The role of religious illiteracy in the clash of values

Religious illiteracy is wasteful, dangerous, and foolhardy, Dr Jenny Taylor told a symposium of bankers and industrialists in Switzerland on 29 September.

Speaking at the inaugural Stein am Rhein Symposium near Zurich, the founder of Lapido Media said: ‘Only by recovering a shared religious vocabulary that does justice to the reality, the extremity and the inter-connectedness of our human condition, will leaders be able to give meaningful direction to business planning, service delivery, and international agency around the world.’

Taylor, a pioneer in the emerging field of religious literacy, addressed ninety future leaders from five continents at the symposium hosted by Think Tank Thurgau at the Hotel Chlosterhof in the Swiss resort of Stein am Rhein.

Speakers included Michael Barbalas, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing China; Jeremy Bentham, Vice-President of Global Business Environment and Head of Scenarios Unit for Shell at The Hague; Dr. Jürgen Hambrecht, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of BASF, Ludwigshafen; and Prof. Dr. Yunlong E, from the Conservation Culture Center of Beijing University.

The symposium was held under the auspices of Think Tank Thurgau with the support of the Jakob and Emma Windler Foundation and the City of Stein am Rhein.

Subjects addressed during the three-day gathering included future geopolitical challenges including Chinese demographics, and the environment.

What is religious illiteracy?  

Religious illiteracy is a western NGO going into the Jumla valley in western Nepal to build pit latrines to improve hygiene – not knowing the people won’t defaecate twice in the same spot because it angers the gods.

Religious illiteracy is not seeing 9/11 coming.

It’s thinking religion is irrelevant.  Or that all religions are the same.

It is US ambassadors to Muslim-majority countries not being required to have any training in Islam.  It is Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton régime having a bureau full of economic experts, and only one expert in religion.   

Religious illiteracy is wasteful dangerous, and foolhardy.

There are three things I want to say.  First, that Religious Illiteracy - RI - means you will miss the Point.  Secondly, that you will miss Opportunities.  And thirdly, that you will miss Targets.  That spells POT:  without a religious understanding, the world is, I suggest, going to POT!

1.  Missing the Point.

What religious illiteracy boils down to is the wilful loss of a meaningful vocabulary in our increasingly globalized systems with which to describe and provide for the things that deep down concern us all the most.  It means missing the POINT.  It is not knowing that Asian people do not identify themselves primarily in terms of their race, but as Tariq Modood showed in his Fourth National Survey in UK, in terms of their religion and caste.  The Survey undertaken ten years ago but still extremely important, found that while for Caribbeans (who are mainly Christian), there was a 44% affirmation as to the importance of religion to identity, for Pakistanis this was nearly twice as high at 83% - and for Bangladeshis 75% - two per cent higher than for Indians.  This simply aborts the old ideological anti-racism agenda of the atheist left who by being religion blind have prevented serious engagement with the world’s issues.

2.  Missed Opportunities in Business Planning

Africa is a massively unrealized market – and a lot of that is to do with religious illiteracy.  Take Tanzania.  Ten per cent of Tanzanians (in East Africa) – around four million people - are disabled.  Disability is a religious issue in Africa, where it’s regarded as a divine punishment.  The best you can hope for is to keep the child who brings such shame on you forever out of sight.  If, as a development worker or a business investor you don’t understand the word ‘curse’ because you have a secular take on the world, you’re unlikely even to see those disabled youngsters – or rather you won’t see their absence. So you won’t think to invest in their productivity.  Your motivation will be far too pragmatic to get down that deep into the culture.

But Susie Hart is different.  She is a disabled young English arts graduate who has created a paper-making and crafts project called Neema Crafts (www.neemacrafts.com) in Iringa that now employs 80 formerly unemployed, previously invisible disabled people.  Using elephant dung to make paper products to sell in hotels and safari parks, she has turned a £400 initial investment into a £70,000 business exporting goods to the US and UK.  Susie believes all people are valuable, whether their bodies work well or not, because they’re made in the image of the divine.  Now they come to her.  Religion pays.  Multiply that profit by the number of disabled people in Tanzania and you’re talking $35million dollars of new liquidity in just one part of a continent considered beyond investment.  Elephant dung comes very cheap but the leaven effect of the value put on Tanzania’s most vulnerable is probably priceless.  Even the President has paid a visit to Neema. 

