by Anthony Egan, SJ
For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by religions.
On the face of it, this may seem strange. I grew up within a strongly Catholic environment and though there were relatives in the wider family who were from other Christian traditions (notably Anglican and Methodist), their faiths were not particularly impactful on my life. As for other faiths, their presence was pretty non-existent. I had a few Jewish friends at school, but once again for at least eight of those years I was at a Catholic school run by the Marist brothers where – though there were a considerable minority of Protestant and a few Jewish students – the culture was overwhelmingly Catholic.
Similarly, during my years at a state school, the default position for most students was Christian of some kind, and by the early 1980s the tone was a mixture of Evangelical, Pentecostal or Calvinist Protestantism – all of a very conservative kind, carefully vetted and approved by the Christian National Education model of the apartheid state. Few of my classmates, including Catholics, expressed views that challenged the Christian Nationalist consensus. Only one classmate was an ‘out’ atheist, a few were semi-closeted agnostics; another described himself as a Buddhist, but seldom did they express themselves in our mandatory but useless ‘Religious Education’ classes. On only one occasion I remember do I remember the atheist stand out – in defence of evolution against creationism, backed by the Buddhist and myself, three students out of thirty. (Why I did that was out of my casual reading, not because I was even close to an excellent science student, and encouraged by the excellent religious education I had from teachers at my Marist school – including a then young Jesuit priest who was also a science teacher).
You might be asking: apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition, where were the other great faiths in your youth? The answer is simple. Apart from Judaism and Christianity, the other great faiths of South Africa – Islam, Hinduism and African Traditional Religion – were literally segregated from us by the apartheid system. Even though from 1976 my Catholic school was non-racial (in defiance initially of the State), I cannot recall any Hindus or Muslims among my classmates: we were ecumenical but by no means interfaith.
So my initial introduction to interfaith relations came through books. I loved books and read widely. My Catholic catechesis was also strongly Vatican II in tone, open-minded and generous, and very much in the ‘inclusive’ approach to faiths of Nostra Aetate. In addition, wider reading – deep dives into books on religions from the great faiths of the world to works on paganism (like Druid beliefs), and even an anthropological work on comparative experiences of death and resurrection in religions and popular music (a book called The Death and Resurrection Show by Brogan Taylor), opened me to a sense that religion was bigger and more complex than Catholicism, Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Although I did not study religion at university in the 1980s, access to the library broadened my reading beyond the courses I was taking. Two key things happened in quick succession in the mid-1980s: my shift from an interest in law to history, and from superficial faith to an interest in the Jesuits. Closely tied to this was a deepening politicisation – a conscientisation about the nature of my country South Africa, and the urgent need for the end to apartheid – that led me towards liberation theology and a deeper interest in theology in general. Though I was a graduate student in history, my research was in politics of church and state, an interest that led to my first academic job as a researcher in the University of Cape Town’s Religious Studies Depart.
The religious Student Department, though it was very strong in Christian theology, was interfaith. Indeed it included academics of no faith, but who all saw religion in general and comparative religion, particularly as a force for social change, as important. I met and worked with radical (in the sense of leftwing not Islamist) Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and a swathe of progressive Christians.
In the country, too, interfaith took on a radical dimension. As the religious community took its place in the struggle that would bring apartheid to its knees, the lines were drawn not along denominational or religious lines but on where you stood: apartheid or liberation. The religious sector adopted a kind of pragmatic religious pluralism[1] that saw priests, ministers, imams, rabbis and swamis linked in arms in protest rallies, often together with Marxists and secular liberals in demonstrations and protests. By prioritising the ethical and political, religious leaders and communities came together, putting aside dogmatic issues in the name of a common good. As one Muslim activist of the era once said to me, “We were all united at the time in that we were all God-fearing Marxists!”
Though my work at that time – before joining the Society in 1990 – was peripheral to these great events, mainly working as a researcher and journalist providing information that could inform struggle debates (not least because I am claustrophobic in crowds!), this practical pluralism of faith moved me deeply. I could not imagine that my non-Catholic, non-Christian and even non-religious friends were somehow beyond the grace of God! (I did worry about many fellow Catholics and Christians who bought into, or actively supported, the apartheid state, however).
Since my time in the Jesuits, this practical pluralism – though never explicitly expressed or engaged with in my ministries – has never left me. I do not have a strong position in the debates between official Catholic inclusivism (and its more subtle expression in the works of Jacques Dupuis) or the theologically riskier forms of pluralism (epitomised by John Hick and Raimundo Panikkar), leaning one way now, the other way later. My interfaith experience is more social and pastoral than systematic: Zen-style meditation as part of some eight-day retreats (often at my initiative rather than that of my retreat director); a guest preacher at a Hanukkah celebration in a Reformed/Conservative Synagogue in Johannesburg; participation in interfaith panels at conferences; informal religious conversation with Muslim academic colleagues, etc. Just as in Ecumenism (which I have been teaching at Hekima for three years), so in interfaith: I am not a professional, but one who tries to live my faith in conversation with the insights of other great faiths.
[1] . On this see: Selwyn Gross OP, “Religious Pluralism in the Struggle for Justice”, New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 841 , September 1990 , pp. 377 – 386. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1990.tb01430.x