Culture and Faith

I live in a foreign land, thus am immersed in a foreign culture. By ‘foreign’, I do not mean simply a place a long way from where I was born. I mean that a ‘method of living’ where norms different to my own are routine and do not merit commentary. The overarching principles defining where I live are sufficiently similar to my own thus I rarely find them either constricting or abrasive. Pond-skating around different cultures, absorbing or rejecting parts of them like a cultural smorgasbord is the meat and potatoes of being an expat. Some love it – like me – others find it intimidating to the extent that they wistfully bring little slices of home into their lives – a VPN for British television, buying Marmite or Branston pickle.

I have no desire to offend my Catholic friends but, in line with other Christian denominations, the Catholic Church, presumably on the grounds of inclusivity or populism, has dipped its toes into the current zeitgeist. Pope Francis recently apologised to ‘indigenous peoples’ and in so doing undermined the faith of which he is the titular head,  declaring that “…never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others…” He seemed to brush aside the fact that intellectual progress in Western civilisation has been shaped, not by success in war, or by commercial and scientific expertise, but by its spirituality. A culture which shapes and forms itself into a vehicle for the greater good and prosperity of all can legitimately be described as superior to one that does not.

The claim that all cultures are equal is skating on thin ice, not least as it leads to relativism, the first casualty of which in the culture war being truth. Further, the idea that relativism is necessarily a ‘good thing’ has woven its way into the public discourse to such an extent that those who dare to disagree are hounded remorselessly on social media and by the Press.

For most Western people today, the word ‘culture’ conjures at best superficial differences—“exotic” dress or food, the convenience of having an Indian restaurant down the street. Grown up thinking informs us, however, that cultures are nothing less than entire and distinct worldviews with their own unique sets of rights and wrongs, often rooted in a religion or philosophy.

T.S. Eliot wrote that: “culture and religion” are inextricably linked and “different aspects of the same thing.”

He wrote:

“Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living…. [N]o culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion…  We can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture.”

Similarly, Anglo-French historian Hilaire Belloc wrote:

“Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it — we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.“

In short, cultures bring much more. The fact is, all values traditionally prized by the modern West—religious freedom, tolerance, humanism and natural justice, monogamy, and so on, did not develop in a vacuum but rather are inextricably wedded to Christian principles which, over the course of some two-thousand years, have had a profound influence on Western societies.

While they are now taken for granted and seen as “universal,” there’s a reason why these values were born and nourished in Christian – not Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Confucian nations. The Enlightenment could not have been born anywhere else. It was the love-child of the Christian West, birthed in times of upheaval, change, radical, divergent thinking and persecution.

This is why all secular Westerners – perhaps arrogantly – see themselves as at the intellectual and cultural apex of all human achievement – “enlightened” thinkers who have left all religious baggage behind with concern only for the material. For them, all religions and cultures are superficialities that will eventually be shaken off by all the peoples of the world as being both irrelevant and a stumbling block to progress.  The non-Western world, according to this thinking, is destined to develop just like the West, which is no longer seen as a distinct culture but rather the end point of all cultures.

The flaw in such thinking is especially on display in the context of Islam who in this new paradigm are seen as embryonic Westerners. Whatever a Muslim may say – calls for jihad, hate for infidels – surely deep down inside he values “secularism,” and appreciates the need to practice his faith privately, respect religious freedom, gender equality, and so on. Thus is he made “in our image,” except, of course, we forget the roots of “our image.”

In reality, the Muslim has his own unique and ancient worldview and set of principles – his own culture – which in turn prompts behaviour that is deemed “radical” by Western, erroneously assumed to be universal, standards.

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN, said recently:

‘For well over a millennium, Islam’s message of peace, compassion, and grace has inspired people the world over.’

In fact, for well over a millennium, Islam caused mass havoc—death and destruction in the name of jihad – beginning in its Arabian homeland, and then spilling out into the world at large.  One century after the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam had, through violent conquest, swallowed up some three-quarters of Christendom—all of North Africa and southwest Asia—and by 732 was in the heart of Europe, plundering, and enslaving. By the fourteenth century, Muslims had, after centuries of warfare, finally managed to conquer eastern Europe.  By the sixteenth century, Muslim slave raiders had reached and returned with slaves from Iceland.  By the seventeenth century, Vienna was on the verge of being conquered.  By the eighteenth century, Muslim slavers provoked the newborn United States of America into its first war as a nation.

(with thanks to Raymond Ibrahim)

T.S. Eliot, again:

“Ultimately, antagonistic religions must mean antagonistic cultures; and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled.”

Not an altogether popular sentiment a quarter of the way through a new century. I wonder if we dare confront the possibility that he may well have been right.

The tip of the spear in such actions is seen in flashpoints all over the world – the seemingly total mindlessness of  antisemitism – seen everywhere from Israel apartheid weeks in universities to random attacks on synagogues. Perhaps the driving forces are similar to those fuelling the unconscionable behaviour of Fulani tribesmen in Nigeria. Their visceral hatred of the entire package of Judaeo-Christian thinking in their view legitimises mass slaughter, church burning and similar atrocities. 57% of Mozambique is Christian, yet similar horror stories perpetrated by a Muslim minority of mass murder, beheadings and even crucifixions surface from time to time, sanitised by the Western media which largely writes these atrocities off as ‘economically fuelled’ or ‘anti-Government’ conflict.

The idea that Muslims can be true to their religion and yet naturally fit into Western society is false and built on an equally false premise: that Christianity somehow also had to reinvent itself to fit into a secular society. In fact, Christian principles, which are in many ways so alien to Islam, were fundamental to the creation of the West with its muddled democracy and sense of fairness.

What, then, of “multiculturalism”—this word that the West is supposed to celebrate and embrace?  Behind it is the idea that all cultures are equal, and none – certainly not Christian or Western culture – “is superior to others,” to quote Francis. Parity of esteem is appropriate insofar as tolerance is a cornerstone of civilised behaviour but is not the same as acknowledging that all identities are equally socially and economically valuable. In reality, a good deal of what we whitewash as ‘multicultural thinking’ is a way of undermining and replacing the truths of our own religion and its culture with moral relativism. 

Earlier Western peoples understood that capitulating to foreign cultural norms was tantamount to cultural suicide.  T S  Eliot again:

 [I]t is inevitable that we should, when we defend our religion, be at the same time defending our culture, and vice versa: we are obeying the fundamental instinct to preserve our existence.

One anecdote well captures this “clash of cultures.”  After the British colonial powers banned sati – Sanskrit for ‘good woman ‘ or ‘chaste wife’- Anglicised as ‘suttee’—the Brahmin practice of the self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre—Hindu priests complained to British governor Charles James Napier that ‘suttee’ was their custom and therefore right, to which he replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pyre. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

Being opposed to “multiculturalism”—that is to say, relativism—is not the same as being opposed to other races or ethnicities but rather being opposed to disunity and chaos.

In short, there’s nothing wrong with a nation whose citizenry is composed of different races and ethnicities – we are all, to one degree or another, refugees –  but only if they share the same worldview, the same priorities, the same ethics, the same sense of right and wrong—in a word, the same culture.