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> New Perspectives on Faith and Development

Posted On : November 13, 2009 4:13 PM | Posted By : Admin ACO
Related Categories: Lambeth

ACNS: http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/news.cfm/2009/11/13/ACNS4667

In a lecture on 12th November, the RSA, Dr Rowan Williams, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, set out the principles by which development
agencies and faith communities can engage in dialogue to build trust and
mutual understanding of their distinctive motivations in order to
collaborate more effectively in tackling issues of justice and global
poverty.

Presenting a broader agenda for development, which seeks to define human
flourishing as more than just material well-being, Dr Williams suggests
that all engaged in the process would benefit by rediscovering their own
humanity in the humanity of the other. This would lead, he suggests, to
a 'proper distribution of dignity'. Dr Williams acknowledges the
challenges to collaboration in the perceptions secular development
agencies and faith communities have of each other, but emphasises the
overwhelming benefits, indeed the imperative, of both to commit to
mutual learning in order to collaborate for the well-being of humanity
and the planet.

This is the closing keynote lecture in the seminar series on 'New
Perspectives on Faith and Development', sponsored by the Tony Blair
Faith Foundation, the UK Department for International Development,
Islamic Relief, World Vision and Oxfam.

Full text of the Archbishop's lecture is below

The last few years have seen definite shifts in attitudes to religious
faith among those concerned to find paths out of poverty and
powerlessness for the majority of the world's population. But these
shifts have not been simply in one direction. On the one hand: there has
been a very belated recognition that the majority of the world's
population does have religious convictions and that to ignore these is
to push against the grain of the societies you're trying to help and
support. Religious faith is a sheer fact about these contexts and it is
thus also a potent force in civil society - often the only effective and
sustainable 'civil society' network that exists, (especially in areas
affected by conflict). What is more, if freedom of religion is an aspect
of human rights, how you actually handle the religious practices of
communities must be part of a global understanding of 'development'; it
can hardly be left as the one form of liberty that a development agency
does not care about. At best, communities of religious conviction have
the potential to be serious and effective allies in the struggle against
privation.

But on the other hand, there is a long-standing suspicion towards faith
in many quarters of the development establishment, accentuated in recent
years by a number of specific issues and coloured by the current
nervousness about religious extremism. Religious communities do not
begin from a clear Enlightenment doctrine of universal liberties; they
are necessarily exclusive, in the sense that they are committed to
particular beliefs that not everyone shares. There is always going to be
the shadow of a suspicion that they will favour their own instead of
working for universal benefit, or that they are using aid and
development as a vehicle for propaganda on behalf of their convictions,
a cloak for proselytism. And they may, of course, disagree about what
'universal benefit' might mean: for example, in the area of reproductive
rights and liberties. The development agency may come to see religion as
a positive obstacle to liberation; and the result is often a standoff
between what can look like two sets of absolutisms, traditional faith
and a passionate enlightened universalism. Faced with the rise of
aggressive religious conservatism - the word 'fundamentalism' is not
actually all that helpful - all this long standing unease becomes more
sharply focused. Combined with governmental reluctance to be seen as
favouring specific communities and their convictions, it can produce a
standoff between development agencies and faith groups that has the
effect of shrinking the possibilities of creative co-operation.

In what follows, I shall try to address a number of issues arising out
of the potential tensions in this situation. The first is to do with
trust. We have seen how religion arouses suspicion among the development
establishment; but, if there has to be a question about whether religion
is to be trusted in this context, there is a counter-question about how
that establishment itself secures trust among those with whom it works.
The second is the complex matter of how the language of rights plays out
in discussing development, and whether religious perspectives help or
hinder clarification here. The third and broadest is why religious faith
has an interest in this in the first place and what the roots of that
interest can contribute positively to the struggle against poverty.

So, as regards trust: granted for the moment that there is a problem in
that religious communities are distinctive groups with beliefs and
practices that are unique to them and not universal, the possible
dilemma for the development establishment is that there is no such thing
as a community with only universal values and loyalties. You are always
dealing with human beings who have specific habits and affinities. And
to deny or override those is to import another sort of propaganda or
proselytism, and to risk engaging with people at less than their fullest
level of self-awareness, moral motivation and so on. It won't do to find
yourself preferring an abstract or imagined community to a specific one;
yet the specific one has commitments that are not universal and habits
that are open to challenge or critique (especially around the roles of
women). It is not an option simply to accept the specificities of a
culture (religious or otherwise) that may actually be responsible for
reducing the liberties or options that are available for other human
beings.

Part of the answer to this lies surely in a better level of religious
literacy among secular NGO's and activists. This involves the ability to
identify and in some measure identify with the motivations of the
culture in which work is going forward. It requires a deepening fluency
in the language of religious discourse, to understand the intention and
nuance behind religiously inspired definitions of mission and human
development. It is to be aware of what elements in a particular
religious culture are most fruitful in terms of the struggle against
poverty; to be able to use the images of fulfilled or normative humanity
that are around in the culture so as to stimulate effective action and,
ideally, change. And this means 'trusting' the specific religious
culture to the extent of recognising in it a sense of what the human
good might be and recognising also the consequent possibility of change
from within that frame of reference. It may also be the capacity to see
that a failure to provide exactly the same range of options as might be
available in a more differentiated or secularised society is not
invariably an impoverishment. And where traditional models do lead to
straightforward conflict, there needs to be a capacity to be clear about
this, to present the conflict as genuinely a disagreement, not simply a
standoff between enlightenment and prejudice that can be overcome by
'neutral' education; a willingness to have arguments with respect.

Without this, the development agenda is doomed to be seen as allied to a
campaign for conversion to someone else's values. 'It...sometimes
happens that economically developed or emerging countries export this
reductive vision of the person and his destiny to poor countries', as
the Pope puts it in his recent encyclical, Caritas in veritate (p.51).
Attempts to bypass local networks, local styles of decision-making, and
above all local rationales for action or change invariably produce
resentment and puzzlement. What people see is an agenda that is not
theirs, activated by foreigners claiming to act on their behalf,
co-opting some of the local people into a new and largely alien elite of
income and lifestyle. If development processes and programmes are not to
be paralysed by such resentment and mistrust, with the result that local
communities cannot see themselves as agents of their own change,
enormous potential is left unrealised. This means, of course, a
challenge to both sides. It means creating space for debate and mutual
learning. This current seminar series, and the inter-religious
consultations on DFID's recent White Paper process, are encouraging
examples of such debates. It is also important to recognise that
parallel debates may be taking place within and between faith
communities, given the diversity of beliefs and values. For example, the
response of faith groups to HIV, while representing an outstanding
witness in the provision of care and support, has also involved intense
internal debates around how we best challenge HIV-related stigma and on
the priorities in effective prevention approaches.

'Franchising' development work to local faith groups or networks,
partnering with such bodies on a long-term basis, can feel like a risk
for governments or NGO's that have to preserve strict accountability for
their electorates or donors; they may have to revisit what they take for
granted about professional standards and the timescale of results, so as
not to force local faith organisations into impossible changes of
practice, that may in turn inhibit authentic grassroots participation
(it's worth saying that this flexibility is no less desirable in the
context of community regeneration funding regimes in this country). But
equally, the embrace of partnership by religious groupings has to bring
with it the readiness to embrace at least some patterns of
accountability and effective delivery that may feel alien. There is risk
and uncertainty for all involved, and a great need for good
communication. But without this, the patterns of crippling mistrust will
not be altered. Some faith-inspired NGOs, rooted both in their faith
beliefs and in professional development practice, play a crucial role in
mediating understanding and promoting mutual trust.

The question of rights and of the proper place of language about rights
in the context of development issues is a notably difficult one.
Although there is a strong case for saying that the religious -
especially the Jewish-Christian - frame of reference is what
historically made this language possible through its emphasis on the
dignity of each individual and the sense of responsibility before God
for the welfare of each and all, the discourse has become very detached
from any specific appeals to revelation or to the divine. It has become
strongly legal in colouring: rights are the liberties you can
legitimately claim, a set of entitlements, the absence of which needs to
be rectified by some authority, legal or political. This is a model that
has served well in some circumstances; but it has increasingly been
recognised that on its own it presents a negative (or at least a rather
thin) view of the human good. What needs to be struggled for is simply
the absence of limitations to our natural entitlements to free choice in
our actions. Hence many of the current moral impasses in our culture,
not least over issues around the beginning and end of life. A vision of
the moral agenda that avoids formalism and individualism has to find a
more substantive picture of what is desirable for human beings; which is
why Michael Sandel in his new book on Justice underlines the need for us
to rediscover how to argue robustly in the public arena over broad ideas
about what the good life looks like, rather than being paralysed by the
model of formal entitlements as the sole business of law and government.

