Godless Morality
and the abandonment of Christian Identity
by Trevor Hart
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20031010041055/http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org:80/godlessmorality.htm
Godless Morality raises a series of far-reaching questions for those who would seek to live as Christians in today’s world. This sounds like a good thing on the whole, and perhaps it is. While faith is about much more than asking questions, it certainly cannot avoid them. If it is to pursue responsible answers then it must constantly be reminded what the relevant questions facing it actually are, not least because nothing stands still for very long: the list of issues demanding a response is constantly being modified, and yesterday’s answers will not often suffice. To the extent that Godless Morality provides just such a reminder it is a valuable stimulus to the sort of faithful interrogation and exploration which characterises Christian discipleship. I shall suggest duly that it is not itself a good example of that disposition, but we may let this pass for now. The problem, though, is that the book raises rather more (and more fundamental) questions than its author seems to want us to notice. While, therefore, some questions are faced squarely (if not, to be frank, always fairly) and with characteristic enthusiasm in the book’s own pages, others are permitted to slip by in the shadows quietly and unnoticed. Yet among these wraithlike trespassers may be identified issues with which the very meaning and value of Christian faith themselves are bound up. It will be part of the purpose of this chapter to name some of these faceless players, bring them into the light, and inquire where addressing them along the lines laid down in Richard Holloway’s book may actually lead and eventually leave us.
The Bishop’s egg - contentious in parts
One oddity of the book is the relative lack of integration between its various parts. Readers of Holloway’s earlier works will find the core chapters exploring contemporary ethical concerns to be typically well written, well illustrated, and challenging. They are not, though, especially controversial. The views espoused in them are ones unlikely to elicit responses of surprise from any intelligent observer of contemporary ethical debate. Even those who disagree with Holloway’s ethical stances will nonetheless recognise them for the most part as ones held more widely within the mainstream of discussion and debate; they are serious and carefully considered, and certainly not part of some eccentric or radically original alternative agenda. More importantly, they are stances which, in themselves and the sort of practices which they advocate, are compatible with both religious and non-religious approaches and responses to the issues. To take just one example, the discussion of contemporary attitudes to the use and abuse of ‘drugs’ in our society, advocating ‘a middle way between absolute prohibition and absolute license’ (103), is one likely to commend itself to very many people (whatever their religious allegiance or lack of it) as a statement of what, for want of a better description, we might label as ‘common sensical’ observations. There is nothing specifically religious or specifically secular about them as such. They seem to belong in a territory where such metaphysical considerations at least permit concurrence rather than compel difference. Other chapters (those on issues of human sexuality for example) may provoke more significant differences of response among more readers more quickly; but even here a survey of ethical writings would quickly reveal that the book’s views are ones which both religious and secular ethicists have held before. Again, therefore, in terms of its specific ethical proposals Godless Morality is unlikely either to surprise us or to move the arguments forward. At best it offers an accessible and rhetorically persuasive introduction to the issues for a wide readership, an achievement not to be underestimated, especially by those of us whose own writings habitually suffer from an surplus of academic qualification and a concomitant deficit of readability!
If, then, the most contentious (and vulnerable) aspects of this book are not to be found in its positive ethical contributions, where may they be identified? The answer, I suggest, is in Holloway’s proposal that ethical reflection and practice should always proceed without deliberate reference to any set of religious beliefs; that it should, in this sense, be ‘Godless’ as the book’s title indicates. This principle is spelled out fully in the introduction, in chapter one, and returned to by way of recapitulation in the epilogue. While it is alluded to in other chapters, though, it forms no fundamental part of their argument and, as we have suggested, the views articulated and conclusions reached in those chapters are not contingent upon it. They have been and are held by others, religious and non-religious alike.
The principle itself is conveniently summed up at the end of the introduction: ‘..the use of God in moral debate is so problematic as to be almost worthless. …. That is why it is better to leave God out of the moral debate and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments’ (19-20). ‘So problematic as to be almost worthless.’ This is a strong judgment; but it is not immediately clear from such a sentence just what sort of judgment it is, or what is being proposed in practice for religious believers by telling them that morality should be approached ‘as if’ God did not exist. Why should such an imaginative game be played at all by someone who believes that God does exist, and what might its benefits be supposed to be? At least three scenarios might be entertained.
