JOIN USSeeking a dharma for these times
During the months that the Covid virus ensured that just about every Indian lost someone they knew, many religious institutions across the country stepped in to help: they organised hospital beds and vaccine camps, distributed food, clothes and masks, and on a rare occasion, offered to look after the educational needs of children orphaned by the deadly virus. A few weeks ago, when Hindu right-wing outfits threatened to disrupt a namaz gathering in Gurgaon, two Gurudwaras offered their premises to the Muslims to pray. Indeed, religious institutions do charitable work during ordinary times too, such as running free or low-cost schools, colleges, hostels, marriage halls and health centres, among others.
While religious institutions are variously engaged in society in the present, it is unclear, however, what the contemporary world means for their religious philosophies, whose origins go way back in time to radically different, non-modern contexts. In a generic sense, the moral appeal of kindness, compassion, honesty and non-violence, to name a few values affirmed across various religious philosophies, continues undiminished through time, but these values are part of complex metaphysical systems with richly varying senses of the universe, God, nature, humans, animals and the relations between them.
If religious metaphysical systems prescribe ways in which humans and communities can evolve a meaningful relationship with their social milieu, what is to happen to them when fundamentally new understandings of the social milieu emerge? Religious thought is, of course, in a dynamic relation with its social circumstances, with religious leaders making their texts speak to their time, to the changed social circumstances, allowing at times for the emergence of new sects or breakaway new religions. However, the current ecological crisis poses a different order of challenge to theology.
If human civilisation will not endure forever at current levels of human misbehaviour with the earth, religious leaders are confronting a world radically different than anything their predecessors imagined. Really, they owe it to themselves and their community to explore whether their theological heritage offers meaningful responses to the new existential predicament. Are there moral ideas and symbols inside that can reorient current life practices, that can bring a less hurtful relation with the earth? Can the tradition sustain itself by allowing for moral innovations in the present?
Barring a rare exception like Pope Francis, religious leaders do not seem to be theologically preoccupied with the ecological catastrophe. As they don’t seem to be with the ever-present threat, since a few decades, of the nuclear annihilation of the world. In his Theology for a Nuclear Age (Westminster Press, 1985), which argues for a fundamental recasting of Christian theology in the light of the nuclear threat, Gordon Kaufman, an American theologian, asked whether it made any sense to see God as sovereign when the whole world could perish at the touch of a button. In a comparative spirit, what does the absence of a sovereign conception of an all-knowing, infallible God in several religious traditions of India mean for reimagining the place of God in relation to the climate crisis?
When it became clear that the UN Climate Change conference last month was mostly a token event, religious leaders in India didn’t have anything to say by way of a response. As a new year makes its way, let us hope that this tragic state of affairs will give way.
The indifference to the new moral challenges on the part of the custodians of religious faiths in the country has been unfortunate: not only has ecological recklessness had a free run, the amoral pursuit of political power has become legitimate and the violence against religious minorities, tribals and Dalits a casual fact. An engagement with contemporary evil, with all the moral resources and experiences that the religious traditions offer, is what we will need to see. That might generate fresh ethical conversations and offer new ways of humanising ourselves. That might open up new sources of hope.
(The ISEC Professor looks for new ways of looking)