THE MULTIRELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT OF CIVIL SOCIETY:

THE NEED FOR BILINGUALISM

William Vendley is Secretary General of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.

Introduction

Three sets of sweeping tasks face the global community at the close of the twentieth century. First, there is the challenge of human survival: the issues of population, hunger and health, energy and environment. Second, there is the fundamental task of building a global community that truly functions as such and that, while embracing pluralism, provides sufficient shared meanings and values to enable its members to arrive at consensus on matters of common concern. Third, there is the need to end wars and reduce the threat of increasingly dangerous rivalries in a post-cold-war world destabilized by arms proliferation and economic pressures. Armed conflicts and wars are not only cruelly destructive, they sap desperately needed human and financial resources from the challenges of human survival and global cooperation for the common weal. Meeting these challenges will require cooperation among highly diverse communities and moral leadership on a level unprecedented in human history. Yet the inescapable need for cooperation comes at a time of increasingly militant manifestations of ethnic and religious nationalism and of social fragmentation around the world.

These three sets of tasks raise the question of political order. While issues within each of the sets can and indeed must at times be addressed piecemeal, each set in its own way points to the need for a form of political order that can serve the common good by being responsive both to the major challenges of our time and the deepest memories of what it means to be a human being in community. Religious visions are typically "utopian" in character; they proffer normative notions of personal and communal fulfillment. If the fact of religious pluralism bars the adoption of one community's utopian vision as the basis for political order, what are the possibilities for discerning shared normative moral commitments among the world's religions and relating these shared commitments to questions of political order?

What, then, is the role that religious cooperation can serve in bringing forth a new form of political order? The question is large and perhaps best clarified with a series of questions dealing with political theory, the history and current practice of religion, and international instruments related to political order.

Questions of Political Theory

s In what ways did the Enlightenment solution(s) privatize ranges of human experience relevant to the establishment of political order? Or more positively, how can religious meanings be mediated in nonsectarian ways toward the building up of "non-reductive," "just" political order in pluralistic society?

s How does the tension between (1) a resurgent religious nationalism and (2) the forces which serve to de-center the nation-state impact on the emergence of political order?

s What are the heuristic features of a political order open to (1) the questions of the Enlightenment, (2) being informed by the levels of meaning foundational to religious communities, and (3) alert to the transnational forces which are de-centering the nation-state?

Questions to Religious Traditions

s How have religions de facto related their foundational meanings to notions of political order? What are the forms/models by which religious meanings have been related to political order?

s How can central meanings foundational to specific religious traditions be re-imagined in their relevance to the building up of political order in ways which are both faithful to historical traditions and public in manner, but nonsectarian?

s Can a convergence be discerned among the central meanings of the major religious traditions in their relevance to creating nonsectarian moral political order? How can these shared meanings be mediated as a constructive force in the development of political order?

Questions of International Instruments

s What is the at least implicit "horizon of meaning" of existing international instruments of political order, e.g., the United Nations and agencies such as the World Bank? What "reductive" features of existing instruments can be disclosed by relating them to the desired heuristic model of political order?

s What new kinds of international instruments need to be envisaged to serve the development of non-reductive notions of political order, alert to the convergence of the foundational meanings among religious communities and the pressures that are de-centering the nation-state?

Answering these types of questions necessarily goes far beyond the scope of this small essay. We limit ourselves to proposing the modest thesis that religious communities will increasingly need to speak two distinct forms of language if they are going to cooperate on matters of common concern, including those that pertain to political order. Indeed, even prosecuting the above types of questions can be shown to require the ability to differentiate between two distinct modes of religious discourse.

How, then, can an attention to language assist people with different religious histories and convictions to cooperate on matters of ultimate concern such as the concern for political order, precisely as religiously committed persons?

This essay is based on two convictions. The first is that the world's many religions differ in important ways in their histories, teachings and practices. A careful and searching examination of religions reveals their distinctive characteristics. Even apparent similarities among religions often turn out, upon close examination, to mask major differences which remain highly important to their respective believers and thus need to be frankly admitted. In this essay I want to acknowledge the differences of the world's religions by suggesting that each particular religion can usefully be described as having its own "primary language." Each primary language can be understood to be related to a particular religion's "originating experience" and to be constituted by a central set of "stories" which together make up an overarching "narrative." This narrative grounds a dynamic set of religiously ordered meanings and values that function within a horizon of ultimate concern or care. Understanding each religion in terms of its primary language can help us appreciate the distinctive character of each religion and the roots of its moral sensitivities.