God as public inconvenience
Least problematic among the three, perhaps, is the suggestion that, while beliefs about God may be important and continue to function morally within the lives of communities of faith, nonetheless they are potential sources of division within society at large, and in ‘public’ discussions and debates, being likely to complicate things and unlikely to command any widespread agreement, they ought to be bracketed out of consideration. In other words, for the pragmatic purposes of securing a public moral concensus, the positive views of particular religious traditions ought not to be heard or brought into play; moral reasoning must be rooted only in considerations of much more general and accessible sort. In itself this suggestion makes no claim about the truth or falsity of the religious beliefs in question, or their abiding moral significance for religious believers. It is simply a practical suggestion about how best to proceed in a pluralistic society in order to secure some degree of shared ethical vision. In order to do so, whatever else we may believe and for whatever other reasons we may believe it, we should concentrate upon those ethical principles and reasons for which there is some basis in the ‘common ground’ of human reasoning or experience.
The argument that religion ought not to play any positive role in ethical discussion is certainly not a new one. It stretches back at least as far as the late eighteenth century. Here, too, it formed part of a serious attempt to establish some measure of public concensus for discussions about truth and goodness, and so secure social stability. The breakdown of confidence in institutionalised sources of authority and tradition (of religious and other sorts) associated with the so-called Enlightenment, and the ascendancy of attitudes such as that captured in the slogan ‘have the courage to think for yourselves’ heralded a new confidence in human reason. But, it would seem, if everyone were genuinely free to think for themselves, to make up their own minds about everything, the result might well prove to be a considerable degree of intellectual and moral chaos; and while the philosophers of the Enlightenment certainly wanted to liberate people from oppressive structures, they equally certainly did not want to open the floodgates to anarchy! Their response was, broadly, to suggest that if people were behaving in genuinely ‘rational’ ways, applying their minds appropriately to intellectual and practical problems, then agreement on the resolution of those problems would be reached, since the relevant criteria of truth and goodness were universal and equally available to all. What was needed, therefore, was for issues to be considered in as ‘universal’ a manner as possible, setting aside any particular prejudices, beliefs or perspectives which particular people might normally hold, but which might serve to distort the picture, and thereby have an adverse affect on the relevant judgment. To be truly ‘rational’ in other words was to pare away everything and anything which could not agreed by any rational person behaving in a rational manner. The only legitimate foundations for moral judgments (and hence the formulation of public policy) would be of such a sort; morality must be disinterested, freed from the beliefs, wants, and dispositions of particular persons or human communities, ‘objective’ and therefore reliable (or at least functional) as an agreed standard for moral deliberation. The only good moral reasons would be ones which were universally logically compelling. Since religious beliefs certainly fell into the category of that which must be set aside, it is clear that the demand to keep God out of morality and religion out of ethics is not one arising from our own pluralistic circumstance, but dates back to the philosophical attempt to replace the universal hegemony of Christendom with a humanistic alternative, and thereby subvert the advent of a pluralism of competing claims to truth which threatened to rush in to fill the vacuum left by God’s absence.
Holloway’s book stands more or less in this same tradition of thought. Confidence in religious authority has, by and large, broken down, at least in the sense of there no longer being any one overarching religious story providing a common outlook and thereby granting order to the fabric of society. The alternatives appear to be either bravely to face radical pluralism (with its apparently inevitable outcomes of chaos, political fragmentation and conflict) or to discover some alternative secure basis for agreement about moral issues. Like the philosphes of the Enlightenment the author of Godless Morality opts for the latter course, confident of its likely success. Unlike them, of course, he ought to know better, since he has the benefit of two hundred years or more of hindsight in his favour, and knows that its attempt to discover the sort of agreed basis for morality which it anticipated has actually failed. It has failed not because its intentions were not good ones, but because its analysis of the relationship between morality and other factors in human life (including ‘religious’ beliefs) proved to be false. Attempts to sever moral vision from wider patterns of life embodied in particular human communities have resulted in artificial life-support systems being deployed to no ultimate avail. Morality dies when its connection with human particularity is breached in this way. The only alternative, therefore, (and it is now widely recognised that this is what was happening) was to furnish a surrogate belief system, a tradition within which such vision could again safely be nurtured and might develop. That the Enlightenment spawned just such a tradition, and then sought to impose it upon everyone else in the name of ‘post-traditional’ rationality, and masquerading as an ‘objective’ basis for judgment, is one of the great ironies of human history. In its way it was every bit as hegemonic and imperialistic as the religious institution of Christendom which it displaced. It simply replaced a religious gospel with an irreligious one; but the demand for response and for faith were no less urgent in tone, and the consequences of unbelief were sketched out in similarly colourful apocalyptic terms.
