Path to Enlightenment on Old Hope Road

Daniel Thwaites, Contributor

Jamaica College principal Ruel Reid does a little evangelism among the boys every year. Some commentators, notably Hilaire and Yvonne McCalla-Sobers, have taken exception. Hilaire wondered, hilariously, if it's a high school or a "revival tent".

I approach this school evangelism with caution, but I don't share the Soberses' panic because I don't share their disdain for religion at all. Still, my own prejudice, I suppose, is that these things are best left for parents to handle. So in general, I would like to keep the schooling in school and the praying in church.

It's nothing new. Similarly, I want to party on Saturday and say confession on Sunday. I don't want preachers annoying me in the dancehall, and I don't want to hear the high priests of bashment, Shabba or Kartel, when I kneel in the tabernacle of the Almighty.

In keeping with my untroubled compartmentalisation of these matters, I have more than once attempted to begin a meeting in Jamaica by slapping the desk and saying, "OK, everybody's here. Let's go!" when a more experienced colleague or comrade will sternly remind me that "we ALWAYS begin wid pryaz!" But I certainly don't consider this something at which to take offence.

In fact, you learn a lot about what's really going on through pryaz. In one meeting I recall, a seemingly gentle old man was asked to choose a verse to open. He had his passage already prepared:

Psalm 3:7:

Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.

This was a man on a mission. He was not happy with some people there, and the meeting was - exciting.

So I admit to an initial aversion if I imagine JC turned into a venue for hand-clapping, foot-stomping, talking in tongues, and maybe even some snake handling. That's preferably homework. But if Principal Reid has found a gap, and that its cause is mere neglect rather than antipathy to pryaz, why not let the boys get a likkle Jesus in dem life?

danger of sectarianism

As a younger man, I had the unpleasant experience of being hectored by an Adventist football coach at Mona Prep about my failure to observe the dietary rules in Leviticus. But so what? I'm only partially embittered. It forced me to explore the theological basis of the bacon-double-cheeseburger early, and it sharpened my distaste for fundamentalism and my taste for smoked pork chops. It's why till this day I sprinkle bacon bits on to bacon, and I have a special place in my heart for jerk pork.

So I acknowledge that there is a danger of sectarianism and narrowness if the principal is an ardent member of some highly specialised worship that believes everyone else are the Beasts of Revelation. My fear is that Reid is nurturing a schoolful of fundamentalist maniacs. Therefore, I agree with Mr Sobers that care must be taken that atheists and other dissenters have full opportunity to opt out.

I'm also interested in knowing that they are teaching the students to think critically, which, however, I do not see as opposed to religious sentiment at all. My question is: Are the boys being exposed to history and philosophy?

At St George's College, I would sometimes attend a service in the morning for pryaz. I continued sporadically, until it was taking too much time from my other schoolboy career in smoking cigarettes. In retrospect, I can't find that the services did irreparable harm, although I'm convinced the smoking did. Later, in Canada, I was forced to attend service every morning, and I adjusted by quitting smoking. I suppose I was 'saved'.

Then there's the matter of cultural literacy. It's not just difficult to understand Western civilisation, but impossible, without a grounding in its religion. And that religion may be studied academically, but experiential exposure to the culture's deepest rivers cannot be a terrible thing. Unless the enemy IS the culture, and the Soberses' idea is to eliminate those parts that aren't 'Enlightenment' certified?

In a stunning barrage of historical error attributable, I think, to excess enthusiasm, Mrs McCalla-Sobers writes that "ancient pagan states of Africa, Asia and Europe were the cradles of civilisation" where "religions were accepted equally ... and philosophers set moral standards to guide daily life ... . In non-Christian Greece and Rome, for example, people were equal and free to challenge conventional wisdom."

FUZZY REASONING

The descriptor 'pagan', which was merely a catch-all Christian pejorative for anything pre-Christian or non-Christian, has somehow been elevated by Mrs Sobers into a fuzzy notion of irreligious or non-religious, or maybe even secular. She's not clear at all, but it doesn't matter: that's bunkum, not history.

In Egypt, there wasn't even the idea of separating religious and state authority, and challenge to either was punishable by death. Greece and Rome were exceedingly intolerant. Socrates seems to have encouraged a species of free thinking, but was put to death for his pains. Early Christians discovered failure to worship Caesar meant death. These societies produced great marvels, but it's unlikely that the estimated 30 per cent of slaves in Athens, or the estimated 40 per cent of them in Rome, spent much time "challenging conventional wisdom".

It was Enlightenment thinkers impatient to advance secularism in 18th-century Europe who propounded the myth of ancient 'freedom'. Voltaire, in particular, the wily Jesuit-trained deist, was an effective propagandist against the medieval scholastics from whom he had learned much. But his real model for a tolerant society was England, which he visited and admired, and where till today there is an Establishment Church.

The legally protected religious toleration that we - that I - enjoy is an inheritance from European sectarian battles. In England, the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Toleration in 1689 achieved detente when Protestant splinter groups laid aside mutual hatreds to extinguish the threat of papists. So toleration didn't apply to Catholics like me, or to atheists like the Soberses, but it evolved to include us, and we needn't be ungrateful.

We, today, live in the great age of freedom and toleration, stemming from that wonderful Protestant Christian idea, 'freedom of conscience'.

I see scant reason to be anything but comfortably conservative on these matters. N.W. Manley, David Coore, and some other JC old boys satisfactorily adopted the British tradition, and here we are today, with freedoms unimaginable to our forefathers from traditional societies of any sort, where a declaration of atheism would likely get you ostracised or killed. Principal Reid's simple mission is to produce more men like that.

Daniel Thwaites is a partner of the Thwaites Law Firm in Jamaica, and Thwaites, Lundgren & D'Arcy in New York. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.