Learning my religion

On Wednesday The Times carried a piece on how parents would be able to choose ‘ethics’ over religion in draft proposals for a new national curriculum. I suppose one must be pro-choice in these matters. It’s also fashionable to root for ‘what really matters’ rather than for the mumbo-jumbo of saints, chérubins and eternal hellfire. Only fashion can be misleading.

There are many hundreds of nuns in Malta, for example, but not one enjoys a public profile- Mark Anthony Falzon

There is much that I find detestable about Catholicism as we know it. For one, I find it hard to stomach the shameless sexism that dictates, prescriptively and institutionally, which gender is fit for which purpose. The consequences of this pig-headedness are both demonstrable and tragic.

There are many hundreds of nuns in Malta, for example, but not one enjoys a public profile. A number of priests are household names – they write columns in newspapers, spend a great deal of their time on television and so on.

Not so nuns, who by all impressions seem not to have an opinion on divorce, IVF, prison reform, or anything else really. Theirs is but to care, pray, and weep for humanity behind closed walls.

I also find it terribly irritating that on-the-ground-Catholicism should be so obsessed with matters to do with people’s sex and family lives (the sort of matters that bothered Jesus sufficiently for him to doodle in the sand, ironically enough).

I’m sure Catholic theology and official doctrine are infinitely varied and sophisticated. Fact is, however, that my main experience of Catholic ethics as an average Maltese child and teenager was that of an army of churchmen trying their best to keep us in the shadow of a celestial chaste tree. Much of it was patent nonsense too.

We were always being told for example that masturbation is a heinous waste of seed, or that sleeping with a woman who is not one’s wife is tantamount to ‘using her’. The second assumes that the letter ‘o’ (let alone the word ‘multiple’) is missing from women’s dictionaries. I could go on but readers will get the picture.

The point is that these notions cause untold and unnecessary misery to millions. They also produce generations of twisted misogynists, and prudes. Not to mention the Leonardesque smiles on women’s faces.

I should be delighted to see such rough tomfoolery abjured and buried certain fathoms in the earth. Certainly, if this is the sort of ‘religion’ the curriculum has in mind, I wouldn’t wish to see it foisted on unsuspecting schoolchildren.

That I think is part of the argument for discarding religious education. Thing is, there’s so much more to the blessed business than priggery and impossible ideals.

For obvious reasons, I won’t be talking about the dividends of religion generally. In any case, I don’t think it can be boiled down to a vulgar cost-benefit analysis. I’ll therefore limit myself to arguing why it might make sense not to deprive children of it. By ‘religion’ I actually mean things like faith, stories of prophets and angels, and regular ritual practice. The rest (how to be decent to others, the difference between right and wrong, and so on) can actually exist quite happily, godlessly.

I’m afraid the first argument requires a grand word: Civilisation. On lucky days I bump into an ex-student of ours at University whose life seems to orbit his knowledge of and passion for Classics. He’s fluent in both (ancient) Greek and Latin and tends on particularly good days to lapse into descriptions of marriage in third-century Athens or somesuch.

I would never dare instrumentalise such an intellectual arsenal. But this young man’s knowledge really gives him the edge over mortals like myself. He can understand things like etymology, the frescoes of Carracci, and Handel operas much better than I can, simply because he is steeped in the classical roots of European civilisation.

One could plausibly apply the argument to a different (if certainly related) set of roots. Take say Poussin’s paintings or the art of Michelangelo. How would one go about making sense of them if one’s parents had decided that Catholic cosmology can be discarded for ‘ethics’? I’m saying we risk a generation of students who are all interactive whiteboards and nothing to write.

Be that as it may, one doesn’t need to believe in the Olympian pantheon in order to know one’s Homer. Which means we’re still stuck, because Catholicism in schools is not just about learning the Bible as a set of myths. I had to attend Mass daily at school, and we weren’t just told that bread and wine became flesh and blood. We were expected to believe and be moved by it. The second argument is somewhat more complicated and has to do with what one might call the ‘ability empathically to understand’. The best analogy I can think of is Ernest Gellner on nationalism: “I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism... I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs.”

Gellner wrote this as a response to critics who accused his work on nationalism as being soulless and cerebral. His defence was, first, that it is indeed the case that a proper understanding of nationalism requires being ‘sensitive to its spell’ and, second, that he was under such a spell himself. The reference to alcohol is just Gellner at his sardonic best.

I would argue that the surest way to understand what religion is about is to spend at least part of one’s life under its spell. A friend whose ambassadors have for many years been missing from God’s territory told me the other day that he can’t read the story of Lazarus without clearing his throat a few times.

He can go through the whole of the Ramayana quite academically. Even so, he perfectly understands why Hindus should feel about Lord Ram what he feels about Jesus.

My point is not that religion is necessarily the main source of emotionality in life. Many things can do that. But surely, given the persistence of religious belief and practice throughout history, one would be shortchanged to not be able to understand what motivates people to cultivate the sacred. In this sense, a religious education and the consequent ability empathically to understand make the world a more charming place to be.

Had my parents consulted me as a child, I would probably have chosen the ethics over the magical bits. I honestly believed at the time that the former were the more important. I now think the opposite. And unlike Gellner, I don’t need alcohol to find the story of Lazarus profoundly moving.

mafalzon@hotmail.com