This is a significant question in relation to development. A philosophy
that stresses only the need to secure abstract entitlements for all
simply fails to address the actual complexity of societies in which
'equal' freedoms amount to protecting the liberty of the already secure
and wealthy - just as in the discourse of a lot of modern market
economics, unconstrained freedom for some means powerlessness for many.
Any talk about non-voluntary redistribution of wealth, whether by
progressive taxation or adjustments in the conventions of international
trade that will protect emerging economies for a period, will threaten a
purely abstract account of rights and freedoms. The basic liberties of
some can be secured only by the restriction of certain liberties in
others; the point is made with characteristic energy by George Monbiot
in his groundbreaking overview of these issues in The Age of Consent: A
Manifesto for a New World Order, particularly the sixth chapter,
entitled 'Levelling', which is an eloquent defence of genuine free trade
as the organ of growth and a scarifying critique of the naked
protectionism practised by wealthy nations.

But this means that we have to find some criteria for deciding which
liberties are more important among the varieties of claims we might in
principle make. And that is not a discernment that can be made without
some broader sense of what is essential for the good life. If we imagine
an economic world in which the prime concern is not just to secure
absolute profit-making freedom for some, or even to secure a moderate
degree of material prosperity for all or most, but to allow communities
to decide the shape of their own life, to become (as it is sometimes
put) the subjects of their own history, something more is at work than a
language solely about claims and liberties.

The point is that thinking about development needs to involve thinking
about human agents as three-dimensional. Without this concern,
development becomes no more than opening up a universal market for
consumers; and in such a perspective, it doesn't much matter whether or
not the disadvantaged are made really able to be subjects of their own
history, agents of their own economic future. The morality of power is
no longer an issue: who exactly brings about material prosperity and
maximised options is of no significance -which also means that
development loses contact with authentic politics. But as soon as this
element of recognising human dignity in the freedom to shape a
community's future is allowed, we have moved beyond a narrowly material
account of what's needed and also beyond a myopic focus on rights as
claims: the notion of human dignity is reconnected to the language of
rights, and the vision of what development actually works towards is
filled out. In recent years we have seen quite a bitter debate over
whether the language of rights is itself a culture-specific thing being
foisted by a secular and legalistic 'West' on the rest of humanity. But
the language of intrinsic human dignity is, in one shape or another, a
theme that resonates with the great religious traditions. Learning to
relate to this language is a specific example of that religious literacy
which I mentioned a little while ago as needing to be acquired by the
secular activist so as to build bridges into the deepest motivations of
those engaged in the battle against deprivation. At the same time, those
coming from a faith perspective need to develop literacy in the
discourse of human rights, to establish ground for dialogue.

Thirdly, why is or should the theme of development be of interest to a
religious believer? I want to answer this specifically in terms of
Christian faith, while aware that there will be other answers from other
perspectives. I do so because, while it is true that all major
traditions, as I have mentioned, share a belief in the dignity and
freedom of the human subject, each one has its own particular rationale
for this and its own ways of spelling out its full implications in
concrete terms. It is easy to see religious motivations here in terms of
imperatives to care for the unfortunate; 'almsgiving' is undoubtedly a
strong theme in most faith traditions. But what is interesting is that
this is by no means the whole story.

Thus, in Christian theological terms, two motifs are specially
significant in such a larger picture. First, there is the belief in
humanity's creation in the divine image, with the implication spelled
out in the Book of Genesis that this entails responsibility for
cultivating the material world around and giving names to the animals.
To be human is to be consciously involved in giving meaning to the world
you inhabit; and so a situation in which you have no power to exercise
that creativity, where you are expected to be passive in relation to
what lies around you, is a situation in which the image of God is
obscured. The Christian belief is that we all begin in such a situation
as a result of 'original sin', but that salvation restores the image and
allows us to take up the position we were made for within creation.

Material poverty and powerlessness are a problem for the Christian
believer because they represent one outworking of the structural sin or
failure into which we are born, the various ways in which our humanity
is compromised or reduced. To be stuck in a reactive relation to the
material world, incapable of getting beyond subsistence, survival, is a
tragedy in the light of what humanity could be. To recover the image of
God must mean recovering an intelligent and creative way of relating to
and working with the environment - not by being set free from dependence
on the environment but by being able to shape it and direct it in
certain ways so as both to express and to increase the creative liberty
of human persons in harmony with the flourishing of all creation.
'Development' is an aspect of this self-recovery and self-awareness as
an agent within the world, capable of making a difference that will
serve human dignity.

