Religion’s Place in a Religiously Violent World

Introductory remarks, Heather Templeton-Dill, Moderator

Prof. Miroslav Volf: Thank you very much. I believe that this is not just the day but the evening of Rabbi Sacks. So I thought I might sit at his feet and allow you to listen in as I sit at his feet and ask some of the questions that motivate me, that have exercised me in these many years of my own scholarly work.

And it turns out that we have a great deal of parallel interests and also many significant affinities, notwithstanding the fact that we come from two different and at times conflictual traditions. So this is, how shall I put it, well, my way to continue learning from Rabbi Sacks. Now, you are arguably the most prominent religious public intellectual today.

Some 50 years ago, the expectation was that people like you will not be around. In two days, we will celebrate the publication in Time Magazine of an issue entitled, “Is God Dead?” And it was in kind of red and black letters, written question over the entire front page of Time Magazine. So, Rabbi Sacks, is God dead? 

Rabbi Sacks: This is a good question.

First of all, is this on? Can you hear me? First of all, Miroslav, if I may just say a special welcome to the audience and what a privilege it is to sit with the NY students and the Columbia and students from Yeshiva University. What an honour it is to be sitting in the presence of two very dear and special people. Pina Templeton, together with her late husband, the late Dr. Jack Templeton, steered the Templeton Foundation so wisely and for so long. And Heather Templeton-Dill, who does so today. 

The Foundation, I mean, I'm really humbled to have received the prize. The prize is only a small part of what the Foundation does to encourage research like yours, Miroslav, into the positive emotions, the spiritual dimension of our humanity.

And it's a privilege to be able to acknowledge the work of the Foundation and to bless it. Thank you. It's also a privilege to sit together with Miroslav, who is one of the great, great theologians in this field, who wrote not only your recent book, which is like all your books, absolutely magnificent, flourishing, but one of the really courageous and visionary books that you wrote a while back called “Exclusion and Embrace,” which I found hugely inspiring.

I have to tell you also that Miroslav, and Elaine and myself, shared one of those little taxis in India called a tuk-tuk. Have you ever seen this? And it's one of the miracles in life. I mean, it is one of the miracles how anyone survives that kind of driving.

And, you know, in terms of is God dead? You have to realise that the power of divine intervention on the streets of India is apparent every single day. 

I was deeply sobered by the story of the rabbi and the Israeli taxi driver who arrived at Heaven at the same time. And the rabbi is refused admission, and the taxi driver’s admitted immediately.

And the rabbi says, ‘I'm a religious scholar. You've just turned me down, and you've let this crazy lunatic taxi driver in.’ And the angel said, ‘Well, actually, the reason is that when you spoke, rabbi, people slept. But when they sat in his taxi, boy, they prayed.’

So, in a sense, God is pretty much alive and needed at certain moments. But it's interesting you should say this, Miroslav, because actually, in 1966, I was just about to begin university, and I saw this Time magazine cover.

And it was very interesting. There's a Jewish magazine called Commentary, that in response to that, in 1966, produced a similar edition called “The Condition of Jewish Belief,” asking 50 rabbis - I have to explain to you, it was not that it took till 1966 for people to ask, is God dead? Nietzsche had raised this already in the 1870s.

It was the fact that an English bishop called John Robinson, the Bishop of Southwark, had written a book. And for a bishop to say God was dead, that was interesting. If Nietzsche says that, well, Nietzsche would, wouldn't he? But for a bishop to say it was very challenging.

And at that moment, some connections were made with theologians like Thomas Altheiser and various other people in America. And I, as a first-year student, was reading this - the Christian account and the Jewish account - and I made a decision that I would come to America and find out, which I did in the summer of ‘68, two years later. And I travelled right around America to meet all these theologians.

And in the course of that, I met certain rabbis, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who inspired me to really change the direction of my life. And isn't it always that way, that whenever people say God is dead, suddenly He is born again? 

Now, that's a little nearer to your theology, Miroslav, than mine. But one way or another, religion having been in intensive care for so long, people missed the phenomenon that actually faith is alive and well, and probably will be as long as human beings on the earth.

Miroslav: And maybe it wasn't doing so well in the West, and we projected our expectations onto the rest of the world. It seems that it took certain events in the West, maybe globalisation processes, to bring to awareness what was in fact always very much alive, undercurrent, especially in the third world, but also in the Western countries. 

Rabbi Sacks: Also in the Western countries. One of the first people to notice this, and he says it very near the beginning of the book, was Alexis de Tocqueville, who, arriving here in 1832 to see democracy in America, it amazes him, because he is coming from France, where religion had a great deal of power, but no influence. And he's coming to a country that he knows has, through the First Amendment, separated Church and State. And he's coming with the assumption that since religion has no power, it has no influence.

And he discovered exactly the opposite, that it has enormous influence, and he called it in the end, “the first of America's political institutions,” because it supported the family, because it built communities, because it got people engaged in charitable works, because it taught people what he called “the art of association.” And he realised that religion was performing a vital function in America, and somehow, somebody, some Western intellectuals believed in the 1960s, that you could keep families going and communities going and morality going without religion. 

