Faith in the Commons

The Commons Conference, Uvic
April 30, 2006
Harold Munn
 

Let me begin by acknowledging that the practice of religious faith in the context of the commons is widely perceived to be a contradiction in terms. By definition, so it seems, a faith community could never be genuinely affirming of a religious or theological commons. Faith communities, it is often understood, consist of groups of people gathered around divinely-revealed truths which can broach no discussion of those truths without violating their relationship with the divinity which has supplied the community with the inviolable truths. Such a faith community draws its very essence from its experience that its revelation is unassailable. Like-minded believers congregate together as a congregation, but are unable to affirm the commons in which no group may claim an ultimate authority. Their reception of that divine authority, the abandonment of which constitutes the ultimate apostasy, cannot allow the sanguine acceptance of other claims to truth within the equality which is the essence of the commons. Yet, if we remove the sense of the absolute nature of the divine from the centre of the faith community, it's not clear what would be left that could be called a faith community. It appears that a faith community would by necessity attempt to subvert the commons either by using it as an opportunity to further the agenda of that faith minority, or by attempting to co-opt the commons to become a larger embodiment of that particular faith community.