The second conviction upon which this essay is based is that multireligious cooperation on issues of shared concern can be facilitated by the use of what I will call a "secondary language." By this I intend a form of secular discourse which, though not religiously sectarian in character, can nevertheless be employed by diverse religious communities to express with at least some degree of adequacy the moral concerns which are rooted in their respective primary languages.

My thesis is that distinguishing primary and secondary language can facilitate multireligious cooperation on issues of shared concern and simultaneously avoid syncretistic tendencies that do not respect the real differences of religions and their respective primary languages. If my thesis is correct, the distinction between primary and secondary languages should assist different religious communities to cooperate with one another when they attempt to face the moral dilemmas, including the need for change in political order, that define our present time in history.

The Narrative Structure of Religion Understood as Primary Language

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," writes Joan Didion. Human life is somehow given its most elemental identity by story or narrative. "For we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative," says Barbara Hady. It is a story or narrative structure which provides overarching coherence to the diversity of experience and which grounds the set of meanings and values by which people can coherently live. All things human refer to a narrative story of some kind. Both individuals and -- one must especially stress -- the communities that form them are shaped in a most foundational and elemental way by narrative.

What is true of human groups generally is also the case with religious communities. Religious communities are organized around central stories and narratives. These narratives can be mediated or transmitted in a variety of ways. They can be passed on orally, by means of sacred texts, through learned commentaries or elaborate and penetrating systems of thought based upon sacred texts, through rituals or forms of prayer and meditation, and by a variety of other carriers of meaning such as music, song, and dance. For example, for the Christian the central narratives are the Biblical texts. There are many different stories in the Bible, but they combine into an overarching narrative of God's redemption of history. But in Christianity this overarching narrative is "filled out" by the myriad expressions of its meaning which, collectively and across time, have attempted to offer an expression of the meaning of God's relationship with history consistent with the vision of the Scriptures. Like Christianity, each religion has its own set of stories which combine into an overarching narrative that provides the deepest base and fertile foundation of the particular religion's interpretations of reality. Importantly, religious narratives can be recognized as founding a particular religious tradition's understanding of ethical responsibility and providing its followers with norms and principles for a requisite moral stance in life.

cheap hotels in OsloThe deep stories which combine into an organizing or overarching narrative of a given religion, however they are understood by a particular religious tradition, I wish to designate as primary language -- the language which defines a religious community. Thus each religious community has its own primary language or interpretations of primary language. The stories or narratives which make up a given primary language may be understood to be the actual Word of God or some other manifestation or mediation of religious meaning. In any case, primary religious language constitutes the core of the living memory of a religious community; it offers the grammar of identity; it provides for the possibility of shared experience and a shared interpretation of experience; it installs a community of believers in a shared moral space; and it provides a fertile foundation for the community's passage through time, orienting it to the past, present, and future.

The primary languages of the world's religions are different. Two brief examples can make this quite evident. First, in orienting their believers in time, a given religious primary language typically asks "whence" a people have come and "whither" they are going. For example, Christians understand the "whence" as being "created" by God ex nihilo, and the "whither" as a passage through death, prefigured in baptism, to a resurrected life in God. Very different answers to these questions would be offered by a Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, or believer in any indigenous religion.

Second, religious primary languages virtually always employ some variation of two related concepts: pathology and soteriology. I am not suggesting that these terms are used in every primary religious language; indeed, the word "soteriology," which refers to the mystery of salvation, is a Christian theological term. However, I am suggesting that virtually all primary religious languages engage in some sort of questioning about what is (or went) wrong with the present state of affairs (pathology) and by what religious means the currently disordered state of affairs shall be remedied (soteriology).

pai gow poker onlineQuestions of pathology and soteriology go to the heart of primary religious languages. Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, indigenous and other religions' stories and narratives which raise questions of pathology and soteriology are remarkable for their profundity, fecundity, and differences. If I am at pains to underline the differences of religious primary language, it is because primary language founds a given religion's moral framework and ethical codes. Underlining the differences of primary languages brings a sharper focus to our central question: how can different religions really collaborate when their primary languages and corresponding moral frameworks and ethical codes vary so greatly? As another step toward an answer, let us look at the way religious communities respond to new ethical problems or crises, particularly in today's situation of religious and secular pluralism.

Speaking Out in Primary and Secondary Language

What goes on within a religious community, within its collective memory, to prepare it to respond to a new crisis in a way that is consistent with the deepest meanings and values of its tradition? What really happens, for example, when a religious community allows itself to confront the fact that 14,000,000 children die needlessly every year, or that our present models of development imperil the natural world and therefore ourselves with incalculable harm? What happens when morally committed religious people try to confront the prospect of nuclear conflict, or the more foundational task of constructing a new political order?