And I'm afraid we've discovered that it isn't so.

Families are in meltdown in Britain. 50% of children today in Britain are born outside the family. Communities hardly exist outside of religious congregations.

And as for morality, well, you know, I couldn't possibly comment on that. But, you know, if you look at the way bankers have been behaving, the way CEOs have been behaving, you begin to realise that without the internalised voice of conscience, we are in a very difficult situation. 

So even in the West, I suspect that the next generation is going to be more religious than the last one, even in the West.

Miroslav: That's a fascinating prediction, and you may well be right, and I hope you are right. 

Rabbi Sacks: I'll tell you why I say that. Because today, secular parents are sending their children to religious schools.

Miroslav: And there is a... 

Rabbi Sacks: It's happening within the Jewish community, within the Christian community. And why? Because they want schools with a strong ethos. And they're finding this sort of individualism and relativism and anything goes.

It's okay. They don't want their children brought up in that kind of environment. 

Miroslav: You know, when you were talking about the need and the importance of religion in especially Western settings, you mentioned that these four fundamental institutions in the West - which would be science, technology, market, and political institutions - they don't give answers.

They are incapable maybe of giving answers, at least answers that are compelling to human beings, on three significant questions: Who are we? Why are we here? And how ought we live? 

You talked a little bit about how we ought to live, about morality and religion. Maybe if you would say something about the contribution to religion, to something that's even more fundamental than our ways of living. And that is who we as human beings are, our identity and our destiny. 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, identity is the way I begin my book, “Not in God's Name.” Because all the best in us, and sadly all the worst in us, come from the same phenomenon.

Which is that although we pass our genes on as individuals, we survive as members of groups. And we can only survive as members of groups. The end result is that we find our identity amongst a group of others, and that group turns the individual ‘I’s’ into a collective ‘We.’

The trouble is that every collective ‘We’ defines itself against the others who are the collective ‘Them,’ the people not like us. And the end result is that altruism sustains groups, so it speaks to the best in us. 

But aggression is the normal standard relationship between groups. Groups meet and they fight. So the best in us and the worst in us are both due to the fact that we are social beings. And every human group unites, but it also divides. And it does so at the same time. 

The end result is that after some very bloody centuries in Europe following the Reformation, the 18th-century kind of dream was, let's do without groups. Let's do without identities. Let morality be wholly universal. 

You know, I think it reaches its climax in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth, you know, [German] all humanity is one big family. At that, around that time, Immanuel Kant is dreaming of perpetual peace.

And then identities came roaring back in the 19th century, defined either by nation states or by race or by ideology. And the end result of that was nation-states gave us two world wars. Race gave us the Holocaust. And political ideology gave us Stalinist Russia and the Gulag. 

So every attempt to abolish identity always fails. Identity always comes roaring back.

And if it is not done by the nation, then it will be done by religion. And that's basically what happened. 

So, for instance, I said once there was a whole generation of Anglo-Jews, of my parents’ and grandparents' generation, who had engraved on their tombstones ‘A proud Englishman and a proud Jew.’ This was the absolute ideal of that generation. 

I said, today, I think I understand what it means to be a proud Jew. And I'm sure I understand what it means to be a proud Christian. But what does it mean to be a proud Englishman? Unless they happen to win at soccer. But, you know, usually they don't. 

So, now that we've lost national identities, at least in Europe, religious identities are roaring back.

Two generations back, an immigrant to Britain would say, ‘I'm a Pakistani.’ Today, he'll say, or his grandchildren will say, ‘I'm a Muslim.’ Because those national identities have grown weak and religious identities have grown strong, because we need identity.

Miroslav: But those religious identities defined in those terms can be also ambivalent, right? They can be a source of new imagination about the way of life. But they can also be markers of oppositional identities, sort of tension-filled nature of identities, even when they're religiously coded. Maybe sometimes, especially when they're religiously coded.

Rabbi Sacks: Religious identities through history have not always been good news. And I'm thinking not only of the history of conflict between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but even the internal conflicts within those faiths. I mean, you know, Europe was scarred by the divide between Protestants and Catholics following the Reformation.

Islam periodically flares up into these quite violent confrontations between Sunni and Shia. And Jews can pick a fight with anyone, but especially their fellow Jews. So not all religious identities are terribly pacific.

And I think you wrote your book and I wrote my book because we feel we have to take a stand on this and say we have to include, not exclude. 

Miroslav: So when religions contribute to articulation of human identity, always particular, but human identity, when they play a positive role, one might say. What comes to my mind, for instance, is a famous saying from the Torah, from Deuteronomy, where you have almost a kind of quasi-definition of who human beings are and how they ought to live.

And it says there, human beings, “Man does not live by bread alone.” That ended up being picked up then in the Gospels. And part of one of the responses of Jesus to the tempter, who wants him to turn bread stones into bread, is now human beings do not live by bread alone.

