Interview: John Milbank

John Milbank is Professor of Theology, Philosophy and Ethics in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham. He is the author of several books of which the most well-known is Theology and Social Theory and the most recent Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. He is one of the editors of the Radical Orthodoxy collection of essays that occasioned much debate.

How would you characterise the present conversation about religion and the public sphere, from where you're standing?

Well, it's got multiple aspects but I think one of the most striking things is that up to relatively recently people took for granted that there was religious toleration. On the one hand, religions were not trying to seize political control. And on the other hand, people had an absolute right to believe whatever they wanted and practise that belief in whatever way they wanted. And now this whole thing is massively contested. Lots of religious people feel once again they're suffering persecution. On the other hand, a lot of secular people think that religions are granted unjust privileges. There is also a renewed sense that some religious sources seem to exercise arbitrary power and even violent power. What is very strange is that there are issues regarding religion that we may have thought were resolved, that belonged to the far past, but which have come back, though I'm pretty sure they've come back in a very different way.

That's very interesting. What do you think is different about how they've come back?

I think in one sense it may be the case that they never went away, and we've exaggerated the degree to which they'd gone away. A key factor here is globalisation: as soon as you start to remove national frontiers, or they get blurred, you realise that religions have always operated very well across national frontiers and suddenly religions become a great deal more visible.

And then I would also say that probably we haven't been aware of the degrees to which religions do still play a large part in our public life, in realms of education, health, welfare, charity, that kind of thing.

And in many ways we went through what you could call a humanist post-Christian phase where the values remain Christian, even though people were agnostic and some people were atheists. Now we’ve moved into a phase of far sharper contestation.

And this contestation I think is particularly visible when we look at the last bastion of Christian influence, the family. It remains central to our ideas of what a family should be. Now you could argue that secular forces, forces of the state and the market, are trying to break up family life, trying to appeal directly to individuals. Just as all intermediary institutions between the state and the individual have been eroded, now I think the family also is being undermined.

And then also with ideas about birth, sex, life, and death, Christian attitudes are now being radically questioned at a very great pace. So in that sense we have entered into a new phase. And in a way you could say that's made Christians newly aware that they've been in a battle for a long time, that they've conceded ground, and that arguably they’ve conceded too much ground. So suddenly I think the British find themselves aware that they're not in an entirely different situation from their continental counterparts. If you think of France or Italy for example, Catholics have always been aware that they're in a continuing battle with secular and anti-clerical forces. That battle has never stopped. Or again, it has I think revived recently very strongly for particular reasons. So I think religion in a sense never went away.

Also there’s this new degree of radical secularity.

And I think a further factor is that we now live in a post-ideological age: the big secular ideologies have failed: fascism and communism and so forth. And even liberal democracy itself is being exposed as an ideology that people but half-heartedly believe in. So you've got a vacuum. And what's filling the vacuum is often the return of religion, in sometimes very ideologised ways. It's obvious that Islamic State fits this bill. People keep saying that it's not Islamic and it's not a State and unfortunately both those assertions are untrue, but nevertheless one can see the hybrid between extremely literalistic Islamic notions of law and various things they've borrowed from totalitarian discourses. But I think you can also see the ideologisation of religion taking place even in some right-wing Catholic Christians where they narrow it down too much to issues like life and death or sex and so on, and sometimes start forgetting the big picture.

And then on the other hand, it is also true to say that secularity is itself becoming a kind of ideology, a new scientistic ideology that looks forward to the post-human as ironically the ultimate triumph of the human will where we just change everything, control everything for the sake of it. And I think that that's in dangerous coalescence with the neoliberal market space where increasingly instead of ideas on public democracy, what we've got is the unqualified rule of markets controlled by very bureaucratic states with no real need for democracy at all. In effect that is the ideology we are now increasingly living under.

And the final factor and then I'll stop this section, is the populist reaction against globalisation, against technologisation, market states, and so on. That reaction, as with UKIP is in danger of asserting an atavistic identity. In the face of this danger in many ways you could say that it's only religions that offer alternative universals, non-reductive universals that won’t reduce the world to either a machine, or to the will, or to both in collusion. So religions assert, if you like a thick identity, but not in such an atavistic way because they are also universal, so they've got that ability to suggest a strong, positive idea of what human beings should do, what human communities should look like. The problem is then that in one sense Christianity is in decline. yet in another sense, a revival of Christendom is also possible. There are now creative minorities that can help us rediscover that our identity in Europe and the Americas is Christian; we don’t have any other identity. The idea even of Enlightenment identity, something very key, depends on a Christian past.