This ‘secularising’ approach to morality is ill-founded in its assumptions, failing to grasp both the inextricably moral nature of Christian (and no doubt many other religious) beliefs and the inextricably ‘religious’ nature of moral responses to the world. We may identify it as a relatively beneficent if misguided attempt to engage in moral discussion without creating friction or generating obstacles to agreement.
God as moral irrelevance
A second, somewhat more problematic reason for urging religious people to live morally ‘as if’ God did not exist might lie in the assumption that in actual fact ‘God’ does not have any direct dealings with the moral dimensions of human life. In other words, the traditional (Christian, but not uniquely Christian) assumptions that human morality is rooted somehow in the moral character of the God who created the world, and that this same God has made manifest both his own moral character and something at least of the ways in which that character ought to be reflected within his creatures, can no longer be sustained and need to be abandoned. For moral purposes, then, God might as well not exist, and we would be better off moving beyond the illusion which has held us captive for so long, and living in the light of this new realization. This is clearly a suggestion of a quite different order to the more pragmatic one which we have just considered. It entails a fundamental reevaluation of the nature, status and media of the human relation to God as understood in many religious traditions, and of the sources and resources of religious faith in such phenomena as scriptures, symbolism, sacraments and so on.
It is clear that this second reason for ‘Godlessness’ in ethics is also one which Holloway adduces in his book. So, for example, he appeals to the recognition of the historical and social relativity of moral claims (the fact that different human societies have produced different and sometimes incommensurable moral codes), the assertion that ‘moral traditions are human creations’ (31), and the insistence that modern scientific study of scriptural texts forces us to recognise their contents as the products of particular human groups rather than treating them as a universal blueprint for human morality in all times and places transcribed from ‘the mind of God’ (27). All of this, it is suggested, compels us to move beyond the suggestion that God is (or should be) involved in any direct and detailed way with the ethical choices which humans make, let alone granting particular moral principles or systems divine warrant over against others. Hence we must ‘reject the role of God as a micromanager of human morality’ and picture him instead in terms of more dynamic images such as one ‘who accompanies creation in its evolving story like a pianist in a silent movie’ (33). It is not altogether clear what the import of this last image is supposed to be, but it is clear that in moral terms God is no longer to be appealed to as either source or critic of human actions. In the case of Christianity, I shall suggest, such a reconstrual of God’s moral significance entails so radical a break with the tradition as effectively to sever itself from it, and to impose a novel and extra-Christian meaning upon the word ‘God’ itself.
God as morally undesirable
We have not yet, though, quite fathomed the depths of Holloway’s desire to liberate his readers from a religiously engaged ethic or a morally invasive religion. His proposal for Godlessness stems not just from a pragmatic desire to argue only on the basis of things which are knowable by and agreeable to the largest number in society, nor from a conviction that (since ethics has its essential roots in the sphere of the human rather than with God) ‘mythological’ modes of expression can legitimately be set aside in preference for more secular ways of saying the same things. His ultimate reason for espousing Godlessness is a strong conviction that the involvement of God in ethics has been and is not just unnecessary or even unhelpful, but positively damaging.
