Sacred

Hi folks, I hope you are ok… we had a nightmare with the venue last week… so we are repeating last weeks blog. We are meeting 7.30 at the Tavern and Galley. I hope you can join us!

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This week Martin has written a guest blog for us…

How might we respond to perceived threat – to our safety, our possessions, our beliefs, our world-view..?  What is sufficiently important to us that, if we think we might lose it, we would take robust action to protect; or, what idea/ belief, that gives our life meaning, is so important to us that, if it is challenged/ denied, causes affront and a perhaps vehement (almost visceral) response?

On the weekend away, one question was about perceiving the ‘sacred’ in nature. That implies one meaning of ‘sacred’.  Another meaning may be broader, and includes anything which we/one holds as absolute, which is the exploration of this blog.

The news is full of strife and war:

Russia invaded Ukraine (did it perceive it’s borders threatened?); Israel flattened Gaza (because it felt threatened and had captives taken); the Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo affairs caused violent response from some Muslims (who were offended by the disrespectful publications); and Christian history is peppered with robust disagreements about belief and practice, in early ‘heresies’, Reformation, Counter-reformation, the nature of marriage… who picks the hymns… does the flowers.. ( shouldn’t be facetious, but you get the drift).

And of course, ‘power corrupts’, so perceived threat can be quashed if one has the ability; which brings me to recent reading and thoughts/ questions.

Omar El Akkad’s personal, part-biographical, and journalistically-visceral reflecting on the 2025 Gazan genocide, invites uncomfortable critique.  He, born in Egypt but working in Canada, writes on the abuse of power by state in response to perceived threat:

To preserve the values of the civilised world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures.  To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables.  To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilised world might win. (El Akkad, 2025, p.77.)

The book invites, for me, reflection on how people and groups think/ perceive/ act, and what are the  essential assumptions and tenets of belief which make such actions, for them, somehow appropriate. One could think of the crusades as an older scenario on which to draw comparison.

The issue at stake here is perhaps not just basic ‘animal-instinct’,  but an understanding of what it is that we assume to be ‘sacred’.  What are the absolutes by which one lives?  And how can we communicate with/ live alongside  others with different understandings of ‘sacred’.

‘Sacred’ might be relating to God,  one’s nation,  child-safety, Newcastle United (well I do wonder..)

[ I have included much bonus-material at the end from Lynch which may helpfully explore various types of ‘sacred’.]

So some questions are, perhaps:

1.  What seemed really unfair to you as a child?  How did you respond?

2. What values are really important to you;  what is/ are your sacred ‘thing’ (s) ?

3.  Does your freedom (of speech / action)  override those of others?

3. What would offend you in others’ speech or action; why?

4.  How do you disagree with someone?

5.  Does the ends always justify the means?

6.  Do these considerations speak to our local/ national situations, which might include, for example, issues of care-priorities, gender, migration, and parochial machinations (?!)…

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Some bonus reading to explore sacred, power, authority…for your perusal and inward digestion:

The idea is introduced of the katechon (Greek  for restrainer, or one who withholds) ‘ holding back the forces of chaos and lawlessness, and so holding of the end of the world.’    

Rose, Marika, Theology for the End of the World, (London: SCM, 2023), p3-4.

For Augustine and many later Christian thinkers, God had created the world with a certain built-in order and structure.  To resist this order was to resist God, and to risk unleashing the forces of evil and chaos.   For Augustine, the essence of evil was the refusal to recognise and submit to the proper ordering of things.   p.5. ibid

To be Christian is, inescapably, to inherit the complicated legacy of the bad things that Christianity means, as well as good things.  And the closer we are to the model of the God-like individual that western culture has come to see as the most perfect of all human beings, the more likely it is that we are formed by the dangerous and damaging aspects of Christian culture. To be white, to be male, to be straight, to be cis, to be able bodied, to be educated, to be wealthy, is to be formed by a culture that wants us to think that the world exists for us, for our benefit, by a culture that will treat us as the closest thing to God, whether we want it to or not.     p. 26-7ibid

