of religion and nationalism as frightening.
The exception to
European secularism can be found in Britain, or at least in the government
of the devoutly Christian and increasingly authoritarian Tony Blair,
which is presently trying to steamroller parliament into passing a law
against "incitement to religious hatred", in a cynical vote-getting
attempt to placate British Muslim spokesmen, in whose eyes just about
any critique of Islam is offensive.
Journalists, lawyers
and a long list of public figures have warned that this law will dramatically
hinder free speech and fail to meet its objective - that religious disturbances
will increase rather than diminish. Blair's government seems to view
the whole subject of civil liberties with disdain - what do freedoms
matter, hard-won and long-cherished though they may be, when set against
the requirements of a government facing re-election?
And yet the Blairite
policy of appeasement must be defeated. Perhaps the House of Lords will
do what the Commons failed to do, and send this bad law to the scrapheap.
And - though this is more unlikely - maybe America's Democrats will
come to understand that in today's 50-50 America they may actually have
more to gain by standing up against the Christian coalition and its
fellow travellers and cohorts, and refusing to let the Mel Gibson view
of the world shape American social and political policy. If these things
do not happen, if America and Britain allow religious faith to control
and dominate public discourse, then the western alliance will be placed
under ever-increasing strain, and those other religionists, the ones
against whom we're supposed to be fighting, will have great cause to
celebrate.
Victor Hugo wrote:
"There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster - and an extinguisher:
the parson." We need more teachers and less priests in our lives;
because, as James Joyce once said, "There is no heresy or no philosophy
which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being." But perhaps
the great American lawyer Clarence Darrow put the secularist argument
best of all. "I don't believe in God," he said, "because
I don't believe in Mother Goose."
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