The gist of Holloway’s account here is that religion has sought to reinforce absolute obedience to particular moral codes by appeal to the authority of a God who threatens all manner of unpleasant and even horrendous sanctions (and who is big enough and powerful enough to carry them out). Thus, he suggests, religious ethics has been arbitrary (granting warrant to the moral opinions of particular groups rather than that which compels widespread human consent), authoritarian (demanding unthinking assent on pain of threatened punishment), inflexible (because the ‘commands’ laid down in one time and place cannot possibly apply in other times and places), and oppressive (because its appeal to motivation rooted in fear has enslaved people and prohibited them from exercising the sort of responsible judgment worthy of the human spirit). Added to all this is the charge that such ‘command based’ moral systems (which, we should recall, do not in reality derive from God at all but from humans) have been ruthlessly exploited by the powerful in order to crush and subjugate the weak. In other words, religious appeals to God in the context of ethics have been utterly immoral! The God whom they envisage and to whom they appeal is a cruel and overbearing projection of the worst traits of human self-assertion, and must be set aside at once. It is not just that such a God is harder to believe in than he once was, but that to believe in and serve him is itself an unworthy thing to do. To allow him any further place in ethical disputation is unthinkable. It is remarkable that Holloway has almost entirely negative things to say about the role which belief in God has played in moral terms, and reveals that, contrary to the book’s claim not to be ‘theological’, in fact there is a very definite theological agenda to be identified between its lines.
Fear, desert, and the spirit of slavery
Like all caricature, the account which Holloway offers thrives on sufficient purchase in the truth combined with gross exaggeration and distortion. No one could deny that religious systems have, in one way or another, been instruments of oppression and subjugation over the centuries. Nor can anyone familiar with the history of the Christian tradition avoid the uncomfortable fact that fear has often been a motivation deliberately appealed to by preachers and prelates alike in pursuit of a stable moral consensus and, no doubt, other less worthy ends. The flip-side of this ethic of desert, of course, is the assumption that by ‘obedience’ of a certain sort we not only avoid punishment, but in some sense ‘earn’ or come to deserve divine favour. This misreading of the relationship between God and humankind is one with an ancient track record in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
The attempt to turn a relationship of unmerited generosity and unconditional acceptance into one with performance related costs and benefits may be traced right through the writings of the Old Testament and comes to a head in the New. ‘Who has bewitched you?’ the Apostle Paul demands to know from the Christian converts in Galatia. ‘All who rely on the works of the law are under a curse..’, but ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us’ (Gal. 3:1, 10, 13, NRSV). The ‘curse’ to which Paul refers is the sense of enslavement by guilt and fear which arises from knowing that one can never meet the law’s demands, and which finally crushes the human spirit. The gospel on which he takes his stand is precisely one of liberation from this ‘spirit of slavery’. Yet over the centuries, time and time again it has been the temptation of Christians to modify this message of freedom and turn it back into a version of the ethic of desert. It is as if we are unable to live with the radical scandal of a genuinely unconditional acceptance by God, perhaps because it devalues the currency of our attempts to please God and enter into bargains with him. We would prefer to hold on to our supposed dignity by retaining some purchasing power, however slight. And so we end up back with the idea that there is something we need to do, and do satisfactorily, before we can be assured of our standing before God. And because, like Martin Luther, when we actually examine ourselves we discover no very secure basis for such assurance, we end up again with an unhealthy cocktail of fear and guilt, driving us to ever more desperate attempts to jump through the hoops of ‘the law’. The spirit of the fear ethic to which Holloway alludes is neatly captured in Luther’s anguished question, ‘How can I get a gracious God?’. The message of the gospel, as Luther discovered, is precisely that we cannot get such a God by our moral performance, but that God is gracious despite our failure, and therefore we need not live under fear and guilt but can embrace with joy the freedom of a discipleship in which failure is part of the process rather than a disqualification. And this surely is the point to make in response to Holloway’s caricature. So far as Christianity is concerned, that is to say, the demand to do away with fear as a characteristic religious disposition, or a motivation for obedience, lies at the very heart of things. The undoubted fact that Christians have often failed to grasp or deliberately misappropriated and distorted this demand, turning it on its head, must not be allowed to obscure the basic fact that the story which Christians tell about God is at root one which undermines fear and guilt as legitimate modes of relationship to God.
