This continues what is liable to be quite a long series of catch-up posts. My aim is to fill in the background details of my various exploits in a quixotic bid to be more comprehensible whenever I report on more recent events.
When last I left off, due to the untimely intervention of bedtime, I had volunteered to be on a working group to form an Inter-Faith Council for Christchurch. The basic brief for this group was to write a draft constitution, find out what legal arrangements should be made, and organise a big public meeting to create the Council. And to arrange tea and biscuits, which is really the most important part. If I had to summarise the very essence of inter-faith activities, it would be “Let’s all have tea and biscuits, but together!” Also to act as role models of tolerance and respect for people who prefer coffee or small cakes.
The working group included a reasonably good first approximation of the religious diversity of Christchurch. The membership turned out to be somewhat fluid, but at rough count there were three Muslims, three Christians (including, notably, the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch), a Buddhist, a Unitarian-Universalist, a Quaker and myself a Bahá’í. It has always been my observation that religious people seldom have any problem working with people from other religions, but tend to be unnecessarily concerned about the sensitivities of others. If, for example, you put a Jew, a Hindu and a Muslim together in a room, the Jew will be worried that the Muslim and the Hindu won’t get along. The Hindu will be worried that the Jew and the Muslim won’t get along, and the Muslim will come up with some issue over which the Jew and the Hindu will disagree. None of this ever takes very long to sort out.
I’ll grant that this observation might not apply perfectly to randomly-selected religious believers, but it seems to fit pretty well for inter-faith activities, where people have generally self-selected for tolerance and open-mindedness.
I am now going to reveal a little trick I have found useful on many committee-related occasions. I find that committees I am on usually work best when I am the secretary. This is due more to a number of crucial flaws in my character than any special secretarial skills: I am poor at remembering names, inclined to wander off the point, inclined to be loquacious, and capable of making grandiose ill-formed plans in the company of others that I forget to carry out properly after I have left the meeting. Being secretary helps with all of these things: I have to write down people’s names, listen carefully to what other people are saying, and summarise decisions clearly. In addition, I already have an obvious job to do in taking the minutes, so people tend not to mind if I don’t take on too much other homework.
Usually people don’t mind too much if I want to be secretary, but just to make sure I make a point of arriving early to the first meeting of any new committee I have joined, getting out my laptop and starting to type the minutes before anybody has time to think about whether they might like to be secretary. In my defense, I can type pretty fast, and I usually manage to have the minutes finished and ready to email before I leave the room.
At our second meeting, some issues of scope arose. We had gathered in a meeting room at the Anglican Centre, and started the meeting only to discover more and more people turning up. In addition to the actual members of the Working Group, there were three or four times as many people who weren’t members but had turned up anyway. Eventually it emerged that somebody (we never did find out who) had invited them to the inter-faith meeting, apparently under the misapprehension that it was a discussion group rather than a committee with a specific task to perform and an agenda to get through. It took about three quarters of an hour for everybody in the room to become clear on what was going on, not least because more people kept arriving while we were trying to sort it out. It is surprising how many people will turn up to a meeting with no clear idea of its purpose beyond it being an “inter-faith thing”, unable to say precisely why they came or what religion they belong to. They were very nice about it once they understood what had happened though, and we all agreed they could sit in for the rest of the meeting if they liked, which apparently they did.
Afterwards, one of the visitors told me that she hoped the inter-faith council would have room for atheists and agnostics in its membership, which struck me as rather like asking the National Council of Women whether men could be members. I did my best to explain that I expected the organisation wouldn’t require members to be theists (there are, for example, plenty of atheist Buddhists involved in inter-faith work), but that it probably wouldn’t be of great interest to people who don’t identify with some kind of religious tradition. Still, you never know.
Matters proceeded apace over subsequent months, and I found myself delegated to prepare a constitution for the Interfaith Council. I learnt that, when reading a draft constitution, different people focus on very different aspects. The members of the working group, being all cuddly do-gooding religious types, focused most of our attention on the statements of principle at the beginning of the document, concerning how we would be nice to each other, and not use the Council for polemics or proselytising. John, a friendly lawyer who helped us out free of charge, spent a good deal more time on the committee structure we would require in order to be recognised as an incorporated society. Then I was invited to discuss the constitution with Tim Barnett, MP, who conducted a thorough and very valuable critique focusing to a large degree on what might go wrong if an organised group of people (or “party”) with a malevolent (or “oppositional”) disposition set about deliberately undermining the Council’s purpose (or “policy platform”)1.
It would have been an interesting experiment to run the constitution past a trapeze artist, a scuba diver and a bee-keeper to see how they might have helped refine the gymnastic, aquatic and apiaristic qualities of the document, but sadly I lacked the necessary time.
