Belief and beyond

In a BBC Radio 4 interview last month Imran Khan, cricketer and politician, described his family as living their religion - Islam.  He went on to make a distinction between living a religion, which he did as a child, and holding a set of beliefs which he does today as a practising Muslim. For much of history, many communities have, like the traditional Pakistani society in which Khan was raised, lived the religion of their families, neighbourhoods or nations: a detailed code of behaviour, learned in early childhood, governed their everyday lives – from food and drink to education and work – and framed their relationships with the wider world.

In many parts of the world religion exerts far less of an influence on people’s lives today than it did in the past. In the UK, for example, a tiny trickle of people turn up each Sunday to worship in the huge parish churches built in mediaeval times in the wool-rich counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Put crudely, materialism has replaced religion at the heart of our existence in the developed world. In 2007 a television documentary brought a group of forest-dwelling Papua New Guineans to the UK.  Stunned by the glittering buildings of the City of London, one of the PNG men remarked that the famous spirit house (St Paul’s Cathedral) pointed out to him by the film maker was dwarfed by some of the big banks: this would not be allowed in his village.

Despite a long-term decline in numbers of worshippers and a long period of indifference, religion has once again become a contentious issue and is never far from the headlines.  While mainstream religions have lost their appeal, there has been a worldwide rise in the numbers of people embracing charismatic and fundamentalist beliefs.  These groups, though a minority, are highly vocal, and better organised and more committed than followers of mainstream religion or non-believers. The development of these new strands of religion in the midst of a secularised society has long fascinated Cambridge academic Dr David Lehmann who will give a public talk on the topic of Contemporary revolution in religious life at the Festival of Ideas on Tuesday.

Lehmann has a long and distinguished career in social sciences; he describes himself as part sociologist, part anthropologist, dedicated to ethnography and comparison. He has been doing research on Latin America for 40 years and has travelled there almost every year. His first research was in Chile on land reform in the years before General Pinochet’s military coup which overthrew Salvador Allende, but since the mid-1980s he has concentrated on religion. His research focused first on dissident Latin American Catholics struggling to apply a radical reading of the gospel known as Liberation Theology during the dark days of military rule; later he turned his attention to the dramatic emergence of charismatic Protestantism in Brazil, and then in the late 1990s he shifted his research to a completely different location, and began a study of the revival of strict observance among Israeli Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin.

“Throughout my career studying religion I’ve been interested in people on the ‘outside’ of mainstream society, who are in one way or another going against the current of respectability and safe options,” he said.

Lehmann’s most recent project is on the Brazil-based neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God which now claims to have 8 million followers in 180 countries and is building the ‘Third Temple of Solomon’ in Sao Paolo, modelled on the proportions in the Book of Kings. Its vast façade will be 56 metres high, and faced in stone imported from Jerusalem; it will dwarf the city’s Cathedral and be larger than the iconic statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro.

“The Universal Church’s ambitions know no bounds,” he said. “It has grown on the basis of spectacle, promise and fear: the spectacle is in the sumptuous scale of its temples, designed and located in such a way as to challenge the dominance of the Catholic Church, and also in the visual and oral manipulation of intensity in its meetings. The promise is of a comfortable life for those who believe in Jesus while also strengthening belief in themselves. The fear is of the devil who can poison their lives and the lives of families, embodied most especially in the witchcraft of indigenous religions. But the Church is also a managerial phenomenon: its leader and founder, Edir Macedo, may not be an unusually charismatic public speaker but he must be a genius at motivating his vast apparatus of pastors and church workers.”

As for the church’s constituency, Lehmann says that in Europe it consists mostly of immigrants, while in Brazil and Africa it is more varied, but the appeal is directed at people emerging from the lower income groups into the middle classes. "The church is notable for the sumptuous scale of many of its temples, often in former cinemas and placed in prominent locations designed to rival Catholic churches;   a formula combining a spectacular emphasis on a promise of prosperity and on the presence of diabolic forces in people’s lives," he said.

Lehmann’s research into the upsurge of charismatic and fundamentalist movements suggests the great importance of conversion in contemporary religion: this refers either to people who have undergone a crisis conversion from no religion to one of the evangelical or fundamentalist movements, and also to those who, also in the wake of a crisis experience, have returned to the religion of their birth, taking on its values and norms with renewed intensity. This is particular evident among Jews and Muslims – especially Muslims in Europe. Like converts to evangelical Christianity, these ‘returnees’ tend to be people who have not only been non-believing, or non-practicing, but also people who have very little knowledge of religion at all, even of their ‘own’ religious tradition.

“Of course, this is not always the case, but the observation should give pause for thought to those who would abolish religious education in schools and it might even encourage the provision of a high quality religious education,” said Lehmann.

He points out that in Europe we have gone from mere toleration to positive commitment to religious freedom, allowing all religious traditions, and sometimes religions with no tradition, to claim the same exemptions and privileges long accorded, in this country, only to the Church of England. Yet the Church of England and the Catholic Church remain great institutions which, almost uniquely, command the respect of vast sectors who only go to Church, if at all, to be married and buried, and may not have any religious faith. This is important, for religion is a resource for society as a whole. Lehmann concludes, echoing the words of President Kennedy: “Think not what society can do for religion, think what religion can do for society.”

Dr David Lehmann will give his talk Contemporary revolution in religious life at the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge,  5.30-6.30pm on Tuesday (25 October). Free of charge, no need to book.  For a full Festival of Ideas programme go to www.cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas.