Last on the Kazakhs (for now)

Having got back from Kazakhstan last Friday and spent Saturday and Sunday with family, I am now (supposed to be) on holiday and am in Brussels. I’ll explain in the next post. However, lack of wifi in Kazakhstan mean that I couldn’t do the usual business of blogging as I went along. So, here’s the last of this batch.

The Congress ended with an ‘Appeal’ which will not be widely read in the West. It still assumes that people do what their faith leaders tell them to do – which is a misguided assumption. Nevertheless, the engagement with each other can produce conversations of value and forge relationships that can be of benefit more widely. The event also provides an excellent opportunity to speak face to face with government leaders about matters of international concern – and this is an opportunity I took in relation to Kazakhstan’s unnecessary and restrictive new Religious Law. I am now following this up with a letter which will set out concerns in detail.

Anyway, back to the Congress itself. I was unable to give a speech at a Panel Session on ‘youth’ as the organisers had arranged for me to be in three places at the same time. I cannot trilocate. So, one of my English colleagues stepped in and pretended to be me. I gather he did an excellent job at condensing our ideas into a coherent and stimulating contribution to proceedings. But, here is the bulk (minus the usual greeting stuff) of what I would have said – just for the record and to give an idea of how direct we can be in introducing ideas that aren’t earth-shattering in the UK, but might be challenging elsewhere. (The complaining I heard about new media and how young people need to be taken away from computers and educated to accept the authority of their elders helped me realise how hopelessly out of touch some religious leaders can be – wishing the world could be now as it used to be…)

… Young people are not ‘the future’, they are ‘the present’ – the ‘now’. I will come back to this later. However, before doing so, we need to recognise that the themes before us in this Congress run along the fault lines of our global societies in the early decades of the twenty first century.

Sustainable development poses a massive challenge to a world in which some people prosper at the expense of those who have little – assumptions about inevitable universal economic growth have been called into question by the financial crashes since 2008. But sustainable development assumes sustainable societies that are sustained by values that are themselves sustainable in the longer term.

When people from diverse cultures live alongside each other we refer to multiculturalism. Allowing cultures to thrive is a rich gift, but in Europe serious questions are being asked about whether a blind acceptance of multiculturalism as a virtue has hindered integration of communities in a common society.

In many parts of the world traditional understandings of the role of women are being questioned. The trafficking and abuse of women by men is a serious and appallingly common feature of our world. An uncomfortable fact of life is that while men talk and fight, women get on with keeping families together, raising children, making society work, making local economies work and shaping communities.

But all of this comes together when we take a look at the future of our young people. The world in which I grew up is not the same world my own children have grown into. And this means that my children – now aged 30, 28 and 24 – look at the world through a different lens. For example:

• The nuclear threat of my childhood has been replaced by a profound concern for the environment, the creation, the tiny planet we all inhabit. Concern for the future of the planet, for sustainable development and for justice is a powerful and non-negotiable starting point for millions of young people.
• This owes something to the development of ubiquitous media, and especially in the last few years, of social media. The world is now connected in ways that were unimaginable even ten years ago. You can go into an African or South American jungle and find people without roads and transport, but everyone seems to have a mobile phone and an email address. Go into a cafe in an obscure town in a developing country and young people are sitting at computer screens updating their Facebook status. Electronic media – in their mere infancy when I was already working as a professional linguist – have by now revolutionised the world, creating new and surprising ways for people to relate, converse and plan together.

However, even though there is a massive uptake of older people using new technologies and the Internet, these older generations (that is, my generation) tend to see such technologies as a means of communicating or working, but not, as millions of young people do, part of their natural DNA. Social media are integral ways of communicating and relating for millions of young people – something most of us, even if we are adept at electronic media, cannot comprehend. Our children obtain their worldview-shaping perceptions and information about the world from these new ways of communicating. The days when our young people only knew a limited number of people in, or just beyond, their immediate geographical habitat have now gone. Children have ‘friends’ across the globe in communities completely alien to their own. (And it is significant that whereas some governments used to try to shut down inconvenient voices during elections or times of social unrest by closing newspapers or broadcasters, now they aim to shut down Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets.)

These two phenomena are clearly connected. The world our children are growing into is considerably smaller than the one most of us grew up in. News is instant, information is infinitely accessible (although ‘information’ is not to be confused with ‘knowledge’ and ‘knowledge’ should not be mistaken for ‘wisdom’), and what happens in a small forest in the Amazon becomes a motivating challenge for people living in London or Bradford. To ignore the revolutionary power of social media is simply to bury our heads in the sand of wilful ignorance. Trying to pretend that the world continues to be what it has always been will not change the fact that these developments have changed the way in which our young people organise, buy in to politics and protest, view authority and power, and suspect institutions.

This provides a radical challenge to religious leaders – and to politicians who need better to understand the place and role of religion as a motivator of people and a shaper of cultural identity. In the western world morality has frequently become disconnected from questions of ‘truth’ and is shaped by mere pragmatism – a worrying development for many reasons. But, complaining about it will not change anything. It is the responsibility of my generation to learn to look though the eyes of our young people and understand why they see what they see in the way they see it.