But there is a second dimension to this. Once the basic breakthrough has
been achieved - by the coming of God in human flesh - the recovered or
restored divine image is understood as involving a responsibility, not
only for the world at large but for each other in particular. The
imagery of the Body, used by St Paul, underlines this by insisting that
the welfare of each individual and the welfare of all are inseparable,
so that the poverty of another is also my diminution and the liberation
of the other is likewise mine as well. Thus to take responsibility for
nourishing the creative liberty of someone who would otherwise be
threatened with a life less than properly human is to open myself to a
gift of greater fullness in my own humanity. This is not, in other
words, simply about the prosperous giving something to the poor, but
about a gift that contributes to the liberation of both poor and
prosperous and transforms both. No-one's identity or destiny in the
Christian framework is to be understood simply individually; in the
much-quoted words of an early Christian monk, 'Our life and our death
are with our neighbour'.

Carrying this over into the ethics of development brings a crucial
insight: we are not trying to solve someone else's problem but to
liberate ourselves from a toxic and unjust situation in which we, the
prosperous, are less than human. The way forward is not simply the
shedding of surplus wealth on to grateful recipients but an
understanding that we are trying to take forward the process by which
the other becomes as fully a 'giver' as I seek to be, so that the
transaction by which I seek to bring about change in the direction of
justice for another is one in which I come to be as much in the other's
debt as they are in mine. The Christian foundation for a search for a
more equal distribution of resources within and between societies is
essentially about what might be called a proper 'distribution of
dignity' - not a mechanically levelling process but one in which
exchange becomes possible in new ways and so mutual enrichment of
various sorts becomes a reality.

If we take this fully on board, we are bound to realise that one of the
most debilitating features of our normal donor culture is - as was
hinted earlier - the mentality of patron and client. One party is always
petitioning, the other is free to give or withhold and so retains power
over the petitioner. It is unquestionably true, alas, that religious
rhetoric has, with its stress on almsgiving, intensified this imbalance
of power; but the truth is that the perspective of faith in this
connection ought to be a critique of patronage. 'The life you save may
be your own' is a tag used by the great Catholic novelist Flannery
O'Connor as the title of one of her fictions: it is a good summary of
the essence of a religious critique of the client-patron trap. An
unbalanced distribution of power is in the long run as damaging to the
powerful as to the powerless. To the extent that a Christian world-view
can provide firm ground for this sort of critique, it is a creative and
necessary element in thinking through development issues.

It is also true for Christians as for other religious groups that what
we might call unofficial forms of solidarity across nations and cultures
are routine. Christian congregations are frequently linked
internationally: to give just a few examples from the UK, dioceses of
the Church of England have partnerships with dioceses overseas; the
Mothers' Union offers an impressive range of contacts for lay people and
has, obviously, a particularly strong focus on women's issues in health
and education; church schools sometimes develop internet links with
schools in Africa or India or the Middle East. These represent a range
of ways to engage with development, not least in raising consciousness
about development issues. They are to do with prayer and mutual learning
as much as practical assistance, and they often involve people from the
less privileged end of the partnership visiting and ministering in the
UK. Of course, as with all development links, there is a risk of
patron-client features, and there is a constant need for scrutiny to
prevent these relationships slipping back into a classically unilateral
and unbalanced style. Many faith organisations (as with secular
agencies) seek to be conscious about the dynamics of power and the
nature of authentic partnership, and to build mutual accountability and
transformation into their vision and practice. But it is not simple,
and, as it has sometimes been expressed, the links described above
illustrate how development is sometimes best understood when it is not
the sole focus of a relationship or an agenda.

It is interesting, incidentally, to see how many of the same
possibilities and challenges are increasingly being identified by
Muslim-based agencies. Like the churches, they can take for granted a
powerful emotional solidarity and (though for different reasons and in
different ways) a set of close cross-national relationships between
particular communities. As in the Christian context, Islamic activists
and organisers face the challenge of working out a distinctive approach
to development questions without becoming exclusivist in their targets,
and recognise the need to locate development within the context of a
global vision for the restoration of 'integral' humanity, a vision or
mission within which the element of economic liberation is vital but not
the only priority.

I have used the term 'economic liberation' as a way of entering a mild
caution about speaking too uncritically of 'development' as a
self-defining notion. The word has - notoriously - been associated with
one particular sort of global narrative, allied to the hope of
unrestricted economic growth. And given the mixture of factors in our
contemporary world that suggest this is a dangerously naïve hope, we
ought to be qualifying our language about development so as to free it
from any such automatic alliance. I have proposed that one of the
contributions of religious conviction to the discussion of these issues
is that faith, by putting economic development in a wider context,
allows us to raise the perennially difficult and often evaded question
of what the purpose of material growth is - in other words, to check the
idea that unlimited material expansion (as opposed to freedom from
poverty) is a self-evident good for any economy or for the world as a
whole. To talk about 'economic liberation' is to bring us back to the
aim of making persons and cultures agents on their own behalf, able to
exercise some creative freedom in regard to their conditions of living;
and that is a different matter from simply guaranteeing material growth
at a certain level, because it factors in the criterion of how human
dignity is to be served.

