TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Tony Blair

Faith matters. Even if you are not of religious faith yourself. Over 4 billion people world-wide recognize themselves as religious. They may not attend an organized place of worship. But Faith plays a part in their lives. A recent poll found that religion is important for around 30-35% of people in Europe, 65% of Americans and for about 90% of people in most Muslim-majority countries.

I started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation because I believe the modern world cannot work unless people from different faiths and cultures learn to live in peaceful co-existence with each other. Understanding increases the possibility of peace. Ignorance increases the potential for division.

The reason this is so important today is that globalization is shrinking the space we live in, making us share it, pushing people together in a way that is unique in human history. Some dislike this process. Some, like me, are content and even welcome it. But, for sure, it is a fact.

In this world, if religious faith becomes a counter force to this process, one which pulls people apart, then it becomes reactionary and divisive. So if I define myself as a Christian in opposition to you as a Muslim, then just as we are forced to live together by globalization, so we are forced apart by a view of religious faith that is exclusionary and hostile to those of a different faith to our own.

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Labels: faith, globalization, tolerance, Tony Blair, Tony Blair Faith Foundation

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Friday, January 23, 2009

The greatest American innovation in religion is tolerance

Andrew Brown
Wednesday 21 January 2009

Watching Obama's inauguration with its repeated invocations of the deity, both formal and informal, it struck me how astonishingly prolific America has been in religious inventions. A short list of religious ideas invented in America would include at the very least religious toleration (from Rhode Island) from the 17th century, the open-air revival meeting (from the Great Awakening) from the 18th, Adventism, and Mormonism, from the 19th century and Pentecostalism and Alcoholics Anonymous from the 20th.

Then there are all the American innovations which are either questionably religious, like worshipping your own constitution or the "free market", or were in some sense pioneered in Europe, like theocratic model settlements. This last also falls into the third category: American religious innovations that were ultimately unsuccessful, along with Christian Science, utopian communes, and, let us hope, scientology.

But the successful American religious innovations have all spread round the world. They have not just become ideas, but transnational cultures bound up with ritual and strengthened by myths about their own history. There has been nothing at any other period of history like that fountain of social invention emerging from one country or civilisation.

Their success is often taken to be an endorsement of the free market in religions: more precisely, it is argued that this is the outcome of consumer choice, as opposed to some nationalised model of religious provision. But to see these belief systems as choices made by rational and autonomous adults is to misunderstand what made them successful and what distinguishes them from the failures.

In the shopping model of religion, nothing much hangs upon your choice. If it doesn't fit, you can give it back, or go to another church. And of course a lot of American religion runs like this, but when it does, it doesn't last. The ones which have lasted and spread are those whose adherents feel that they don't have a choice. They are not deciding what to believe. They are recognising what is true.

This is most obvious in the case of AA, where it is also explicit. The convert is told that unless they understand the world in a certain way, they will die; and so far as anyone can tell, that's actually true. But of course this isn't and doesn't have to be denominational. As it happens, the three AA members I know best are all Christians, but that, I think, is because they are all journalists more or less specialising in religious affairs. But they are none of them proselytisers and I know slightly a couple of alcoholics who were distressed to have to invoke a higher power to stay alive. It went against all their principles. I want to get some of them to write about this experience, but that's for later.

If you don't convert, as to Pentecostalism or AA, then the inevitable quality of the religion has to arise from childhood. I think this is much less effective than conversion as an adult. If it were really the case that childhood indoctrination is impossible to break, the Catholic church in Ireland would never have collapsed: what happened there was broadly speaking that an entire generation which had been brought up as Catholic children stopped as adults believing and performing the rituals of belief and then failed to pass on either to their children. If these ideas about indoctrination were true, this could not have happened at all. But it did happen, for reasons which aren't entirely clear, but which seem to go back to the generation before the one that lost its faith: it's not enough to bring children up in certain beliefs, or rituals. What's needed is that life should continue to reinforce the message that these rituals work, and that the beliefs are true even if you can't see why.