Crucial to this is the place of schools and education. One of the challenges faced by children of some of our religious communities in Britain is that of ‘compartmentalisation’. This is where children are taught by their religious institutions or communities to see the world in one way, whilst then being taught a different approach in school. For example, a scientific account of evolution is worked with in the classroom, but a non-scientific ‘belief’ held in the mosque or church. Such compartmentalism cannot be sustained by people who grow up to realise that there is only one reality, that something is true because it is true and not because we would like to believe it is true.

Perhaps this is why some observers predict a collapse in religious commitment by many young people where their experience of the world is rejected by religious authorities that occupy a different reality. (And, just for the record, I see no contradiction between accounts of why the world is the way it is and how the world came to be the way it is; we must just be careful not to confuse ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions.)

The hearts and minds of our young people will no longer be won by appeals to authority or loyalty, but by capturing the imagination of people who take the world seriously. Too often fundamentalists thrive because they know how to appeal to these base commitments in young people who want to shape the world differently. They see our failures, our conflicts and fragmentations, and are not impressed.

So, in conclusion, I want – as a Christian leader, committed to the truth of God in Jesus Christ – to encourage us to take young people seriously… on their own terms, knowing that our refusal or inability to hear their voice or look though their eyes or hear through their ears will not change what they say, what they see or how they hear. Religion that is confident will embrace the challenges that our young people bring – not simply conceding every inch of ground, but taking seriously the critique of what is and the potential for what might become.

The Hebrew prophet spoke of young men dreaming dreams. That is a dangerous thing to encourage. But, if the prophet sees here through God’s eyes, then religious leaders might need to wake up to both the reality and the potential.

 

 

Kazakhstan discussions

Here is the text of my address (minus the opening stuff and greetings from the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom I represent) to the opening plenary session of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Astana on Wednesday 30 May. Please note that it wasn’t delivered in a vacuum, but in a particular context and for a particular audience. This means it was using particular language to be heard by a wide range of people and, for many of them, through interpreters.

The importance of inter-religious dialogue grows by the day and does not diminish. We live in a a world of considerable challenge and complexity, one in which the euphoria of immediate freedom from tyranny soon becomes tempered by the realism of having to create a new polity and a new social contract. The so-called Arab Spring has been observed with serious interest and concern in a Europe that now finds itself under enormous economic, financial, political and social pressure. Africa boils – conflict erupting along too many religious and cultural-historical fault lines. The world does not stand still. It is easier to break down the old than to build up something new.

Yet, under all this lies a question that is all-too-easily ignored. What is the world view that informs the value systems and priorities of those who wield power in our world? There is a common assumption that ‘my’ assumptions about the world and human meaning are somehow neutral, whereas the assumptions of others are somehow ‘loaded’. This so-called ‘myth of neutrality’ is hard to displace or challenge – especially when represented in western media that assume religion to be a problem (an aberration) and not part of the solution.

Christians believe that every human being is made in the image of God – the imago Dei. All other arguments inevitably come back to this fundamental point – one that questions any world view that allows persecution, violence, oppression or killing as legitimate ways of exercising power over others. Any concept of justice or human dignity must be rooted in something more real than some simplistic notion of ‘reality’; for Christians the demand for justice is rooted in and derived from this basic understanding of every person having been made uniquely in God’s image and, therefore, having infinite value.

The corollary of this, of course, is that every human being becomes accountable – not only to God who has created us, but also to others who bear the imago Dei and are, therefore, in relationship with each other. And it is this common humanity that underlies any further consideration of religious identity, historical grievance, perception of religious truth or exercise of power.

To return for a moment to what I called the ‘myth of neutrality’, we cannot simply claim that human beings matter simply because they exist. As we know, a fundamental tenet of ethics is that ‘you can’t get an ought from an is’. And it is here – where one of the world’s deepest fault lines lies – that religious leaders have a unique responsibility: to challenge the uncritical prejudices and assumptions that drive some of those value systems and behaviours in ways that dehumanise other people and dress ‘power’ in the colours of unattributable ‘rights’ or selfish ‘freedoms’.

In other words, what is it that enables me to say that human beings matter… and are mutually accountable for their individual and social behaviour? And, to press the point, on what foundation is my (or our) demand for justice and freedom built?

At this Congress we will be listening to many voices. It will be important to dig beneath the surface of what is being said… in order that we might understand why it is being said. After all, the first rule of communication is this: it is not what you think you are saying that matters; rather, it is what is heard that matters more. (We should note that we are suing the same words to mean very different things around this table – for example, we speak of the rights of women, but mean very different things. We need to see through the lens and hear through the ears of those unlike us…)

Religious leaders have a profound responsibility to go beyond the rhetoric of their own community and listen to that rhetoric through the ears of those who come from somewhere else and see through a different lens. Taking seriously the injunction in all our faith communities that we must not misrepresent each other (“Do not bear false witness against your neighbour”, as the ninth Commandment puts it), this responsibility extends to (a) interpreting each other within our own faith communities, (b) exercising authority in articulating and exemplifying a rooted commitment to mutual respect and generous love, and (c) standing on the fault lines between communities that find generosity too demanding and resort too quickly to conflict and alienation.

This is not merely notional. This is why it has to be earthed in consideration of what this means for mutual sustainable development on an overcrowded small planet, how different cultures (grown from diverse histories) should co-exist on this small planet (multiculturalism), how we are to challenge the abuse of women across our societies (and allow women to speak for themselves), and how (and on what anthropological or theological basis) we enable our young people to shape today’s world which will be the world their children will inherit.