Grace and the moral reality of God
Why, then, it might be asked, does Holloway not acknowledge any of this? Why does his book make no reference to so basic a feature of the way Christians are supposed to picture and talk about God? Surely a bishop of the church cannot be unaware of the difference between the basic message of the Christian scriptures and the abuses and distortions of this message which the church has contrived (though we should also take opportunity to observe that such abuses have not been universal)? Why, then, does he effectively suggest that the only significant contribution God talk has made and could ever make to morality is by introducing a mythological carrot and stick of sufficient proportions to motivate enhanced moral effort and performance? We can only surmise. One rather obvious answer might be that to acknowledge such a distinction might compel the conclusion that God-talk need not be abandoned but only adjusted and realigned in moral contexts; in other words, acknowledgment that God-talk is not inevitably (even if in practice it sometimes has been) a bad thing. Furthermore, we might observe that the way in which the culture of fear, guilt and enslavement is subverted within the logic of the Christian gospel is quite alien to the route which Holloway himself would have us take.
Specifically, the logic of the gospel involves no abandonment of the perception of God as a moral reality whose own character is of fundamental significance for the question of how we, as creatures called to live in fellowship with this same God, ought to live. The demand ‘You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy’ remains one possessed of absolute force for those who would identify themselves as Christians. We cannot shirk it. Within the context of that unconditional acceptance which Christians call grace, though, this is not a pretext for fear and guilt (what George Steiner calls ‘the blackmail of transcendence’) but for rejoicing, for it stands as an eschatological promise as well as a demand. We are to strive to reflect God’s own character in our daily living not in order to earn God’s acceptance, but motivated by love and gratitude for the one who accepts us as we are and has committed himself to working in, with and through us by his Spirit until we begin to reflect more fully the pattern of a humanity made concrete in his Son. This humanity is anomalous in the world’s terms, for, while we are called to ‘perform it’ in the midst of this world, it belongs finally to a promised new creation which we are as yet able only to imagine and hope for. So, we are faced with an ethical paradox; we are called to live according to a pattern which, by definition and no fault of our own lies ever beyond us and cannot be realized fully in this world. Indeed, the attempt to realize it will almost certainly bring us into painful conflict with the world’s standards and priorities. This is what Bonhoeffer called the ‘cost of discipleship’, and it is intrinsic to Christian identity.
Far from crushing us with impossible moral burdens, or reducing us to slaves of an alien and arbitrary justice, though, the widespread testimony of Christians across the centuries has been that the demanding pursuit of this same ‘transcendent’ humanity, within the context of God’s gracious dealing with us in Christ, is one that brings liberation, delight and joy, as if we had ‘come home’ in moral terms for the first time. Ironically, from this standpoint it is sin, and not obedience, which binds and enslaves people to ‘alien’ patterns of life. Life lived in correspondence with God’s own holiness enjoys the ‘perfect freedom’ of which the typically modern demand for moral autonomy knows and understands nothing. Holloway disagrees, and his disagreement must be respected. It is unfortunate, though, that he is unable or unwilling to reflect this widespread feature of Christian religious experience, and suggests instead that the introduction of God as an authoritative moral player into human life can only result in an overbearing and oppressive divine coercion on the one side, and a passive, unthinking (and to this extent morally irresponsible), and demoralized humanity on the other.
