But what, finally, about the issue of the innate exclusivism of revelation-based faith and communities of faith? We have noted that any claim about what is good for humanity as such will have about it an element of exclusivity: it is the reverse side of trying to hold to a perspective of universality and equality in the human world. We cannot, however passionately we want to avoid ‘sectarianism’, settle for a philosophy that believes radically different things are good for different sorts of people \u201d\u201c different races, sexes, classes \u201d\u201c without entrenching a politics that would be rightly objectionable to most of our contemporaries and which would make nonsense of any discourse of rights. David Martin, in the book referred to a little way back (Does Christianity Cause War?), notes that ‘universality itself sets up a boundary…The announcement of peace sets off a profound tension’ (p.159), and concludes that such conflict is an inescapable aspect of our human condition. No-one can identify the argument that will establish convincingly for everyone that their variety of universalism is correct (and this holds for post-religious spirituality as much as for anything else). The question is, Martin suggests, less about the universal character of the claim than about how we imagine (that word again) our methods of commending the vision.<\/p>\n
The better we understand the distinctiveness of religious claims, the better we understand the centrality within them of non-violence. That is to say, the religious claim, to the extent that it defines itself as radically different from mere local or transitory political strategies, is more or less bound to turn away from the defence or propagation of the claims by routinely violent methods, as if the truth we were talking about depended on the capacity of the speaker to silence all others by force. Granted that this is how classical communal religion has all too regularly behaved; but the point is that it has always contained a self-critique on this point. And that growing self-awareness about religious identity, which has been one paradoxical consequence of the social and intellectual movement away from such an identity, makes it harder and harder to reconcile faith in an invulnerable and abiding truth with violent anxiety as to how it is to be defended.<\/p>\n
In short, as religion \u201d\u201c corporate, sacramental and ultimately doctrinal religion \u201d\u201c settles into this kind of awareness, it becomes one of the most potent allies possible for genuine pluralism \u201d\u201c that is, for a social and political culture that is consistently against coercion and institutionalised inequality and is committed to serious public debate about common good. Spiritual capital alone, in the sense of a heightened acknowledgement especially among politicians, businessmen and administrators of dimensions to human flourishing beyond profit and material security, is helpful but is not well equipped to ask the most basic questions about the legitimacy of various aspects of the prevailing global system. The traditional forms of religious affiliations, in proposing an ‘imagined society’, realised in some fashion in the practices of faith, are better resourced for such questions. They lose their integrity when they attempt to enforce their answers; and one of the most significant lessons to be learned from the great shift towards post-religious spiritual sensibility is how deeply the coercive and impersonal ethos of a good deal of traditional religion has alienated the culture at large. But, more importantly, if we who adhere to revealed faith don’t want to be simply at the mercy of this culture, to be absorbed into its own uncritical stories about the autonomous self and its choices, then we need to examine the degree to which our practice looks like a new world. And if this debate drives us Christians back to thinking through more carefully and critically what the great Anglican Benedictine scholar Gregory Dix meant by describing Christians as a new ‘species’, homo eucharisticus, a humanity defined in its Eucharistic practice, it will have served us well. ‘The unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’ is the gift of the Easter Gospel, we are told in the liturgy; ‘Lord, evermore give us this bread’ (Jn 6.34).<\/p>\n