Religions should not compete for power

The Guardian's Comment is Free - belief website runs a weekly feature called The Question, posing one at the start of the week, then publishing commissioend responses on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday following (along with the facility for readers to post responses of their own). This week's question is, "Should Religions compete?" Here's today's response, from Maggi Dawn, a fellow and chaplain of Robinson College, Cambridge.

Religions should not compete for power

The call for peace at the heart of most religions contrasts with the way they behave as competing communities

The question: Should Religions Compete?

Throughout history religious factions have competed with each other, and their reasons are often dressed up as being for the good of the people, or for the honour of God. In truth, though, competition is usually about gaining or maintaining power for the purpose of the survival and growth of a community. Religions have therefore competed for land, for money, for sacred sites, for political power, and for the loyalty of their communities.

If you take their ideals and doctrines at face value, though, most of the world's religions call their followers to live in peace, to love God and love one another. So for one religion to compete against another, or for any religious adherent to use force or bullying tactics to persuade others into their particular kingdom, would seem anathema to what the religion itself stands for. Some form of the Golden Rule appears in a number of different religions, as does a call to hospitality for the stranger, so to indulge in any kind of pressure that dehumanises the other cannot be said to be the practice of true religion.

At heart the Christian gospel in its earliest form was the precise opposite of a bid for power: its central message was one of laying down power for the benefit of the other. Christ himself represented this ideal; St Paul wrote that Christ voluntarily laid down his right to equality with God in order to assume humanity, for the purpose of being the servant of the human race. Christ's acts of self-giving were the model for his followers, and the Golden Rule as it appears in Christianity is a call to Christians to lay down their own lives for one another, as Jesus had done for them. So although common sense suggests that a group that doesn't fight for its own survival may die out, when a religious group does begin to compete for power, it begins to compromise the heart of its own message.

Even in the twenty first century there's a surprising number of genuinely good people who, for the love of God, really do lay down their own interests to serve others (not, of course, that you have to be religious to be good, but for some it is a central motivation). Such ordinary saints rarely make the headlines, and when religion hits the news its usually because of its failures, not its virtues. By contrast, the kind of religious infighting that is visible in the public sphere seems to have little to do with true religion, and it often seems that the world would be a better place without it.

On balance, then, it seems to me that you can only follow a religion if you lay down the wish to compete for power. But that doesn't mean becoming a doormat, or giving up any discussion or disagreement on opinion, doctrine or ethics. Aiming to live in a self-giving way doesn't mean becoming passive and opinion-free, and to dismiss religious difference by saying that all religions are basically the same is to ignore the fact that they really are not the same at all. Their histories, their doctrines and scriptures, and their ways of reading and interpreting the world are profoundly different from each other. The most rewarding religious conversation occurs when people of different traditions listen with genuine respect to another's views, to learn what it means, standing in someone else's shoes, to be human.

I must say I'm disappointed that the three published responses to this question are two Christian and one Muslim, even if in one of these responses (Alan Race's, of course) inter faith issues are foregrounded). I also find it disappointing that there's little talk about cooperation instead of competition. I should put my money where my mouth is and chip in my own comment then!