Editorial

This special issue of Theology focuses upon the public role of Anglican cathedrals. Three of the writers, Lynda Barley, Ian Stockton and Christopher Irvine, are themselves residentiary canons. The contributor on Difficult Texts, Anthony Phillips, also has long cathedral experience as a former Headmaster of Kings School Canterbury. The other contributor on cathedrals is Fraser Watts, who is otherwise well known for his scholarly work on religion and psychology.

These articles raise very important questions about the Church in modern society. Two veteran scholars of religion have published significant books this year that help to contextualize these questions:

Grace Davie, Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox, 2nd edn, Wiley Blackwell: Oxford, 2015; 280 pp.: 9781405135955, £55.00/$95.00 (hbk), 9781405135962, £21.99/$39.95 (pbk)

John Bowker, Why Religions Matter, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2015; 362 pp.: 9781107085114, £55.00/$85.00 (hbk), 9781107448346, £19.99/$29.99 (pbk)

Both books are concerned centrally with a religious paradox. For Grace Davie, Emeritus Professor of the Sociology of Religion, this paradox is sociological. She puzzles over the fact that, apart from cathedrals, churches across denominations in Britain are in a serious state of overall decline, yet religion in general is given an increasing amount of attention in public debate. For John Bowker, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, the religious paradox is more ethical in character. He argues that religions, even in the modern world, are important and contribute significantly to human good, yet paradoxically they are also deeply involved in conflict around the globe.

Grace Davie’s book is technically a second edition. In Short Notices two years ago (Theology 117.1), I recommended the second edition of her important textbook The Sociology of Religion, but noted that it added a new Preface but left most of the text unchanged. The interval between those two editions was, after all, just six years. This time the interval between editions is twenty-one years, and she has changed both the subtitle and most of the text and even distanced herself somewhat from her earlier views. The result is a well-written, carefully researched and judicious sociological assessment of religion in modern Britain outstripping most of its rivals. She reassesses the most discussed feature of her earlier edition, captured in its subtitle ‘Belief without Belonging’ and moves beyond that. Manifestly Christian belief has declined significantly over the last two decades along with Christian belonging, with the British becoming decidedly more secular as a result. Instead her focus now is upon three distinctive (and, in part, positive) features: vicarious religion; religion as a matter of choice rather than obligation; and increasing religious diversity. Those familiar with her writings will know this already. But she does it well and brings to it a remarkably extensive knowledge of other European churches. Overall this is an excellent summary of a life-time of research that continues to guide both scholars and church leaders.

John Bowker is now eighty and from an online interview clearly sees his new book as a life-time summary (<http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/religion-general-interest/why-religions-matter>, accessed 23 June 2015). He writes and speaks with passion about both the importance and the danger of religions. His thesis is:

[W]e need to understand religions better, not just because they can be terrifyingly evil and destructive in what they do but also because they are the context in which the finest and ultimately most important possibilities in life are opened up before us – certainly the most far-reaching achievements of mind and spirit, but also of God and Enlightenment as well. And that is what I have called the paradox of religions: religions are such bad news only because they are such good news. Religions are the vehicle delivering into human life and history the greatest possible treasure, truth and delight, and for that reason people (or at least some people) would rather die than lose or betray them. If necessary, and particularly if a religion demands it, people will not simply be defensive; they will take the fight to those whom they perceive to be the enemy. (p. 42)

As with Grace Davie, John Bowker makes constant references back to his previous studies, and those familiar with them can expect no surprises. He has a functional understanding of religions – for him they are means of understanding death and generating meaning, deploying myth, ritual and imagination. He has an immense knowledge of world religions and is ever sensitive to both their external and internal differences and variations. A particularly thoughtful chapter looks at the tension between dogma and doubt in a variety of religions as well as (ironically) in science. He is unimpressed with both scientism and religious fundamentalism and is clearly thoroughly irritated by Richard Dawkins and the new atheists. But arguably he constructs too much of this book in response to the latter. Yet he accepts part of their challenge when agreeing that ‘religious warriors’ (as he calls them) with access to nuclear, biological and chemicals do present a real threat today – a threat which Western politicians, ill-educated in religious studies, are not well equipped to understand.

The relationship between religion and violence has been the subject of quite a number of books recently. Most of the ones that I have reviewed in Short Notices (Theology 117.1, 2 and 6) are less bleak than his about the extent of specifically religious violence. Reading Julián Casanova’s A Short History of the Spanish Civil War (I.B.Tauris, 2012), for example, it is clear that the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Spain sided heavily with Franco against the Republicans (and paid severely with many hundreds of priests and religious murdered and reliquaries desecrated). But in what sense did this make this a religious civil war? Arguably Franco (who had no compunction about killing Basque priests) would, with Nazi and Fascist help, have fought and won this horrific war with or without the legitimacy provided by his church. One study of 1,763 recorded wars through history found only 123 to be ‘religious in nature’ (<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/14/religions-war-cause-responsible-evidence_n_6156878.html>, accessed 23 June 2015). Much depends upon definitions. If John Bowker, like the new atheists, exaggerates the scale and power of ‘religious warriors’, however, his paradox remains. Any religiously inspired act of terror sits uncomfortably with the beneficent effects of particular forms of religion.

Grace Davie and John Bowker are to be congratulated for raising these religious paradoxes so clearly.