There's something much more fundamental in human beings that cannot be satisfied simply by attending to more bread, more sophisticated kinds of bread, and bread standing here for the goods of the ordinary life. When I think about who we as human beings are and what religion, what Judaism, Christianity, might be able to contribute, is to remind us that we are larger than our ordinary lives and needs of ordinary life, larger than bread. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, and you know, that becomes very, very important the more secular we become.

The more people define success in terms of wealth and material goods, the more people feel this is not all there is to life. And that is when people start taking religion more seriously at the end, you know. There is something that transcends the purely physical, and everyone really knows it.

And that can lift us to great heights, but it can also lift us to great harm. That is the thing that I think we have to worry about. I mean, for me, the definitive moment came on that moment in, you know, in January 2002, when they moved the World Economic Forum from Davos to New York after 9/11 as an act of identification and solidarity.

And the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey and I, and Chief Rabbi of Israel and Imams from the Middle East and Gurus from India all came together in prayer at Ground Zero. And that was when I suddenly realised, this is the great choice. Here is the power of religion to do harm, and here among us praying together is the power of religion to heal.

And I suddenly saw that’s going to be the great choice in the 21st century. 

We are undoubtedly seeing an age of desecularization as the ideologies that sustain the West in the modern age have reached the end of their useful life, and religion is returning. Will it be the fire that warms, or will it be the fire that burns? And suddenly, you know, that was a life-changing moment.

I just stood there and I realised this is going to be the biggest choice humanity faces in the 21st century. 

And each of us within our faiths has to take a risk and to say we have to reach out in friendship to people of other faiths. Let our religious identities unite instead of dividing us.

Miroslav: So when we think about religions and how they function, we talked about potential for good. We talked about the potential and not just potential for good, but actual contribution to the good, and not just potential for evil, but actual contribution to evil acts. And you talked about this altruistic violence as part of religious history, religious tradition.

You know, it struck me that when one thinks about why and how religions turn violent, David Martin, in his book “Does Christianity Cause War?” has suggested that Christian faith - but other religions he suggested as well - foster violence when they see themselves, strongly identify themselves, as markers of group identities and are involved in the maintenance, in the power relations that maintain the group boundaries and solidarities. In other words, closer religions come to power of a particular group, the more likely they are to be involved in religious violence. 

One example that comes to mind that is extraordinary is how can, it comes from Sri Lanka. How is it that in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist monk can carry arms? What happened there? And one can analyse the situation along the lines of what David Martin has suggested. A worry about Sinhalese culture has made, kind of pushed people toward defence of that culture through violent means, and religions are participating. How do you see that? Is that, do you assess this as a major contributor to religion being employed as tools in violent conflict? Or would you see things differently? 

Rabbi Sacks: Once a political conflict becomes, if I can use this awful verb, religionized, it becomes almost impossible to solve.

And the reason is that to solve political conflict, you need something which in politics is a virtue and in religion is a vice. And that is compromise. 

If you are secular, you can compromise for the sake of peace.

If you're religious, never compromise. 

So once a political dispute becomes, as it were, saturated with religious ideology, it becomes insoluble. And I actually think that is why the liberal democratic state is a very spiritual thing.

Because it is politics that doesn't try and get involved in religion. It is politics that knows its limits. The great difference between liberal democratic politics and Athenian democracy is that in Athens, the citizens serve the State and in liberal democracy, the State serves the citizens.

So it is the secularity of liberal democratic politics that allows religious groups to live peaceably together. And it does so by the secularisation of power. 

Now deep in their founding documents, both Jews and Christians believe in this.

In Christianity, it comes with Jesus saying, “Rend unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.” In Judaism it happens by separating three distinct leadership roles. The King on the one hand, the High Priest on the other, and then the Prophet to criticise both if they exceed their limits.

In Judaism, under the Hasmonean kings, after the revolt against the Seleucid Greeks that we celebrate by Chanukah, Chanukah is lighting candles and eating doughnuts, which is a rather nice modulation from what it was, actually was, a religious counter-revolution. But the Hasmonean kings then did the unforgivable because they had themselves made High Priests. So they breached the separation of powers.

And the Talmud says, it uses exactly this language, they said to the Hasmonean kings, “You are kings. Why then would you want to be priests as well?” This is against the division of powers. So Judaism does it one way, Christianity another.

Montesquieu in the 18th century, in “L’Esprit des Lois,” gives the secular version, which then gets taken up by Jefferson and Madison and so on and becomes part of the infrastructure of American thought. 

And that is undoubtedly what will happen in the Middle East within Islam, once people - good and sincere Muslims - wake up to the fact that we're killing one another. And this cannot be what a compassionate God wants of us.

So I think in the end, the marriage of religion and power has universally proved to be disastrous. And religions need to go through quite painful experiences of civil war before they reach that conclusion, but they all reach it in the end. 

Miroslav: It strikes me also that religions, at least great what some people call world religions, also have, at least in their foundational documents, have two convictions that are central to Judaism and Christianity.

