Religion: the cure that kills

Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have once been asked by a journalist what he thought about western civilisation. "I think it would be a very good idea", Gandhiji is supposed to have replied. True or not, the anecdote came to mind when I read William Rees-Mogg's piece in the Times Online: "Religion isn't the sickness. It's the cure". A curative religion, one that civilises, would be a very good idea. Pity it's not yet in existence.

Rees-Mogg repeats the old canards of conservativism about "modernity" - it is a moral failure, a panic against religion, a neurosis, and it caused social Darwinism and eugenics, leading to Hitler, or worse, George Bernard Shaw. All of these have been dealt with on this blog before. I won't go into it again, except to say that as a modernist, I have no lack of moral standards and objection to these supposed outcomes of it (and that they were, in fact, outcomes of attitudes in place well before "modernity", whatever that is, came into being).

What I want to look at now is the claim of the subeditorial headline writer - that religion is the cure for what ails us. Rees-Mogg writes

The world needs religion to address the moral issues. In the advanced societies it is these moral issues that now mock us. Europe and North America are hugely wealthy regions, but they are morally impoverished. Broken families, drugs, booze, youth gangs, crime, neglect of children and the old, the sheer boredom of shopaholicism, terrorism, the inner-city slums, materialism itself, are all the marks of a global society in decline. Societies can be judged by their care for children. Social education must start in the family and must have a moral basis. Children need to be taught to distinguish between right and wrong. A recent report by Unicef showed Britain as 21st out of 21 advanced countries in the welfare of children; our national failure is a shame and a disgrace.

While it is a shame, it is not because Britain is no longer Christian, or America (both are predominantly Christian countries, and both had these evils when they were entirely Christian). It is because social conditions are the outcome of many distinct social pressures, including, but not restricted to, the anti-social welfare agendum of conservatives. Large societies that for economic reasons force families to move around fail to maintain the social networks that might once have worked in a village (as with Charles Darwin's usually anonymous largesse to the underprivileged in Down, where he lived and acted as magistrate, but let's not mention him or conservatives might find their mindset challenged).

Why do people have to move around, and not set up strong social bonds? Because the conservative agenda includes as bullet (headed) points that the economic rationale pre-empts all social ones, and the profit motive drives large corporations. I would say that they cause the problems they bemoan and claim to have the cure for. Any doctor that did that would be debarred and imprisoned.

Religion is no cure for this. Nor is it the (sole) cause. If we want a society that looks after its children, in which social mobility truly does allow the best of any social class to achieve, there are some very good examples of how this might be done - Sweden, for example. Provide lots of support to all classes and reduce the increasing wealth divide of our countries. Nations like the United States and Britain (and Australia), where several decades of economic conservatism (even by notionally socialist governments) have put the chances of the lowest classes rising upward through the societal hierarchy at its lowest since the Gilded Age, are leaving more children in poverty than we have seen in living memory in the west. The difference between the west and the developing nations is declining in some cases, but overall the west continues to exploit poor nations even as it invades them to "bring democracy".

Rees-Mogg says

The 20th century was an age of religious decline and of accelerating decline in social cohesion as well as in faith. “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ When wealth accumulates and men decay.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth. What he means is that the 20th century was marked by a decline in traditional, i.e., Christian (Church of England, no doubt) religion. It was definitely not marked by a decline in religion. The standard conservative rhetorical ploy of identifying religion with social cohesion (sure, if you all attend the same church) means that Rees-Mogg is implicitly denying one's right to believe what you choose.

None of this is modernity's fault, in part because there is no such thing, just various people accommodating knowledge, science, and social changes as best they can. Yes, there are those who deny religion's worth, and there are those who deny that religion ought to be tolerated (at least, while it is itself intolerant). I am one of them, although I don't think religion is always malign. Just a lot of the time. And neither is it the cause of our ills. People, and economics, are the causes of our ills and they won't go away because we are willing to hand some elite group the rights to set our priorities for us. In fact, they'll get worse that way, religion or no.

Don't blame the tellers of truth for the ills they speak of. And don't think that killing the messenger makes those facts go away. Religion will solve nothing. If allowed untrammeled reign, it will certainly make it worse, because monopolies, in morality and policy like anything else, are inefficient and subject to corruption.

But if you happen to come up with a religion that will truly cure our social diseases, by all means let us examine it. It would be a nice change...