Lynch, Gordon, The Sacred in the Modern World: a Cultural Sociological Approach, Oxford: OUP, 2012:

‘… our bonds to the sacred evoke, and are reinforced by, particular sentiments.  […]  we need insight to be able to name the forms of the sacred that move us, to understand their  histories, as well as the light and shadow that they cast. Without this, our complex, pluralist  societies are in danger of repeating cycles of conflict through sacred reflexes that do more harm than good. p.3

       Rather than thinking about the sacred as an ontological phenomenon that transcends signification [ eg ‘God’], the cultural sociological approach understands sacrality as a particular form of cultural signification in which symbols, objects, sentiments, and practices are experienced as expressions of normative, absolute reality…. [that is] that sacred forms constitute what people take to be absolute realities that have claims over their lives. p.15.

The sacred is defined by what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities which present normative claims over the meanings and conduct of social life. Sacred forms are specific, historically contingent, instances of the sacred. Sacred forms are constituted by constellations of specific symbols, thought/discourse, emotions and actions grounded in the body.  These constellations of embodied thought, feeling and action recursively reproduce the sacrality of the sacred form and constitute groups who share these discourses, sentiments and practices. The normative reality represented by a sacred form simultaneously constructs the evil which might profane it, and the pollution of this sacred reality is experienced by its adherents as a painful wound for which some form of restitution is necessary.  p. 29.

[American] civil religion is constituted around the sacred values of universal human rights and freedom, enshrined in the principles of democratic society, in which freedom is viewed in positive moral terms as the freedom to pursue a just and civically responsible life. This system of sacred values finds expression in particular sacred texts such as the declaration of Independence, the Constitution, seminal speeches such as the inaugural presidential addresses of George Washington and J.F. Kennedy, and rituals such as the celebration of Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as through material forms such as the American flag and national cemeteries. P 37.

[A] hierarchy of sacred forms is made more likely when there is no clear social structure or space through which widespread identification with a subjugated [ lesser] sacred form is possible; when power is held and deployed in ways that maintain a dominant form; and when the logistics of cultural meanings are such that a dominant form is widely reproduced and performs an important work, and challenges to that dominant form are experienced as too threatening to social and moral order to be given credence.  p.79

The sacred has shadow side.  While sacred forms symbolise and perpetuate deep moral and existential commitments, they equally have the capacity to legitimate oppressive social  orders, violence, and the breach of basic human rights of freedom and well-being.  Rather than necessarily binding society into a shared order of meanings and values […] the multiplicity of contemporary forms of the sacred threatens to fragment society and provide potent symbolic material for social conflict.  p. 114.

Under the power of the sacred, the normal codes and conventions of mundane life can be suspended.  Violence is legitimated and rights can be violated by the symbolic, moral, and  emotional demands of sacred forms. [ eg National Socialism in Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China…]  p. 115.

[Emilio Gentile opines that totalitarian regimes use sacred forms politically, in which they:]

a) define the meaning of life and ultimate ends of human existence; b) formalise the commandments of a public ethic to which all members of these movements must adhere and c) give utter importance to a mythical and symbolic dramatization in their interpretation of history and reality, thus creating their own ‘sacred history’, embodied in the nation, the state or the party, and tied to the existence of a ‘chosen people’… glorified as the regenerating force of all mankind.  p. 116.

Sacred forms that we experience as exerting a normative claim on our lives are, ultimately, not susceptible to critical analysis, nor can their ontological reality be proved or disproven to their adherents through rationale debate. This is not to suggest that identification with sacred forms are unchangeable.   p. 129.

All of which could offer an uncomfortable searchlight onto many political and religious practices.

And may offer a tool for considering how to approach dialogue across cultural divides, and within schismatic debates/clashes.   MVH