As religious leaders from all over the world, we have a unique opportunity not only to speak and listen to each other – making our points and vindicating our presence here – but also to offer the world a model of how good leaders need constantly to be learning. We need to be open to challenge and scrutiny, seeking to understand better why people see God and the world in the way they do, curious about how the world looks when seen through the eyes of someone different. This is not about becoming bland or uncritical; rather, it demands serious engagement with each other and not mere polite rhetoric.

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this event – this complex conversation – and look forward to an informative, instructive and challenging Congress. I pray that we will return from here more strongly motivated to live differently, speak differently and lead differently in order that genuine peace might prevail and the image of God in every human being be taken seriously as a starting point for any rhetoric or behaviour.

 

 

Funny hats in Astana

The wifi was poor in Kazkahstan this week, so I was unable to post anything about the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. A packed programme and some substantial public and private conversations didn’t leave much time or mental space for writing anyway. But, what I intended to be the first post is this:

Sitting in the Pyramid at the heart of Astana, the astonishing capital city of Kazakhstan, it is hard to concentrate. There are fifty of us around the table, discussing a pile of issues related to faith and politics. Ironic, then, that although one of the panel sessions tomorrow is to address the role of women, only one woman sits at the top table. (We will also be addressing questions of ‘youth’ – without any young people! Extraordinary.)

Two things grabbed my attention: (a) male religious leaders spoke passionately about protecting the dignity and ‘family’ role of women without once letting a woman speak for herself, and (b) given the range and variety of headgear, we could have been at a hat competition. It is certainly colourful. The Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions brings together leaders and representatives of most of the world faiths: Christian (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran), Muslim (Iran, Saudi, India, Turkey, etc.), Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and so on. There are also a number of politicians from various parts of the world. It’s a mixed bag, but it’s also a colourful and somewhat random bag.

It is easy to sneer or take for granted a conference such as this. Where does all the talk get cashed out? What difference does it actually make on the ground? Who takes notice of religious leaders anyway – especially when they are elderly and fairly conservative? How do you get a common statement without it being a lowest common denominator expression of motherhood and apple pie?

Yet, a meeting of these people would never have happened twenty or thirty years ago. We take it for granted that religious leaders meet and speak together honestly. But, we easily forget that such conversations are relatively recent phenomena. To see the President of Kazakhstan sitting flanked by the Patriarch of Russia and the top man of the Muslim World League – who are flanked in turn by a Chief Rabbi from Israel and a Roman Catholic cardinal (I was a couple of places away…) – is still remarkable.

But, the questions still apply. It is well known that Kazakhstan’s international reputation for religious tolerance is currently threatened by the new Religious Law due to come into effect in October 2012. This new law is partly provoked by fears of extremism or terrorism, but is the wrong answer to the right question. It insists on a form of registration that would make it impossible for an Anglican Chaplaincy to be opened, for example. It also provides for any published materials to be vetted before distribution. It gets a bit more complicated than this, but you get theidea.

Look at the geography to understand the fear; but, extremists are not going to register under any restrictive law and this law will have two potential negative effects: (a) it won’t do what it is set up to do – control extremism – but will restrict the freedom of minority or small religious groups (especially Protestant groups such as Baptists and Lutherans), and (b) will compromise Kazakhstan’s hard-earned reputation for religious tolerance in a remarkably complex country.

Anyway, I am writing this during a Panel session on ‘multiculturalism’ while a Chinese speaker is passionately saying something very important, but without translation into English. There are other Panel sessions on ‘the role of women’ – which could get lively -, ‘youth’, and ‘sustainable development’ today and tomorrow. I did a plenary speech this morning (which I will post later) and will contribute to the session on ‘youth’ tomorrow. Before then I have to plant a tree (don’t ask) and have a big meal.

This conference can be frustrating – especially when speaker after speaker limits their speech to the blandly obvious (“it is good to talk…”) – but there are also some passionate, informed, challenging and controversial contributions. It isn’t boring.

However, as with most conferences, the real benefit comes from the networking and conversations in the margins. After all, it always comes down to relationships.

(Wifi is not available everywhere here and I can’t get pictures up yet. So, not much posting this week…)

 

Peace, love and understanding

One of the best bits in the film Lost in Translation is when Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson end up doing karaoke in a Tokyo bar. Bill Murray belts out Elvis Costello’s What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? I love the film and I love that scene.

But it’s the song that’s running around the inside of my head just now. Driving to Manchester Airport en route to Kazakhstan for the fourth Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, I had Elvis (Costello) on CD and played that song four times so I could belt it out with him.

The Congress is also the fourth I will have attended – the first one being back in 2003 in Astana. We came back from that one with all sorts of questions and misgivings – particularly regarding some socio-political phenomena in Kazakhstan itself. I have continued to press those questions ever since, but on the basis that engagement is better than shouting from the sidelines. So, we have persisted in working with other religious leaders and their representatives from all over the world and been able to discuss all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t necessarily be discussed through ordinary diplomacy.

This time we (I am leading a delegation of five from the Church of England) will address themes such as multiculturalism, the role of women, sustainable development and young people. In among these themes there will also be space to address other issues of import and concern. The important thing is to articulate such concerns in ways that will enable them to be heard. There is no value – other than the smug feeling it gives you – in saying things that don’t get heard… however ‘prophetic’ or true.

There’s nothing funny about peace, love and understanding; but they’re dead hard to work on unless we are satisfied with platitudes and sentimentalism.

