Surveying the Faith

Last week Red C Research published the findings of WIN-Gallup’s ‘Global Index of Religions and Atheism’, suggesting that Ireland was abandoning religion faster than almost any other country. The papers weren’t slow to regurgitate claims that whereas 69pc of Irish people were religious in 2005, only 47pc were in 2011. 

That’s not what the poll says, however. Contrary to Red C’s press release, the WIN-Gallup poll doesn’t find that Ireland is one of the least religious countries in the world; it finds that Ireland is one of the countries in which people are most reluctant to describe themselves as religious. This is a very different thing, not least as the word ‘religious’ means different things to different people. 

This was made very clear to me a couple of years ago at an Anglican church in Manchester, where I used to go so I could learn how evangelical friends lived their faith on their own terms, rather than relying on how my fellow Catholics described them. 

The curate spoke at length about how Christians shouldn’t be religious, because religious people are hypocrites. We’re called to love God, not to be religious, he said. Christianity, after all, isn’t a religion: it’s a relationship. 

I agreed with him up to a point. It’s a cliché that Christianity is a relationship rather than a religion, but it’s only a cliché because it’s largely true; the very word ‘Christian’ suggests that. 

Rather than meaning ‘follower of Christ’, it literally means someone who belongs to Christ as a member of his household. Romans 8:14-17 says that we’re brothers and sisters of Christ, God’s children rather than his slaves, and as 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, it’s baptism that adopts us into this family. 

Talking about this in the pub later, some of the regular congregation said they felt that the curate’s core point was sound but that he’d expressed himself poorly. Religious people can be hypocritical, but ‘religion’ shouldn’t be dismissed as mere lip service. 

Methodology

When discussing polls, it pays to look at the question and methodology. Ireland was one of the few countries in which this poll was conducted online; it’s difficult to see why Red C did this, as their website boasts of the accuracy of their telephone polling and warns that online polls are of questionable reliability in Ireland, where the over 55’s are inadequately represented in online panels and at least a third of adults lack internet access.

Red C's press release is adapted from WIN-Gallup's international press release, which conspicuously excludes Irish data from any tables showing how things have changed since 2005. Ireland, which Red C reports has experienced the second-largest decline in religiosity since 2005, is absent from the table of ‘ten countries experiencing notable decline in religiosity since 2005’, and from the two tables showing trends in religiosity and atheism in 39 countries surveyed in both waves.

It’s almost as though WIN-Gallup doesn’t regard the new data on Ireland as comparable with the 2005 data.

Allowing that the poll should be treated with caution, it’s hardly surprising that it found that the number of Irish claiming to be atheists seemingly has risen from 3pc to 10pc since 2005; the 2011 census figures and recent polls should have led us to expect as much. 

I doubt this figure will rise much further without government interference. If graphs in the official census highlights are remotely accurate, those most likely to deny a religious affiliation in Ireland are aged between 25 and 29, and even then only about 9.5pc of those do so. Denial of religious affiliation seems to drop back to 8pc among younger adults. 

Rather than rushing to embrace atheism, it seems Irish people are slipping into an ill-defined quasi-Catholicism, and it’s here that the question’s wording is all-important: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person or a convinced atheist?” 

The number of people willing to describe themselves as religious seems to have plummeted from 69pc to 47pc, whereas those rejecting atheism while saying they’re not religious seems to have risen from 25pc to 44pc. 

It’s difficult to tell what exactly this means, not least because the survey question – which confuses religious practice with atheistic belief – explicitly allows people who attend places of worship to say they don’t consider themselves religious. Red C thus observes that globally, “Most of the shift is not drifting from their faith, but claiming to be ‘not religious’ while remaining within the faith.” 

Judged purely on an Irish basis, this seems a fair judgement. The census found that 84pc of us still claim to be Catholic, even after the horrors of the Ryan and Murphy reports, but it’s clear that many of us have drifted from the teaching and precepts of the Church. 

Only about a third of us attend Mass every week, according to this year’s ACP and Irish Times surveys, while the Irish Times poll seemingly found a widespread rejection of basic Christian doctrines. For example, 15pc of those who’d call themselves Catholics don’t regard Jesus as the son of God, and 62pc believe that the Eucharistic elements merely represent Christ’s body and blood. 

Many who scorn atheism but wouldn’t call themselves religious would be among these; they’d probably consider themselves ‘spiritual’ rather than religious, or say that they have faith but disagree with organised religion. Others, though, would surely be ordinary Catholics, wary of boasting about their faith. 

Connotations

The word ‘religious’ carries uncomfortable connotations for a lot of us. A priest friend of mine once admitted that he found it hard to like a lot of religious people. “Some of the coldest, hardest, most unforgiving people I’ve ever met,” he said, “have been some of the most religious.” 

Outward Practice

‘Religious’, for him, clearly wasn’t a word to be crudely equated with ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’. It was, instead, something relating to outward practice rather than inward devotion; he’d found that people could be punctilious about their religious observance while being devoid of a spiritual inner life, or a simple love for other people. 

That’s not to say our external practice and attitudes don’t matter; on the contrary, they play a vital role in expressing and supporting our inner life. As Pope Benedict pointed out last week with reference to St Dominic: “… to kneel, to stand before the Lord, to fix our gaze on the Crucifix, to pause and gather ourselves in silence, is not a secondary act, but helps to us to place ourselves, our whole person, in relation to God.” 

Internal Realities

The problem, alas, is that too often our external and internal realities are at odds. Jesus made this unforgettably clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, in directing us to fast, pray, and give alms in secret, and in condemning as pedantic and hypocritical the ostentatious religiosity of the Pharisees. 

Familiar as we are with such admonitions, and increasingly suspicious of public displays of piety, it’s hardly surprising that for many of us the word ‘religious’ is a term we’ve become loath to apply to ourselves. Who wants to be seen as a ‘Holy Joe’, especially nowadays? Who dares to call themselves devout?


-- A version of this appeared in The Irish Catholic, 23 August 2012.

Primitive Dubbing Techniques

A friend of mine -- perhaps my closest friend, really -- had a little baby girl last night, all tiny and pink and perfect. I mentioned to an expectant friend today that the newcomer has a very pretty nose, which surprised me, as I tend to think of newborn babies as looking uncomfortably like Winston Churchill.

Oh yes.

She responded by pointing out that I'd not seen any of hers as newborns, and that my pretty nose comment reminded her of Asterix and Cleopatra. Rightly so, I'd say, but that in turn reminded me of this.

That third panel always strikes me as one of the finest comic panels I've ever seen -- it's utterly dependent on the incongruity of picture and words -- and possibly my favourite joke ever on a comic page.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012