That's extremely interesting. Thank you John. Do globalised contexts bring different trajectories into the vacuum? So when Middle Eastern Muslims migrate to Britain for example, are they just stepping into this vacuum and filling it? They don't start from that same vacuum position do they? So what's the relationship do you think between the Western vacuum and the ideas that are filling it?

It's very complicated but I think that as I said, one truth is that religion never went away, especially outside of Europe and outside the West.  And sometimes western impositions upon traditional faith communities has not worked. For example the imposition of the nation-state in the Near East.  The reality that the cross-border fluidity of Islam is really the fundamental reality in the region is something that the British and French foreign policy foolishly tried to ignore, but it still remains. And so now what you've got is an incredible coalescence of the ability of Islam to cross borders with the facts of modern globalisation. Which is not so crazy because in the very long term perspective, Islam is a very modern religion. That's only one example. Christianity is from the outset also an international religion. And I think these cross-border operations have always gone on, but the point is that now in a globalised world religion is one of the forces that is able to operate across borders with very great ease. And that's one reason why it's back in the picture.

I wanted to ask if you think religion is special in that regard?

It would totally depend on what kind of religion. Ancient pagan religion is wholly bound to very specific place and very specific cities, or else is directly bound to imperial projects. Really Christianity and Judaism and then Islam are all in different ways inherently and perhaps uniquely very international religions. They operate with the ecclesia or with the sense of a dispersed Israel or with the umma.And so you could say all these things invent something beyond a regional community and beyond states. And in the case of Christianity and Judaism that's a massive factor in inventing what we think of as civil society, or the idea of the so-called big society or the good society is more than simply a political process. In the case of Islam it's very different and it's slightly different again for Sunnism and Shi’ism. Of course there's far more difficulty there in distinguishing the political project from the religious project. Although one of the strange things about Islam is that the figure of the caliph, who is allowed to make up the rules as he goes along. Sharia law doesn't cover what the caliph does. In a sense there's a sort of vacuum there that has to be fixed by absolute rule and places the ultimate ruler almost outside Islamic norms -- and that's one reason why I think Islam tends to oscillate between anarchy and tyranny, totalising religion and pragmatic secularity It has chronic and perennial, not just recent problems about politics.  So of course does Christianity, b=ut I think it’s arguable that those of Islam are specifically worse because it had a greater conflict over the transmission of internal authority from the very outset (whereas Christian splits came much later in its history) and never clearly allowed the emergence of a distinguished secular political power.

You talked about how secular forces are breaking up family life while appealing directly to individuals and so on. I've got two questions about that. One is how conscious do you think is a mind that drives that; what are the driving forces; where does it come from?

It's a really good question and I find myself struggling with the answer to that. Because I don't think that these things are deliberately planned, but somehow there is what I can only call an objective intentionality at work that is going in one clear direction. For example, I think we are now heading at the moment towards a situation in which we will increasingly disconnect the sexual act from the business of procreation. We will move more and more towards an artificial reproduction of the human race. And I think that things like gay marriage play into that, even though that's not the intention of people who supported it.  But nonetheless it's to do with the feeling that individual choice should be merely about pleasure and personal needs, and the fact that the sexual act is linked to a possibility of having babies and therefore to tying you down to responsibilities and to locking you into a social cultural structure, is somehow embarrassing for our underlying liberal credo. So the pressures that separate the sexual choice totally from procreative consequences are very strong. You don't have to agree with everything the Catholic Church says here to be aware that nonetheless that is the case. In some ways the Catholic Church’s narrative (even though some its more extreme specific positions are exaggerated and illogical) is now much nearer to what's really happening than everybody else’s narrative. Equally we have the implicit idea that anything new or anything that's  projected into the future has to be either something scientifically planned, or else it has to be presented to you as a product or a commodity that you have selected from a list.. So because the state and the market rule absolutely everything, it becomes logical that they will eat gradually into the biosphere if one can put it that way. . Foucault, Agamben , Illich, Sahlins and Latour are right, liberalism is based on a biopolitical logic, an absolute disjunction between culture and nature. There is no sense here that our strangely uniquecultural identity is nevertheless our natural identity as an animal, that there are somehow in-built constraints and we should be trying to go in harmony with nature, fulfilling nature in the right kind of beautiful way even if we have to discover and constantly create that path. Instead we've got the idea that we've got to endlessly extend the boundaries of culture conceived as a techne and as an operational control. And even beyond their such purposive control as a kind of manic and anarchic experiment done for the sake of sheer experimentation.

There seems to be I think a tension between something sort of inherently liberal if you like, like gay marriage, which lands on the political left, and the conservatism of natural law which lands on the political right. And yet there is some sort of cross-over between them. What do you think of that?

