On Christianity

I can add another denomination to my fairly short list of "Types of Christian I Wouldn't Mind Being If The Big Fella Came Down Tomorrow". To Quakerism and the Rowan Williams sit-down-and-have-some-tea type of Anglicanism I now add Unitarianism, the first service of which I attended the other day in the First Parish Church of Lincoln, Massachusetts.

A quick word on the former two. I first attended a meeting of the Friends a couple of years ago, in a cultural exchange with a Christian friend of mine in which I promised to go to her Charismatic service if she went with me to a service of my choice. Since Cambridge at the time at least lacked an atheist church, I went for the next best thing, and took her to a Quaker meeting. For those of you who've never been (I seriously recommend you go), the "service" consists of half an hour or more of sitting in silence with your eyes closed. There's much more to be said about this encounter, but suffice to say that 30 minutes of undirected meditation was enough to make me almost uncontrollably happy. My poor Christian friend probably thought I had been touched with the Holy Spirit, the way my teacup was trembling afterwards; instead it was the simple joy at feeling clean and wholesome in the way only a good hard extended look into your own mind can make you. I have been back since and never cease to gain a great deal from those meetings.

As for the Church of England, well, I could never entirely love a church based on a divorce, a power grab and a great deal of propping up of an established class system. But my affection for it remains strong, partly because it is so woven into the rural English idyll that forms a part of my childhood, and partly because right now it does come across as a pretty decent attempt to do religion properly. Unlike the hyper-competitive American capitalist brand of Protestantism, the staid complacence of modern Anglicanism has led it to do the right thing almost because it can't think what else it wants to do with itself. When Justin Welby promised to compete the payday loans companies out of business, I couldn't help thinking as a proud secularist that here was something the CofE could do that perhaps no one else could. I would probably even work for an organisation that did stuff like that.

Which brings me to Unitarianism. Yes, Lincoln, Massachusetts is the bluest of blue America. Yes, the fact that I'm sure half of the congregation were probably Harvard or MIT academics might have had something to do with the enlightened service. But what a service it was. The affirmations of the congregation were in the language of human brotherhood and human dignity (and it is that word, dignity, which I consider to be the very cornerstone of humanism, and the bedrock of my personal morality). The sermon was given on this occasion by a guest, Arnold Weinstein of Brown University, and he talked about Kafka and Sophocles and how we make humans into animals without even noticing it.

Pretty much idyllic.

And God was barely mentioned. The hymns we sang were my favourite sort, not submission and unworthiness and dreary repetition of pleasantries, but the uplifting and ennobling hymns of the kind Wesley and Watts poured out in the 18th century. They approached the fighting spirit of my favourite hymn of all, Bunyan's To Be A Pilgrim, a song you can happily sing as a non-believer and not feel you're being disingenuous with a single word. These are hymns that talk about how wonderful it is to be alive, to be moving, to be doing good work. But they are not hymns that ever make me think of the nihilistic sado-masochism that characterises a great deal of Christianity, that which emphasises above all how grateful we must be, how sinful we are and above all the vast and unconquerable power of the Almighty Himself.

The problem with faith that actually tries to engage with God is that it tries to pin him down. In its rush to prostrate itself, it feels it must first identify exactly what it is we are prostrating ourselves in front of; exactly what he thinks of homosexuality, exactly the language that makes the Qu'ran the true Qu'ran. The three faiths I have mentioned do the opposite - they run as far away from God as possible. The Quakers abandon most doctrine in favour of the Inner Light, the Anglicans are famously so establishment they consider belief in God embarrassingly sincere, and the Unitarians, as Joelle Renstrom says in this rather lovely post, value their space. This seems about right to me - if God exists, he is so vast and unfathomable that we should keep our distance, and never be too sure we know what he's thinking.

There's an extraordinary Unitarian hymn called A Core of Silence which ends with the line: "The 'true religion' gathers up its text / 'In The Beginning Was The Word' / But I seek the quietness behind that start / And name it nothing, much less God". Most other Christians, would, I think be appalled at the reticence to recognise the Creator. But once you name something you limit it, and to me that in a nutshell is the great work, and the great mistake, of organised religion. But there are other things organised religion can achieve. On that morning, surrounded by that community, saying those words in honour the dignity of humanity, I felt gloriously happy. And I believed in something.