Sean O'Conaill

Last Updated: 30/07/2008

Secularism and Hesitant Preaching

"So why don't we focus on this huge issue for a while, devise policies to deal with it and leave aside tangential issues for the moment?"

This was Vincent Brown in the Irish Times in April 2008¹. To his great credit his 'huge issue' was the awful problem of all forms of sexual violence, as quantified by the SAVI report of 2002². If its figures are correct, about 1.2 million Irish people are victims - and, as Brown keeps reminding us, we can't really suppose that the scale of the problem has diminished significantly since 2002.

But it was the word ‘policies’ that caught my attention, because it seemed totally inadequate to describe what's needed to get a grip of not just this but a whole series of related problems in Irish life. A policy is something debated (often endlessly) by pundits and politicians, then promoted to win support, and then (if adopted) resourced out of taxation. Given the many claims on the latter in a 'flat' economy, given the low-tax climate that a healthy economy supposedly demands, and given the cost of, for example, intensive counselling and psychotherapy, no foreseeable state-sponsored policy on sexual abuse seems remotely capable of addressing the scale of what confronts us in Ireland, even if we isolate just this one problem.

And given the common connection between sexual abuse and the abuse of alcohol and other substances, it's equally clear that any effective policy on the former would need to address the latter. And given the connection between substance abuse and the low personal morale often caused by economic insecurity and relationship issues, can we really propose to solve any one such 'huge issue' in isolation?

Moreover, what about the moral momentum required to completely change an abusive lifestyle? How can a policy devised at the state level reach the deepest core of an individual who is experiencing so radical and subterranean a challenge? Effective state policies can indeed change our external environment for the better, but what about inner, deep-seated dysfunction that so often occurs within the privacy of the home?

In an earlier era in Ireland there would have been a very different kind of response to a crisis of the scale described in the SAVI report - and it would have originated with the church (understanding that term in the widest sense). The nineteenth century temperance movement is a good example. It is another reflection of the depth of our current social crisis that we have now apparently no alternative to secular policy to change our society radically for the better - and that the churches seem incapable of providing that alternative. (Especially if we focus these days on sexual abuse.)

But in fact political secularism - the atomisation, rationalisation and politicisation of every problem - is very much part of the fix we are in - because it tends to disempower the ordinary individual in his own space. Teaching us to delegate everything upwards to politicians and professional experts, it has virtually no power to engage individual citizens in a deep, voluntary commitment to behave honourably, and to join with others spontaneously in doing good, in their own space. The recent debate on what to do about alcohol abuse and other forms of addiction in Irish life proves this conclusively, because we have not moved one step forward on that issue either.

What is required, then, to mobilise the moral idealism of a society, and especially of its youth?

The problem with the moral programme of the church as we have commonly understood it is twofold. First ,we have not fully grasped the compelling human and community reasons for the most important behavioural boundaries prescribed by our Christian tradition (e.g. the taboo against serious intoxication). As a result we tend to resent God for making rules that don't make sense.    We tend to suppose these rules exist for God's sake rather than for ours - mainly because we mistakenly suppose that God shares our own basic tendency to be self-absorbed.

Secondly, because of this, we have not understood the connection between these boundaries and the church's basic positive law - the law of love.

To resolve these problems we need to do two things. The first is to wake up to what our daily news bulletins are telling us: that all dysfunctional behaviour is abusive of others and of ourselves, and to recognise (i.e. to know anew) all of the most important moral boundaries in those terms. St Thomas Aquinas' profoundest observation - that God is not offended until we hurt ourselves - applies to all sin, including sexual sin. Our society is radically self-harming, and we urgently need to reconfigure our understanding of sin in those terms .

The second vital connection is to understand why people self-harm. Congenitally unsure of our own value, we become seriously dysfunctional if our society tells us we don't have any. And that is the message we receive daily when the media remind us that we are not important enough to be the source of the images we see. The teenage girl who cuts herself or starves herself in anger at her inability to fit the ideal media-prescribed body shape unwittingly explains all self-harm. Secular society ('the world') rewards the seeking of attention over the giving of it - and that is precisely why social respect, and self-respect - are so scarce.

And that in turn is why the Christian 'prime directive' is to love God first of all - the only reliable source of self-respect - allowing us then to love both ourselves and our neighbours, unconditionally, and to build a mutually respectful community.

It takes only a moment's reflection to realise that Jesus' love for the poor was in fact a deep respect for them, as they are. In teaching us the reverse of that - that respect can only be acquired by upward mobility, by changing ourselves in some way to win the approval of others - secularism both lies and condemns us to endless frustration and self-harm.