Obedience, autonomy and responsibility
Remaining with this matter just a little longer, we must also reject the claim that recognition of God as a moral authority entails a ‘command morality’ which is by definition unthinking and naïve in its responses. Of course the Christian tradition, like many others, deploys the language of divine commands to express the idea that God’s own moral character has direct implications for the shape of human living. If God is indeed a moral personality whose reality impinges significantly upon human life, then at some point the impinging must become apparent in concrete rather than abstract terms, and in Scripture one way in which this occurs is through God actually telling people how they should and should not live in ‘covenant’ with him. The ten commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are two obvious central examples of such divine instruction. Holloway appears to think, though, that only two responses to such codes for living are possible, and only one tolerable: there is the ‘simple surrender and obedience’ which he eschews, and the complete moral autonomy which he advocates in its stead as the only attitude worthy of enlightened people. But this is patronising in the extreme, as well as false to the facts of the matter. Christians have always recognized that such ‘commands’ play only a partial role in the pursuit of the life of holiness. No matter how much is ‘given’ in this way, more will always be required than any simple or ‘blind’ obedience. No set of moral instructions could ever provide a complete map of the moral contingencies of human living. There will often be the need for interpretation, extrapolation, imaginative application of and improvisation upon the basic framework or themes which such commands provide. Sometimes the challenges in this regard are quite significant, and the responses to them highly sophisticated and careful. To denigrate any religious ethic entailing recognition of divine commands as exclusive of moral responsibility or the exercise of freedom is therefore unworthy. The belief that God has provided some clear indication of moral principles, orientation and even precise instruction for particular circumstances is certainly exclusive of the sort of autonomy which Holloway craves; but that is not the only form which human freedom and responsibility may take.
One might add that it is far from clear that to be given less rather than more as a context for moral judgment and action (i.e. to have one’s space for moral flexibility unconstrained by any transcendent moral authority) is the pathway to liberation and responsible living, and something to be celebrated. The very opposite might be argued. The essentially amoral cosmos in which Holloway bids us forge our existence, inventing our own morality as we go, might be argued likely to be a frightening rather than a welcoming place. One of the distinct advantages of a rule-based ethic (whether religious or of some other sort) is precisely that it lifts a certain amount of pressure from the shoulders of the moral agent. No one can reasonably be expected to treat every fresh practical and moral context in daily living as an opportunity to prove his or her capacity for responsible consideration of all the relevant ins and outs and pros and cons of different moral responses to it. At some point we have actually to get on with living life! To have to make an original moral decision in every circumstance would be a fast track towards a nervous breakdown, and we should quickly find ourselves paralyzed by the overbearing sense of responsibility imposed upon us. If ever there were a recipe for fear, guilt and a sense of oppression then surely this is it?
Rules, habits and judgments
In most situations, therefore, we do not attempt the sort of de novo moral theorizing which Holloway advocates as the hallmark of humanity come of age. We fall back on other considerations, and in doing so we do not abandon moral responsibility, but exercise it. That is to say, we do what is needful in order to act morally, rather than standing and shivering in the face of the crushing demand to ‘decide, decide, decide!’. Sometimes we fall back tacitly on rules or ‘commands’ which are not meant in any way to prohibit moral responsibility, but to indicate what in most cases will almost certainly be the best thing to do, drawing at least on deep reservoirs of that wisdom generated by centuries of moral experience. ‘Thou shalt not lie’ does not rule out the likelihood that there will be cases where to lie is better than not to lie; but in 98% of cases we can probably fall back on it as a good rule of thumb, and in terms of the development of moral character we would certainly be better advised to seek to become the sort of people who ordinarily do not lie than the sort who need to weigh the evidence and decide whether to lie or not whenever an opportunity for lying presents itself! And this leads us to a further significant observation about the way people live their lives morally, and the function of religious traditions (and God) in shaping such living. Rules are not the only, perhaps not even the primary factor additional to moral choosing. Very often we act morally without conscious reference to any rule or set of principles whatever. We act simply according to the sort of person we are or, as we would say, according to our character. We act, that is to say, in accordance with moral habits which we have acquired, or moral virtues which have been inculcated in us. We act in ways which ‘come naturally’ to us to the extent that who we are is already a morally disposed (rather than a morally neutral) consideration.
