Le Monde des religions, March-April 2008 —
Dear Régis Debray,
In your column, which I encourage the reader to read before proceeding further, you raise a very stimulating point for me. Even if you somewhat caricature my thesis on Christianity, I fully acknowledge the difference in our perspectives. You emphasize its collective and political character, while I insist on the personal and spiritual nature of its founder's message. I understand perfectly well that you are questioning the foundation of the social bond. In your political writings, you have convincingly demonstrated that this bond always rests, in one way or another, on an "invisible" element—that is, some form of transcendence. The God of Christians was this transcendence in Europe until the 18th century ; deified reason and progress succeeded him, followed by the cult of the nation and the major political ideologies of the 20th century . After the failure, sometimes tragic, of all these secular religions, I share your concern about the role money is playing as a new form of religion in our individualistic societies. But what can be done?
Should we feel nostalgia for Christendom, that is, for a society governed by the Christian religion, just as there are societies governed by the Muslim religion today? Nostalgia for a society on whose altar individual freedom and the right to differing thoughts and religions were sacrificed? What I am convinced of is that this society, which bore the name "Christian" and which, moreover, built great things, was not truly faithful to the message of Jesus, who advocated, on the one hand, the separation of politics and religion, and on the other hand, insisted on individual freedom and the dignity of the human person. I am not saying that Christ wanted to abolish all religion, with its rites and dogmas, as the cement of a society, but I wanted to show that the essence of his message tends to emancipate the individual from the group by emphasizing their personal freedom, their inner truth, and their absolute dignity. So much so that our most sacred modern values – those of human rights – are largely rooted in this message.
Christ, like the Buddha before him, and unlike other founders of religions, was not primarily concerned with politics. He proposed a revolution of individual consciousness capable of leading, in the long term, to a change in collective consciousness. It is because individuals will be more just, more conscious, more truthful, and more loving that societies will eventually evolve as well. Jesus did not call for a political revolution, but for a personal conversion. To a religious logic based on obedience to tradition, he opposed a logic of individual responsibility.
I grant you, this message is rather utopian, and we are currently living in a certain chaos where the old ways of thinking, based on obedience to the sacred laws of the group, no longer function, and where few individuals are still committed to a genuine path of love and responsibility. But who knows what will happen in a few centuries? I would add that this revolution of individual consciousness is in no way opposed to religious or political beliefs shared by the masses, nor to the institutionalization of the message, the inevitable nature of which you rightly point out. It may, however, impose a limit on them: that of respect for the dignity of the human person. In my view, this is the entire teaching of Christ, which in no way negates religion, but frames it within three inviolable principles: love, freedom, and secularism. And it is a form of sacredness, it seems to me, that can reconcile believers and non-believers today.