Social Affairs

Thinking Anew – The role of religion in society

The age of self-sufficiency will be seen for what it is

Byzantine painting from the Church of St John Lampadistis, Cyprus. Photograph: Getty Images

Gordon Linney
Sat Feb 5 2022 - 00:01

There has been much discussion about the decline of the church and its lessening influence in the world. That’s hard to take for those who remain active and who understandably feel discouraged by the indifference and apathy they encounter from time to time. But they should hold their nerve because in time the age of self-sufficiency will be seen for what it is.

What then should the church do in such circumstances? A recurring theme in the Judeo-Christian story from earliest times has been a confusion about the role of religion in society. Early books of the Bible such as Genesis and Exodus tell of a God of promise and deliverance. There is adventure in the stories of the Exodus, the escape from slavery and the uncertainties of life in the wilderness. But through it all this pilgrim people experienced a God of action who could be counted on in time of trouble. There was a solid connection between their faith and their everyday struggles.

The biblical books that follow like Leviticus and Numbers spoke to a different situation. A once nomadic people are becoming settled and rules and regulations are needed to establish identity and maintain order. In this process what is known as the priestly tradition takes control and religion becomes more altar bound; the link between believing and being, faith and conduct, is weakened.

About eight centuries before Christ, we begin to hear from the Jewish prophets, such as Amos, Hosea, and others, with a simple message. Your rituals and liturgies pay lip-service to things like justice and truth but in your everyday lives you trample on the poor and the weak. Believing and being are no longer connected.

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In tomorrow's reading from Isaiah the prophet describes a profound religious experience he had in the Temple at Jerusalem surrounded by all the trappings of organised religion which brought home to him the disconnect between religion and people's lives. He is overcome with guilt: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" He is not talking here about bad language but a lack of concern for truth. He describes a burning coal scorching his mouth, as if cauterising an infection – a searing image that has a fresh intensity in our times when truth is mocked by political and religious leaders, lies and misinformation are used to hide crimes and injustices that destroy people's lives.

In The Shaping of Prophecy, Fr Adrian Hastings maintains we need a spirituality that speaks to everyday issues: "Every time prayer is detached from the politics of the marketplace leaving the marketeers free to proclaim a God concerned with the spiritual only, the core element of the specifically Christian is lost . . . A religion of pure spirituality is a privatised religion with a privatised God, and a privatised God cannot or should not exist. God is the God of everything or of nothing. Without such a God and without the human prayer that makes us conscious of such a God there can be no absolute critique of evil government and corrupt politics, no tradition of prophecy. We can only prophesy out of an objectivity of truth and goodness. If love is preferable to hate, truth to lies, whatever an individual chooses to think or do, then there exists over and above us a moral order, unchangeable, objective, absolute."

According to tomorrow’s gospel, Jesus encounters a group of fishermen who have come ashore after a disastrous night’s fishing.

He persuades them to get back in their boats and to “put out into the deep water and let down (their) nets for a catch”.

They are amazed at the result.

That call to exchange terra firma for choppy waters which have seemingly little to offer is where the church is today.

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