Of course this advocacy of the role of rules and habits/character is not meant in any way to deny the genuine need for careful moral judgments to be made in certain circumstances, circumstances in which to fail carefully to weigh the relevant factors and make an informed choice would be morally irresponsible. But most of our moral engagement is not like this and could not be. Furthermore, responsible ethical reflection of this sort requires something to ‘respond’ to, something to work with as a starting point or set of principles to guide us. We cannot make up morality out of nothing. Rules such as those offered by religious traditions and secular societies alike furnish just such a framework for response. The only thing resembling such a given starting point in Holloway’s moral world is the somewhat niggardly ‘harm principle’. Important as the intent not to harm others may well be, many readers may be grateful to have rather more than this to go on, rather than feeling oppressed by any such surplus. (How far down the chain of unseen future causality must we go before we are able to wash our hands of implication in ‘harm’?) And then we must reckon with the fact that those who engage in moral reflection and choice are particular people whose lives already have a moral ‘spin’ on them. Such reflecting and choosing is never something done in a vacuum. Those who must choose are real people with a history, an upbringing, a sense of what matters and what does not, even a sense of what does and does not constitute a moral question worthy of consideration. Habit, virtue, character and the subliminal impact of familiar moral codes cannot be erased from such contexts of choice. We cannot, in other words, become someone other than who we actually are in moral terms, and who we are makes a difference to what we are likely to choose and to do. (It will certainly have an impact, for example, on what we are capable of identifying as ‘harm’.)
Morality and Christian identity
Christian faith (I do not presume to speak here for any other religious tradition, but something similar may well be true for others) is about a way of living in the world, which is to say that it is irreducibly moral. This certainly does not mean that such faith is some matter of simple subscription (let alone unthinking subscription!) to a set of moral rules. While such rules have their place, they only have meaning and justification at all because of the wider context of ‘beliefs’ and practices within which they are set. More precisely, they make sense only within the framework of a particular understanding of God, God’s character, and God’s relationship to the world in which this character is unfolded. Christian faith is about living in the world in the light of the knowledge that its final purpose and meaning lies in the God whose identity is made known in the story told in Scripture. This story is summarized by one recent text on ethics as follows: “The God of Israel, the creator of the world, has acted (astoundingly) to rescue a lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus; the full scope of that rescue is not yet apparent, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news, the church. While awaiting the grand conclusion of the story, the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is called to re-enact the loving obedience of Jesus Christ and thus to serve as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes for the world.” (Richard Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, New York, 1996, 193.) No doubt this summary could be tweaked or adjusted slightly. But in its basic form it is a reliable synopsis of the story-line of the book which Christians read in church day by day, and which is unambiguously woven into the texture of its liturgies. It is the story which Christians tell (to themselves and others) and in accordance with which they seek to live life. To be a Christian is to live in obedient response to this God, to seek in all circumstances to do nothing that cannot be offered to this God as an act of service. It is to live in the light of what this God has done and has promised to do. The identification and recognition of God as a ‘moral’ personality, and the pursuit of a human way of being in the world which corresponds to God’s own moral reality is thus not peripheral, nor even only desirable within Christianity; it is what Christian faith is.
Stated thus, it should be clear just what the advocacy of a ‘Godless morality’ actually amounts to. To urge Christians not only that they may but that they should live morally ‘as if God did not exist’ is to urge the effective abandonment of what it means to be a Christian at all. Nor is it at all clear how one might with integrity participate actively in the liturgical and scriptural tradition of the Christian community at one moment, and then live as if it were untrue (even a source of harm) the next. And what place is actually left for God once he has been purged from the sphere of the moral in this way? In terms of what the word ‘God’ means for Christian faith, it seems, very little if anything. God appears destined to become an idol of our own making, kept in a closet for those occasions when we crave a mystical or aesthetic fix, but never allowed to trespass into the sphere of our actual dealings with the world in which we live. Such a God may be a convenient ‘religious’ adjunct to secular existence, but has nothing whatever to do with the God made known in Jesus Christ and worshipped by the Christian community as ‘Lord of heaven and earth’.
Morality, beliefs, and respect for the other
We must return, though, to where we began. The question which faces us is whether our earliest observations about Godless Morality do not support this its most drastic proposal? If, as we have suggested, the ethical standpoints which Holloway adopts on particular issues in the book are ones in principle compatible with both religious and secular perspectives, does this not indicate precisely that morality may be disentangled from religion, and that, if only for the sake of removing unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of a moral concensus, ought to be? So it might seem at first glance. But here appearances are entirely misleading.