Perhaps it isn’t entirely inappropriate that today is Pentecost in the Christian calendar. Before leaving for Manchester I confirmed some adults in a Keighley parish this morning and addressed a vast collection of Christians, passers-by and curious onlookers at a Pentecost celebration in Lister Park, near where we live in Bradford. It was loud, colourful and celebratory. But, it reminded me that Pentecost is not about creating a uniform church or a monochrome culture; rather, the key point about Pentecost (at least, as it was experienced by the ‘outsiders’) was that people from all over the place where enabled to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in ways they could both hear and understand.

The job of the church is to work hard at speaking different ‘languages’ to different people in order that the good news might be heard and understood by a vast diversity of people who don’t start from the same place. This is what makes communication interesting and challenging. But, if it seems to be God’s priority at Pentecost, maybe it should be ours, too.

It might even help create a little more peace, love and understanding if we start from where people actually are and speak a language they understand.

Which, I realise, is a statement of the bleeding obvious (as someone once said).

 

 

Haunted by loss

I have only known Washington through the epic series The West Wing. We spent a year watching it from the first episode to the last. Having visited Washington DC for the first time today, I will now have to watch it all again.

What struck me when we arrived this morning was the scale and beauty of the place. You can tell this city was designed to be the capital: symmetry around a central axis, but the most stable triangle holding together the Capitol (legislature), the White House (executive presidency) and the Supreme Court (judiciary) – which can all be seen at once from just to the south of the Washington Memorial. Look west and your eye is taken to the huge reminder of the fragility of the Union, the Lincoln Memorial.

Paris shows the hand of a single mind: Haussmann. Berlin pivots on its axis (from Unter den Linden through the Brandenburger Tor). If Hitler had had his way, both Berlin and Linz would have become enormous memorials to hubris and a monstrous ego. The only other place I have seen that shows such singular design is Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan. Here, too, the man responsible for holding the country through the transition from Communism to free market Capitalism (and doing rather well out of it in more ways than one) has designed his capital on an axis that is breathtaking in its ambition.

Nursultan Nazarbayev decided to move the capital from the beautiful Almaty in the south (prone to earthquakes and too close to expansionist China) and build on what had originally been the village of Aqmola (Kazakh for ‘White grave’ – not the best name for a new capital city) and later became Tselinograd. Since the capital moved north some ten or fifteen years ago the President’s ambitious building programme has gradually and determinedly been realised. It isn’t pretty, and it’s pretty confused in terms of its mixture of styles – but it is symmetrical and grand and imposing.

However, the link between Astana (which actually means ‘capital city’ – not exactly imaginative) and Washington DC – to my mind, at least – is the ubiquity of a search for or assertion of identity. Astana has essentially three styles of modern architecture: Islamic, Soviet and (what I call) ‘Dubai’. It is as if this young country – of which so many of it’s young people are hugely proud, building a new future – is trying to decide who it is: the nomadic horse people of Genghis Khan, a peaceful Islamic (though in a rather ‘keep it quiet and unobtrusive’ sort of way), or a modern, confident Islamic buffer state between the fanatics down south (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan), the imperialists up north (Russia) and the expansionists to the right and down a bit (China). The architecture betrays the search for which origins will eventually define Kazakhstan’s identity: they will work out who they are and who they might become by where they decide they have come from.

What struck me about Washington was the emphasis on ‘greatness’, grandeur, self-justification (and I mean that neutrally, not pejoratively). And the ubiquity of conflict. Every memorial seems to speak of conflict won or lost. It seemed poignant to me as a visitor that the two most powerful memorials were those closest to the Lincoln Memorial – Korea and Vietnam – and both of those were lost. More to the point, tens of thousands of lives were lost – and it isn’t obvious to younger generations what the point of these wars was.

As I watched so many young people reflected in the stone and the engraved names of those lost and missing in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975, I was haunted by the enormity of the loss. Not only the Americans, but hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and others. It reminded me of when I visited the memorial to the fallen in the ten-year Soviet Afghan campaign (1979-89) in Astana and I saw the mothers still weeping at the sight of their sons’ names etched into the stone.

What was it all for?

I loved Washington. It is beautiful, confident, friendly (despite the snarly policewoman I asked for information – a mistake I won’t make again). The wide avenues are stunning. The vistas are breathtaking, the architecture pleasingly classical (mostly), the sense of space and pace relaxing. But I also found myself wondering what researchers will be making of it all in a thousand years. Will they be seeing the place as we do when we look at the ruins of Rome or Greece and wonder what happened?

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Location:Washington DC, USA

 

Living the dream?

Or enduring the living nightmare?

The phrase ‘living the dream’ belongs to the United States – the land of opportunity and optimism. Philadelphia is where it all began: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the first Congress, the birth of American democracy. Those who signed knew they might be signing their death warrant – after all, this was an act of treachery against King and country. Blood was shed, lives torn apart, families shredded by people taking different sides on the matters of the day – matters considered to be life and death issues.

It isn’t great being a Brit while listening to the story of American independence. But, it is a salutary reminder that a new country needs a single narrative to give it meaning and direction. Now I understand why American rhetoric is always full of repeated mantras of ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, and so on. These were people who threw off the authority structures of monarchy and church, replacing them with representative democracy and a structural separation between church and state. You can see it in the architecture of Philadelphia: no dominant church spire or tower – City Hall is where all roads meet.

