The Ambiguity of Religious Passion

This week I read an account from the UK of a tai chi group being told they could no longer practice on church premises. The teacher of the tai chi group practiced with patients in a local hospital as part of their wellness program. After one of her clients in the hospital read the story in the local newspaper, he refused to have any more tai chi therapy, believing it to be bad.

The minister of the church said, "Our understanding is that the basis of tai chi is an Eastern religion, and from the church's point of view that isn't something that we want to be involved in."

It is often the case that reasonable, highly religious people, full of religious zeal persecute others who follow a different way. In the New Testament, Saul of Tarsus was one such man. It says,

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Persecution is a strange word—it is not a part of our everyday language. It means to be hostile to someone, to subject him or her to ill treatment. Usually it is because of their religious or political beliefs, or because they happen to belong to the wrong race or ethnicity. It is often out of pure spite, prejudice or hatred. Yet, it is often because the one persecuting seeks the best for the other. Their beliefs or lifestyle are considered so wrong that they must suffer hostility in order to change their ways. In the long run, the persecution is for the person's own good. So the script reads!

My thoughts turn to the ambiguity of religious passion. In the world in which we live, I think it is hard to be a person of faith. Not because believing is in itself difficult to do (though belief has its issues now as it has always) but because the practitioners of religion in the contemporary world are so often violent, so often persecutors of others. Their religious passion leads them to do harm—harm now that good may come in the future. I do not want to pick on any one religion. In this regard all religions are the same: all have their religious zealots. It seems the world is more full of them now than at any time. If you thought the wars of religion ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 after the Thirty Years War, think again. Take a look at what is happening in Nigeria and a score of other sub-Saharan African nations. Listen to the rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations”—Islam against Christian western democracy. Even in Tibet, despite the pleas of the Dalai Lama, passionate Buddhists have turned to take up arms. Think, too, of the internecine religious struggles in Northern Ireland (where, thankfully, some change is beginning to be seen). And finally, since the death of Ghandi and Indian partition, Muslims and Hindus have been continually hostile to one another. It is often because of religious passion. They even threaten each other with nuclear weaponry. Truly, religious passion has no bounds!

Like religion itself, religious passion can be very good and very bad. It can also be very irrelevant (in terms of effect on others) when religious passion is a purely private affair, with no social outworking.

Religious passion is ambiguous. Without religious passion, would we have seen the end of the slave trade? Without religious passion, would Martin Luther King Jr. have pressed for integration? Without religious passion, would we have seen the advancement of medical care, the care for the poor?

Saul of Tarsus in the New Testament is just one example, on a small scale, of where religious passion often leads. Threats, murder, seeking the imprisonment of the offender. Can a leopard change its spots? Can the religiously inspired hurter become a religiously inspired lover?

I think so. Saul, in the story, is one example to give us hope. His is, perhaps, not the best example, but a good one. From a persecutor of others he becomes, in the words of F.F. Bruce “the apostle of the free spirit.” His passion turned from persecution to love, from law to grace, from religious conformity to the freedom of the spirit. He worked hard at breaking down religious and ethnic differences. He opened the way for women to lead in the communities he created. In a limited way, he presented a new way of looking at slavery—not yet a liberationist, but saw all as slaves of Christ. Of course, we can point to areas where Paul (new name for a new person) still adopted the old patterns. I suspect he would still have hostility to those he perceived as sexually aberrant. Yet, by and large, the change is amazing, the leopard changed its spots (or at least, quite a few of them).

Back to my story of the tai chi group being asked to leave a church. I am sobered to think that 30 years ago I would have agreed with the minister.

What then can we say about religious passion? Should we avoid it like the plague or embrace it in the hope that some good will come. I am tempted, to be brutally honest, to opt for the former. I have seen so much damage caused by religious passion. Aristotelian balance is quite appealing to me! Yet, here is a idea: religious passion can be a good thing when it is grounded in the kind of love that seeks only the well being of the other, seeks to do no harm and respects the personal integrity and autonomy of everyone. It needs to be rooted in nonviolence, both as an internal discipline and an outer practice. Without this, religious passion quickly becomes destructive and a travesty of love. Even when love is defined as, “to seek the neighbor’s good,” without a commitment to nonviolence, to no harm, “the neighbor’s good” can become an excuse to harm. “I torture you now, so you will go to heaven later,” says the Inquisitor.

My final thought is this. In the story of Saul the persecutor, in a vision the Christ says to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” The Christ is always the one persecuted, never the one persecuting. Wherever harm is done, the Christ is the one harmed, incarnate in the other. My desire is to be found as a person of nonviolence, of love, and not to be confronted as a persecutor of others.

+Ab. Andy