Moral vision is never free floating. It is always rooted in and nurtured by wider patterns of ‘belief’ (i.e things which are held to be true), pictures or stories about the nature of what it means to be human and the sorts of ends and goals which are worthy of pursuit and protection in life. One function of religious traditions, I have suggested, is to furnish some such framework of reference to which appeal is inevitably made in moral judgments. But other sorts of beliefs, including the sort of secular liberalism advocated by Holloway, function in a precisely similar way, whether explicitly or tacitly. The belief that there is no morally relevant God, no ultimate set of standards which may be known and in accordance with which we are to live our lives, and that we must therefore invent morality for ourselves, is just as much a shaping influence in morality as religious alternatives to it, and in Holloway’s hands is possessed of no less missionary zeal. Indeed, in so far as they function as a set of fundamental commitments, such beliefs function ‘religiously’, even when no God ever makes an appearance in their midst. Thus we may safely say that in this sense moral responses to the world are inextricably ‘religious’, rooted in and informed by some set of ultimate beliefs about the way things are in the world.
The sort of agreement which may often be identified between religious and non-religious approaches to certain ethical issues, or between different religious traditions, does not indicate, therefore, that such beliefs finally make no moral difference and may conveniently be set aside without loss for ethical purposes. It simply indicates that in a pluralistic context differing human traditions of understanding and practice, whether religious or ‘secular’, may and do sometimes overlap, share certain concerns, and are therefore not altogether incommensurable. It may also indicate the complexity of particular traditions, not all adherents of which will think and act in precisely the same ways. This means that on some issues, sometimes, and to certain levels, adherents of these differing traditions may helpfully combine their energies in the pursuit of shared goals and visions which they believe to be important. If, though, we dig a little deeper and inquire after the foundations for such actions (the ‘reasons’ why these goals are deemed worthy of pursuit), we may rapidly discover that the further beliefs which inform and sustain the overlapping commitments are actually quite different, and perhaps incommensurable in certain basic respects. Since morality (unlike law) has to do with the reasons why people act as they do, as well as the actions they actually perform, such differences can hardly be dismissed as insignificant.
The problem with the ‘religionless’ basis for ethics which Holloway proposes is that, laying claim to a sort of universality, it rides roughshod over and fails to respect all other beliefs than those which it itself pays homage to. Under the guise of a pluralistic tolerance of difference, it actually wants imperialistically to turn difference into sameness (ie sameness to itself) in ethical terms. Once its ‘religious’ foundations are laid bare, its basic desire to convert the other into a version of itself also becomes apparent. The motivation for this appears to be the highly questionable assumption that only like can live peacefully and constructively with like in community. The fellowship of the different is impossible, therefore all traces of difference must be purged, at least from certain basic contexts (such as those in which moral debate occurs). But here, as so often, the setting aside of difference really amounts to everyone else setting aside the respects in which their beliefs differ from mine in relevant ways. ‘All ethics must be done without reference to God’ is thus just as surely a claim born of evangelical passion as any to be found in the positive religious traditions which Holloway eschews, and altogether less tolerant than any but their more extreme versions. If the attempt to persuade others of the truth (and moral significance) of one’s own beliefs is to be made then it must be made openly, with genuine respect for such differences as exist and may remain, and a willingness to listen as well as to speak. To disguise it as the urging of a logical and pragmatic requirement is to lay claim to a privileged perspective which does not exist. In effect it is to put oneself in the place of the God one has just dismissed as a moral irrelevance.
Summing up
Godless Morality proposes that religious beliefs ought not to count as ‘reasons’, but should be set aside for the purposes of facing and resolving moral questions. My argument has been the precise opposite: namely, (1) that there can be no moral vision which is not directly informed by some set of basic beliefs (usually embodied in narrative form), (2) that the distinction between religious and non-religious beliefs is in this context wholly misleading, since the sort of secular liberalism which Holloway’s book advocates is not simply what remains when ‘religion’ has been stripped away from modern understanding, but is itself an alternative tradition which informs and shapes moral vision, and which does so on the basis of metaphysical assumptions incommensurable with those provided by Christian faith and other religious perspectives, and (3) that a more honest approach is for different traditions to admit their differences, to enter into dialogue (which presupposes and respects such differences) in order to facilitate maximum mutual understanding, and to seek those areas of practical ethical concensus which exist or may be developed.