And one is a radical equality of all human beings before God, and therefore, in your terms, “dignity of difference.” And the other one is a sense of freedom of religion, that I have to somehow embrace that faith and have the right not to embrace it and cannot be forced to embrace faith. And if one combines these two convictions of equality and freedom of conscience, one will inevitably, I think, under certain circumstances, be pushed towards something like liberal democratic polity.

Rabbi Sacks: One will indeed. The Talmud is very amusing on this. It uses a little bit of rabbinic licence, and it says the following, that when God came to give the Torah to the Israelites who were standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, God said to the Israelites, God lifted the mountain up and suspended it over their heads and said, ‘You have a completely free choice. You can agree to the Torah, in which case, fine, and if not, I let go of the mountain.’ Now, the Talmud then says, in that case, that is a fundamental objection to Judaism. And the Talmud then answers, ‘Well, nonetheless, many centuries later on, they accepted it freely.’

In other words, the argument that John Locke brings in his letter concerning intoleration, that forced assent is not assent, is stated in the Babylonian Talmud over a thousand years earlier in a rather more radical way, that even God Himself cannot force us to believe in Him against our will. I mean, that's a very, very powerful thing. And, of course, the Koran has something very similar. There is no compulsion in religion. 

So, in a sense, these three Abrahamic monotheisms do affirm that freedom, which is perhaps the single most important thing that God gave us. And that freedom and that radical equality, which are, as you say, the twin foundations of Abrahamic monotheism, is just that when you tempt religious leaders with power, very few of them can resist it. That's the problem. 

Miroslav: And that's why I think that democratic traditions, especially within the West, pluralistic democratic traditions, arose from marginal groups. I mean, I'm thinking of Roger Williams in this country, how significant it was, his discovery.

He was equally as committed, equally as sectarian, equally as exclusivistic as was John Winter. The only difference is that he had a kind of different reading of the biblical text and, in a sense, was marginal, experienced himself as marginal. Marginal groups contribute to freedom a great deal. 

When I talk to some of my friends, for instance, at Yale, about religion, or even now, I'm teaching a course together with my colleague, Chris Wyman, who is a poet and who has written this marvellous book called “My Bright Abyss,” his kind of struggle to come and understand and embrace faith. A beautiful, beautiful book. 

And so we're reading Christ in modern literature, a variety of readings of Christ in modern literature. And what struck me as I was reading these texts is, in some ways, how kind of particularity of a single life and of ordinariness and ebbs and flows of that single life, seems almost to rebel today against something like universal codes or even communally binding codes that religions seem to advocate.

So Truth of religion or even truth in a smaller T for a particular community or this large narrative, but I don't fit in that narrative. And there was a number of books for tomorrow. We're reading Colm Toibin, Toibin's book, “Testament of Mary.”

And it is Mary's rebellion against the scribes who narrate the story of Jesus Christ, a story which distorts her truth as she has experienced it and the truth of just this ordinary life. And as I talk to my students, my colleagues, often that seems to be the push against religion. It's a kind of Nietzschean push against religion.

It's that it brings something foreign and it poses that on life, and it doesn't honour the particularities of it. How do you respond to that? 

Rabbi Sacks: That is clearly what makes religion at odds with the spirit of our age, which is probably the most individualistic age in history. Although you sense the birth of that individualism certainly in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

But it is that insistence that I don't want anything that constrains my choices. I don't want anyone telling me what to do and what not to do. 

But the price you pay for that degree of individualism is very great.

What lasts when ‘I’ dominates everything? We then lose families, we lose communities, and so on and so forth. And I see a lot of my contemporaries, and a lot of our children's contemporaries, embracing those constraints just because it's so lonely out there. Loneliness.

I have to say, this rabbi I met in 1968, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, wrote a famous essay called “The Lonely Man of Faith.”

Miroslav: Marvellous essay. 

Rabbi Sacks: It's a wonderful essay, but nobody ever said that before. Isn't that extraordinary? Nobody ever thought the man of faith or the woman of faith is lonely because faith meant being part of a community. It meant however lonely you were, read the Psalms. David sometimes feels himself very alone, but he's in direct communication with God.

So this feeling of loneliness is such a new thing as something that you assert. 

And in the end, your kids probably don't want that.

Miroslav: And in some ways, what strikes me also with the kids, but also in some of the more recent literature on this, there is an awareness that if all the meaning is simply self-chosen meaning, if all meaning is constructed meaning, that to which I give meaning, I can take the meaning away.

And then kind of nihilism threatens, and people can't live too long in nihilism. And then from this meaninglessness of choices - Milan Kundera called it “unbearable lightness of being” - one flees into very sturdy, even oppressive identities. And so you have a kind of movement back and forth between fundamentalism and meaninglessness.

And it reminded me of Nietzsche's “Three Metamorphoses,” how he has a camel and a lion and a child. Camel is the animal that bears, bears the weight of the law. Lion is the one who roars and frees himself from this weight. And the child is the one who lives beyond any kind of law, simply in the moment, existing. But Nietzsche forgot that a child sometimes wants to turn into a camel. And so that you have this circle that's moving.

Rabbi Sacks: The child usually wants its parent to turn into a camel. 

Miroslav: Yeah, right. Adolescent.