Incidentally, there is of course nothing uniquely religious about a belief that is true because it just is. I have absolutely no idea why Australians don't fall off the bottom of the planet. I know there is a force called gravity, and that it works and accelerates things at 32ft per second per second. But I have absolutely no idea why this should be the case; it's just a given fact about the universe. Actual religious faith can work that way too. It doesn't appear to the believer as a willed belief, but as a recognition of brute truth.

This is of course extremely frightening. It's not much fun from from the inside, but it's even worse from outside and that's why I think that the greatest American innovation is the first: religious tolerance. It demands the ability to marry an experience of inner compulsion with the terrifying understanding that other people may have inner compulsions which are just as real and compelling, but entirely different from yours. This is horribly unnerving when you understand it applies even to of members of your own tribe. But it now seems to most Americans a simple brute fact about human nature, which they understand their constitution to say with its talk about the separation of church and state. Of course, that means they can't understand people who don't think the American constitution is a vehicle of universal truths, but then no tolerance is perfect and this one has just been proved a little wider than anyone thought possible a year ago.

Labels: America, Andrew Brown, innovation, President Obama, religion, tolerance

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Former New York Times reporter looks at growth of interfaith movements

Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

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INSIGHTS: Arguing that interfaith understanding is crucial, Gustav Niebuhr says: "Religion is to the 21st century what ideology was to the 20th."

In 'Beyond Tolerance,' Gustav Niebuhr examines the ways various religions are reaching out to one another. But obstacles remain as many faiths preach that they are the one true way.

By Steve Padilla, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 30, 2008

Conflicts between religions continue to rock the world, but when Gustav Niebuhr looks out on the religious landscape, he sees what he calls the "possibility of community."

Niebuhr, an associate professor of religion at Syracuse University, detects an encouraging (he calls it unprecedented) trend: people of faith reaching out to those of other faiths.

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This is not to suggest conflicts between religions will end soon, if ever. Just this week, Hindu mobs destroyed more than a dozen churches and attacked Christians in India.

But in Niebuhr's work as a professor and, before that, a reporter on religion for the New York Times, he began noticing that, bit by bit, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims were making efforts to learn about other faiths. Niebuhr explores the trend in his new book, "Beyond Tolerance" (Viking), and came to Southern California this month as part of a book tour.

He argues there is urgent need for interfaith work, given the way religion now sometimes splits, and endangers, the world in the way the Cold War once did. "Religion is to the 21st century what ideology was to the 20th," Niebuhr said.

The title "Beyond Tolerance" conveys one of Niebuhr's principle themes, and he discussed the work on a recent weekday before he spoke at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Groups can tolerate one another, he noted, without really getting along. A lack of conflict doesn't necessarily mean cohesion.

"Tolerance is not enough because there's no educational component to it," Niebuhr said. "Tolerance doesn't bust down stereotype. Tolerance doesn't put a face on faith."

Niebuhr argues, with anecdotes and statistics, that thousands of believers from a wide variety of faiths are trying to reach across religious divides. He cites a 2000 study of 14,000 U.S. congregations by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

The report, "Faith Communities Today," found that 7% of American congregations had participated in some interfaith activity, such as holding a joint religious service. It also found that 8% had collaborated with another congregation on a community service project.

That may not sound like much, Niebuhr writes, but with an estimated 335,000 churches in the United States, that translates to 20,000 to 25,000 congregations teaming up for such work.

"But the original survey provided a baseline for a second, more intriguing one five years later," Niebuhr writes. "This time around, the institute reported that the number of houses of worship participating in inter-religious worship had tripled to more than 22%, while the number that joined in community service had risen more than fourfold to 38%."

Niebuhr concludes: "A cultural shift had taken place." In the interview, he put it this way: "People are not beyond redemption. People can learn. People can cooperate."

What's prompting the shift?

Mass communication has made it easier to reach out beyond one's own group. He notes that in the 1990s, Hindu temples on the East Coast began holding open houses so their neighbors could learn about them.

This practice has been taken up by many mosques and for some has become a yearly event. This month, "Open Mosque Day" was observed by many Islamic congregations in Southern California. Look at many mosque websites, Niebuhr said, and you'll often find an option called "take a tour."