I would like to suggest that religious communities respond by engaging in two highly creative types of activities. On the one hand, they are driven back into the roots of their own histories, back to their central religious stories. The new experience, if it is to be grasped by a given religious community, needs to be interpreted in relationship to that community's primary language. Perhaps not all stories in the primary language appear immediately helpful in the sense that they can be readily connected with the new problem at hand. The community is driven back in search of a "usable past." What story, what chapter of a story, what teachings or practices embodied in at least some episode of the overarching narrative of a particular tradition can help orient contemporary believers before the new situation they face? This task of "turning back" to listen to or "hear" the narratives of a religious tradition from the perspective of a new problem or situation is itself a highly creative activity. The religious community has to work out a connection, to discover a correlation, between the religious narrative and a new situation.

On the other hand, when confronted with a new challenge, each religious community must also move forward. It has to try to "say anew" what it has "heard" of the tradition in relationship to the new crisis being faced. This hearing of tradition and saying anew what one has heard are not at all the same thing. To really say anew what it means to be a Buddhist, Hindu, Jew, Christian, Muslim, or member of another religion in relationship to a new challenge requires a dynamically creative set of acts which orient believers affectively, cognitively, morally, and spiritually before the new crisis. By "saying anew" we mean not just words, but the total religious response in words and actions which addresses the many dimensions of the problem being faced.

How, then, does a religious community say anew what it means to be faithfully religious when confronting a new and grave crisis? I would suggest that there are two fundamental ways. The two ways correspond to two types of language: primary language and secondary language.

ERROR MSGSpeaking in Primary Language

Members of religious communities speak among themselves. Religious primary language is employed again and again to say anew what it means to be a religious believer within one's own circle of believers. For example, Christians regularly speak among themselves with the rich symbolic language of their faith about the meaning and moral demands of contemporary events. Using the primary speech of Christianity, they enjoy a shared access to all the stories which make up the complex narrative of the Christian religion. Symbols of pathology and soteriology are creatively employed to interpret the significance of contemporary challenges. This conversation takes place in the minds and hearts of individual Christians whenever they reflect on what their faith means to them in a given situation; it is given a particular focus every Sunday in churches in various forms of reflection and worship; it is also extended in seminaries and special schools, and further still by means of an ever-expanding literature of theology and spirituality. In turn, this extended Christian conversation bears fruit by clarifying Christians' moral sensibilities and guiding them into responsible forms of action precisely as Christians. Analogous activities occur within other religious traditions insofar as they say anew what it means to be believers with their own unique primary languages in relationship to contemporary issues.

On the one hand, the great strength of saying anew one's identity in one's primary language is the wealth of primary language. The extraordinary fecundity of primary language can be seen in its ability to secure continually the religious identities of believers and reorient them morally in the constantly changing vicissitudes of history. On the other hand, speaking in primary speech, for all of its richness, limits one for the most part to the circle of believers who share the same language. Primary language is not a language for multireligious cooperation.

Speaking in Secondary Language

Today religious communities do not restrict the expressions of their ultimate concern to their own members. Under the pressures of religious and secular forms of pluralism, and through the engagement of urgent issues which involve more than a single community, representatives of religious communities are now learning to speak a secondary language of moral care beyond their particular circle of believers. Religions now feel compelled by their own sense of the truth and universal relevance of their central stories to "speak their concerns" in the public square by translating, or better transposing, the ethical sensibilities which are rooted in their respective primary languages into a secondary language. This secondary language is the language increasingly shared by today's modern pluralistic societies. It is the language currently used by modern governmental institutions, public schools, and nightly news programs. It varies, no doubt, from country to country, but is becoming increasing universal. It serves, for example, as the language of international organizations such as the United Nations, the Red Cross, or Amnesty International. It can be banal or express such elevated notions as universal human rights. In a word, it is "secular" language.

There has been a long tradition in some societies and religious communities of notions of natural law, which attempt to give expression to an intelligible moral sphere available to human intelligence without the direct assistance of religion. This intelligible moral sphere has been recognized as a basis for the organization of a nonsectarian understanding of political order. Today, however, there is no widely shared consensus about natural law. In its stead, the notion of human rights as set forth in international declarations and covenants provides a slender but essential area of public social/moral consensus expressed in secular language. And increasingly the world's religions are learning to root the notions of human rights in their own rich primary languages.

These advances in correlating the tradition(s) of human rights with religious traditions suggest the need for analogous creative advances around questions of political order. More specifically, each religious community is challenged to re-imagine its central meanings in their relevance to the building up of political order, and to re-express these meanings in public terms. Using secondary language as a medium, the search for convergence among the central meanings of religious traditions in their relevance to nonsectarian political order can go forward.