I think I knew this in my head – I have read alot about America and it’s cultures – but I hadn’t ‘felt’ it until coming here while England burns at a distance. This is a country that reads it’s own story alongside that of the exodus, the conquest of the Promised Land, the place of freedom won and self-made achievement lauded. (Of course, this leaves out the more uncomfortable prophetic injunctions of the Promised Land deal…)

I once did a lecture on ‘Space, place and pace’ (I know… tacky title) in which I explored how the three types of architecture in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, say something about that country’s search for identity, for a history that explains and legitimises who they now are, for a sense of place in a complex world in which Kazakhstan is a baby country. This search is integral to every person and every community: we can’t escape it. This week, however, it is the narrative of the USA that preoccupies my imagination.

If the Exodus and Conquest provide the ‘story’ (and evokes the ‘dream’) that shapes the self-understanding of the USA, what is the story that shapes England today (a ‘nightmare’?)?

There is something almost naive about the youthful enthusiasm of America when compared to the tired cynicism of England (and much of Europe). We have had too many wars, too many religious conflicts, too much pain and suffering, too much being let down by unfulfilled promises. It is surely not accidental that English humour is so self-deprecating, ironic, cynical. Or surprising that we love to be negative, ‘can’t do’, unadventurous, small-minded and unrealistic about our real place in the world? The Empire has long gone, but you wouldn’t believe it…

In his excellent book The English, Jeremy Paxman points out that to be Irish, Welsh or Scottish is also to be ‘Not English’… whereas it is meaningless for an Englishman to define himself as ‘not Scottish’. We don’t actually know who we are. My own family has Irish, Welsh, Manx, English… and probably French, German, Viking and (odds on) Genghis Khan.

This is what makes the English Defence league so ridiculous. What assumed ‘Englishness’ do they think they a defending? What is the story they think gives our history – and therefore our future – meaning?

The demise of Christendom in England has taken with it a shared narrative, reinforced in our language and symbols, our folk stories and sense of destiny. We now know what we were, but no longer know who are. Which means we cannot purposefully move into a shared understanding of our future. We have lost more than we ever thought mattered. And, like when the Soviet Empire collapsed, the framework disappeared and the was nothing to take it’s place; so corruption walked in and bought the place up. Didn’t Jesus once say something about clearing demons out and leaving a vacuum?

So, what are the narratives that people think will give us a future common ‘idea’? The churches have one – coloured by the freedom of service of a God who first served us. This narrative is rooted in the simple conviction that all human meaning and ethics begin with the nature of every person being in the ‘image of God’.

I am not hearing too many alternatives today. But I am reading Nigel Rooms’ new book, The Faith of the English (SPCK, 2011)…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Philadelphia, USA

 

Central Asian uprising

The President of Kyrgyzstan is refusing to resign despite the take-over of the country by the opposition. This might sound like a local skirmish a million miles form anywhere interesting, but this could turn out to be deeply significant. I write with a close knowledge of Kazakhstan and note that the British Ambassador in the region does the job for both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Central Asia had all the potential for catastrophe. Among other factors, its infrastructure had been dominated by and run for the benefit of Moscow and the ethnic mix had been engineered by Moscow over 70 years to integrate European Russians in the Central Asian territories. The end of the USSR brought huge challenges to the region.

When Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991 it was cut adrift by Russia. Its economy, no longer subsidised by Moscow, fell apart and it had to invent new symbols of identity, currency, political and economic structures. Continuity was provided by the General Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party (Nursultan Nazarbayev) becoming the first President of the Republic and driving (ruthlessly) the changes needed to establish a new economy. Crucial to this was the ownership and exploitation of oil and gas.

However, Kazakhstan faced several other challenges: (a) it borders on China and there was/is a powerful fear of Chinese expansionism – hence the move of the capital city from Almaty in the south to Astana in the centre; (b) as a landlocked country, the need for access to the sea – necessitating the recovery of good relations with Turkey; (c) its location between the unstable and less developed other southern republics (including Kyrgyzstan and the bizarre Turkmenistan) and a growling Russian bear to the north and west (with Chechnya not far off).

Look at the map and you can see why Kazakhstan has worked hard to establish itself as a buffer between Europe and Asia, between China and Russia, and in distinction from its southern neighbours beyond whom are Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to the south. This is not insignificant territory for global security – as both the Chinese and the Russians know.

So, ructions in Kyrgyzstan send vibrations through the other republics and into the surrounding powerful nations with their potential for expansionism. It isn’t yet clear how the situation in Kyrgyzstan will develop – let alone resolve – but its importance might be greater than the ‘oddball country somewhere over there’ treatment by the western media might initially suggest.

 

Rochester opens up

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, retires this week after 15 years in post. He will now devote his time to supporting Christians facing persecution in some tough parts of the world. I have no idea what this will actually mean from day to day – or how this will be funded and Michael and his family supported – but he has made a brave decision to move on at this point and enter an unknown world for the last five or ten years of his ‘paid’ ministry.

As I have said before, I heard Michael speak when I was a curate in Kendal in the late 1980s and was astonished at his fluency, intelligence and memory. He didn’t once appear to refer to a note or script, he quoted theologians and thinkers I have trouble even remembering, and dealt with questions with a gracious eloquence that didn’t expose how silly some of them were. Michael has never lost that amazing ability and has used it to great effect for the sake of the Gospel and the Church. Being on the receiving end of his eloquence and forensic analysis is not always comfortable (which is an understatement), but his passion and integrity are unquestionable.