Or again, take Muslim women in the UK, another case of missed opportunity caused by religious illiteracy.  If a Muslim man exercises his Islamic right to divorce (by saying the talaq three times), or takes a second wife, she loses out.  Unlike every other religious group in Britain, Muslims refuse to undertake civil marriage to acquire the protection of secular law.    Out of around 1600 mosques in UK, just 26 are registered as a place for state-recognized marriages to be conducted. So if the marriage fails, the woman has no come back.  The money she’s put into the marriage, her home, honour, community status, even kids – none of these things is protected in law.  And she may not even know whether she is still married or not.  Under shariah law, the man could at any time return to demand his conjugal rights, by saying he was angry or drunk and the divorce is invalid. 

The secular state does not ‘do God’ – as Tony Blair’s press officer once famously said – and so it cannot help here.  Marriage is a civil and moral institution.  It’s apparently not the secular state’s business encouraging people to be moral or to get married, so it has nothing to offer these Muslim women.  Indeed, the British tax system actually penalises marriage – and the secular worldview abandons people to their ‘culture’.  An unemployed couple living apart, or in an "unofficial" relationship, will typically receive £70 more in welfare payments than if they marry or openly live together. As Muslim women become overwhelmed with the problems they face, they cannot contribute to society.  To bring Muslim women fully into the British economy requires a nuanced and detailed grasp of religious facts that the State actively discourages.

3. Missed targets in international development

A failure to appreciate the importance of understanding about religions before embarking on development work has probably contributed the lion’s share of the estimated 2.3 trillion dollars spent on it since 1960, according to one source.  This message was reinforced in 2005 by the Africa Commission Report set up by Tony Blair, which stated: ‘Those who ignore culture are doomed to failure in Africa’.  The report went on: 

The outsiders who ran a workshop on AIDS in Angola recently learned that. They came to pass on their knowledge about transmission and prevention. They left having obtained new understandings of cultural practices such as initiation rites, scar-tattooing, blood brother practices, means of breaking the umbilical cord, polygamy and traditional marriage and healing practices.

These are all religious rituals.  The report went on:

Only then did they come to understand why their education and awareness programmes had not resulted in higher use of condoms or lowered rates of infection. They had not known enough about local cultural norms and values on sexuality.  An appreciation of the role of religion in African life will require some fundamentally different approaches by the international community’ (Africa Commission Report 2005, p. 29).

According to former World Bank researcher Bill Easterly, $2.3 trillion has been spent since 1960 on development, yet... 3 billion people still earn just $2 a day, 840 million people still don’t have enough to eat, 1 billion people still lack clean water, 1 billion adults are still illiterate.1 

In a society of religious illiterates, we become blind to what we have no understanding of; impotent to effect what our discourse disallows; cut off from things-as-they-really-are.

Some of this stems from the belief in evolution.  There is a very deeply held view in western societies that religion has over the last two centuries become sociologically irrelevant.  It is the belief – held with the tenacity of a religion - that secular societies have advanced because they’ve ‘evolved’ - out of religion.  And that religion is a thing of the past. 

This erroneous view is compounded by ideological conviction.  It is part of what sociologist Peter Berger calls ‘the plausibility structure’ of our cultures that religion is universally in decline. The smart money is on anything but God. Consumption and gratification are our attempt to fill the void that is left – and that, you might think, is good for business.  But the global financial catastrophe should shatter that illusion.  That void cannot be filled by material things.  When greed is sanctioned by governments, it knows no bounds.  Aspiration loses its moorings.  The word ‘enough’ simply has no meaning unless it’s a religious meaning.   How you define ‘enough’ can have profound implications on market performance, as we’re now beginning to realize.

Only by recovering a shared religious vocabulary that does justice to the reality, the extremity and the inter-connectedness of our human condition, will leaders be able to give meaningful direction to business planning, service delivery, and international agency around the world.