So the importance of faith within the language and practice of
development is not simply to act as a motivation for realising goals
that have been defined by some independent universal authority, but to
provide a critical perspective on how some of those goals can be pursued
unthinkingly, and in ways that will do further damage in the long run.
It should be very clear in our current situation that we need more and
more public debate about the goals of economic growth; but what that
really means is that we need more debate about what makes us human. If
it is true that this isn't a question we can answer just by taking a
poll of random opinions or by appealing to what all reasonable people
really know, then the voice of religious conviction needs to be heard.
The Pope's recent encyclical, already referred to, insists that no
concept of development is finally workable or justifiable unless it
allows for the transcendent and the gratuitous in human nature (e.
pp.19, 50, 63-4); and it is because of this, he argues, that our
capacity to create a sustainable universal community, a 'a fraternal
communion transcending every barrier' (p.63) in our own strength is
bound to be flawed.

The corollary is not that NGO's and governments concerned with
development matters should be subsidising religious institutions or
privileging faith-based agencies. It is rather the twofold point that
there needs to be a willing and intelligent partnership with religious
groups, both faith-inspired NGOs and faith communities, and that such a
partnership needs to involve engagement with some of the broad issues
about the good life and the human calling which religious conviction
presses. At least, it entails a readiness to question the kind of
secular rhetoric around development which would reduce the whole issue
to one of securing the formal liberties that can be spelled out in terms
of human rights; to question some of the unexamined assumptions about
power (political and ideological) that attach themselves to this
rhetoric; and to enlarge the definition of human well-being to take in
the possibility of relation with the transcendent. The argument I have
been mounting is not only that doing this delivers a more effective set
of local strategies for achieving paths out of poverty - though there is
reasonably good evidence that this is a common result - but also that it
connects the whole development project with a renewed political and
moral energy, an agenda beyond solving the 'problems' of poverty and
looking towards a genuine strengthening of what is distinctively human.

As I have noted, this carries challenges to faith -based activists and
groups as much as to secular development agencies. There are temptations
and risks here. The undoubted 'capital' constituted by the trust felt
towards religious organisations should not be taken so much for granted
that it comes to be jeopardised by co-option on the part of governments
eager to have their work done for them cheaply. The need to take
seriously and sensitively the traditional ethics and cultural norms of
religiously shaped societies should not be an excuse for failing to
confront oppressive and dehumanising patterns of power (once again, the
status of women is the most obvious area of concern in many contexts).
Partnership between religiously based agencies and governmental or
secular bodies should not become an excuse for the former to ignore
issues of prosaic accountability and effectiveness. And, of course,
there needs to be a steady vigilance about proselytism, manipulative use
of favours, exclusive focus on people of the same faith and other
practices that distort the goals of liberation for a whole community.
The fact that these risks are sometimes exaggerated and are used as
grounds for rejecting the whole idea of partnership with religious
bodies should not blind us to the fact that the dangers are perfectly
real.

If it is true that there is a real, if cautious, rapprochement between
what I have called the development establishment (government and NGO's)
and the world of faith-based aid organisations and local faith
communities, there is major potential for benefit all round - not only,
as I've argued, in terms of increasing reliable delivery systems for
development goals, though that is hardly trivial, but in broadening the
horizon of our whole discourse about development and sharpening the
critique of some of its more ambiguous features. If development agencies
continue to learn how to relate intelligently to religious faith, the
concept of development is less likely to be seen reductively as a matter
of securing universal claims and more likely to be seen as one aspect of
a wider human liberation. But for this to happen, religious bodies too
need a degree of humility and willingness to learn - about the causes of
poverty and the problems of power, about their own internal resources
for thinking through the imperative towards mutuality not merely
benevolence, about what is needed to maintain credibility with the wider
world in terms of responsible and professional practice. We are at a
point where both sides seem unusually ready to learn. If the hopes of
realising the goals we have spent so much energy discussing and defining
in recent years are not to be disappointed, the honest exchange of
challenge and experience in this area is an urgent matter.

> © Rowan Williams 2009

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