Michael Valpy's Articles on Lions Roar

God is Big These Days—suddenly very big—and thus there is no rest for Karen Anderson Armstrong. Michael Valpy profiles the ex-nun who is one of the world's most authoritative commentators on religious issues. It is mid-August. The sixty-one-year-old British ex-nun and author, arguably the world's most lucid, authoritative and valuable living commentator on religion, leaves an international forum on religious fundamentalism in New York to fly to Canada for the Couchiching Conference north of Toronto. The subject is: "God's Back with a Vengeance: Religion, Pluralism and the Secular State." Before the forum in New York, she addressed the Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona, and after Couchiching, she will go back across the border to the Chautauqua Institution's annual symposium on religion in upstate New York, where she will speak on the Abrahamic vision for building a global neighborhood. Somehow woven into this relentless global travel is the endless stream of essays she writes for the English-speaking world's leading newspapers and magazines, her regular column for the British Guardian, her radio and television appearances, public and academic lectures, consultations with politicians (she has addressed members of Congress, the State Department, the U.S. intelligence services, and the United Nations), a promotion tour for her fifteenth book—an autobiography entitled The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness—and continuing research on her sixteenth book, which will be about what historians term the Axial Age, the period in the first millennium BCE when all the world's great religions got their start. She arrives midmorning at Couchiching ill, feverish and losing her voice. She wants quiet and sleep before her evening keynote speech. But, told that a journalist—me—has made the ninety-minute drive from Toronto for an interview prearranged by the conference organizers, she ends a too-brief nap to come resolutely to the conference center's dining room to talk, a small, wan, tired woman speaking hoarsely and above a whisper. She forgoes rest because Armstrong is a woman on a mission, a messenger bearing warnings for Americans and the world: Beware. Beware. Misbegotten U.S. foreign policy is pushing Islamic fundamentalists closer and closer to the use of weapons of mass destruction. Time is running out. The American administration and its allies have ignited a conflict that will last a generation. It is, she says, just the beginning, and Pollyannish optimism about its outcome she labels a sin. "It is just the beginning. Even to call it a war on terrorism is a mistake," she says. It is war, a religious war, launched in an era of mushrooming worldwide religious fundamentalist revolt against modernity and secularism. Fundamentalism, she says, is an enormous socio-political problem that must be addressed—it is splitting countries like Egypt, Israel and America into two camps—and the lessons from history are unequivocal: religious fundamentalists always, always become more violent under attack, whether in the Middle East, Iraq or in the United States itself. Armstrong warns that this is a conflict frighteningly aggravated by the rising domestic political might of American conservative Christian evangelicals and traditional Roman Catholics. Whenever religion is allowed to enter political debate, positions become more absolute and the middle ground of compromise and flexibility erodes. Because religious behavior mirrors the culture in which it exists, she says, the Christian right in the U.S. has absorbed the endemic violence of U.S. society and taken on the vengeful Armageddon fantasies of the New Testament book of Revelation. She proclaims George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden to be parodies of each other with their talk of black and white, good and evil. "They'd probably get on pretty well if they could meet," she says. Our conversation, scheduled for a few minutes, lasts more than an hour, becoming a journey into the history and meaning of religion—and the nature of the sacred. Brushing aside solicitudes for her voice, Armstrong delves enthusiastically into institutional religion's antagonism to women, Christianity's twisted problems with sex, and secular society's cataclysmic error in consigning religion and spirituality to the trash cans of history. From her wealth of religious knowledge, she flings out nuggets on the Biblical origins of scapegoating, the hysteria of the early church fathers on sex—"St. Jerome and St. Augustine were scarcely sane on the subject"—and a delicious anecdote about an Anglican bishop of London who proclaimed that he could not see a woman priest at the altar without wanting to embrace her. "How he could even think of making that statement in public just astonishes me," she says. "Men have hijacked religion. It is rubbish, who can be ordained and what kind of contraception can be used. The churches are doing a marvelous job of putting themselves out of business. The