I’ve recently returned from a visit to Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, a town where preparations for the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation are bordering on frantic. I brought home with me a pair of famous Luther socks – “here I stand I can do no other”- their popular appeal second only to the Luther Playmobil figure, the fastest selling German toy of all time!
The Governmental office of Luther2017 responsible for the civic commemorations says it wants to “show the effects of the Reformation on art, culture, education, language, society and politics.” The word “religion” howls its absence. Partly that’s because – in a country with a self-conscious separation between Church and State – the Government is wary of treading on Church toes. But it’s also because it wants this anniversary to mean something for people without a religious interest or vocabulary.
In a poll a few years ago Martin Luther emerged as the second greatest German of all time. Yet the theologians and pastors I met here told me that people’s knowledge about him is superficial at best. Wittenberg, a 40 minute train journey from Berlin, belonged to the former East Germany. Church membership here (measured according to payment of a church tax) stands at less than 15%. In the former West Germany it’s closer to 50%, although declining. According to Hans Kasch of the Lutheran World Federation, East Germany is the most secularised part of the world after North Korea and the Czech Republic. A generation grew up in a society where religion was not discussed and therefore, what we have come to call religious literacy is low, not just in that generation but in that of their children too.
When I got home, my blog feeds were all pointing me to recent research from Stephen Bullivant at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, showing that in England and Wales, people who identify as having no religion (known as Nones) now outnumber Christians. Not having a religious belief does not, of course, mean that people are religiously illiterate. There are also plenty of people confessing faith who manage to restrict their understanding to one particular cultural expression of religion. But it does mean that we have to pay attention to where people get their information and understanding of religion from.
We know that Europe is what sociologist Grace Davie calls “the exceptional case” and that the world beyond European borders is becoming more religious, not less. The movement of peoples across continents means that the religious complexion of Europe is changing too. Young people will be ill-equipped to function in the global community if they don’t understand the roles that faith plays in the lives of most of the world’s people.
The authors of Blind Spot – When Journalists Don’t Get Religion write persuasively about the critical role played by the media in informing people about religion, and the problems that occur when they fail to appreciate its impact in human, social and political affairs. Jenny Taylor, founder of Lapido Media, put the point dramatically to the newly formed All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on religious literacy in the media: “The West has become a menace to the whole world because of its secularist blinkers. The world is full of religion and we meddle with it at our peril.”
I remember my own steep learning curve after the events of 9/11, which stimulated a desire to learn about Islam and the reading of it that could possibly have lead the terrorists to act as they did. It wasn’t something my own journalist training had prepared me for ten years earlier. Any suggestion it might have done would have been met with incredulity. It can be fairly argued that a journalistic training which teaches the rigour of identifying the story, checking facts and sources and ensuring balance and impartiality means that students should be equipped to tell any story, whether religious or not. Acting on the suggestion put to the APPG that there should be a religious expert in every newsroom runs the risk that ignorance about religion can continue to be worn as a badge of honour by everyone else. Still, it’s worth noting that a couple of national newspapers which decided they could do without religion specialists a couple of years ago are now reemploying them.
The US has been ahead of the UK in developing religion courses for its journalism students, although a number of university and charitable bodies here are now doing so. A course at the University of Alaska Fairbanks requires its students to critique of a piece of religious journalism every week and find and report on their own religious stories. But before they do that, students simply have to spend time with people from places of worship or faith activities who they would not normally come across. It is one thing to have the head knowledge of the basic tenets of the world’s faiths (and of the variety of expressions and beliefs within them), but it is quite another to understand what that means in the lives of individual people. Along with clergy, religious educators, and Home Office staff assessing asylum claims, journalists can get hung up on what people believe, but it is more often the lived experience of faith that they will need to communicate to their audiences; and that is much harder to do.
You can’t “get” religion if you don’t get that. In the same way, you won’t begin to fathom Luther and all that followed if you don’t appreciate that his starting point was a burning existential question about how a person could get right with God and be saved.
Rosie Dawson is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.
