Salt, Vinegar & Bling
Dr Tina Beattie
If I were asked to name the third person of the Holy Trinity, I would
call her Serendipity because there is sometimes a lovely feeling about
being asked to do something which is meant to fit into an integrated whole
and hoping to goodness it does, and Gavin has certainly set the context
into which I want to contribute the second part of the Symposium as a development
and going on from, rather than questioning anything he has said. So I’m
going to look particularly at literacy – religious literacy – in
a very broad sense, in the context of politics and culture, or social justice
and culture, and I’ve called my paper Salt, Vinegar and Bling.
The title Reading the Runes is thought-provoking, for it suggests something esoteric and mystical in the deciphering of a text, an event or a society. It invites an attentiveness to detail, an awareness of hidden meanings and a respect for the role of interpretation in the ways in which we understand the significance of signs and symbols and make connections between them. But when this task is done properly, with respect to religion certainly, it should leave us with more questions than answers. I always tell our first year students, ‘If you come to study Theology Religious Studies for three years and we send you away thinking you know the answers, we’ve failed you in your education. If you go away knowing the kind of questions its appropriate to ask, we’ve educated you well’. And I tend to think of education in terms of a saying I once heard, that ‘knowledge is what’s left when you’ve forgotten what you learned’. So it’s in that kind of context that I’m exploring some very broad questions this evening and I’m taking as my theme the idea of Salt and Light – the call to the followers of Christ to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And I want to ask how we might interpret those metaphors of salt and light in a post-Christian society where a liberal democratic plurality is threatened by extremism and fragmenting social visions.
With regard to extremism, British society isn’t yet fractured along religious lines, as our American counterparts are heading towards, but I’m afraid that we may be going in a similar direction. We know that widespread discontent among British Muslims is giving rise to violent forms of Islamist extremism, but our own Christian communities are increasingly divided between a resurgence of conservatism, which afflicts Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant communities in different ways and a rather bemused liberalism which flutters on the fringes of our traditions and wonders what to do with itself. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins and his followers are fuelling new forms of religious warfare in their embrace of militant atheism as a rhetorical platform from which to launch ever more hostile attacks on religion.
So the religious picture is complex, threatening perhaps, but definitely not a marginal concern. Those theorists who argued that the process of secularisation was unstoppable in the Western democracies have been proved wrong. Religion has rarely been so newsworthy or significant.
I referred to fragmenting social visions, and we sometimes seem to be a society on the brink of meltdown. A recent survey by researchers at York University found that our young people are among the most miserable in the world, closely rivalled in that position by their American counterparts. Our political debate sounds more and more like a corporate advertising campaign, with the war in Iraq standing put as the monstrous elephant in the living room which refuses to budge, despite Tony Blair’s increasingly desperate attempts to perform the kind of vanishing act for which illusionists like Darren Brown are famous (and for those of you who don’t know of Darren Brown, he once made a Concorde disappear on television – perhaps he bribed the Saudis to buy it!).
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