How broadly?
Something Madeleine Bunting said in her piece on ‘faith’ schools yesterday.
[O]ver 70% of people in this country still describe themselves as Christian; that may not mean going to church but it may mean wanting children to grow up with broadly Christian values.
But what are broadly Christian values? They’re probably not really Christian values at all, that is, not values that depend on believing that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and was bodily resurrected and hauled up into heaven. (It’s a little hard to know what values would depend on believing that, really. Atonement? But is the Christian version of that really a value? If it is is it a broadly Christian value? It’s well known that the Christian atonement can seem like a very dubious bit of morality indeed to outsiders.) Bunting probably means simply values that are mistakenly attributed to Christianity but are in fact in no way exclusive to Christianity or dependent on it – values like compassion, mercy, universal love, a kind of irrational generosity. Those are admirable values (whatever the worries about the potential of extravagant compassion to encourage cruel people to go on being cruel), but they are not theistic values. It’s also not entirely clear that they’re Christian values even in the sense of ‘Christian’ being a shorthand for the abovementioned values like compassion and the rest – because to many people Christian values apparently means not turning the other cheek but various things to do with sex and alcohol. It is, frankly, not really a useful phrase, being flawed from more than one direction.
Absolutely, but then this is the muddiness that Christianity as cultural identify, as opposed to any sort of rational adherence to a set of beliefs, represents.
I don’t see a way out of it, for too many people, far too many people, belonging to Christianity as a “gang” is much more important to them then the whether their beliefs or internall consistent.
But we can attack people like Madeleine Bunting for being disengenous, that’s what she does all the time, muddies these two positions in order to defend the “seat at the table”, be it faith schools or communitarian representation in decision making. Which most people aren’t arsed about, they just want their little moan about “well, I think a Christian school shouldn’t have to teach muslims”.
“Ok, but do you think a school (which a jewish person pays taxes to support) should be allowed to expel a kid that it finds out their parents are jewish?”
“Ah, no, of course not”.
Christian values. Is that like ‘Christian Science’ and Christian Rock’ where the word ‘Christian’ means ‘Not remotely’?
Don,
how about Christian submission ??
:-))
(hope the bloody html worked??)
According to the stats I use at work – which admittedly are only for Scotland – it’s around 67% of the population that describe themselves as having a religion.
Of those the vast majority are Christian. On the other hand, the churches do seem to have more sway up here – I’d guess the figure for the UK as a whole is nearer 60-65%
Actually, your mention of ‘irrational generosity’ reminds me of something I was thinking about the other weekend (while watching Grand Prix cars tearing through the Ardennes forests – who said noise gets in the way of thought).
People often caricature an atheistic perspective on life as based on ‘cold’ reason as opposed to ‘warm’ ‘fuzzy’ faith. And if it were true, they might have a valid criticism – if the rationalist coldly calculated the benefit of helping out a friend or the likelihood a relative might turn around and stab them in the back all the time.
But of course, most of us don’t – any more than most Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or whatever do. Why? I think we might be back to the evolutionary advantages of ‘faith’ in a broader sense – a willingness to take on trust that most peoples’ intentions are good most of the time, rather than always having to coldly weigh up each individual’s intentions at every moment. It would certainly save a lot of time and mental effort. In this model, faith is about a willingness to trust, to give the benefit of the doubt, in game-theoretical terms, to play *generous* tit for tat, as it were.
Religion in fact misappropriates faith by applying it to an essentially factual/scientific question – the existence or otherwise of a (usually ill defined) deity – piggybacking on a concept which originally evolved to ease social interaction and group cooperation. Or I could be talking complete nonsense…