Homophobia, sectarian violence, and Christian anxieties about the BNP

The news in the UK seems to offer fruitful material for reflection in the debate about the issues that shape secular fundamentalism.

It's been reported on the BBC today that a man was murdered in Northern Ireland yesterday for purely sectarian reasons following Glasgow Rangers' victory in the Scottish Premier League. Also in the headlines in some news outlets is the controversy in the Church of Scotland surrounding the appointment of a practising homosexual minister in Aberdeen and the declaration of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York against the the BNP.

All of these events are symptomatic of the kinds of phenomena that feed the animus of secular fundamentalism. Each of them, of course, can become events in the secular fundamentalist narrative of religious belief, confirming its foundational assertion that religion is - despite all its protestation to the contrary - an engine of irrational hatred.

Even the Archbishops' declaration - an ostensible denunciation of religious hatred - must appear to some secular fundamentalists as a kind of rearguard action by a retreating and compromised religious establishment in England, edgily aware of the fact that Islamophobia can be fed by appeals to historic Christianity, and ultimately appearing to rely on secularist premises for the relative vehemence of their declaration.

How do Christians respond to the secular fundamentalist version of these events?

So what has Christianity to object to the secular fundamentalist version of these events? The main line of argument is, of course, that sectarian murder and Islamophobia are, by definition, inauthentic expressions of Christianity. Christ taught his disciples to love their enemies and, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, taught that the authentic fulfilment of the commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself involves compassion for any human who it's in your power to help, irrespective of their religious or ethnic identity.

It's harder to pursue this line in the case of the condemnation of homosexual acts - the historically decisive authorities for most Christians for all of Christian history (scripture for all, with the addition of Tradition and Natural Law for others) speak with one voice on the subject of homosexual acts (although it must be remembered that they are silent on the subject of sexual orientation). The toleration of homosexual relationships within Christianity almost certainly involves an act of doctrinal repression - inconvenient scripture and Tradition must either be ignored or syncretically assimilated by a "spiritualised" extension of other texts or principles not hitherto used to justify homosexual acts.

But, leaving aside the tricky case of the toleration of homosexual acts for the moment, the Christian line against the secular fundamentalist generally involves variations on the theme that hate crime and the politics of hatred are inauthentic expressions of Christianity. And there are at least two versions of this line. The first is the most obvious - you can't be truly Christian and found your world view on the basis of hatred. A second line is a great deal more subtle: the theory espoused by the Catholic, Rene Girard.

Does Rene Girard provide an answer?

Girard accepts one of the key assertions of the secular fundamentalist: religion is a social mechanism that is founded upon, and attempts to manage, the human impulse to act violently. He argues that the central mechanism in this process is the practice of scapegoating - and that the essence of the Christian revelation is the assertion that, in Christ, the true God exposes, rejects, and repudiates the scapegoating mechanism. Girard also argues that this has not stopped many Christians from using Christianity in precisely the manner repudiated by the God they claim to worship.

If Girard is right, then the concept of the "secular fundamentalist" takes on a new significance - the terminology, of course, is designed to impute precisely the kind of bad faith to certain forms of anti-religious feeling that the secularist imputes to religion. If Girard is right, then the phenomenon of religious belief is actually a scapegoat for the secular fundamentalist. This would then prompt the question, "When the secular fundamentalist seeks to scapegoat religion, with whom will this sacrificial act achieve a temporary truce? Who is the offering of the sacrificial victim of religion going to appease?"