Rabbi Sacks: I mean, for me, you know, the transformative moment was engaging with a man I never had the privilege of meeting. His name was Viktor Frankl. You know, Viktor Frankl was a young psychotherapist working with university students. And then Hitler comes to power and he's in Auschwitz. And his whole life, everything is taken from him as it was taken from everyone. 

And he had this question, you know, what do I do in a situation like that? And he dedicated himself in Auschwitz to giving people the will to live.

And he did so, as he says in his great book, “Man's Search for Meaning,” by persuading one individual after another that they had a task in life, which they had to survive Auschwitz in order to complete. One had a child waiting for him in Canada. Another had written a series but not completed a series of travel books and had to complete the series.

And somehow or other, that very profound idea of being called to something was what he saw as the central human condition, the search for meaning. And based his whole school of psychotherapy, after the war, logotherapy on it. And Frankel says, in many of his books, that call has to come from outside the self.

That is what previous ages called God. 

So, meaning can't come solely from within the self. Meaning is always a call from outside the self. That, I suppose, is what we mean by the spiritual dimension. That God is not Someone we invent. God is Somebody who calls to us.

And I think people search for that. Because the lonely self is an unbearable place to be. 

Miroslav: And presumably, that something that comes from outside, I have to sense that in some deep fundamental sense, it is for me rather than against me.

If I'm squeezed into something that comes from outside, something is imposed upon me, I will chafe against it. I have to discover that which gives me meaning is something that affirms my own being. And I think in monotheist, great monotheist traditions, that is the God who is the Source of our lives, toward whom we strive.

Rabbi Sacks: I think that is clearly the single most revolutionary idea at the heart of all the Abrahamic monotheisms. That God actually loves us. 

You know, I was on some programme on Irish television a few months ago. And this programme about the meaning of life, this interviewer whom I'd never met before, had saved his best question to last. And he said to me, ‘When you get to heaven,’ he said, ‘I'm not so sure I will, but you know, if you... ‘What question, when you finally meet God, what question will you ask Him?’ And I very honestly said, ‘If I ever get that opportunity, I know exactly what question I'm going to ask God. Why did you keep believing in us? We disappointed you so many times. Why did you have faith in us?’

I never find it problematic that human beings have faith in God. I find it deeply problematic that God has faith in us. And that is the truth at the heart of the Abrahamic monotheisms.

These were the first moral systems to place love at the centre of the universe. God created the universe in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive others. That is absolutely revolutionary.

The religions that preceded the Abrahamic monotheism saw the world as a very scary place. And the gods is essentially hostile to humanity, because that's the natural way. The world is a scary place. And it often feels as if we're intruders, or at least, at the very best, the universe is completely indifferent to our existence. And then you get these absolutely heart-wrenching lines, whether they're in Hosea or they're in Isaiah, that God loves us and can't stop loving us, however many times we have been unfaithful. 

And I find this whole what the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “the divine pathos.”

This is the absolutely fascinating thing. And that, at a simple human level, I have to say, Miroslav, is what I find sustaining in faith. You know, there are many times when I lost faith in myself, and I just had this feeling that God has more faith in us than we have in ourselves.

Miroslav: What a great place to end this conversation, that the great discovery of Abrahamic traditions, of Judaism and Christianity, is that God is this unconditional love. Thank you very much. 

Rabbi Sacks: Thank you.

Heather Templeton-Dill, Moderator: We now have some time for questions from the audience. I hope that's okay. And please feel free to direct your questions to either of our panellists.

We have microphones roaming throughout the room. We'll bring one over to you. If you would state your name and your university or affiliation, and please limit your question to one or two sentences so that we can have time for a number of different questions this evening.

Thank you. If you raise your hands, I'll identify you. Is there a question here? 

Questioner: My name is Sheldon Friedman. I'm a layperson, not in the university. Not in the university. My question is to the rabbi.

When you see the desecularisation of the society trending, do the institutions of the university and the media, do they become instruments of the desecularisation, or will it always be done in opposition to them? 

Rabbi Sacks: I can only speak for Britain, actually. And the British, at least the television media, don't like religion at all. It's quite difficult to get a bit of a presence there.

I remember, I mean, Europe is very, very secular in comparison with the United States. And we had a prime minister, Tony Blair, who was personally a very religious man. Very religious man. And so people often wanted to interview him about his religious beliefs. And he had a press officer called Alistair Campbell who always used to block those questions by saying, “We don't do God.” And that just shut it up completely.

So for all those years he was Prime Minister, he was never allowed by his own press officer to speak about his religious belief. When he stopped being Prime Minister, I phoned him up and I said, “You're no longer Prime Minister, you can do God.” And so I did the first interview with Tony Blair, the first television interview with Tony Blair, after he was Prime Minister on BBC television.

And it was a very revelatory interview because he spoke very beautifully about the role it played in his own life, in his family life, in the way he brought up his children. But he also spoke about the role it had played in some of his work as Prime Minister. In particular, how it had helped him bring about the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement.