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph he gave his final interview before moving on. Predictably, the thrust of the reported interview highlights the perceived concerns of the Telegraph itself, focusing on the need for the Church of England to “do more to counter twin threats of secularism and radical Islam”. Apparently, he warned us that “traditional British society is under threat from the rise of aggressive secularism and radical Islam”. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the interview itself – only the report of it. So, it isn’t clear what else Michael might have talked about in the interview. (Update 3 September: Martin Beckford has very helpfully written up the interview.)

I agree with Michael that ”the Church of England, which is used to working with society, should speak up … to defend the country’s customs and institutions, most of which are based on Christian teaching”. But I do not agree with the bit I excluded from that quotation: “more often”.

The first question this begs is: who is the Church of England? Is it the bishops or the Archbishops’ Council or the clergy or…? The fact is that the Church of England – in its parochial clergy, its chaplaincies, its bishops, its synods, its reports, its bloggers, its representatives in the House of Lords, etc – is always ‘speaking up’ and questioning the drifts of society when they need to be questioned. But not everybody gets listened to as Michael does. I am constantly surprised to hear that the Archbishops of Canterbury or York have been silent on something when a cursory look at their speeches, sermons and writings tell a different story.

I regularly get asked why I have not ‘spoken out’ on something or other when I have preached, blogged and debated the matter openly. What is really meant is: ‘you weren’t reported as saying what I want to hear you say in my newspaper.’

The same can be said of : “I think it will need to be more visible and take more of a stand on moral and spiritual issues”. What would such a ‘stand’ look like? And which ‘moral and spiritual issues’ will be regarded as those most important for the Church to be heard on? We are accused of not ‘speaking out on moral issues’ when it has to do with sex or relationships, but not often when it is to do with climate change, banking/finance or media misrepresentation.

I think there’s a double jeopardy – on the one hand an aggressive secularism that seeks to undermine the traditional principles because it has its own project to foster. On the other is the extremist ideology of radical Islam, which moderate Muslims are also concerned about. This is why there must be a clear recognition of where Britain has come from, what the basis is for our society and how that can contribute to the common good.

Michael has been well-heard on these matters, but he is not and has not been alone in speaking on them – either at parochial, local, national or international level. (I raised questions about persecuted Christian – and other religious – minorities during the Congress of Leaders of World and Tradional Religions in Kazkahstan in July this year…) I hope he will continue to bring his unique perceptions and perspectives to bear on these and other issues, but I also hope that others will get heard when they do what he is asking for, but don’t have the same facility as he does for getting reported.

 

Steppe up to the microphone (Kazakhstan 5)

Here is the text of my speech to the III Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday 1 July 2009:

The role of religious leaders in building peace based on tolerance, mutual respect and cooperation

 The role of religious leaders in building peace based on tolerance, mutual respect and cooperation is to use words as if they were fragile glass or weapons that kill.

I don’t want to repeat things that have already been said during this Congress, but will come back to the matter of words and language later. But, I wish to begin by bringing the greetings of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Congress and to the President of Kazakhstan and his staff – with an expression of gratitude for the invitation to be here and for such generous hospitality. No opportunity for conversation between religious leaders can ever be wasted and the Third Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions has the potential to create ever greater trust and affection between leaders from all over the globe.

The Archbishop has just returned from Istanbul where last week he convened the eighth meeting in the series of Building Bridges seminars focussing on discussion of the relationship between religion and science from Christian and Muslim perspectives. This has proved to be an excellent example of how religious leaders and scholars converse with each other in an intelligent, informed and respectful manner. And this is just one form of such dialogue in which relationships are built up and knowledge and understanding deepened.

Recently the Archbishop launched an initiative in London called ‘Presence and Engagement’. London is a vibrant, colourful and complicated city, bringing together people from every corner of the earth. The Church of England and other Christians are committed to serving in communities where the local population is no longer mainly Christian – being present and engaging openly and in love with people of other faiths. This is in no way a denial or watering down of Christian ministry, but a necessary response to and living out of the Christian gospel by those who claim to follow the Jesus we read about in the gospels.

At the launch of London Presence and Engagement the Archbishop spoke about the power of words and it is here that I wish to address our thinking in the context of our own congress here in Astana. For words matter enormously. And religious leaders are challenged to speak consistently, using language to articulate hope not only at forums such as this one, but also back home in the communities where our voice is heard and heeded. Empty words become a hypocrisy and that is not something religious leaders can embrace.

There are those who criticise events such as this for being ‘all talk, no action’. They say that this is just another example of where religious leaders talk about peace, but never get any further than merely talking. Well, I want to argue that talking is action. Talking together builds relationships of trust, exposes true motives and makes us responsible for what we do as a result of the conversations. The fact that we have spoken about the importance of talking together means that we can never pretend that the conversations never took place. That matters enormously.

During my speech at the Second Congress in September 2006 I said this:

It is vital that religious leaders come together, speak together, listen carefully to each other, and build relationships of mutual understanding and respect with each other. But it must not stop there. Once in a relationship with leaders of other religious traditions, it is imperative that honest and open conversation leads to action and the making of a difference. The challenge to the religious leader is to have the courage to stay with the conversation when the honesty is painful to bear and when the easy option would be to walk away. The promise is only that being a religious leader in such a context will be lonely, painful and personally costly. But it is also true that greatness in a leader is seen when the leader is big enough to stand in the middle, between people of two different worlds, and hold the two together… while being pulled apart by the exercise itself.