last time I went to church in Britain there were five of us and a dog." Listening to Armstrong, the image unavoidably creeps into one's mind of the cartoon figure of a bearded, ragged man standing ignored on a Wall Street sidewalk, holding up a sign saying, "Repent!" But there is a much better image for Armstrong, that of the cerebral, literary, Old Testament prophet Amos who exercised his ministry in Israel between 760 and 750 BCE, in that Axial Age, when the world's great faiths were born. Amos wags his finger outside the tents of the mighty; he denounces all levels of society for their spiritual apostasy, adherence to false and alien rituals, absence of compassion, oppression of the marginalized, and breach of elementary and unwritten laws of natural humanity. He writes in excellent Hebrew. He has a scholarly knowledge of historical traditions and Israelite and regional cult practices. He uses vivid imagery drawn from nature. He is an intelligent observer capable of articulating his insights and experiences in powerful, literary language. Armstrong is post-Axial Amos. She is asked, often, "How did you come to this?" Karen Armstrong's journey into religion began in 1962 when, as a bright, idealistic seventeen-year-old, she entered the Roman Catholic convent of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in Britain "to lose my adolescent self in this great fulfilling religious experience and be transformed by God and filled with joy and serenity." Instead she found herself forced into obedience and senseless rules and taught, above all, never to question. When her order sent her to Oxford to study to become a teacher, she suddenly encountered professors who insisted she do quite the opposite: criticize and challenge everything around her. In the convent, she had been shut off from the world, removed from newspapers and television and outside friendships. At Oxford, she heard for the first time about Vietnam and the Beatles. She saw long hair, short skirts. She found Oxford life impossible to reconcile with the rules of the convent when she returned home. One day she collapsed, weeping uncontrollably. She also had been experiencing blackouts and hallucinations—caused by epilepsy not diagnosed until a decade later—leading her to question her sanity. She quit the order in 1969, depressed and suffering from anorexia. It took her six years to readjust to secular society. She returned to studies in English literature and had her doctoral dissertation rejected. She taught for a while in a high school but ill-health forced her to quit. Halfhearted attempts at churchgoing soon turned to anger and atheism. She began making television documentaries on religion that were award-winning but highly controversial, and TV executives pulled the plug on her broadcasting career. So she started writing books: first about her experience in the convent and the trauma of leaving it, then about the crusades, English mystics, religion's treatment of women, Mohammed, and (in 1993) her History of God, the work that brought her to international attention with its thesis that God has been invented and reinvented through the centuries by the three monotheistic, Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. More books have followed: histories of Jerusalem and Islam, a critically acclaimed study of fundamentalism, a life of the Buddha, and another autobiography. "I never would have thought when I started all this," she told an interviewer, "that it would have brought me so much to the center of public life. I do feel that if people are asking at this ghastly time in our history for elucidation, then this is something I must do." The idea that she would find peace and fulfillment in studying religion—and indeed, rediscover God—took Armstrong by surprise. Human beings, she resolutely believes, are naturally religious. "We are creatures who seek transcendence. We're meaning-seeking creatures, we fall easily into despair." Always her thoughts lead to the essence of religion, its meaning to humankind, and its indomitable significance in human affairs. While Western Europe and a handful of other odd countries like Japan, Canada and Argentina remain in a religious cold belt—"locked," as Armstrong puts it, "in the good old world of the mid-twentieth century when it was assumed that secularism was the commanding ideology and religion would never again play a major role in world events—aha! we got that wrong"— the rest of the world increasingly demands the presence of religion in public life. It is a statement echoed by one of America's most respected public research organizations, the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Its forty-four-nation survey shows that no fewer than eight in ten Africans see religion as very important personally, and that similar or greater majorities exist in the Middle East, most of Asia and in every Latin American country except Argentina. And that, significantly, the importance of religion to Americans...

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