WE SHOULD strip the Remembrance Service at the Cenotaph of all
its religious aspects in order to make it more inclusive and
"relevant", the British Humanist Association announced as its
contribution to the national tribute to the fallen last weekend.
This seems to me a bad idea, even for those who do not believe in
God.
There is clearly something that the British value in established
religion even when they are not churchgoers. The recent funeral of
the murdered schoolgirl Alice Gross was conducted by a humanist
celebrant. And yet such events are still rare enough for the media
to feel the need to remark upon them. Far more typical was the
funeral of the murdered taxi-driver aid worker Alan Hennings, when
locals packed the parish church announcing that they did not
normally attend church but wanted to be there that day. Local
disasters very often provoke exactly this reaction.
The British Humanist Association's chief executive, Andrew
Copson, at first suggested that prayers should be replaced by
"reflections" from democratically elected leaders. Then, realising
that this meant that a Prime Minister who had sent troops off to
die would be given a public platform for self-justification, he
switched to arguing that the Bishop of London should be replaced by
"commentators, thinkers, people who have thought about the ethical
content of war".
But there is much more needed than reflection. There is an
emotional and psychological complexity in our prayers for the
fallen which honour, lament, regret, and show a purpose of
amendment all at once. There is consolation in the collective, as
well as a commitment to try again, and to try harder next time.
Remembrance is more than remembering. It is rooted in the
institution of the eucharist and Jesus's words "Do this in
remembrance of me." The New Testament Greek for the word Jesus used
is one that means far more than recalling the past. It is about how
we make a person from the past mystically alive to us in the
present. Time stops momentarily, and "then" and "now" become the
same.
There can be secular equivalents of this sacramentality. Those
who flocked to the Tower of London to see the moat full of poppies
intuitively understood that. Each poppy represented a member of
service personnel who had been killed, and in doing so brought the
person behind the flower back into our present. But the breadth of
the wider function of prayer is harder to replicate in some secular
equivalent.
Atheist commemoration must also wrestle with the problem of
accountability. Our tradition is rooted in the notion that even the
Sovereign is answerable to God. You can get rid of monarch and
deity, but you are left with the conundrum of to whom, or to what,
the Government or the State is accountable.
Democracy is not a sufficient answer. Democracies, as history
shows, can become dictatorships of the majority. There is in the
commemoration of the fallen an element of dedication to a wider
good and a more noble aspiration. Secular atheists must offer an
alternative as rich. Sniping at religion is not enough.
Paul Vallely is author of Pope Francis: Untying the
knots.