The Responsible Adult: on being grown-up in religion

Two unconnected stories have hit the headlines and made me stop and think.

The first is the sentencing of a teacher who had sex with a 16 year-old pupil of his. The trial judge gave him a suspended sentence, saying that the girl had 'groomed' him.  In other words, his culpability was mitigated by himself being a victim of her manipulative behaviour. This sentence has met with a strong and, in my view, entirely understandable, reaction. The teacher was the 'responsible adult' in this relationship. And as everyone who works in caring professions knows, whether in education, the church, medicine, social work or mental health, the practitioner holds the power in this unequal relationship. To have a sexual relationship with someone for whom you are professionally responsible is regarded as abusive, unambiguously so when that person is legally a minor. It is 'sex in the forbidden zone'.

The other story is the defiant publication of 3 million copies of the post-attack edition of Charlie Hebdo. Its cover shows the weeping Prophet carrying the slogan of solidarity with the victims, 'Je suis Charlie'. Underneath is the statement 'All is forgiven'. This too has met with a mixed reaction from Muslims and other people of faith. Some have said that to publish a cartoon like this a week after this terrible slaughter is a calculated and provocative act that simply pours fuel on the already fiercely burning fires of religious hatred. Pope Francis seems to underline this in what he said today: if you utter a curse against his mother, you can expect a punch. 'It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.' Though others have referred to the Prophet's non-violence in the face of abuse and commented wryly that Charlie has captured precisely that.

What's the connection between these stories?

The link for me is how we respond when we are provoked. It's implied by the judge that the school teacher was provoked into having sex by an irresponsible schoolgirl. It's implied by some people of faith that the jihadists were provoked into committing atrocity by irresponsible journalists and cartoonists. So their reactions were understandable even if they were not defensible.... But the truth is that in both, a provocation has been met by behaviour that is utterly destructive. The question is not whether schoolgirls should incite their teachers, or whether satirical journals should pour scorn on religious faith. Many of us don't find much to admire in those behaviours. But in a liberal democracy, religion can't and shouldn't be privileged from being ridiculed. The key question is, when we are provoked, what is the right way to respond?

I find the phrase 'responsible adult' helpful here. It's the well-known way of referring to the person who holds the caring role in unequal professional relationships, like that between teacher and student. As I've said, that role confers power over another person. But we can transfer it to how we think about Charlie Hebdo. What do you do when your faith, your prophet or your saviour is mocked and insulted? It's a question of who holds power and therefore responsibility. I don't much care for words and images that under the rubric of free speech are calculated to provoke and hurt. It's a kind of grooming, a provocation to react. As I blogged last time, even when I am hurt or offended, I hope I shall defend the right of others to offend me within the law. But in this exchange I believe I am required to be the 'responsible adult'. I must not collude with the offence others give by brandishing a gun any more than I should collude with seductive behaviour by producing a condom. If I give in and play by the rules of the child, I cease to be an adult myself.

So my plea to all of us who are people of faith is that we stay grown-up and don't revert to infantile reactions, however much our instincts drive us to. This is what both the Jesus modelled in the way he handled abuse. The passion narrative makes much of how he did not retaliate and thereby endorse the behaviour of those who mocked, insulted and murdered him. He remained the 'responsible adult' toward his abusers, just as he did in his relations towards the weak, the vulnerable and the young. I quoted a New Testament letter in my last blog: 'when he was abused, he did not return abuse'. 

It is worrying that a lot of religion reacts very primitively in its handling of both sex and conflict. Faith communities, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, often find it hard to respond to the challenges of contemporary life intelligently and wisely. But in a world where abuse is rife and people go on damaging one another, religion has the opportunity to break abusive cycles by showing a more excellent way. The Fourth Gospel spoke to us over Christmas about how grace and truth have come into the world. This is faith's answer to provocation, wherever it comes from, whoever perpetrates it. 

It's what being a 'responsible adult' means. 

Je Suis Charlie: thinking and praying in the shadow of a massacre

As I write this, a vast crowd is gathering in Paris in a defiant cry for freedom and unity following last week's terrible massacres. Many world leaders are joining them, among them David Cameron. I wish I could be there too. Yet I am there, wholeheartedly, in spirit, in imagination, in sympathy, in everything except body.

Much has been written about these events and their aftermath. The Twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has trended beyond all expectation. I have added to the volume of tweets expressing sorrow, prayers, outrage, and condemnation. Above all I have wanted to join the worldwide chorus of Non!, the refusal to cave in before the fear violence is meant to evoke. Bombs and guns will never, ever, intimidate the pen. Not in any society that treasures democracy and is pledged to live by it. 