But there is a second element and it is simply that talking involves listening. And when it is religious leaders from different faiths and different parts of the world with their different cultures and histories who are thrown together, that act of listening can be difficult. It can be hard to listen to the perspective of someone whose position we find difficult to accept. But, we do listen because we are here together in the same shared space and cannot walk away. This encounter has the potential to change us – and through us to change those whom we lead and serve.

Perhaps it is this notion of ‘shared space’ that goes to the heart of our mutual concerns. After all, the planet is small, life is fragile and our faiths put upon us the responsibility to enable human beings, within their limited environment, to flourish as best they can. There is no other option open to us, despite the best efforts of some religious and non-religious people to create conflict wherever they can. No one who claims the voice of God can escape the obligation to serve the interests not only of his own community, but those interests that promote what has become known as ‘the common good’.

But, to go back to the power of words, we need to recognise that leaders in any sphere of life bear a very heavy responsibility for using words wisely and well. Words can inspire people to lay down their life for the sake of other people; but, they can also be used to conspire in destructiveness, cruelty and neglect of the poor, weak and vulnerable. Words can inspire, but they can also depress. They can give birth to new possibilities, but they can also kill the spirit as well as lead to the killing of bodies. Words can heal, but they can also very easily wound. Words – especially when allied to authority (especially religious authority) – can also either open up relationships or simply close them down, thus condemning us all to misery.

The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures tell us vividly and frequently through the agony of loss that the people who claim to be God’s people must be the bearers of promise. When the world has closed down for many people who feel trapped in cycles of enmity, hatred or violence, it is the prophets – indeed, the poets – who craft the words that tease people’s imagination with the possibility of a new future, of new birth, of hope. When those in exile are taunted by their apparently victorious oppressors about the apparent futility of their faith, it is the poets who use words to paint pictures of hope, who conjure up images of newness and who keep alive the potential for a different future when such an idea simply looks and sounds absurd.

But such a poetic hope is not simply to be hijacked into defending the narrow interests of a few of ‘my own’ people. Rather, it is to be held out for all people and especially those who suffer whether through their own fault or that of others. Hope cannot be tamed or turned into a possession of those who happen to be most powerful at the moment. A Christian can do no other than lay down his own life and interests and rights if that is the cost that has to be paid for making reconciliation and peace even possible.

And this is why, I think, religious leaders have a vital role in ‘building peace based on tolerance, mutual respect and cooperation’. Not because these are nice or pleasant notions upon which all can agree, but because religious leaders have a massive responsibility to lead their communities towards hope – often, as was the case with the prophets of old, at enormous personal cost. Telling the truth and leading communities in right ways is never an easy option in a world which deems power as the greatest good.

However, religious leaders – as they are represented here in Astana – are only one part of the solution. The problem we have is how to cascade well-meant language down through our communities to every level of religious community and commitment. It is not enough for us to agree to statements at this level if this makes no difference to those who wish to fight or kill or impoverish those they consider to be either their enemy or just ‘different’. If we satisfy ourselves with friendly dialogue and the agreeing of a statement without working these ideas through our networks and communities – using the authority we have by virtue of the offices and roles we fulfil – then we have done worse than fail: we have merely played a religious game and our words will have been nothing other than an empty hypocrisy.

I am – as always – pleased that here in Kazakhstan in this Congress we are able to model relationships and dialogue based on tolerance (as a positive practice), mutual respect (which comes at cost) and cooperation (which demands action). I urge us all as religious leaders to take our words and language seriously, to become poets of hope for hopeless people and to remain dissatisfied until our own actions are effective in challenging, encouraging, persuading, changing and shaping behaviour throughout the communities for which we are responsible and accountable.

More could be said. But I want to strongly endorse the proposals made by Ishmael Noko in his speech earlier and ask that they be taken seriously in preparation for the next Congress in three years’ time.

Thank you.

 

Stepping forward (Kazakhstan 6)

Progress has been made in the culture of this Congress – but not enough. These two days have heard calls from many parties for talk to be converted into action at every level. Yet the day ended with a stage-managed concluding ceremony and not one word of discussion about the Final Declaration. Now, the reason behind that is likely to be that the Secretariat (involving representatives of many of the faiths represented here) has worked on it and agreed it, so there is no need to argue about it all over again in a potentially unmanageable plenary session. I’ll come back to this.

This morning there were two concurrent ‘group sessions’, one on ‘Dialogue and Cooperation’ and the other on ‘Moral and Spiritual Values, World Ethics’ (sic). The third, which was a plenary, addressed the theme ‘Solidarity, particularly in the Time of Crises’ (sic). I went to the first session on Dialogue and Cooperation’ and heard the usual list of platitudes. But there was also some serious stuff addressed.

The Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, went straight for critique, asserting that dialogue between religions is only a first step and runs the risk of the people involved having nice conversations and then going home unchanged. As a sponsor of the Alliance of Civilisations initiative (with Turkey), he was keen to illustrate the need for practical and grassroots engagement in a programme to develop an ‘agenda for cultural diversity’. He was impatient with mere talk and said so in unequivocal terms.

