S10 #03 - Free-religion’s challenge to all Covenantal Singularisation Projects - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/06/free-religions-challenge-to-all.html

Please feel free to post any comments you have about this episode there.

The Cambridge Unitarian Church's Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation can be found at this link:

https://www.cambridgeunitarian.org/morning-service/
 
Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

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Since Benjamin Netanyahu and his Jewish fundamentalist colleagues in government are, again and again, referring to the State of Israel as the “Jewish State”; and because the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei leads a fundamentalist Shia, Islamic government dedicated to the annihilation of the “Jewish State” — in their language, “the Zionist entity” (see this link for an article on “An Iranian Worldview — The Strategic Culture of the Islamic Republic” by Dr Ali Parchami) — it should come as no surprise that many people without any deeper knowledge of Jewish and Islamic traditions, are being drawn into becoming more and more anti-Jewish (i.e. anti-Semitic) and anti-Muslim (i.e. Islamophobic) in their opinions and actions. In the one-dimensional culture war we are in, for too many people the false equation now exists that says, the current appalling Israeli Government = Judaism, and the current appalling Iranian Government = Islam. It should not go without comment — although it nearly always does — that the current appalling regime in the US, which is dominated by many fundamentalist Christians, does not then turn for most people into the superficial equation that the current appalling regime in the US = Christianity.

In passing today, but extremely importantly, we must be clear that there is not, and never has been, any such thing as Judaism, Islam, or indeed, Christianity; there have only ever been Judaisms, Islams and Christianities. Naturally, it is the case that some of these traditions are extremely conservative, highly reactionary and anti-democratic, and we should continue to be highly critical of them, but it is also true that some of them are liberal, progressive, and pro-democracy, and with them, we can always find common cause.

So, not surprisingly, here I am going to push as strongly as I can against all superficial, dangerous (and plain wrong) equations that claim the State of Israel = Judaism, and the Iranian State = Islam. But, before I do that, I need to observe the difficult truth that this kind of equation gets going in the minds of many people because, alas, there is something correct about these equations that is to do with an aspect of Jewish/Christian/Muslim versions of monotheism. This must be frankly and honestly acknowledged. What that thing is, is exceptionally well summed up on the back of Peter Soloterdijk’s essay from 2015 called, “In The Shadow of Mount Sinai” (Polity Press, 2015):

“At the core of monotheism is the logic of belonging to a community of confession, of being a true believer — this is what Soloterdijk calls the ’Sinai Schema’. [This schema, based on Exodus 32, is characterised by a “narrative triad” of the sealing of a covenant, its breach, and, through acts of extreme violence, its re-establishment.] To be a member of a people means that you submit to the beliefs of the community just as you submit to its language. Monotheism is predicated on the logic of one God who demands your utmost loyalty. Hence at the core of monotheism is also the fear of apotheosis [i.e. the fear of making and worshipping of other gods], of heresy, of heterodoxy. So monotheism is associated first and foremost with a certain kind of internal violence, namely, a violence against those who violate their membership through a break in loyalty and trust.”

I hope you can see that the dynamic just described is clearly present in so many aspects of life within the modern-day states of Israel, Iran and the USA.

But the difficulty with labelling it as a problem with Jewish/Christian/Muslim forms of monotheism per se, is that the same dynamic exists within atheistic states as well, most famously those that are, or have been, connected with Nazi, fascist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies. This is because they are the children of monotheism. In these atheistic ideologies, the one God element was simply swapped out and replaced by their own One-Ideology-shaped element, whether that element was, or is, a single strongman/woman leader, a single Party with a single ideology.

Again, in passing today, but very importantly, it’s vital to see that this kind of schema is also visible in counties where the religious tradition is not monotheistic. So, for example, we see it being played out in India thanks to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, and we see it too in the Buddhist Nationalism displayed in Myanmar.

So why am I alerting you to this fact today? Well, for two reasons.

The first is that because of the genocidal violence being displayed by the Israeli State against innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the current war now going on between Israel and Iran, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are rapidly on the increase in our own country and, of course, elsewhere. To help us counter this dangerous slide into religious bigotry and violence against Jewish and Muslim persons we need, as a matter of the greatest urgency, but particularly in the current crises, to get people to stop willy-nilly blaming Jews and Muslims for the violence currently being perpetrated by governments in the name of these two particular religions, and then to see that the problem is not simply with these two religions per se, but with an underlying, ancient, religio-political schema that has got itself embedded, like a kind of mind-virus, all around us, and across all kinds of religious and political traditions.

But to get people to see this, we need a single name for all the examples I’ve just rehearsed with you. If we cannot identify and name the single, if incredibly complex, dynamic that is going on and point to that, we will never be able to work together across religious and political divisions to challenge it in all its forms. So, what is the name? Well, Peter Soloterdijk calls them all: Covenantal Singularisation Projects.

Covenantal, because all these projects force people to sign up to a convent with God/Führer/Party/Nation, who (or which) then says to you: as long as give us your total (and it means total) loyalty and continually show it in all aspects of your life, then, in return, we’ll protect you at all costs from those bad, even evil, people who are not part of this covenant.

Singularisation, because these are projects that are constantly trying to create a single religion, people, state, nation, or whatever, by a constant process of internal cleansing (often by purges or violent suppression) and external cleansing, by suppressing, intimidating, and sometimes actually killing its perceived (or indeed actual) enemies in war, i.e. anyone who isn’t part of their covenant.

The things we are currently seeing done by the governments in Israel, Iran, the USA, Myanmar, India, China and Russia, and which we can see being done across the world in many other places including, alas, Europe and the UK, all of these things are born out of different versions of the Covenantal Singularisation Project. And it is this project that we now urgently need to get people to start challenging and, to repeat, particularly at this moment in time, not allowing ourselves or others to vent our anger with these governments by venting anger against innocent Jews and Muslims, who are often as angry about the actions of Israel and Iran as are non-Jews and non-Muslims.

And the second reason I’m rehearsing this with you is that it helps us see the free-religious project we are trying to spark into life here in Cambridge, offers people a way to begin to develop a real religious and spiritual alternative to all of these Covenantal Singularisation Projects. Our approach, rooted in the dynamic, creative, inquiring and free-religion that explicitly draws on the insights of liberal forms of Unitarian Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintō, Confucianism, Hinduism and Humanism, as well as the ideas of important individuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henri Bergson, Imaoka Shin’ichirō, and Norbert Fabián Čapek — that this approach provides us with an utterly different religious and spiritual way of being-in-the-world to those on offer within any kind of Covenantal Singularisation Project. In free-religion, remember, there simply is no chosen, set-apart, special people because, in the cosmic cooperative community that we can call Great Nature [大自然], there is no differentiation of precedence, or of superiority or inferiority between anything, because as all things always interpenetrate and contain the other. All things are children of Great Nature, and thus are bothers, sisters and cousins of one another. 

Because of this, I will continue to recommend free-religion to you because it is a powerful, liberal spiritual path that can help us skilfully negotiate these very, very dangerous times in a humane and deeply compassionate way.