David Boulton reports on his speaker tour to SoF groups overseas and sister organisations.
When a handful of enthusiasts got together after the BBC's Sea of Faith series in 1984 to organise a conference 'to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation', they cannot have imagined that the waves they were creating would roll across the oceans and fling a few pebbles up the strands of distant lands to create a world-wide network. Not quite the Fifth International (though church traditionalists were quick to denounce it as a fifth column), but a network of networks linking radical religious humanists and their allies in Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States, with outliers dotted across the globe. And when I first stumbled across the UK network in the early 1990s and was given the responsibility pro tem of producing this magazine, I never imagined that I would one day be crossing these oceans to visit each of the networks in turn. But that's what I found myself doing in 2004, and the experience was hugely enriching.
It all began with an invitation from Sea of Faith in Australia (SoFiA) to speak at their inaugural conference in Perth, in September. Then it transpired that the New Zealand network would be holding its annual conference only a week later, a few thousand miles away in Cambridge, just south of Auckland, and they asked me to pop over. Meanwhile, earlier in the year, I had attended the Westar Institute's mega-conference in New York, and accepted an invitation to speak at SnowStar's conference at Niagara Falls, Canada. A unique opportunity, then, to compare and contrast the different manifestations of the Sea of Faith phenomenon in all its diversity.
First, then, the Westar conference in March. Westar is not, of course, a part of Sea of Faith but an academic institute based in Santa Rosa, California, best known for its Jesus Seminar in which some of the world's leading New Testament scholars and historians have been working together to find a scholarly consensus on the historical Jesus. Over the last five years or so, however, Westar has been calling on a different expertise, that of the radical theologian, Don Cupitt (whose books are now published exclusively by Westar's own Polebridge Press) has become a star in Westar's crown, as has New Zealand Sea of Faith's Lloyd Geering. Our own David Hart is a Westar Fellow, and others who have backed SoF's promotion of religion understood as a cultural creation Karen Armstrong and Richard Holloway among them have likewise followed the Westarly trail. The result is that the SoF networks and Westar have become closely linked as allies in the campaign for religious literacy and an up-to-date understanding of religious culture and mythology.
The connection works both ways. Westar's founder-director Robert Funk has been a SoF guest speaker in Britain, and Associates of the Institute such as Hershey Julien, John Klopacz and Tom Hall have attended UK annual conferences. Hershey is SoF's representative in the USA and has been busy recruiting new members. One day soon membership will reach the critical mass required to enable US members to make their declaration of independence and start their own network.
Westar usually holds two conferences a year in Santa Rosa, but Robert Funk switched the Spring 2004 meeting to New York and the swanky Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square, so for four days The Future of the Judeo-Christian Tradition was right up there with the big Broadway attractions. The star-studded cast, in addition to Cupitt, Armstrong, Holloway and Geering, included Marcus Borg, Elaine Pagels, John Shelby Spong and Karen King. Rarely have so many of the biggest names in radical theology been gathered together in one place. My supporting role was to deliver the citation for Westar's John T Robinson Award, which went to one Don Cupitt.
The problem was that there was little room for participation by the floor. The platform talked, we listened. What we heard was richly rewarding, but opportunities for questions and open discussion were limited. In style alone, this was very different from the participatory format of SoF conferences. Another difference was the relentlessly theoretical emphasis of the stream of lectures. In all four days there was scarcely a reference to the real world outside and the preoccupations of the man and woman on the Broadway sidewalk. Christian US America was knocking the hell into Iraq, Mel Gibson's tacky film turning the passion of Christ into a sado-religious spectacle was the talk of the town, but none of that found its way into the learned expositions on the meaning of the Second Axial Age.
So back to Britain, only to pack a fresh suitcase and fly off to Niagara for the SnowStar Institute's conference on Paradise Lost, Now What? SnowStar was founded only four years ago, its name indicating its early ambition to do for Canada what Westar was doing for the United States. But when it comes to conferences, SnowStar's style is much closer to SoF's than to Westar's: informal, participatory, bottom-up rather than top-down. As I read their Constitution I found myself wondering why it all seemed so familiar, till I realised that I had written a lot of it! Del Stewart and David Galston, Snowstar's founders and inspirational double-act, had simply copied much of SoF UK's constitution into their own.
Where more than 300 had packed into the Marriott Marquis, SnowStar's 120 made for a more intimate and friendly event. Still new and finding its feet, their previous conferences had started at 40, then doubled, then grown by half as much again. Main attraction this year was John Dominic Crossan, who reminded us that the first-century Romans had had their own 'saviour', son of God' and 'king of kings' all titles of the Emperor Augustus. But perhaps the most original and rewarding speaker was Riffat Hassan, Muslim, feminist theologian and campaigner for human rights, who challenged our perspectives on Islamic fundamentalism, and did so with humour and an enviable lightness of touch.
