The Word, Ireland
Dec 29 2006

Is Religion an Obstacle to Progress?

This is a fascinating question, not least because of the ambiguity of
the two main terms used: religion and progress. Religion as a human
phenomenon, history teaches, is subject to all the ambiguities of the
human heart, which can pervert even the highest of human ideals. And
yet, for all its shadow side, religion as a notion retains its
positive claim to heal the wayward human heart and enable it to rise
above the mundane.

Progress is even more ambiguous. The main movement behind the
genocide of Armenians in Turkey at the beginning of the last century
called itself the `Committee of Union and Progress’. It would not be
the last time in that century just past when the notion of progress
would be used to justify mass murders of the so-called enemies of the
march of progress, as, for example, defined by the Communist Parties.
In Czechoslovakia, before the Velvet Revolution, dissidents there,
such as Vaclav Havel and the signatories of Charter 77, were labelled
as `conservatives’ and `reactionaries’ by the powers-that-be.

In common with all the great world religions, Christianity is
ultimately concerned with eternity, with what is beyond the mundane.
It thereby gives our daily life its meaning and so makes material
progress truly human. But Christianity goes one step further.
Rejecting the fatalism of the pagan religions of its day,
Judeo-Christianity introduced the notion of progress into world
history – namely the conviction that social conditions can, indeed
must, be improved.

The French Revolution’s `Cult of Reason’ – Chaumette unveiling
‘Reason’ (Notre Dame, 10 Nov 1793). Chalk lithograph by R. Weibezahl.
Courtesy: akg-images

However, in the Age of the Enlightenment, progress itself became a
religion. The main theoretician of the religion of progress was a
Catholic priest, the Abbé de St Pierre. The influence of his ideas
can be traced down to our day. Most of his ideas – including free
education, the reform of female education, and the abolition of
poverty – have been the stock-in-trade of Liberals for the past three
centuries.

More significant is `[the French cleric’s] fundamental doctrine of
the `perpetual and unlimited increase of universal human reason’,
which will inevitably produce the golden age and the establishment of
paradise of earth’. The main point is that belief in progress is
itself a religion, more precisely a Christian heresy – moreover an
extremely irrational one, despite its glorification of reason (or
perhaps because of it), since it flies in the face of reality, namely
the fact that the bloodiest of all centuries was the 20th century
that prided itself as progressive.

The 2003 McGill Summer School papers provide a sober estimate of the
contemporary Irish situation. They celebrate the astonishing material
development of our small country over the past decades and at the
same time they recognize frankly the equally extraordinary collapse
of the moral fabric of society in tandem with it. That sober estimate
acknowledges, on the one hand, our new self-confidence as a nation
and yet, on the other hand, they appear to be perplexed in the face
of the equally new phenomenon of alienation, lack of trust in public
institutions of Church and State, and the various forms of escapism
and breakdown of civilized behaviour that are creating a black hole
in society.

And yet the paradox is that, according to various European value
surveys, we are the happiest people in Europe, a factor linked
perhaps to the still more or less vibrant faith of so many Irish
people, who make up the highest percentage of regular Sunday
Mass-goers in Western Europe.

In Ireland today, few want to be called conservative and those who do
are often an embarrassment. Most want to be seen as liberal and
progressive – even if only a tiny minority want to be progressive
democrats! Progress tends to be seen as being of its nature something
unequivocally good and positive. The Catholic Church in Ireland has
been increasingly attacked as the major obstacle to progress: it is
accused of being traditional, conservative, even reactionary, in the
face of so-called liberal values that a highly motivated minority
seek to impose on the majority. The paradox is that the Church’s own
massive investment in education over the past two centuries arguably
provided one of the conditions for our present economic progress.

Irish Catholic Church leaders since Vatican II often lacked a
critical theological sense and were themselves afraid of being
labelled conservative (or pre-Vatican II). Consequently, they have
been less than convincing in their defence of traditional Catholic
faith and practice. More recently, they have been intimidated into
quasi-silence by clerical sexual scandals. And yet, at the
grass-roots level, the Church is stronger and more vibrant than many
imagine. There, participation in Church life is not experienced as an
obstacle to progress but the means by which people rise above the
flat meaningless of an increasingly grey world of material progress.
I would argue that secularism is the ultimate source of that bleak
world.

`Soviet Communism and Liberal Capitalism share the same basic
convictions about reality. Both worldviews are materialist, in the
sense that they hold that matter is primary, spirit being simply the
product of matter. This is the dogma of evolutionism. As a result,
both worldviews deny explicitly or implicitly the primacy of the
human being. Both claim the end justifies the means, which is the
perversion of one of the most fundamental moral axioms, namely that
the end cannot ever justify the means.’

Secularism, as is well known, has its roots in the reduced form of
reason which the Enlightenment embraced. It is better described as
rationalism since it excludes God from its scope. The power and the
fragility of this restricted form of reason gave modern Europe the
specific shape we know today. The power unleashed by this form of
reason gave rise to phenomenal developments in science and
technology, and it created the modern notion of human rights that
fuelled the American and French revolutions. These are positive
achievements. On the downside is the fragility of this understanding
of reason, which was manifested in the reign of terror first
unleashed by the French Revolution. It found its most horrific
expression in Marxism and Nazism, both products of that particular
kind of reason, which first emerged in the Enlightenment. Why?

God was left out of the equation, and so man sought to redeem himself
by trying to formulate his own moral norms and to create a perfect
society on earth through social engineering. Liberal capitalism,
Marxism, and Nazism are all attempts to achieve this goal, the most
successful being liberal capitalism. Despite their obvious
differences, both Soviet Communism and liberal capitalism share the
same basic convictions about reality, as Vaclav Havel pointed out
some years ago, when he was still a dissident. Both worldviews are
materialist, in the sense that they hold that matter is primary,
spirit being simply the product of matter. This is the dogma of
evolutionism. As a result, both worldviews deny explicitly or
implicitly the primacy of the human being. Finally, both claim the
end justifies the means, which is the perversion of one of the most
fundamental moral axioms, namely that the end cannot ever justify the
means.

When the Absolute, God, is denied, then those aspects of social life
that should be relative become absolute. As a result, individuals are
freely sacrificed on the altar of a new god: race, nation, the myth
of progress articulated in political ideologies, or, as increasingly
in Ireland today, the economy. (The Government’s failure to oppose EU
funding for destructive embryonic stem-cell research lest we would be
left out of possible economic benefits is a case in point.) At the
heart of such a society, where only wealth counts, and where might
increasingly becomes right, a void opens up that leads to escapism of
every kind, from drugs to suicide.

Furthermore, totalitarianism is not something of the past, but is a
real threat today in Europe, Ireland included. Its shadow can be
found in the thinly veiled threats made last year by a member of the
Government-appointed Crisis Pregnancy Agency to the few chemists left
in Ireland that still refuse on conscientious grounds to sell
contraceptives. In a totalitarian State, even when it calls itself
pluralist, all must conform.

Celtic cross from Clonmacnoise.

The Church is not an obstacle to real progress, but it is an obstacle
to the false religion of progress based on the myth of creating a
perfect society on earth. Pure religion is the conditio sine qua non
for genuine progress and the creation of a truly human civilization,
a civilization of love. The existential question is: is the Church of
the majority in Ireland at present capable of rising to the task of
supplying this pure religion?

D. Vincent Twomey, SVD, is the author of The End of Irish
Catholicism?, Veritas, 2003. His new book, Benedict XVI, Conscience
of Our Time will be published by Ignatius Press in April.

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