He said, ‘Everyone else saw religion as the problem. I saw that we could use it as part of the solution.’ I mean, Tony Blair was, at that time, a Protestant married to a Catholic. He's now a Catholic - well, his wife is the strong one in the family. And it was a wonderfully revelatory interview and it would have been a bit of a scoop.

And I was very amused that the BBC refused to show this television programme before 11 o'clock at night, in case it, God forbid, corrupted the young and made them believe. 

So British television is quite anti-religion, which is odd because Lord Reith, who created the BBC, was a deeply religious man who would not allow any television on Sunday because people ought to be in church. And that lasted for quite a long time.

So the media in Britain, at any rate, or much of the media, is quite anti-religious. 

Questioner: Yeah, I believe you said that the inevitable solution to what's going on in the Middle East will be that the Muslims will realise that they have to love each other instead of kill each other. Do you see any signs that that is happening? 

Rabbi Sacks: I think things have to get quite bad before they get better. I'll be honest with you. Let us think. I go back in Judaism to the scene as described in the last days of Jerusalem by Josephus.

With the highly factionalised Jewish forces inside the besieged Jerusalem, fighting and killing one another - even destroying one another's food supplies - rather than fighting the enemy outside. Then I move forward to the parallel phenomenon in Christianity. And you think of not only the wars of religion in France in the late 16th century, but the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, which according to some estimates resulted in the death of one-third of the population of Central Europe.

So things have to be quite bad. It was out of that Thirty Years' War experience and everything that was associated with it that led to Hobbes and then Locke and then Spinoza. 

Actually, believe it or not, in dialogue with the Hebrew Bible, I mean all three of them, despite the fact that Spinoza didn't believe in the Bible as a God-given document, and he and Hobbes were probably what we would call atheists. But it was that crisis. So I think crisis has to get quite deep, sadly, before things get better. 

But in the end, people work out that that is actually the only way forward.

And it was actually an Oxford political philosopher called John Plamenatz, who in the 60s wrote a very interesting book called “Man and Society,” in which he says this very striking thing, that liberty of conscience was an idea unknown to the ancients. It was born in perhaps the most religious age of Europe in the 17th century. And it was born not despite faith, but because of faith.

And he says exactly how it was born. Because he said, it's one step to move from the proposition, ‘Religious faith is the most important thing in life, therefore everyone must have the one true faith,’ to the sentence, ‘Religious faith is the most important thing in life, therefore everyone should be free to follow their own religious faith.’ It was that one step that led to liberty of conscience.

And if it could happen in Europe, I think it can happen in the Middle East. But it happens only out of, I think, deep pain. 

Miroslav: And maybe just a footnote to underscore, if you look at some of the very early Baptists, who were in the early 16th century, who formulated, I think, the most radical account of the freedom of religion.

They did it from exile in Amsterdam, brought the stuff to England, and paid very dearly for that, with their lives, often. You see it similarly, and they influenced also Roger Williams, who brought it here to the United States. So you have this deep, deep tension born out of persecution, and then formulation of the liberty of conscience idea that is so foundational to our Western way of thinking.

It's not inherently - and I speak now for a Christian - it hasn't been for centuries Christian. It has been in first centuries, it was Christian with Constantine on, it has been completely forgotten. And I think freedom of religion has been retrieved for the majority of Catholic faith only in the second half of the 20th century, officially.

And yet now, we think of it as absolutely fundamental to how we think about that. I personally think, similarly to Rabbi Sacks, that something similar is bound to happen in Islam. 

Rabbi Sacks: There was a wonderful sceptical mind, David Hume, who wrote a very interesting article about two ways in which religion can go wrong.

One he called superstition, and the other he called enthusiasm, or what today we would call fanaticism or fundamentalism, that's what enthusiasm meant in the 18th century. And his view was that enthusiasm is much more dangerous than superstition, but enthusiasts turn around and become tolerant in a way that the superstitious never do. And so David Hume put a positive slant on this, that today's fanatics may be tomorrow's forerunners of religious liberty, just because they want to preserve that freedom to observe their own faith.

And they realise that they must not base that on being in control, because maybe the other side will win. Maybe the other side will be in control. And the enthusiast then becomes the forerunner of religious tolerance, because he wants to safeguard a territory where he will be free to live his faith, despite the fact that the other side may be in power.

And when that happens, you get this sudden tilt, this tipping point, that the fanatics become the campaigners for religious liberty. 

Moderator: Another question over here. 

Questioner: I'm from Israel, and I wanted to ask whether you believe in the advantage of a liberal state, whether you believe in the separation between State and Religion in Israel.

Rabbi Sacks: Do I believe in the separation of State and Religion in Israel? Yes. Yes. Deeply and profoundly.

Questioner: No coercion of religious norms and religions?

Rabbi Sacks: I think that Israel is a classic example of how not to do things. As I said, when Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America, he was absolutely fascinated by this paradox.

How come religion has so little power and so much influence? So, he went and asked priests, vicars, and they said to him - and he records this in his book - they said to him, the reason is because we never get involved in politics. And he said, ‘Why?’ And they said, in effect, ‘Because politics is divisive. So, if we got involved in politics, we would be divisive, too. And that's the reason that we stay out of it,’ and that was voluntary self-restraint. 