What have been my thoughts in the past few days? They have swung this way and that, I admit it: when events are so wicked, it can take time for our initial responses to stabilise. At first I entertained the notion that when religion is mocked or insulted, as in the long tradition of satire in which Charlie Hebdo stands, we should not be surprised if its committed practitioners react violently. But that's the first step on the dangerous path where understanding an evil can veer into subtly shifting responsibility for it. We can start to think that when people say certain things or draw certain pictures, they should expect a retaliation. So while we are appalled, we toy with the thought that they partly brought it on themselves: whether through malice, unwisdom or just carelessness, they were responsible. But this is absolutely how not to see it. Responsibility for this atrocity lies with those who pulled the trigger - with them alone. 

What they did was an act of hatred of the freedoms our democracy stands for. We need to calibrate those freedoms. In any society, rights are not absolute. They have to be negotiated and consented to. Freedom of speech, precisely because of the power it gives, has to be handled responsibly. Paddy Ashdown tweeted last week: 'Some say that because you can say something, it doesn't mean you should. But free speech means that because you shouldn't say something, it doesn't mean you can't.' To put it that way round is clarifying. There are things I shouldn't say or write; if possible, I shouldn't even entertain the thought behind them. Not because I am not free to, or am afraid to, but because it erodes the value of another human being, damages people, or is exploitative or hurtful or just plain rude. That is a judgment everyone must make. And within the boundaries of what is lawful, we should expect a huge range of opinion as to what is or is not responsible in an environment where so many freedoms are given us. Charlie Hebdo is not everyone's cup of tea. But however people use these freedoms, and even if they abuse them, violence is never the answer. 

Voltaire has predictably been much quoted: 'I disagree with what you say, but shall defend to the death your right to say it'. It's hard to improve on that. I guess that saying that makes me what I have realised in a new way I am: a citizen of modernity, a child of the Enlightenment. The assault on Charlie Hebdo was a clear attack on the values of the Enlightenment at the very heart of its French homeland. Freedom to speak, equality before the law, toleration of dissent, all this was in the sights of the Islamists as they named their victims and gunned them down. They did what they did not out of reverence for truth and justice on behalf of the Prophet. It was an act of naked fear. 

To be a post-Enlightenment society means standing for the belief that the tyranny of ideas, any ideas, even the best, can never belong in a civilised society, let alone the distorted and debased doctrines of radical Islam or other extreme fundamentalisms. The principle of laïcité lies at the heart of the secular French Republic. That clear separation of the state from religious belief and practice is the direct heir of Enlightenment thinking. It's not that religion is to be repressed, but that everyone should be allowed to practise it according to their conviction in an environment of toleration. Or not, as the case may be. It's important for people of faith to understand that liberal secularism, so hated by some strands of Christianity, is not the tyrannous proscription of faith but the guarantor of a space in which it can find its free expression. At its best, it is the ally of good religion, not its enemy.

This much has become clearer to me in the past few days: that we must speak and act not out of fear or hatred but out of the love of truth. Yes, the Enlightenment itself did not always live up to its own best vision of a civilised society: witness the Terror that followed the French Revolution. But just as in Christianity and Islam, we need to rise to the highest aspiration of a noble movement, not the corrupted versions certain periods of history bear witness to. And the Enlightenment has given us gifts we should celebrate and be profoundly thankful for. It's arguable that it could only have happened in a Christian environment with its respect for the individual, for personal freedom and for the pursuit of truth. 

The preacher in the Cathedral today got it right. He said that he certainly did not like it when his Lord was maligned or mocked or his name used as a swear word. It is hurtful and grievous. Yet nothing anyone can say or do to Jesus Christ today can go beyond what he has already suffered in his passion and crucifixion. He stands before us as the Lord of truth and love. And, as the New Testament tells us, he did not resort to retaliation when he was ridiculed and insulted. 'When he was abused, he did not abuse in return.' 

Islam honours the same God of Abraham as Christians and Jews. He is not a coercive tyrant; on the contrary, as the Qur'an insists, he is 'Allah the compassionate and merciful'. We do not confuse those who follow the noble path of Islam with the crazed extremists who have so violently twisted its meaning and practice, and by wreaking havoc on the streets of France brought the name of a great world faith into disrepute. Jesus prayed from the cross for those who did not know what they were doing. These atrocities are beyond comprehension to us, beyond our capacity as mortals to forgive. We burn with anger on behalf of victims who can no longer cry out for themselves. Yet is it not precisely in the heat of our rage that we must pray that hardest of all prayers that Jesus uttered at the darkest moment of his passion: 'Father, forgive'? Or try to?