In the interests of drawing this long and I suspect less than completely gripping post towards a conclusion, I shall skip further details of our committee adventures and speaking engagements and proceed directly to the big night, which was last Thursday.
About a hundred people gathered in the Caledonian Hall for the Great Big Meeting to approve the constitution and thereby form the Council. In order to ensure the smooth conduct of the meeting, we arranged an ample supply of tea and biscuits, and introductory speeches by the Human Rights Commissioner and the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch (who was, as it happened, also the chair of the Working Group). We were also pleasantly surprised to receive a last-minute letter from the Prime Minister, and it turned out that she was broadly in favour of the endeavour, which was good news. There were a series of motions from the the general “We ought to have some sort of Interfaith Council affair” one to the more specific “We trust these people most of us have only met this evening to be the interim Executive until the first AGM” one, and every one of them passed unanimously. Therefore, we have a Council. It won’t be saying much in public until after the first AGM, sometime in August, but it exists. There was much back-slapping and everyone left the Hall in high spirits.
And there the saga of the Interfaith Council and me would end, except for the fact that my name ended up on the list of people to form the interim Executive. Thus I am now on another committee, much like the previous one except more formally constituted. I’m still taking the minutes and writing the constitution, armed with an extensive set of amendments proposed at the meeting. The only major change so far is that I’m also fielding questions from newspapers. There’s no lack of work still to do, but I’m rather proud of how far we’ve come in the last few years.
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All words in quotes inferred by me, and not actually spoken by Tim Barnett. In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that he also corrected a number of my typos.
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Technorati Tags: baha’i, catch-up, christchurch, religion
Hi Isaac
Thanks for sharing your experience with this inter-faith work. I hope your can respond to some questions I have about this as I find the issue a bit problematic but can’t otherwise find any information to help clarify issues.
Some background - I have been aware of, and participated (in a restricted sense given the exclusive approach taken) in discussion on the national statement on religious diversity. My interests were in recognising the importance of developing tolerance and respect in a way which enables cooperation and helps prevent the violations of human rights, terrorism and hate crimes - all in a context of the wide diversity of beliefs in this country. A problem I saw in this is that religious diversity was defined (by those controlling the process) as applying only to certain prescribed beliefs, control of the process was limited to these and the resulting document shows this (for example it limits the right to safety and security to “Faith communities and their members”). Religious diversity was defined as excluding a third of the country whose beliefs are not religious.
So my questions:
1: What do you have to be to be a member? Your seem to rule out agnostics and atheists but not Buddhists - can’t understand that.
2: What does “faith” mean in terms of defining rights to membership? Theist beliefs? (What about Buddhists/), religious organisation (how is it defined, how is religious defined?)
3: Is there a logic to excluding organisations such as Humanists, Rationalists, Skeptics? (A bit like the Buddhist these may include agnostics, atheists and theists)
As you are involved in developing a constitution I hope you can clarify these points.
Let me stress, I am not being provocative here - they are genuine queries. And I do have a concern that a policy of exclusion cannot help overcome problems arising from diversity of belief. My attitude is that both theists and non-theists can (as a result of their beliefs) commit, or be victims of, hate crimes or acts of terrorism. We should all be working together to prevent this. Theists and n-n-theists should work together on this common problem.
Or have I got it wrong and are the inter-faith groups about something else?
Look forward to your response.
Hi Ken.
Firstly, I should emphasise that these are just my own opinions - I can’t speak on behalf of the Council, not least because it’s only partially formed and we have yet to work out under what circumstances anybody might be said to be speaking for the Council.
I believe that inter-faith groups are more or less by definition for people who profess religious beliefs, whatever they might be. I can perfectly well understand that a someone without any religious belief might be interested in religion, but I must admit I have difficulty seeing what value they might derive from serving on an inter-faith council.
I don’t think there’s any need to define what constitutes religious belief for the purposes of an inter-faith council. If people consider themselves religious, then they might be interested in belonging. If they don’t, I can’t see why they would be. It seems to me as absurd as my belonging to an organisation to encourage mutual respect and tolerance between practioners of different forms of astrology, when I don’t believe in astrology.
I mentioned Buddhists specifically (and admittedly somewhat tersely) to draw out the distinction between religion and theism. Buddhist atheists have been active and valuable members of inter-faith groups. Likewise, I’m aware that there are Unitarian Universalists involved in inter-faith activities who happen to be atheists. They identify their beliefs as constituting a religion, which seems to me to be all that’s relevant. I’ve certainly never heard anybody suggest that they should be excluded.
I’m not particularly familiar with the Humanist or Rationalist organisations, but I’m familiar with the Skeptics, and have a lot of respect for what they do. The difference I see between the Skeptics and Buddhists is that Buddhists (or at least many of them) consider Buddhism to be a religion, whereas Skeptics don’t consider Skepticism to be a religion. Being a Skeptic is pretty much orthogonal to being religious, like being a Rotarian or a cricket fan. I guess I could imagine a situation in which lots of cricket fans wanted to join the Interfaith Council and use it to further their interest in cricket, and it would then be necessary to point out that this isn’t the purpose the Council was formed for, but I wouldn’t see that as an exclusion so much as a clarification.
I don’t think any of this precludes theists and non-theists, nor religious and non-religious people, from working together to prevent hate crimes or terrorism. I just think that asking whether people who don’t believe in any religion might be members of an inter-faith organisation is a category error.
As far as the Christchurch Interfaith Council goes, there’s still some work to do to clarify how it relates to other organisations. The general consensus, as I understand it, seems to be that people don’t want membership of the Council to imply that people are formal representatives of their religion. This was pretty unclear in the draft constitution, so I’ve been working on fixing that so that members are simply individuals who are interested in inter-faith activities.
There’s also the facility for organisations to become affiliated with the Council, which would register that they support its endeavours and agree with its principles. These organisations need not necessarily be religious in nature - I would expect, for example, that the Human Rights Commission and the Christchurch City Council might do so. If the Skeptics, Humanists or Rationalists wanted to support the Council as an organisation, this would probably be the way to go about it.
Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for the response Isaac.
I don’t feel this has really dealt with my basic concerns about the interfaith groups.
From my reading the interfaith groups have been given (by HRC) a controlling role in dealing with the problems of intolerance (terrorism, hate crimes) arising from diversity of belief by developing and promulgating the national statement. The problems with the statement have arisen because diversity of beliefs is wider than just theist beliefs - religious diversity should have been interpreted as diversity of beliefs about religion, not restricted to only that subset of beliefs. I don’t believe narrow approaches like this ever solve the real problems.
So, I take it from your comments that the interfaith concept is interpreted as exclusive, rather than inclusive, on these issues. That is OK to me but it does show that we need to have a more widely inclusive approach (and organisations) in dealing with these issues. I guess the fault here is with the HRC who should have sponsored a wider organisation to manage the discussion.
Imagine if the process had been controlled by a group comprised of the rationalists, humanists, other non-theist organisations, scientific societies etc., but excluding theist groups (except through submissions which didn’t have to be seriously considered by the control group). I don’t think this would have been any better than what actually happened.
If the HRC had taken that approach I imagine the first thing the group would have done is realise the necessity of involving representatives from theist groups, so that the group could more accurately represent the true diversity of belief within the country.
There would be value in developing “Inter-Belief” organisations to deal with these issue. I really can’t see why this hasn’t happened. Are religious groups afraid of cooperation with “infidels”? They shouldn’t be. My experience in the peace movement (going back to CND days, the Vietnam war and the arms race issues of the 80’s) demonstrated how well people of different beliefs (including both theist and non-theist) can work together on these sort of issues. And these movements were very effective.
The issues we face today required the same attitude to cooperation. It would be great if somebody from the “interfaith” movement would acknowledge this and express an interest in such cooperation. (It would be nice if the HRC acknowleged this instead of taking a defensive attitude - after all they are a secular organisation tasked with dealing with human rights issues in an unprejudiced way)
By the way, I can appreciate that the interfaith groups may be more interested in talking about religions in a more narrow way, rather that dealing with the issues and problems arising from diversity of belief. And, of course, this doesn’t directly interest non-theists like me. But even with this limited interest a less inward-looking approach could be of value. As an example, I am very impressed by the (now regular) contacts between Tibetan Buddhists and western scientists. I recently read a very interested book on this (Destructive Emotions:
A Scientific Dialogue With the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman) resulting from one of these meetings (the 8th Mind & Life Conference).
It seems to me that here we have an example of what can be achieved by such open meeting of minds and ideas. Western neuroscientists have been able to appreciate that a centuries old tradition has accumulated some valuable knowledge and ideas about human consciousness and psychology and as a result develop research programmes leading to new discoveries about the human brain. On the other hand Buddhists have been able to obtain some empirical evidence for the brain processes underlying their meditation practice. Neither side had to sacrifice their scientific principles or religious beliefs (such as rebirth) to achieve this (although I am impressed by the Dalai Lama’s statement that where scientific discovery produce knowledge contradicting Buddhist beliefs, then Buddhist would have to change their beliefs).
But, as I say, my main issue is how we can develop cooperation on those issues which initially motivated action around the national statement. In principle, how do we change to a more accepting society where there is proper respect for, and tolerance of, the different beliefs (non-theist as well as theist)we now have in our society. I hope you can appreciate this and take into account such attitudes if you organisation does in fact become involved in these wider issues.