Israel today, sadly - and I understand why religion is involved in politics, because many of the founders of the State were quite aggressively secular, so there were religious authorities who felt they have to defend all sorts of religious principles, like Shabbat as the day of rest, Sabbath as the day of rest, kashrut in official institutions, and so on. And because there was a very aggressively secular presence there, religion developed this aggressive, defensive presence.

But today, religion in Israel is divisive, and it's very, very difficult for it to step outside. Now, there's no doubt that religion and politics must disengage over time in Israel, because I am pained by what's happening in Israel today. There's a real divisive power of religion, and it's tragic and completely unnecessary.

We should have learnt from the history of the previous times where it happened. So, the last time I said this, I was in London, and somebody laughed and said to me, ‘But you're a member of the House of Lords, you're involved in politics.’ So, just in case you come back with the same rejoinder, let me just tell you the following things.

Number one, in the House of Lords, since you don't need to get elected, you can sit as a crossbench peer, which means you sit representing no party whatsoever. And because of my principle, I have sat in the House of Lords since November 2009, and not once have I voted. And the reason is because I believe that as a religious presence there - not officially, but ad hominem - I seek a voice, but not a vote.

That's how I differentiate between influence and power. A voice is influence, a vote is power. 

So, I have practised the same self-restraint that Alexis de Tocqueville found among Christian ministers when he visited America.

And I really believe this. There has to be separation of Church and State in Israel, too. And you do that without endangering the fundamental character of Israel any more than you endanger the Christian character of Britain, which has an established Church.

And yet, Britain remains a very tolerant and open country. It's very hard for Americans to understand how you can have a Royal Family in an established Church and be tolerant. Maybe it's because most days in Britain are like today in New York.

You know, it's rather hard to become a fanatic in the soaking wet and the cold of an English summer. But one way or another, England manages these things. So, even though there's an established Church, it carries its power very lightly indeed.

And because of that, it has some influence. 

Miroslav: The principles, the foundational principles of pluralism it embraces, namely freedom of conscience and equality, right? And institutional arrangements differ, but fundamental moral principles are secure. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, it took time. I mean, it took not until 1859 was a Jew able to sit in the House of Commons, you know, until Lionel de Rothschild was elected four times to Parliament, from 1844 to 1859, and only on his fourth election victory did they allow him to take his seat without a Christian oath. So, you know, it takes time, but we get there. 

Moderator: Another question right here in the front row.

Questioner: Taking what both of you have said about the secularisation and the power of secularisation, one of the great experiments of this, of course, is the EU. Do you see the present developments, and possibly the Brexit vote, as being a potential unravelling or the counterforce beginning to gain traction of wanting to assert your individuality and your own culture coming back? 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, the EU used to speak vaguely about “L’âme d’Europe,” the soul of Europe, but nobody actually ever found out what that meant. In fact, nobody had a clue, and any suggestion that there might be any religious content in the self-definition of Europe was ruled out of court.

The end result is that Europe doesn't have any clear conception of itself. The thing about where Miroslav began, the four institutions of the modern world, science, technology, the market economy, and the liberal democratic state, is they're all procedural, not substantive. Science explains how, but not why. Technology gives us power, but doesn't tell us how to use the power. The market economy gives us choices. 

As Charles de Gaulle said, ‘How are you supposed to run a country with 749 different kinds of cheese?’ You know, it gives us all the choices, but doesn't tell us how to make the choices, and the liberal democratic state gives us maximum freedom to live as we want.

So these are all procedural. They're not substantive. They don't tell us who am I, why am I here, how then shall I live? Now, can you hold an organisation like the EU together merely by procedures? You see, now Europe does not know what to do with immigration, with migrants, with asylum seekers, with open borders, because it's got no real set of values to refer to.

So it can't take a principled stand, and because it can't take a principled stand, because it doesn't have a moral or a spiritual base, just a very abstract set of human rights, it really is not going, I think, to survive intact. The current storm that is really shaking it to its foundations, whether Britain stays in or doesn't stay in, Europe is really in quite a bad state at the moment, and that is because nobody ever sat down and said, ‘Who are we? What do we believe in?’ And I don't think you can sustain political organisations by procedures without any substance, and that is the threat to Europe today. 

Moderator: We'll take one final question here. Thank you. 

Questioner: Hi, I'm Professor Capelle from NYU. I'm used to, in this room, chairing the Faculty Senate, actually, so it's quite a different discourse this evening.

Let me ask you, you both, both of you fine scholars and gentlemen come from a European religious tradition, different ones, of course, but you've also both become more than familiar with American religious and social life here and academic life here, so I would like to draw you out a little bit more on the issue of the, which you've also addressed already, but I'd like a little bit more about projecting forward, about the similarities and differences between the Western European and American religious moment. That's to say, as you've mentioned, Western Europe is a very profoundly secular society in many ways compared to America. The influence of religion and social and cultural life, going back to the … but even going into the present, is much greater here.