My view as a post-liberal is that the left and right are now in secret agreement. The left has tended to retreat from any kind of social and political commitments towards essentially a range of cultural, politically correct issues that appeal to very dubious traits in human character. And the right is mainly about the market. It either pretends to a kind of social conservatism, or even increasingly it doesn't even pretend. To illustrate my comment on the left, the left would now seem to be much more worried about Ken Clarke saying that some rapes are more serious than others, which is virtually a statement of fact (and in no sense a dismissal of the sheer heinousness of any act of rape) than that Ken Clarke was trying uniquely to carry through a genuinely liberal humane reform of prisons and was dismissed on that count. So Ken Clarke is a very good illustration of somebody who is not a kind of modern politically correct liberal and yet in the best sense of the word is liberal or humane, generous, wanting to treat prisoners with decency and hope is liberal in the best sense. The current left doesn't seem to care all that much about the truth that what happens in our prisons is increasingly monstrous. There is no education, no re-training going on. And we get endless articles in the Guardian about the position of women which of course is a major concern, but it's become an over-dominant concern, and not even well-served if taken in isolation from other issues liberals have ceased to be even richly liberal.

And presumably that's part of the account of why a conservative coalition government would pass something like the gay marriage law. It's the collapse of ideas into a brand that can win votes?

Absolutely. On the one hand, it's doing something apparently liberal. Yet at the same time it's shutting many of our rights: the right to protest, the rights of trade unions, which has a directly repressive effect on wages, and so on. So people are not realising that we're in the grip of a kind of extreme liberalism that cannot be genuinely ‘liberal’ in the sense of generous and tolerant, because these other causes require a certain sense of social justice and the importance of collaboration and the importance of group rights and so on. Besides also a sense of proportion and priority: it may be right, for example sometimes slightly to risk the health and safety of inbdividuals in order to sustain collective festivities and manifestations of protest.

And just to bring religion back in very directly, what do you think it is about Quakerism that allows Quakers to celebrate gay marriage for example, but not Catholicism?

Well, I'm just trying to pause and think about that question. You know, the founder of the Quakers would have been horrified, 19th century Quakers would be horrified, Quakers up until 1980 would be horrified. The question is much more why suddenly we get these things, in other words why do they suddenly become acceptable. And I think the processes of manipulation of public opinion at work here are sinister. The reason why maybe Quakers would go along with this is maybe they have a lot less strong explicit metaphysical awareness, a less worked out metaphysical credo than for example Catholics. They don't so often assume such a deep theoretical level. I suppose also that linked to this their sense of the sacramental is thinner. In the very long term it's Protestantism itself that's helped to usher in the disenchantment of the world and of civilisation and so it's not surprising. The Lutheran Church in Denmark has accepted gay marriage as well. But nonetheless you have to say the Protestants of the past would be stupified. We mustn't lose hold of the fact that when, in the sixties, a lot of people wanted to stop arresting old men in lavatories and so forth they were doing it for humane reasons, they wanted to tolerate homosexual practice. Moreover it was often in fact Christians and other religious people who did this; they were in the forefront of reform - people now forget that. But never in a million years did they imagine that this toleration of homosexuality meant equality of homosexuality in a crudely univocal sense. That is to say, in the sense of granting gay people always ‘exactly the same things’, as opposed to the things that might suit their needs and situations. So, for example, ‘equal natural rights’ might here suggest ‘an equal right to bear children’. But the fact that this would have to be artificially contrived in terms of medicine, law and interpersonal agreement starts to make such a claim of equality look very odd. And here an ignoring of difference may ride roughshod over other considerations about the needs of children in relation to their origins and the increasing impersonal, political and market control of procreation. If you really want absolute equality in the sense of always the same provision despite people’s differences, then really you make everything, so to speak ‘ontologically homosexual’. The same triumphs differences and especially over group and generic difference, including gender difference, until simply being male or female starts to look a bit fustily dogmatic! A further victory for nominalism!  And then you potentially get liberal fascism, because this position can tend to force upon people, in certain situations, not just tolerance and welcome – which is right – but also an artificial suppression of their naturally constitutive aversions. How, for example, is a heterosexual really supposed to be able to council a gay couple? What possible help is he likely to be to them? Nor should sexuality and gender-identity be usually presented to children as a matter of choice, because this could be psychologically damaging. So I believe in toleration, absolutely. But the idea that we should make homosexuality equally socially normative has absolutely disastrous implications because it's never a good idea to make rules out of exceptions. And I think that this process is in reality one instrument for more insidious changes – it permits and carries the further extension of biopolitical control.