spirit level
Cedric Mayson
The telephone exchange in Heaven has been suffering from overload. Both United States President George W Bush and Osama bin Laden have been using their hot line to God on an hourly basis. Israelis and Palestinians both report direct contact on high. Christians and Muslims in Nigeria are fighting for fibre-optic space, crossing lines with Hindus and Muslims from India, with Indonesian Christians or Muslims breaking in all the time.
In the West, stuffy and arrogant traditional churchmen are fighting pestilential pentecostals of every persuasion for divine connections. Supporters of these various protagonists in South Africa have been told not to hang up because their calls are important to Heaven. They’re still holding on.
Many such supplicants are deeply sincere people, and each will cite the justice of their own point of view, but sinners can be as sincere as saints. Any theology that claims the support of a God of love, mercy and peace for acts of human decimation is warped. It is the ancient problem of people trying to make God in their own image, and Bush and the Taliban have that presumption.
Many feel heart-rending sympathy for the innocent victims of both the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan, and realise there is no future in the attitudes that have unleashed this anti-human violence and counter violence.
Despite the propagandistic presentation of CNN and BBC on one hand and Taliban broadcasts on the other, the situation clearly demands an alternative evaluation and solution. Some South African newspapers and politicians need an accolade for seeking that alternative.
What we see in many fields today is the failure of extremists, left and right, and the emergence of progressive forces that are not aligned with either. Only the progressives have a viable future.
South African liberals, with years of pussyfooting experience, seek to find a comfort zone huddled up to one or the other side of a conflict, muttering imprecations. But the great lesson most of us have learnt is to look for alternative progressive solutions.
Brits and Boers fought for more than a century before realising that their conflict was irrelevant to the wider struggle for non-racial democracy. The liberation struggle was weakened and lengthened by those who focused on Pan Africanist Congress versus African National Congress, or Inkatha Freedom Party versus ANC, instead of uniting to make apartheid ungovernable.
During the Sixties a major conflict split the South African Church about whether Christians should support apartheid or reform it. Beyers Naude formed the Christian Institute which, together with the South African Council of Churches, saw that the system had to be replaced altogether by a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic society which Africans had known for decades.
The fundamental challenge in Africa is not to decide which side to support in Zimbabwe, Angola, the Congo or Sudan, but to encourage all people to grasp the alternative, progressive view of a new continent with new relationships, new powers and new ways of relating to the forces in the rest of the world. It is only against that progressive continental vision that a realistic national policy can be visualised.
Opponents of the proposed new policy on religious education in schools seem to have missed the point that it is better for learners to appropriate the spiritual values on which everyone agrees, rather than be indoctrinated to perpetuate conflicting religious attitudes. The practice of different traditions and rituals belongs in church or mosque or synagogue, not school.
Employers and unions correctly express concern over the millions of people in our country who are unemployed, but if their imagination goes no further than job creation they are calling the wrong number.
Progressive thinking realises other factors. One is that while the owners of capital think it is an instrument to make profit, it will never be used as an instrument to make jobs for the unemployed. The callous indifference to poverty by those who own and manipulate the globe’s wealth must be changed. (US policy is not anti-Muslim but pro-oil.)
Another factor is that the old system of sharing wealth through earning wages has been immobilised by machines and computers. There will never again be enough jobs to distribute wealth from rich to poor, which is why alternatives such as Jubilee 2000 and the People’s Wage are pointing a way forward.
The West has given us an obsession with separating religion and politics that is very good when applied to structures but very bad when applied to transforming society.
Here in Africa the last thing we need is a government that controls religion, or a religion that controls the government, but we desperately require a progressive alternative that enables regular informed cooperation between religious and political structures working together in communities. Enlightened councils and clergy have begun experimenting on those lines and Mpumalanga is about to follow the Eastern Cape in holding a one-day religious Parliament.
The challenge is to develop a unity among the progressive forces seeking to transform our society. Contemporary history often throws up conflicts that require us to seek a progressive alternative instead of taking one side or the other. It is no good asking for God’s blessing on a number that does not exist on the heavenly network.