On the other hand, we do have some large elements of secularisation, very visible in the culture here, so projecting out, does America become more like Europe? Does Europe become more like America? Do they each go on a distinctive or different path? Where do you want to take a guess forward? I'm calling you here not only as men of religion, but as prophets to project forward on these questions. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, I mean, you know, I just love being here at NYU. It's a wonderful and embracing institution, but I've yet to find here or in any other university a really good postgraduate degree in Prophecy.

Which is a shame, actually, because it would be quite useful in these terms. 

Questioner: We call it a business degree here. Or economics, perhaps.

Miroslav: But it hasn't kept anybody here from prophesying. 

Rabbi Sacks: One of the points I make, obviously, is the difference between a prediction and a prophecy. And I make it in these terms.

If a prediction comes to be, it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes to be, it has failed. That's the big difference.

Prophets don't tell you what's going to happen. They tell you what might happen if. And they tell you that in order for you to take action to make it not happen.

But what actually seems to be happening to America is, from an outsider's point of view, is whether America is like Europe or different from Europe depends whether you're on the coast or in the heartlands, actually. Because, clearly, the coastal elites are very European and very secularised. And there are heartlands of religiosity in America which are much more intense than anything we find in Europe at all.

And very surprising, actually. You received an award in Louisville, Kentucky some years ago and I did a couple of years later. Elaine and I arrived there to see that all the books in the central aisles of the airport bookshop were all religious books.

And if you go to a bookshop in London and try and find a religious book, you know, you've got to look very... You know, somewhere tucked between the colouring books and the mindfulness and the books on decluttering and tidying up, you might just find an odd Bible here or there, but very rare indeed. So, in a sense, it's those biblical heartlands of evangelical Christianity in America which we don't have in Britain at all. And that obviously has to do with the fact that sometimes, if the best way of killing religion is nationalising it, every European country virtually has an established Church.

Whereas in America, churches face an open market and they have to go out and compete. And that competition generates very interesting forms of intense religiosity. And I'm very struck, not just by the evangelical heartlands, but by the megachurches.

You know, I got to know just a little Rick Warrens of the big megachurch in California. I've forgotten what it's called. Saddleback, yeah.

You know, this is a church where you get between 25,000 and 40,000 people on a Sunday, and it is speaking to some very profound needs of those people who are not at all the sort of southern heartlands but want a space that affirms moral values, family values, community values, that isn't cynical towards altruism, and so on. 

And I'm very struck by the fact that Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, in his book “American Grace,” found these religious communities the great sources of social capital and so on. And certainly in Jewish terms, spending time here in NYU, seeing these little communities down in this part of New York, you realise that in the end there is a limit to secularisation.

People do want to belong to communities. They do want to feel that they're not alone in this lonely crowd.

And so I tend to feel that America has had a history of religion reasserting itself, of these great revivals. And I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet, actually, in modern times, because the need for it, when the economic crash came in 2008, was immense. I think there was a moment lost there, an opportunity lost.

But I think America has proved its ability - religion in America - to go through these great revivals and renew itself. The odd thing, of course, that is going to happen in the Jewish community for entirely demographic reasons, is that 25 to 50 years from now, this community is going to be much more Orthodox than it has been since the 1880s. 

Miroslav: And maybe talking about demographics, I think if you look at the partly demographic picture associated with the question of religiosity in the world at large, I think statistics all show that the world is becoming more, rather than less, religious place, both in absolute and in relative terms.

The number of seculars is growing in the world, but not as fast as the number of religious people is growing. Second feature, not just the numbers, religion is becoming more and more politically engaged religion, and partly it's becoming politically engaged religion because of democratisation processes, because most world religions embrace democratic ideals. And like Tocqueville's America, Americans, they want to bring religions into public sphere. 

Now if you think of this as a globalised world, rather than insulating either Europe or America, my sense is that in 50 years, Europe is going to be less secular, and is going to be able less to work with high-degree secularity of the institutions, and will need to rediscover itself as pluralistic, a kind of pluralistic democracy friendly to religions.

And similar thing is going to happen to America in even greater degree than is the case now. Now that's maybe both pessimistic and optimistic prognosis, but it seems to me that at least in the foreseeable future, something like pluralistic liberal democracies will predominate in the Western world. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I think we have to prepare for that by making sure as of now, that we're laying the groundwork for theologies that make maximal space for the other.

Because the worst thing that could happen is religion comes roaring back in its most fundamentalist and intolerant forms. And that's why, you know, always, you know, we can't prophesy, but we can act so that the world that our grandchildren inherit will be protected from some of the mistakes that previous generations made. 

And that's really why I wrote “Not in God's Name.” I think it's why Miroslav wrote “Exclusion and Embrace,” to say, let us now begin to think what it would be like for Jews, Christians, Muslims to meet as friends, not as enemies, as brothers and sisters without sibling rivalry. 

And I think if we do that now, we can look forward to a more religious future without some of the fear that otherwise we might have. So let's make sure that religion remains the flame that warms and not the flame that burns.

Closing remarks