It also disempowers us in our own space by telling us to wait for experts, delegated politicians and their civil servants to come up with a policy that will change everything that ails us. This is the shell game of secular democracy: 'give us power so that we can solve all your problems, and meanwhile wait inertly for us to do so'. We could wait forever.

To tell someone the reverse of that: that they already have the power, and the obligation, to love themselves and others, now and always, in their own space - and by so doing to change that space radically for themselves and others - is true empowerment of the individual. And that is essentially what the Gospel is telling us.

Our inability to value ourselves as we are - to love ourselves - lies at the root of every one of the huge problems that secular politics patently cannot solve:

·      Addiction: (This is usually rooted in fear of failure, or in self-hatred or shame, and is best addressed by e.g. the twelve-step programme which restores a realistic and robust sense of self-worth.)

·      Environmental collapse: (The global pursuit of an unsustainable lifestyle is also driven by media-induced shame at not having what the wealthiest have.)

·      Depression: (The challenges of life in an individualistic culture can lead to a critical loss of hope and self-belief– because individualism also leads to a loss of supportive and affirming family and community relationships);

·      Inequality and injustice: (All desire to be superior arises out of a fear of being considered inferior.)

·      Violence: (This is also mostly rooted in competition for dominance out of a fear of inferiority. Even the violence that arises out of addiction usually has its origins in shame and fear of failure, because that is where most addiction begins.)

·      Abuse: (Self-absorption and lack of empathy also originate in lack of self-love - often due to a serious deficit in early nurturing. The person who deeply respects himself is most unlikely to disrespect others. The person who has been deeply loved as a child is most unlikely ever to abuse children.)

There is therefore absolutely no reason for the hesitancy that has overtaken the preaching of the Gospel in Ireland in recent decades, for the common feeling that faith is socially irrelevant, or for the assumption that the future lies with secularism. There is instead a dire need to seize the initiative by arguing that religious faith, accompanied by reason, can supply the only binding and compelling power available to us to deal directly with the problems of our own local environment as our crisis grows.

We are hindered in doing this presently only by our own inability to connect the Gospels with the problems of our own time and to realise the danger of a force every bit as dangerous as undisciplined sexuality. This is vanity - the seeking of admiration. It arises out of our natural inability to value ourselves as we are, and it lies at the root of the widest variety of evils, from rampant careerism (even in the church) to workplace bullying, and consumerism.   It also destroys community and family by leading us into individualism, social climbing and dysfunction.

It is the inability to make these connections that leads to the present chasm between church and society in Ireland. Clericalism, including lay clericalism, deepens this chasm by fixating on the behaviour that the priest regulates in church, and by disregarding what is equally important - the individual lay person's role in, and understanding of, the secular world.   We have almost lost the connection between a healthy spirituality and a healthy community, and Catholic education and parish life too often fail to restore that connection when we most need it - when we are adults.

Sadly, although love is not lacking in the church, and many Sunday homilists do indeed convey the importance of love, few ever explore the pervasive pursuit of celebrity in modern culture, or the reasons for it. I have yet to hear a good homily on the problem of vanity, as revealed in, for example, the debates among the apostles on which of them was the greatest, and in the parable of the Prodigal Son. No one ever notices the particular problem of the second son (he supposes he will never have the status his father enjoys while he stays at home). And invariably the reluctance of the rich young man to follow Jesus is supposed to be all about loss of money and security, never about loss of the social status that wealth always provides.

Almost certainly this strange inability to 'get' such a constant theme in the Gospels has to do with the fact that the church is still emerging from a long period of clerical social pre-eminence. But, now that this period is at an end in the West, why is institutional Catholicism still very much a status pyramid, despite the insistence of Lumen Gentium and Canon Law that we are all equal in dignity? Do our seminaries fail to ask this question (and to point out that the Gospel answers it) because they too are status pyramids of a kind?

It is time we all understood what was going on in the Gospel when the apostles competed for status - and almost came to blows. And noticed also that spiritual health always involves a deep consciousness of one's own dignity and a loss of fear of what others may think. Only when we have understood the vital community role of spiritual health, and of spiritual insight into what is wrong with us - and then commissioned our laity to rebuild their own local communities by loving one another - can we revive our church, and our society.

Notes

1 ‘Appalling incidence of sexual abuse virtually ignored’, Vincent Browne, Irish Times 230408

2 The SAVI Report - Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland, Sponsored by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Published by Liffey Press, 2002.