Will Humanity Survive Religion?. W. Royce Clark
or metaphysical mandates; it is something often influencing from the indistinct and shaded borders of consciousness, though such persuasion is conspicuous when the constituency of the group is analyzed, within the silent peer pressure, even unspoken sibling or parental inducement that can easily overpower one’s autonomy. A religious person need only reflect on his or her own “belonging” to the religious group to see subtle heteronomous powers at work.
Certainly, significant human relationships ought to be cherished and nourished. But the religious institutions always teach people to cite the major doctrines, symbols, creeds, and legitimate authorities, or ecstatic spiritual experiences as the real reason for their “conversion” or embracing the religion rather than simply enhanced human relationships here or there.8 It is as if to cite intensified human relationships as the motivation for the conversion is far too mundane, perhaps even blasphemous or humanistic. After all, the improved human relationships are not eternal, not sufficiently esoteric, in fact, too obvious, perhaps not even spiritual if so commonly experienced. As if anyone ever became a significant member of a religious group without being influenced to join it by some person already within the group?
Ironically, this wall of exclusivity has been so important to most of the major religions in history that they have eventually split in two, or three, or into hundreds or thousands of shreds, always with each group claiming—whether the older one or the fledglings—to have ultimate truth. The established wall excludes not simply people who are not religious, or are of a completely different religion, but even, and often more vigorously excludes the closest competitor within the same generally designated religion. One needs only to begin counting how many different forms or separate communions exist within Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and even a few in Judaism.9
While Hinduism may have a stronger historical tradition of tolerance of difference than the others, the nineteenth century had witnessed a resurgence of the Vedas in Indian life, and even their “infallibility” was emphasized by various Hindu leaders such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, which had parallels in both Catholic thought and Protestant Christian fundamentalism in the same century. Even it has its extreme fundamentalism that sees itself as a persecuted minority, which has been embraced especially in the Hindutva movement. It was graphically apparent in 1992 when a militant group of worshippers of Shiva stormed and dismantled an Islamic mosque in Ayodhya, which they claimed had been built upon a holy site of Shiva’s. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was another earth-shaking event, involving two devout men representing different Hindu castes. Then, of course, there was the Partition of the Muslims and Hindus. So despite the de-emphasis in much of Hinduism of one particular marga or religious path, human nature still seems to rear its exclusionary head and feeling that the major legislative thrust has placed Hinduism into the status of the least protected, the victims. That same emphasis of being a persecuted minority, even though actually the majority, is common to many religious groups, which has a polarizing effect even when it is not factual, as seen during the past few years in both India and the United States.
Notwithstanding the strong ecumenical talk prior to Vatican II, that Council in 1960 simply referred to Protestants as “separated brethren,” contending that they need to return to the true church, which “subsists” in the Roman church. The Council left untouched the most heteronomous (if not the most divisive) doctrine of ultimate authority of Papal Infallibility, as had been defined in the first Vatican Council in 1869–1870. That nineteenth century had also witnessed the Syllabus of Errors, which claimed the Absolute authority, that no one really has any choice of religion since there is only one true religion, and Vatican II, a century later, did not nullify or even modify such a statement.
In the same nineteenth century, Protestant fundamentalism, especially in the United States, in its militant opposition to Darwinism, proclaimed the “inerrancy” of the scriptures literally interpreted. So Protestant Christianity continued to splinter into literally hundreds of different, exclusive groups, most of whom contended that only they had the full truth. Some of the most conservative have since taken up the mantle of the persecuted minority in the United States, when legal decisions came from the Court supporting birth control, abortions at certain stages, and same-sex marriage, as Robert P. Jones showed in The End of White Christian America. 10 While we thought the antagonism between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland had finally been resolved, now it appears perhaps it has not. Meanwhile, Turkey requests permission from the U.S. president to drive the Kurds, with their very ancient religion, out of Northern Syria, Buddhists in Myanmar extricate the Muslims from their country, and proxy war with genocide continues unabated in Yemen, in countries in which the religions ironically allegedly honor life above everything.
While the walls of religious exclusivism are erected at different places in various stages, one can hardly miss them, just as one can hardly miss the way the religious exclusivism is subtly utilized by political and military powers, manipulating wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. They all suggest a battle for turf by national groups, which depend upon an ancient “faith” and its ideological control of masses of people. Is this ultimately a battle to be the final word about religion, or simply to use religion to take over control of other countries or populations? Is anyone unaware of the religious dimensions behind so much of the inhumane divisiveness today, whether it poses as racism, anti-immigration, sexism, or other?
If the will of the Absolute (God) can be presupposed, a will to tolerate no competition no matter how strongly it must oppose human autonomy in any field of thought or activity, what will be the end? But do not most religions in the world speak of “love,” “unity,” “compassion,” “respect,” “kindness,” of caring for the needy, the orphaned, the widowed? Indeed they do. That is why Whitehead said religions are “ambiguous” because they can show both a positive and negative side. They can be instruments of unity and generosity, but also of extreme arrogance, exclusivity, and can even help weaponize political divisiveness by their Absolute. Being “ambiguous” does not mean religions are worse or more destructive than nonreligious groups, but simply that they are actually as human as all human groups, that they do not have some corner on an Absolute, despite their claims that they do.
Even thinking strictly in Western history, this bifurcation of humanity into “us” and “them” may have preceded the invention of human language. So perhaps divisiveness is even part of our genetic code in the larger “survival” syndrome. But why and how soon did the “other”—whether different sexual orientation, skin color, territory, customs, and finally language—get turned into the “enemy” of one’s group, then later its cultural forms, and this including its religion become the enemy of one’s god or gods, finally to become the object of the god or gods plan of unending opposition and punishment? It is a long process. In Ancient Israel, Abraham was promised great blessing by his God, including that he and his people would be a blessing to the nations, or perhaps that he would be the “father” of many future nations. Yet Israel found itself surrounded by enemies from its very existence, which was, in fact, attributed to the result of God’s miraculous deliverance from their (and God’s) enemies in the Exodus, and their being “given” the “Promised Land” (which was already quite occupied by others). The enemies continued for Israel as it became “Judaism” of the Jewish people. The enemy or very different other was “Gentile,” and assimilation into that culture was to be unfaithful to the Jewish God. If later some circumstances prompted the birth of apocalyptic within early Judaism, we have already noted from IV Ezra the author’s problem with an idea of God’s division of people by their “works.” But how could he have squared the idea of the “chosen” people with any idea of justice on the basis of human morality or “works”? Is such a juxtaposition religiously not bound to defy one’s sense of “justice”?
Although the accounts of Jesus include a rather inclusive ministry, defying those stagnant racial and ethnic divisions that were powerful, even the writers of the redacted gospel tradition place on the lips of Jesus a “Final Judgment,” which seals the fate of the “sheep and the goats.” This is seemingly a moral judgment, based on how the people lived in their relations to other humans, especially those in need. But how such a division of humanity could occur without being a gross oversimplification or caricature of the “others” is difficult to fathom. In fact, even with the