Books

God is not dead and monotheism is anything but monotone

God’s oneness has yielded not uniformity but diversity and difference, a new book argues

A limited view of what was Christian or Jewish or Muslim was limiting the fact that God was alive in many different ways. Photograph: Getty Images

Amanullah De Sondy
Wed Nov 4 2020 - 05:53

Is God dead? The fantastic proposition of God’s demise has fuelled our wonderings for millennia. The great philosophers and scientists have conceded that God’s existence or non-existence is a personal and arbitrary matter, yet the topic brings out the most contested views whenever discussed amongst friends.

The great acts of injustice, abuse and killing taken in the name of God have helped many a staunch atheist argue that a belief in God brings about great destruction. We also know that faith has brought relief to many in the name of charity, and some of the great commandments have been the foundation stones of our legal systems.

Recently we read that here in Ireland secondary schools were moving toward more multidenominational and pluralist approaches to religious education in schools. These are realistic steps in understanding that Ireland is not mono-religious and that an appreciation of the “other” makes us stronger.

Some do want religion to be rooted out of schools completely, but do we really want to go down the route to where France finds itself? Secularism often disguises a very rigid, singular vision that stamps out differences and, often, paradoxically entrenches antipathies.

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So the question endures: is God dead?

There is something very palpable about God in our everyday lives. Growing up in Glasgow, I was fortunate to have believing parents who inspired my love for difference. My Muslim Dad had a grocery store in the heart of the Jewish community in Glasgow’s Shawlands area. I grew up watching him sell tons of Jewish Chronicles and Jewish Telegraphs to customers who affectionately called him Willie (his name was Inayat).

Christmas was a time when my Dad would be having conversations with customers about how they did or did not celebrate the festival. When we made summertime trips to my parents’ home village in Pakistan, the housekeeper was a Christian: Ferozan would tell me about Christmas in Punjab, and I would compare it to the Glaswegian Christmastime I had come to appreciate so well. Although we lived very different lives, we were all part of the Christian rhythm.

Today Judaism, Christianity and Islam interact in unprecedented ways. There are hostile interreligious encounters in the realms of global and national politics. There are constructive relationships in the religiously pluralistic life of the world’s great cities and within multi-religious families. At the same time, these religions also are experiencing increased scrutiny – and scepticism – particularly in Western industrialised societies.

Among other factors, the global clerical sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, increasing public acceptance of same-sex marriage and reproductive rights, the events of 9/11 and their aftermath, the rise of Isis, and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East have coincided with a worldwide drop in organised religious participation and increasingly sharp divisions between secularists and religious people, particularly in the United States and Europe.

Faith in God might not be alive for some around the world, but clearly it is for many others. And that’s ok – we don’t all have to be the same. This is the challenge we face in appreciating that one size does not fit all and that our polarised views on God do not help us understand the complex lived realities around us.

It is this complexity that has always fascinated me about One God and it is for this reason that I wrote An Introduction to Monotheism: Judaism, Christianity and Islam with Michelle A Gonzalez and William Scott Green.

While I was teaching at the University of Miami, my colleagues Michelle and Bill suggested we teach a course on “One God”. As in our book, with the class we didn’t want to dodge any taboo subjects but we first wanted to lay a solid foundation, cementing the three traditions individually and together. What did Jewish biblical monotheism set in motion that become Christianity and Islam?

This one idea of God has developed in difference – the distinctive ways of understanding and faith in the forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Besides a solitary deity, what connects these three traditions is the way that they root to scripture and from here develop understandings of God in relation to creation, covenant, multiple identities, the daily sacred struggle of upholding good morals and ethics, reflecting on how a successful life always points toward death.

But we wanted to further complicate these themes with some of the most heated debates amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims, such as gender, sexuality and marriage. It is too simplistic to dismiss these religions on an understanding that they are, for example, homophobic – we wanted to explore the many tensions and glimmers of hope that accept a more inclusive, faithful understanding even while more rigid ways also live on. At least in lived reality if not in professed ideals, a certain pluralism has always been at the very heart of religious systems with One God.

To forge a global future, it is important for us to understand how the ideas, values, and behaviours of these longstanding religions may influence the political, social, and personal choices of the majority of the Earth’s population – particularly if we are part of a society and culture in which people increasingly do not subscribe to or share those ideas, values, and behaviours.

The internet enables people to know more about more religions than ever before, but we all recognise that contemporary news and social media often foreground the most extreme or highly visible expressions of religion, so that much of what we think we know about religion may be biased, incomplete or flat wrong.

When I moved to Florida in 2010 and lived there for five years a lot of my youthful Scottish experiences had begun to make more sense. A Jewish colleague of mine used to invite me to Shabbat dinners, where I began to think more carefully about the many anti-Semitic comments I had heard throughout my life. The fact that I had very little interaction with Jews as I was growing up in Glasgow and much of my interfaith experience was limited to Muslim-Christian debates gave me much to ponder.

I was becoming aware of what connected my own experiences of Islamophobia with anti-Semitism and the experience of Ferozan in my parents’ village as a Christian. From those dutifully praying to the intoxicated dancing mystic – these diverse forms of worshipping God could be found as Jews, Christians or Muslims. I realised that my Islam was incomplete without understanding Judaism and Christianity but that a limited view of what was Christian or Jewish or Muslim was limiting the fact that God was alive in many different ways.

Monotheism is resilient because it is more diverse than ever. When God is boxed in neatly, the monotheistic idea will inevitably suffocate. But when we begin to appreciate and explore the paradox at the heart of it – that God’s oneness has yielded not uniformity but diversity and difference – we see why the ancient and challenging idea of One God has for centuries shaped civilizations across the globe. And it continues to influence contemporary nations and societies.

Perhaps to the disappointment of atheists and secularists, God is not dead. Monotheism in particular is alive and perhaps as vivacious as ever.
Dr Amanullah De Sondy is head of study of religions department and senior lecturer in contemporary Islam at University College Cork. He is co-author of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Introduction to Monotheism (Bloomsbury, £19.99)