Religions, however, cannot simply "adopt" existing secular language as an automatically adequate carrier of their deepest meanings. Religions must be creative in their use of secular language. Secular language must always be challenged by religions to become ever more morally adequate, without at the same time becoming sectarian. Even the word "secular" has its dangers: all too often it is understood to intend a social sphere bereft of religious meaning. In that derelict reading of the term, the public square can easily be interpreted as having nothing to do with religious meanings and values. In turn, religious convictions will easily be misunderstood as a private, individual affair having nothing to do with public life and its attendant moral issues. The speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. offer an instructive example of the religious employment of secular language. King successfully transposed his Christian convictions regarding the dignity of all persons into a form of nonsectarian public speech addressed to all Americans by utilizing the secular concept of civil rights.

There is an enormous advantage for religious communities in being able to speak a secondary secular language. First, when different religious communities express their ultimate senses of caring through the employment of secondary secular language, they can often discern important areas of convergence of moral concern. Indeed, a shared secondary language artfully employed by different religious communities can provide a medium to clarify agreements on matters of moral concern and a basis for cooperative action. Of equal importance, a shared secondary language also allows different religious communities to clarify where they disagree on moral issues. With a shared secondary language, religious communities are given the freedom to agree on some issues and disagree on others without violating the religiously normative character of their respective primary languages. Secondary language provides a medium for multireligious cooperation which avoids the dangers of conflating different primary religious languages.

Both primary and secondary languages will remain of major importance for religious communities. Neither can be collapsed into the other without impoverishing a religious community's ability to know and act upon its deepest possibilities for care in today's pluralistic world.

What are the limits of secondary language? From the religious point of view, why does secondary language remain perpetually in need of the more primordial primary language? Why are both primary and secondary forms of religious language necessary today?

Contemporary secondary secular language is a composite language. It has been composed by highly diverse and often competing narratives. Importantly, there is no one overarching narrative to secular language except perhaps the intentional disestablishment of any particular primary religious language as a privileged, state-sanctioned public language. Secular language has no central narrative, no single organizing plot. For example, Robert N. Bellah has discerned major competing secular narratives operative in the United States. People in American society, Bellah suggests, are often quite unaware of the fact that they are trying to live by diverse and often competing secular narratives. As a result, people continuously switch back and forth through the course of a day between the strands of the different narratives underlying what we have, in this essay, all too innocently named secular secondary language. This "makes for not only a fragmentation of language worlds among members of a social context but also for fragmentation within the day-to-day experience of the individual." This particular liability of secular language shows up with particular force when the "plotless" secular language becomes a person's form of primary language.

Again, Joan Didion is instructive. She writes:

ERROR MSGWe interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Didion's perceptive lines affirm the importance of narrative in the perception and interpretation of experience and even in the construction of our lives. But when read more deeply with respect to the way narrative contributes to the formation of a coherent self, Didion's lines can be profoundly disturbing. Attend to her words with care: is reality really a matter of multiple, seemingly arbitrary choices as secular language would suggest? Do we really just arbitrarily "impose" a narrative line on an otherwise shifting and incoherent phantasmagoria of experience? Or, alternatively, do the religious depths of reality perhaps make a claim upon us; do they summon us to an ultimate caring and moral responsibility through primary religious language? For example, are the injunctions "Thou shalt not kill" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" merely arbitrary? Religious primary language is not a matter of multiple choice, nor a matter of the arbitrary imposition of a narrative line; rather it is the offering of a particularly powerful form of narrative line, one that gives speech to different communities' understandings of the "call" of the divine on the human, however differently the divine and the call may be experienced and interpreted. Didion continues:

I was supposed to have a script, and I had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience . . . I wanted still to believe in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

hotel hilton BauskaDidion's remarkable lines illustrate the dangerously frail character of secondary secular language. First, the self is described in a haunting image as "a cutting-room experience." It is not coherently formed because secondary secular language taken as a primary language cannot offer the self a coherent and overarching narrative. Second, and correlative to the fragmented self, reality is experienced as "rather more electrical than ethical." Secular language is dangerously weak in both its capacity to form a coherent community of selves and assisting them to sustain an ethical stance through the vicissitudes of history. These possibilities are, of course, precisely the strengths of primary religious language. Discourse with both forms of language will, I suggest, be required if we are to have diverse religious communities composed of well-formed and coherent members with durable moral sensibilities and, at the same time, find a medium for their collaboration in facing the global problems of our day.