Outside the largest tent in history
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call ‘inter-faith’ projects the largest tents in history - Inside it we have all these faiths that hold completely conflicting views on the way reality is but are willing to put that aside. Sure they may disagree with each other on every conceivable point, the nature of god, the name of god, the number of gods, which impressive hats impress god most, but everyone thinks something strange is going on right? And that means….something. That means they can work together and fix all that is wrong with the world. Inside this large tent they learn about each other, learn how they can live in peace with each other, learn what they have in common and pool their resources to accomplish good in the world. How can anything so inclusive be bad?
The one snag is that I had to keep using ‘they’ there rather than ‘we’, this ecumenicism leaves out one the largest single groups in the world: The non-believers. We are consistently left outside the largest tent in history.
The problem isn’t the idea that we can put differences aside and learn from each other and work together to accomplish great deeds - It’s that the very notion of inter-faith projects is phrased in ways like “faith has special qualities”, “faith makes us better people”, “faith inspires us in ways that nothing else can”, which are all nice, fluffy ecumenical stuff for the religious but directly offensive to those who thought they were doing well enough as human beings without faith. The inter-faith movement is rooted in something that is fundamentally demeaning to the morals and achievements of a growing (but already sizable) portion of the human race. It’s not that we lack language capable of drawing together every kind of person, the humanist tradition has a lot of it, it’s that those running this show either still labour under the misconception they’re still the only game in town or don’t seem to care that they’d come closer to achieving their goals by including non-believers.
I am for some reason on the mailing list of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. They recently started an initiative called Faiths Act, working with Malaria groups to fund getting a million mosquito nets. What can I possibly find fault with here?
As many as three million people die of malaria each year, most of them pregnant women and children under five living in Sub-Saharan Africa. One child dies every 30 seconds. Their deaths are preventable.
Across much of Asia and the rest of the world, malaria continues to strike, and doesn’t discriminate between religions.
No that’s right, it doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t discriminate between religious and non-religious either. This is an issue for all (and would be even if it was only Muslims dying). What is the point of being so ecumenical that anyone who believes anything is inside under the tent, without bringing non-believers into the action? We have money and consciences too. We can save more people together than alone.
Unfortunately it’s not just poor wording in the emails, the Faith Foundation’s mission statement is fundamentally opposed to the ultimate ecumenicism of bringing atheists into the fold.
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.
Faith is vitally important to hundreds of millions of people. It underpins systems of thought and of behaviour. It underpins many of the world’s great movements for change or reform, including many charities. And the values of respect, justice and compassion that our great religions share have never been more relevant or important to bring people together to build a better world.
But religious faith can also be used to divide. We have seen throughout history and today we still see how it can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism.
The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a response to these opportunities and challenges. We will use the full power of modern communications to support and step up efforts at every level to educate, inform and develop understanding about the different faiths and between them.
At the same time, the Foundation will use its profile and resources to encourage people of faith to work together more closely to tackle global poverty and conflict. By supporting such inter-faith initiatives, the Foundation will help underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution.
The very language of the mission statement is designed to make the religious feel better about them, but again, is directly exclusionary to non-believers. Do I not share a similar sense of respect, justice and compassion? The next line is a tad ironic, because the foundation has moved past divisions between faiths to find the one division that’s apparently truly important and worth keeping: the division between the faithful and the nonbelievers.
This seems to be the problem with the Faith Foundation in its present form: it encourages selfless acts for its own selfish ends. Its primary goal isn’t to help people, but to show that faith can help people – that is the first line of the mission statement. This is frustrating because there is a real role for an organization that can pick an important issue and mobilize communities and people (both religious and non-religious) world-wide around it. I didn’t know about the Malaria No More project, now I do and there are a few more bed nets in circulation (here’s a link for anyone who feels like giving). More can be helped if we reach out to all than try to prove petty and self-serving points.
If the Foundation’s role is to be an inter-faith talking shop, then hey, atheists and humanists should be at that table too. I am often annoyed (to put it extremely mildly) when world religious leaders go out of their way to insinuate that people who don’t believe in God are inferior moral beings and responsible for the evils of history (despite any inconvenient facts to the contrary) - It’s quite clear they don’t understand us and need to be educated. Or again, if the Faith Foundation’s role is to coordinate large scale campaigns, then again, there are enough non-religious communities springing up that it’s worth reaching out. For the love of all unholy, use us.
So the question for Tony Blair would be: Is it more important that we ‘underline the religion’s relevance and positive contribution’ or make a tent just a little bit larger and bring a bit more understanding to the world and a few more hands to healing it’s scars? I can’t see how any ‘inter-faith’ project couldn’t accomplish it’s goals better if it scrapped it’s ‘inter-faith’ credo and brought everyone into the tent.