Mark Warren of Amnesty International and campaigner for the rights of the 600 prisoners at the USA's Guantánamo Bay concentration camp ensured that real-world concerns were at the heart of our religious preoccupations, and I provided a light dessert with a tour of the Republic of Heaven. Galston and Stewart laid on some innocent merriment by humiliating their guest speakers in a trivial pursuits quiz, where we all won the dunces' prizes we deserved. SnowStar takes religious literacy seriously but is good at factoring in some comic relief. And when the backdrop is Niagara Falls turning into the world's biggest icicle in a snowstorm, it makes for a memorable experience.
Next stop Sheffield, where we all wished we were at Leicester. The speakers were Keith Ward, Nigel Leaves and Don Cupitt, with a debate between Robert Forman and Peter Selby on the relative merits of free-ranging spirituality and institutional religion. Only in one or two workshops was there any attempt to relate radical theology to radical politics, which SoF continues to sidestep (but may not be able to avoid much longer if our new editor has her determined way).
And so to Australia and New Zealand. Sea of Faith in Australia (SoFiA) has existed in autonomous groups for several years, stretched across the country's vast distances. Perth, in the deep south-west and one of the most isolated major cities in the world, seemed a strange choice for their first national conference, especially as most SoF groups are concentrated a couple of thousand miles away along the east coast; but Nigel Leaves' Wollaston Theological College proved a fine venue, and Australians seemed happy to follow their song-lines across the continent. One determined SoFer from Brisbane drove all the way. It took him ten days there and ten days back. It's as if we held our annual conference not in Sheffield or Leicester but Moscow.
The theme was Where to now with Religion?, addressed by Don Cupitt (en route to Beijing to lecture the Chinese on non-realism!), Rachael Kohn, an ABC broadcaster, and myself. I had the good fortune prior to the conference to address SoF groups in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Canberra (a joint meeting with Quakers and the Centre for Progressive Christianity), which gave me an exhilarating taste of the openness of mind with which Australian SoFers explore religious commitment in a secular age. Theosophists and charismatics shared their insights with dyed-in-the-wool atheists.
Finally, Cambridge, New Zealand, for the biggest of all the SoF conferences, some 240 strong. Noel Cheer, a guest at our own UK conference, was in charge, welcoming us with a Maori greeting which must have echoed across Middle Earth. Here too our theme was the future of religion and I found myself sharing the platform with Lloyd Geering, doyen of radical philosophers of religion, and a wonderfully courageous radical Muslim woman, Ghazala Anwar the first Muslim I have met who sees Islam as a human creation, and who tells me she would like to start a Muslim SoF network. I hope it will be possible to invite her to one of our UK conferences soon to pursue this exciting idea.
I confess Anthea and I did steal away for a few hours to visit nearby Hobbiton, where we duly had ourselves photographed on the steps outside the round front door of Bag End. There's very little of the film set left to see, but the landscape was perfect for the Shire, and we paid our homage to a non-real Gandalf the White, who died and rose again to vanquish the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...
So what did I learn about the different networks? Mainly that they are not very different. New Zealand, from the start, chose not to adopt the UK's 'mission statement', opting for a broader commitment 'to facilitate the exploration of religious thought and expression from a non-dogmatic and human-oriented standpoint'; and SoFiA has followed much the same open line. But in practice any differences with the UK network seem negligible. SoF UK is open to all who 'sympathise with' the view that religion is a human creation, but in practice accepts members who want to explore it without committing to it. New Zealand and Australia don't commit to it, but their literature excellent newsletters, run respectively by Noel Cheer and Greg Spearitt is no less 'religious humanist' than that of the UK. Australia seems more open to 'new age' spiritualities than most of us are, New Zealand sees the UK network as skewed towards Anglicans and 'godless vicars'. Both share the UK's suspicion of linking radical theology with radical politics, terrified that to do so would provoke disharmony and splits.
But what the three networks, together with Westar and SnowStar, are doing together is refusing to leave religion to those who root it in another world, beyond the bright blue sky. We don't have all the answers, but we are not afraid to ask the questions. How long, then, before we organise the first SoF International conference? The Fifth International could, after all, be an idea whose time has come! And there's at least one line in the old Internationale which we could make our own: 'No saviour from on high delivers!'
David Boulton
David Boulton is a former editor of this magazine. His latest book is The Trouble with God: Religious Humanism and the Republic of Heaven (O Books, Alresford, 2002).