Thanks for the chance to comment.
Ken.
Thanks for your comments, Ken. Judging from what you’ve said, I think you see the various interfaith events and activities that have happened recently as representing a bit more monolithic a process than I do.
I see your point with respect to the Statement on Religious Diversity. Non-theists and non-religious people are certainly part of the diversity of beliefs concerning religion in New Zealand, so I see no reason why the Statement couldn’t acknowledge that. I wasn’t involved at all in the process that formed it - my closest association was drafting a brief submission before learning that one had already been made by the national Baha’i community, which rendered mine superfluous. All I can say is that, given the purpose of the Statement, involvement by people who don’t belong to a religion would make sense to me.
Likewise, where inter-faith groups are involved in education or discussion of the range of beliefs, it seems perfectly appropriate to include non-theists and non-religious people where they’re interested and its relevant. I’ve not known any non-religious people who’ve got involved in this sort of thing, but there’s no reason why the couldn’t. Plenty of religious non-theists do.
The Christchurch Interfaith Council, however, seems like a different situation to me, as its brief involves acting as an intermediary between religious communities. For this reason, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to people who don’t belong to a religious community. However, I’m talking about a single institution here.
It seems to me that your point (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that some things that are “inter-faith” ought to include viewpoints that aren’t religious. That seems reasonable to me, and I think you’re quite correct that religious people should be careful to notice when these situations occur, to avoid unnecessary exclusion. I can see that the Statement on Religious Diversity would fall into that category. I think there are also some things that are legitimately “inter-faith”, and inherently unlikely to interest people who don’t belong to a religion, and that the Christchurch Interfaith Council happens to be one of them.
I really can’t speak for the Human Rights Commission, but I think they’re feeling their way when it comes to inter-faith activities. My impression is that they’re used to dealing with groups defined by language, nationality or enthnicity, but communities defined by belief are not their normal area of expertise (and I’m not sure they should be). And I think they’re well aware of this.
I hope this goes some way towards explaining my position. If you’d like to carry on the conversation, let’s take it to email.
I sent the following to your email address Isaac but it bounced with the message “Connection denied after dictionary attack”:
“Thanks Isaac.
I think, however, we seem (from your last post) to agree on the essentials and I am happy about that. And I do think there is value in a more public discussion of these issues. It has frustrated me that non-theists like me have been kept out of the loop.
It is an ongoing issue as we can see from the plan by Destiny Church to demonstrate against the statement (specifically over the question is NZ a Christian Nation?) at Waitangi this month. Hopefully, there will be other avenues for entering the discussion.
Thanks again.
Ken”
Isaac, you may be interested in this bit of information about the committee profile of the UN NGO Committee on Freedom of Religion and Belief. It is this sort of thing I have been arguing for - an attitude enabling both theist and non-theists to work together.
Ken:
CONGO Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief
New York
Committee Profile
Officers
President
Matt Cherry
International Humanist and
Ethical Union
48 Howard Street
Albany, NY 12211
tel: (518) 432-7820
fax: (518) 432-7821
MCherry@humaniststudies.org
Vice-President
Judith Hertz
World Union for Progressive Judaism
tel: (212) 737-1538
fax: (212) 737-1538
jmhertz@msn.com
Secretary
Jim Nelson
Unitarian Universalist Association
tel: (212) 986 5165
jnelson@uu-uno.org
Treasurer
Jonathan Gallagher
Seventh-day Adventist Church
tel: (301) 680-6682
GallagherJ@gc.adventist.org
MEMBERS-AT-LARGE
Bani Dugal
Bahá’í International Community
tel: (212) 803-2519
fax: (212) 504-2798
bdugal@bic.org
Antonios Kireopoulos
Greek Orthodox
Archdiocesan Council
tel: (212) 870-3422
fax: (212) 870-2817
tkireopoulos@ncccusa.org
Kathleen Stone
General Board of Global Ministries
The United Methodist Church
tel: (212) 682-3633 x3127
fax: (212) 682-5354
chaplain@gbgm-umc.org
[...] this. We can see this in the way “Interfaith” groups have been formed in New Zealand - atheist and agnostics are excluded while non-theistic religions (such as Buddhism - the third largest religion in New Zealand) are [...]
Hey Ken and Isaac.
Nice reading about your exchanges guys..
I am a tibetan buddhist from the DiamondWay Tibetan Buddhism..currently residing in Christchurch.
NOTE: I am NOT representing the DiamnondWay School
If my schedules permit, I may be able to attend the Inter-Faith Council AGM to be held on thursday August 30, 2007.
Sandy