The interfaith movement -- and "Beyond Tolerance" -- were not prompted by 9/11, but the terrorist attacks helped shape them. Niebuhr was in Manhattan that day and reported on the World Trade Center attack for the New York Times. "You were in the presence of a crematory," he said.

He found himself thinking of religious tolerance and acceptance -- ideas already brewing for years -- and decided that if "tolerance is all we can manage," the victims of 9/11 deserved better.

As Niebuhr researched his book, he encountered a variety of efforts to reach out. He ran across a nun who organized discussions of about six people from different faiths; it was a small effort, but it was her way of building understanding.

He also frankly describes the difficulty of reaching out. Niebuhr writes of an effort by a group of Buddhists and Roman Catholics to forge ties in Los Angeles.

He quotes from a report by the group: "It challenged us to articulate to one another what we took for granted among ourselves."

Labels: 9/11, Gustav Niebuh, interfaith, religion, Steve Padilla, tolerance

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Survey Says: People Are Happier

The 2008 World Values Survey found that freedom of choice and tolerance—and not simply wealth—have lots to do with a rise in happiness

by Matt Mabe

Happiness hunters have done it again. They've used an army of pollsters and a mountain of data to uncover the world's happiest countries. But this year, there are some unexpected winners—for unexpected reasons.

The World Values Survey, which has compiled data from 350,000 people in 97 countries since 1981, found Denmark to be home to the planet's most contented citizens (again) with Zimbabwe as the most miserable (again). Classic Scandinavian front-runners like Sweden and Finland were nudged out of the top 10 by Puerto Rico and Colombia. El Salvador placed a surprising 11th, beating out Malta and Luxembourg. Further down the list came the U.S., ranked in 16th place.

Directed by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and administered from Stockholm, the survey found that freedom of choice, gender equality, and increased tolerance are responsible for a considerable rise in overall world happiness. The results shatter the more simplistic and traditionally accepted notion that wealth is the determining factor, says Inglehart.

This year, the analysts were shocked by their findings. Reported happiness had actually risen in 40 countries and decreased in just 12. Inglehart, who has been involved in this research for 20 years, says the results defied conventional wisdom on the subject of happiness, which has held that levels remain more or less static. "We knew it couldn't happen," he says. "I said to myself, 'Do I dare report this?'"

Inglehart's team figured it needed a better explanation for the data. "Most of the earlier studies, including my own, were based on economic factors, which are something you can simply pull off a bookshelf and look up," he says. "If that's all you look at, then that's all you find."

What the survey found this year is that freedom of choice and social acceptance are the most powerful forces behind national moods. "Money's pretty powerful, but it's not the whole story," says Inglehart, though he maintains that a strong correlation still exists between high standards of living and happiness measures.

It's Not Just About Money

Generally, a rising global sense of freedom in the last quarter-century has eclipsed the contribution of pure economic development to happiness, he says. This is especially evident in developed countries with stable economies, where the freedom of choice gained through wealth has made people happier—not necessarily the wealth itself.

Social tolerance is another important factor in how happy a country rates itself. Over the last quarter-century, growing gender equality and acceptance of minorities and homosexuals has played a major role in those European countries found to be the most content. No. 7-ranked Switzerland, for instance, has elected two women as head of state in the last 10 years, while No. 4-ranked Iceland has recently passed laws guaranteeing virtually all the same rights to gay couples that married couples enjoy. "The less threatened people feel, the more tolerant they are," says Inglehart. Tolerance simply has a rippling effect that makes people happier.
Gratitude Improves Attitude

While Inglehart does not profess to know the true secrets of happiness, he says that this most recent study has made the picture a bit clearer. In his opinion, benevolence and expressions of gratitude appear to be subtle but powerful ways to bring happiness into one's life and to extend it. Religion and solidarity in the community play a big role in this, he says, but any positive belief system can help. "Latin America seems to understand this," he says.

"In the old days I would have told you to work hard and save your money," says Inglehart. "It's different today. I just haven't nailed it down yet."

Labels: freedom, happiness, Matt Mabe, Ronald Inglehart, tolerance, wealth