The sectarian stigma

RELIGION
R D Kernohan challenges the PC view which demands quiet co-existence between faiths

Photograph by Islay McLeod

I thought that even the editor of the Scottish Review might run for cover when I suggested a pair of articles putting in some carefully chosen good words for what current fashion may label sectarianism. I did him an injustice and I hope I have not enrolled him in what the Te Deum calls 'the noble army of martyrs'.
     For nothing is more politically correct in contemporary Scotland than to be non-sectarian. The national church (if that expression is not yet under interdict or rendered ridiculous by events) makes apologies for things said 80 years ago in committee reports and more than 350 years ago in confessional statements. The Roman church, when defending its separated sector of state education, explains that its schools, far from cementing sectarianism in Scottish life, teach tolerance and mutual understanding in a multi-faith society.
     And while here in Edinburgh people still eagerly ask: 'What school did you go to? – for that is a sociological inquiry – the same question is rather frowned-upon now in my native Glasgow for fear it may seem a theological one. But I have three objections to the current non-sectarian orthodoxy.
     The first is that it provides convenient camouflage. It helps those who are not just anti-sectarian but anti-religious to prise away at what remains of what the great Scottish Victorian A H Charteris called 'the national recognition of religion' – a term he used to look beyond the sectarian conflict over 'establishment' and 'the voluntary principle' which so vexed most of our Scottish ancestors. It is easy to be anti-sectarian when you cannot understand why anyone should adhere to a sect. We have already reached a stage where the real establishment is of liberal secular assumptions and modes of thought, with tolerance for what, when I last checked on the current jargon, were called 'faith communities'.
     In education our non-denominational schools, heirs of the Reformation tradition of godly and accessible learning, are wrongly regarded as secular ones, and even Roman Catholic ones are not immune from the pressures. In the health service I am now offered 'Hello' and 'Saga' magazine, but no longer the Bible, in my surgery waiting-room. Nurses are reprimanded for mentioning prayer and hospital chapels call themselves something else. Employers scan their workers' jewellery for religious symbols. Churches and religious societies may still be allowed a subsidiary role in provision of social services (as they were even in communist East Germany) but while their work retains its religious inspiration and ethos it has to be carried on according to priorities and regulations determined elsewhere.
     My second objection to the current orthodoxy is that it lumps together as 'sectarianism' ways of life and thought which have nothing in common with each other. There is sectarianism which is mere tribalism tinctured by the rotted debris of decayed religion. Donald Findlay QC recently made a brave attempt, in his professional capacity, to defend aspects of it on grounds of human rights and freedom of speech. I had some sympathy for his case until I managed to trace the words of the 'famine song', far nastier than anything in the mild little orange and green song-books published by Mozart Allan and once sold side by side by Woolworths in Sauchiehall Street.
     Similar, if less eloquent, attempts are sometimes made to justify the hymnody of the IRA and insults to the crown as some kind of cherished ethnic rite. Such claims of right and antisocial rites are often linked to religious slogans but have no religious meaning. Those who revel in them think Ignatius Loyola is somebody recently signed by Real Madrid. And such crude but essentially irreligious attitudes can even be murderous when embedded in the far broader and trans-sectarian Scottish lowlife culture of drinking and violence. They merit the social and legal disapproval they now encounter.
     That disapproval ought not to extend to plain speaking about differences of religion, whether among Christians or between them and Islam, many of whose spokesmen in Europe manage to be extraordinarily sensitive and assertive at the same time. There will always be those who carry this liberty to its limits, as the late Pastor Jack Glass and the early Ian Paisley sometimes did; and there will be others who make rather ridiculous use of it, like the priest whose website assures me that John XXIII (by far the best of recent popes, because he was a learner and not just a teacher) was a dangerous freemason. But their views, however extreme, are part of a search for truth as well as an exercise of civil and religious liberty.
     That is why my third and most important objection to the present political and ecclesial correctness is that it discourages more reasonable and better informed searchers. They are discouraged – more by self-restraint than church regulations – from arguing too vigorously the claims, strengths, and weaknesses of the main Christian traditions at a time when some old differences remain very important but new divisions among Christians often cut across old divisions and create new ad hoc alliances. For such ententes do emerge – whether in 'liberation theology' and similar impulses on the political Left or on the socially and theologically conservative Right, sympathetic to 'pro-life' arguments, and fearful of sexual anarchy.
     The instinct of Protestant church leaders – including what the editor of the Scottish Review correctly calls 'the liberal establishment' in the Scottish Kirk – is to huddle as comfortably as possible on as much common ground as possible. The instinct of the Roman Catholic ones seems to be to stay in this huddle most of the time, nipping out occasionally to relieve themselves by crying 'murderers' at some abortionists or stem-researchers. That tone, I fear, makes it more difficult to carry on dialogue, never mind find consensus. But I think I prefer these Roman indiscretions to the Protestant passivity, just as I prefer Pope Benedict's notorious botched-up discussion of aggressive and intolerant tendencies in Islam (when he let controversy focus on a medieval quotation) to Archbishop Williams' botch-up when he seemed all too friendly to Sharia law.
     I understand these instincts of both sets of leaders for a quiet co-existence, especially when they have seen Rome and Canterbury fall into the traps set for unwary scholars, but I wonder if it would not occasionally be better for each part of the church to be more candid about what it thinks of the others and, for that matter, of Islam. Rather than resent any criticisms, any religion should consider them as part of what should be its own continual process of self-criticism or reformation. In the second part of this dip into dangerous currents I shall suggest what a few of these criticisms might be.
     A reversion to sectarianism? But 'sectarianism' is one of those terms, like racism or sexism or homophobia or fundamentalism, whose meaning is both so subjective and elastic that their denunciation can be used to promote the users' prejudices, not least by campaigners against alleged prejudice and discrimination. For there are no bigots more determined than bigoted liberals, as both the Kirk and the Anglican Communion have recently discovered in their uncertainty over applying their own doctrine of marriage and sex.
     That is why I am ready to put a word in for a more positive affirmation than is now fashionable of the beliefs and practices that divide Christians and not just the things that unite them in the church – whose roll-book is known only to God and is made up, as the Calvinist confession says, of all those 'that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one under Christ'.

Part II will follow on Thursday