Yet this was followed by speakers extolling the predictable virtues of dialogue. It occurred to me that several Muslim speakers wanted to claim Islam as a peaceful religion while ignoring the dark side of the faith. We heard that ‘India is a land of peace’ – on the day the UN is launching an investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and in which I reminded the assembly of the persecution of Christians in Orissa last year (and ongoing?). I intervened later in the discussion to ask for honesty as a fundamental basis for effective dialogue and to state that dishonesty about bad religion leads us into fantasy and a waste of time and words.

This did not go down well and one or two speakers cited (for example) the Orissa murders as ‘an aberration’ – without declaring when a series of ‘aberrations’ becomes a ‘norm’. Christians cannot be free in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Turkey, but this is not acknowledged by those who wish to pretend all is well everywhere. Freedom of religion in certain places might well be a noble aspiration, but it is often spoken of as if it were a reality now and that is simply not the case. (This position was helpfully and strongly reinforced in a later discussion by Jonathan Aitken who is here representing Christian Solidarity Worldwide.)

But this leads me to a probably surprising conclusion. Had I not spent six years involved in this (often frustrating) process, I would not have been able to make this point clearly and unamibguously to this remarkable gathering without being considered rude, destructive or difficult. The value of this Congress is not primarily that it proves its worth in agreed statements, programmes or outcomes, but in (a) successfully bringing a group of difficult people together in one place and (b) creating the space in which relationships can grow to the point of trust allowing for frankness. This achievement should not be minimised and might even make the vast expense and rather controlling political culture justifiable.

Part of the problem with this Congress is that it is founded, driven and serviced by politicians, but for religious leaders who work on the preparatory Secretariat and do all the talking. This produces an inevitable tension that cnanot be easily resolved: the politicians want to deliver a good and efficient event while the religious leaders want to get to grips with argument – which, of course, might get out of hand and prove to be uncontrollable by those who need to deliver a smooth conference.

And although I am a bit sceptical of the content of certain speeches, there are some very good contributions, too. The Orthodox Leonid Kishkovsky (USA) made a disciplined and substantial short speech which should have moved the discussion on – but was followed by further prepared speeches. An American Muslim woman noted the lack of women around the table and called for this to be redressed in future. She was supported later by my Church of England colleague, Dr Jane Clements. Fr Christian Troll made a helpful distinction between the nature and language of religious and political leadership. The speaker who opened his speech with the words, ‘Let me tell you the history of Islam in China’ cheered me up enormously by not doing so and encapsulating it in a mere three or four minutes.

When I emerged from the hall I was confronted by French, German and Austrian television crews wanting interviews. The German began with something like: ‘So, all is well, the sun is shining on us all, there is nothing wrong between religions anywhere and everything in the world is lovely?’ I knocked that one on the head, but it was not hard to understand why this was the message he was hearing from many speakers.

So, what preliminary conclusions do I draw this evening?

1. The Congress has faults in culture and process and this causes some to feel they have been exploited for either (a) boosting Kazakhstan’s domestic and international image or (b) giving credence to the assertion that Islam is always and everywhere tolerant and unproblematic.

2. These faults are openly identified and discussed and will be addressed at the next meeting of the Secretariat, probably in November this year. That these can be openly articulated and not met with mere defensiveness demonstrates great progress in relationships, process/culture and political maturity – especially with the Kazakhs themselves.

3. The fact that this group of big-shot religious leaders come here, sit together (interspersed and not in ‘faith blocs’), speak freely and listen to (often uncomfortable) neighbours is not to be underestimated. There will be those who question why we pitch up to an event such as this – especially when it is such an effort to get here in the first place – on the grounds that some leaders are playing ‘window-dressing games’. My response is to ask if it would be better not to have this context in which hard questions can now be asked and some hard listening be done? Surely it is better that Sheikh Tantawi and Chief Rabbi Amar sit around the same table (when they don’t have to come) and listen  to each other, isn’t it? Or would we prefer to keep them apart where lack of relationship/proximity can only lead to enmity, generalised (dehumanising) categorisations of ‘the other’ and lack of public accountability for what they do and do not say?

4. The non-monotheistic faiths must feel a bit put out by the language of ‘creation’ and ‘creator’ – used even by the atheist Nazarbayev in several speeches. They have constantly looked for other language to be used in agreed statements, but the dominant language of this 2009 Congress betrayed assumptions about theism that, were I (for example) a Buddhist, I would find irritating and excluding. I wonder if they will stick with the process despite this.

5. Hospitality is a mark of the generosity of the Kingdom of God and the hospitality of the wonderful Kazakh people is remarkable. Furthermore, this is a country that is young, optimistic and involved in creating its future – a big contrast to the tired cynicism of the west where we just try to patch up our institutions and reinvent ourselves without any new or radical energy to create something new.

6. Relationships are now well established to the point where we can move on to substantial discussion of tough themes such as the persecution of religious minorities. That has got to be better than not having a forum in which such discussion is possible.

Other questions remain and will need to be discussed in due course. But, for now, this Congress has ended with a presidential blessing, wonderful Kazakh music in an outdoor amphitheatre, the release of doves and balloons into the sky and a reception to get us fed before bed. Tomorrow will bring a lie in (at last), lunch with the British Ambassador, an afternoon seeing Astana with friends and an evening meal with Lyazzat and her mother. The plane back to London Heathrow via Istanbul leaves at 2.30am…