It’s not just me then. In a letter to the Catholic Weekly The Tablet (16th January 2016) Steve Wilson wrote,
“I have asked friends for a definition of this word. We have consulted dictionaries and trawled the internet. So far not one of us has found a meaningful contemporary understanding of the word mercy. It does not speak in a relevant way to any of us…”
It’s Pope Francis favourite word, of course. His Jubilee Year of Mercy aims to focus the mind of the church on God’s mercy. With his global reach if anyone can bring the word back into popular usage it is him. But what’s the value of the word beyond God-talk? Is it a useful concept in secular public discourse or is hampered by its religious associations? Can it be broadened in such a way as to positively inform society’s attitudes to vulnerable groups and individuals?
What would it mean for a discussion of the refugee crisis, for example, if mercy was considered a public virtue? Imagine if you will a U.S. presidential race in which the candidates’ policies towards migrants were subject to a mercy-audit. For Donald Trump the word doesn’t appear to exist without a “No” in front of it. He wants Muslims kept out of the USA and a wall built along the thousand-mile border with Mexico. On the other hand, when Barbara Walters asked Bernie Sanders what he would want to be remembered for were he to become President, he simply said “Compassion.”
A close match. Both compassion and mercy involve responding to the needs of people over whom one has power. But mercy carries the connotation that the response is one that the recipient doesn’t strictly deserve. That’s because of its religious usage and legacy; God’s mercy, being more than we can earn or hope for, in some sense goes against the grain of justice. So if we hear the word at all today it’s in the area of the criminal justice system where a Judge may be said to show mercy to an offender by imposing a lesser sentence than the crime warranted. It’s also used in respect of assisted dying – a “mercy killing” – where the terrible wrong of taking a life is mitigated by the easing of suffering. In both cases there’s the idea that mercy is at odds with what human instinct, reason or natural justice tells us should be the case; namely that offenders owe a debt to society that should be paid, and that life should be preserved at all costs.
So if we don’t hear the word it’s because there’s something not quite right about showing mercy. It does someone else out of justice. “Going soft” on criminals may mean victims’ demands are ignored. Granting refugees asylum and citizenship raises the fears that other people will lose the jobs and housing to which they are entitled by dint of nationality or payment of taxes. If mercy is to be practiced at all it has to be strictly rationed.
The idea of mercy declined in public discourse with the arrival of the Enlightenment and its ideas about democracy and rights. It’s all very well to speak of mercy in a society in which monarchy and hierarchy are part of the given order, but once everyone is equal, doesn’t the virtue of mercy itself become suspect – at least as a public value? Equality and Justice should surely suffice.
But – this side of the Kingdom – as the Pope says, mercy is what you need to make justice truly just. U.S. Scholar James Gilman agrees. In his book Christian Faith, Justice and a Politics of Mercy he argues that justice, as commonly perceived in liberal societies, only goes so far. We can enshrine peoples’ human rights in international and national law but those don’t of themselves deliver equality of opportunity and sustainable livelihoods. A move from liberal justice to what Gilman calls “egalitarian justice” requires “policies of mercy” which prioritise the needs of the most disadvantaged. And since the idea of mercy acknowledges the unequal relationship between those that bestow it and those that receive it, its policies must go beyond charitable hand outs. They must empower its beneficiaries in such a way that the power structures which created that inequality in the first place are disrupted.
So a question to ask of a mercy-audit is what it means for the relationship between the powerful and powerless. It can be seen early in the first instance in the symbolic actions and gestures governments make towards refugees. There’s no misreading the message of the power- boats sent out from the Greek coastline to force fragile dinghies packed with people back to Turkey, or of the Danish proposal to dispossess new arrivals of any valuables they have managed to hang onto during their journey. By contrast, put yourself in the shoes of the refugee arriving in Canada to find him/herself greeted by the Prime Minister. Or listen to the song which went viral, of Canadian children singing a traditional song first sung, it is said, by residents of Medina to welcome refugees from Mecca.
It does lift the heart to hear it. But of course the real challenge is to move beyond the symbolic expression of mercy to action. “Policies of mercy” taken seriously may lead to a profound unease (more honestly owned up to by the anti-refugee lobby) on the part of even the most generous. As the anonymous quote currently doing the rounds says, “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality (justice – and even mercy) can feel like oppression.”
Rosie Dawson is an Associate Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation.