Shut up with your religion!

In conversation with Liz Slade, Dougald Hine & the Prophet Isaiah

Here is a recording of me,

Dougald Hine

and

Elizabeth Slade

reading a blisteringly beautiful passage from the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 58.¹

It is a passage that condemns religiosity, and affirms the actions of many that wouldn’t call themselves religious - including some of you perhaps. So there’s a chance (we hope) that this conversation might be of interest for readers whether they consider themselves religious or not.

break forth like the dawn

Religion, in the Bible, is often a bad thing.

Jesus frequently railed against it, and those that policed it.

The writer, James, in the Second Testament,² tells us that true religion is this: ‘to visit orphans and widows in their affliction [i.e. the ones that society forgets], and to keep oneself unstained from the world’.³

And the prophet Micah, in the First Testament, when asking himself ‘what does the Lord require of [us]?’ says this: ‘to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] G_d’.⁴ He then says that prostrations and costly sacrifices - religious practices and rituals - mean nothing if we are not doing that.

Basically, if it’s not ‘good news [for] the poor’, then it’s not Good News.

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor...’

Jesus & the prophet Isaiah

After the US presidential inauguration those weeks back, I found I had to take a shower to wash off the religious language and imagery (I feel like this after every kind of state appropriation of religious imagery, but the need was particularly strong after this one).⁵ So I sought out the power-hose that is Isaiah 58 - one of the most brutal, expunging passages in the Bible. G_d telling ancient Israel, through the prophet, to ‘shut up with your religion’ and return to true fasting...

‘is not this the fast that I choose,
...to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and to bring the homeless poor in to your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh.
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily’

Isaiah 58:6-8

It doesn’t matter if we are to the left, politically, or to the right...progressive, traditional, ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ or, like me, ‘a bit all over the place’. This is the kind of religion that the G_d⁶ of the Bible apparently wants. So this passage stands in judgement of all of us that call ourselves ‘religious’, in the biblical tradition at least. And I, for one, fall far short.

My friend

David Benjamin Blower

and I have, for the last three years, hosted fortnightly bible studies for friends that wouldn’t normally read the Bible, or that left it behind in a previous life and wanted to re-encounter it...or be re-encountered by it.

We were being approached by friends that sensed we needed to find ways to draw again, as a culture, from our more ancient wisdom traditions, including the Bible. So they asked us to help them become more biblically literate.

I had, in the years running up to that, been a little haunted by the idea of the Bible being like a trapped wolf, or tiger, that was prowling around in a cage, longing to be set free to roam wherever it wanted. It made me think of RS Thomas’s White Tiger,

‘...breathing
as you can imagine that
God breaths within the confines
of our definition of him’

David had similar pre-occupations.⁷ So we decided to gather around biblical poems and stories in a way that allowed them to break loose from our expectations. Become a bit feral. Slip through the bars of our prejudices and doctrines and roam a little freer.

I imagine we’ll write about that practice another time. I mention it now to give some context for the conversation that follows, between Liz, Dougald and myself, around why our reading of Isaiah 58, in our 8am bible study on Friday 24th January, felt so profound.

Liz has been Chief Officer of the Unitarians since 2019. And, for as long as I have known her (since 2016/17 I think, around the time when she wrote a lovely piece on ‘The God-Shaped Hole’) has been concerned with creating spiritually healthy communities that can effectively serve the complex times we are living in. She is part of Hard Art collective and has, for many years now, been quietly weaving relational networks of creative practitioners, dreamers and activists around the UK. She is wise and honest and I love reading the Bible with her.

Dougald is known to many as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, but when I met him (introduced by Liz at our friend Andy’s wedding, where we three sat on the ‘soul’ table) he was just starting A School Called Home, with his wife Anna. I was part of their first gathering, on the side of a hill in Sweden, and we’ve deepened in friendship since then. I recommend reading his recent book, At Work in the Ruins, if you haven’t already done so. It sang to me of the kind of brave, tender, humble work that we need those wisdom traditions to help us to do.

Interestingly, when I fell through the bottom of my church-self in 2018, in the midst of the bleakness, Liz and Dougald were two of the only people I felt free to say yes to. As if somehow they represented what was ahead for me, rather than behind. I called them my ‘friends in the wilderness’. So it is lovely to share with them here.

And here’s an alternative intro from Dougald:

‘it seems worth acknowledging (and laughing at ourselves over) the strangeness of our little conclave – a theologian who follows Jesus and leads Bible studies but would rather not be called a Christian, a church-leader who is clear that she’s not a Christian and doesn’t know the Bible that well, and a writer who grew up around churches and goes to one most Sundays, but hesitates to identify as a Christian. It’s like the opening of a rather convoluted joke! ;-)’

24.01.25

Vanessa: I was conscious this morning of feeling held in a spacious place by our shared encounter with our passage, Isaiah 58, in a way that felt quite distinct. Often we greet each other at 8am on a Friday morning and the text feels like a lump of cold clay that we will ourselves to stay in contact with. Only towards the end of the 75 minutes do we realise it has softened in our hands and become malleable and a pleasure to work with. But this morning felt different. Like somehow the text welcomed us and we found it easier to cross the threshold and enter. What was different? It's such a fierce passage, it can't be that it felt friendlier. What do you think was going on?

*

Liz: This time, arriving with the 8 o’clock groggy fresh morning brain probably helped, as did the storm in the night that had kept me awake - I didn’t have too many thoughts yet to get in the way. And I think we all arrived with a certain tenderness because of it being the week of Trump’s inauguration - it felt immediately that the power of Isaiah’s trumpeting voice met the grim forces of global politics we’ve been witnessing this week. There was a commonality of our experience - our group dotted about with very different lives - because of that shared context of feeling that the tectonic plates are shifting. It also helped that I’d been in person with you and others from the group at the weekend - relationships refreshed and deepened by real life connection and hugs and whisky.

All of that context perhaps left me vulnerable to the power of the words, and that first third immediately cut through my normal comfortable worldviews - in the same way that the shifting political landscape has since the US election. It felt so clear that the words could point to the cosiness of being a lefty western do-gooder - I felt deeply how the Trump supporters’ disdain for ‘wokeness’ might actually be responding to a certain hypocrisy. I know I can be guilty of hand-wringing about first world problems when I am also complicit in systems that cause hunger and homelessness. The discomfort of putting myself in the shoes of the Trump supporters and seeing things anew opened something up in me.

I think it also helped that the text is so clear and declarative. It wasn’t one of those passages that needs a lot of head-scratching to know what it actually means. And the poetry of the passage gives it energy that matches its meaning - so I think that morning we received a direct, full-power message that met us all wherever we were.

*

Vanessa: Beautiful. I hear you saying so many helpful things there. One being that this passage, in that moment, had a power that was dynamic enough both to resist grim global forces and to resist certain grim forces and areas of blindness in yourself, is that right? So pretty exposing all round?

I wonder if you could say a little more about your experience of the prophet Isaiah’s ‘trumpeting voice’. From our years of reading the Bible together I’m aware that your instinct isn’t always to trust these ‘trumpeting’ male voices. I love what you’ve shared about your own more tenderised receptivity that morning, but I wonder if there is anything else you might like to share about the particular quality of his voice that made it easier to trust him than other ‘trumpeting’ male voices?

*

Liz: Yes, it was exposing and I suppose the work of the group helps those exposing things to be felt and then spoken. The safety that comes from threads of trust built up over repeated gatherings over several years - the trust that it’s a space that can hold difficult or uncertain things being spoken into it.

And yes, I was surprised that I accepted the ‘trumpeting voice’ so readily. Often in these sessions I start off feeling angry and affronted at the voice of the book, feeling both the centuries of oppression that have been acted in its name, and my own childhood experience of Christianity being something that wants to tell me what to do, to follow the rules, to conform.

I know next to nothing about the context of Isaiah, who he was historically, theologically, or mythologically, or what the context of this chapter is. And so I really was meeting it fresh, as story. All I can say about why I accepted this voice today was that when I read it I heard truth. It didn’t sound like a false or harmful voice of ‘power over’. It sounded like the true voice of the natural loving pattern of the universe - which I suppose is what some people call God?!

And I was moved to learn that this has been such a foundational text for you - I wonder whether the truth that spoke to me is the same truth that spoke to you. Or whether it’s a consequence of you being such an influence - directly and by osmosis - of my own adult relationship with the Christian faith. Maybe paying attention to your relationship with God and the Bible primed me to hear truth in these particular words.

The other thing that felt powerful was verse 11’s words of peace and nourishment:

‘The Lord will guide you continually,
And satisfy your soul in drought,
And strengthen your bones;
You shall be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.’

Those words met me that day when I was feeling like I had strength in my bones for the first time in many months, and that a spring of water was returning - so I had faith in the feeling of that ready aliveness.

*

Vanessa: Thank you Liz. This is all so good to read. Particularly that the passage could mirror back to you that sense of relief at a spring of water returning. And our capacity to be like a ‘well-watered garden’ even in a context of drought. That promise, which is richly laced throughout the Bible, is perhaps reason enough for me to want to encourage people to read it in these particular days.

That’s interesting about my relationship with the passage. I like what Jacques Derrida says about translation - that the best translations always involve some kind of genuine friendship with the text. And this passage really is an old friend. Which is strange to say because it is possibly one of the more brutal passages in the Bible. Basically G_d saying to religious people like me ‘will you just shut the f**k up for once’...! Enough of your facades of holiness and self-righteous religious language. If you want to truly pursue holiness, then serve the least and practice justice. Stop judging others and feeling superior. Open your homes to those seeking refuge of any kind. Share your food. Eat with strangers. Stop exploiting labourers. Undo your systems that oppress. Spend time with the victims.

I remember a friend making me watch a George Carlin comedy sketch many years ago. He thought I’d be horrified, because Carlin swore a lot and laid into religion, exposing its hypocrisy. But at the end of it I said ‘I think that was amazing. He sounds like Isaiah in chapter 58. It’s just a shame he hasn’t bothered to read the Bible before mocking it’. At which point we read the passage together and he changed his tone…!

Dwelling in the passage on Friday morning made me realise how lucky I was to have this as a foundational text in my journey of faith. After being encountered by Jesus at the age of 24, I quickly found my way to a community that was trying to practice His priority towards the poor and marginalised in any society. I’d always known that to be the case since I was a kid. So it was beautiful to be able to explore that core mystery of faith, that G_d is particularly present to those that society rejects, at that point in my life. That G_d is with the victims of any social or political order.

Maybe that’s why I’m so mystified that some of the louder parts of the church today seem to so easily dismiss core parts of that biblical teaching - the priority of G_d’s heart as portrayed in the Bible. It’s too ‘woke’...the ‘social justice gospel’. But it can’t be dismissed that easily. That’s biblically illiterate. Like George Carlin, but he didn’t claim to profess faith (and I’m aware that the same accusation...’biblically illiterate’...could be directed at me by people with different priorities).

Anyway...

Dougald, over to you. I wonder what, if anything, from our time of gathering around this passage, remains warm in your body? Would you like to respond to anything we’ve shared already?

*

Dougald: Thanks, both of you, for inviting me to continue our conversation like this, and for all we’ve shared in this Feral Bible Study group. In the past few weeks, I’ve started practicing the piano regularly for the first time in what’s probably thirty years, and it reminds me of a strange sensation I had when I began getting together regularly with this small group of you to read the Bible regularly, because the best explanation I can give – and I’m not sure how this will land with either my Christian or non-Christian friends – is that it was like picking up an instrument which used to be an important part of my life, feeling the lingering memory of its music in my hands, and with it a certain sense of homecoming.

Often it’s in the way that the text is passed around between us that it starts to quicken for me – and when you spoke, Liz, about feeling those opening verses directed at you, illuminating how you might look from elsewhere as a “lefty western do-gooder”, I felt the focus sharpen. This bit, especially, from verses 3-4:

‘Look, you seek your own pleasure on your fastdays
and you exploit all your workmen;
look, the only purpose of your fasting is to quarrel and squabble...’

I mean, when I read that, I can’t help thinking of my years on Twitter: how easily the performance of doing-the-right-thing, being-one-of-the-good people can serve as a way to get the hormone kick of conflict and feel virtuous into the bargain. And all while knowing that the tools you’re using (and the tools which I’m using to type this now) are the product of the exploitation of workers in mines and factories which I’ll almost certainly never visit.

The second thing I felt, sitting with this text last week, is that it’s modelling what it looks like for a tradition to call itself into question, to face up to the possibility that what it thought was doing the right thing might not have been good enough, that it’s called to a more excruciating self-honesty. And again, while that’s part of the story of the historical events in which this book was formed, it feels pretty relevant today to anyone who isn’t jubilant over how politics in America or lots of other places has gone over the past decade. It’s not enough to be indignant and ask “Why hasn’t it worked, when we did everything right?”

That’s the third bit that landed for me, looking at the answer that’s given in the text. Because I agree with you, Vanessa, that it’s very hard to square this account of what G-d wants with the kind of “civilisational Christianity”, Christian nationalism or prosperity gospel stuff that you’re calling out – but I don’t find anything here that works as a comfortable endorsement for progressive politics as we’ve known it, either. Maybe because of the way that Ivan Illich shaped my sense of these things, I read the description of “the sort of fast that pleases me”, and I’m thinking about how much of the history of the left has been about building and defending systems which allow us to outsource the call that comes in these verses: to secure these outcomes through impersonal systems which remove the need for me to do anything so inconvenient as sharing my food or sheltering the homeless poor.

This isn’t to say that, starting from where we find ourselves, the call should be to abolish those systems and the provision that they still offer, where they do. It’s more to do with not mistaking such systems for the way of being in the world, the way of showing up for others, which I’m hearing in these verses: the way of being which unlocks that mysterious abundance, where you become a flowing spring “whose waters never run dry”. And maybe because I’m reading the manuscript of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s follow-up to Hospicing Modernity, so the impossibility of sustaining the systems and securities of how things were in the rich world for a few generations is on my mind, I find something powerful in that distinction – in the sense that something else might be called for, beyond those systems and their achievements.

Does that make any sense?

*

Vanessa: It absolutely does. Particularly that idea that we are being called at this time ‘to a more excruciating self-honesty’. Thank you Dougald. I struggle to read Illich, but I imagine his imagination was drenched in imagery from these kinds of prophetic passages?

And I love that we’ve picked up on the flowing spring again...that there is a way of being that unlocks ‘mysterious abundance’, irrespective of our circumstance.

It makes me wish people would talk less about ‘Christianity’ and return to talk of some kind of ‘way’. That’s what the original Jesus people were identified as...’followers of the way’. A lot of the time, Christianity isn’t following Jesus.

You second point is begging to be unpacked, but I want to dwell on your third for a moment.

I remember sitting in a tutorial back in 2008 and hearing someone talk about the rise in power of the ‘religious right’ in the US. I was stunned by the rage I felt. Not particularly at the ‘right’. But at the idea any religious movement, whether left-leaning or right, can claim a monopoly on ‘biblical values’. That any part of the church can claim the Bible as ‘theirs’. Since then I have tried to understand the Bible as a kind of ‘third space’ that resists appropriation. Like Plato’s Khora, or the Nihil...a space of super-abundance, perhaps, rather than emptiness, but one that is too cavernous and contradictory for any one to ever get any real kind of grasp on. One minute it seems to be with us. The next it is against.

I think that’s why I consider it a particular treasure for this age, if we can find ways to read it as such. It has the capacity to unsettle all of us. To undress all of us. It doesn’t allow any of us to assume we are ‘right’. Compels us to humble ourselves and become teachable. To learn from others... particularly our ideological enemies. The only people it immediately comforts are those that, in this life, are always already unsettled. When I read the Bible, I experience it as being both ‘for’ me and ‘against’ me at the same time. And the ‘against-ness’ is really important.

So yes...I love hearing your experience of Isaiah 58 being against everything that isn’t life-giving...whether that be the practice of self-serving nationalism, or our reliance on bureaucratic systems in place of relationships. I still hold out hope that we humans are capable of becoming people that can resist the ‘tyranny’ of the left and of the right at the same time. And perhaps the Bible can help cultivate our capacity for that?

From our years of reading together, would you agree? Is it a book that it’s worth people weaving into their life even if they profess no kind of faith? Who do you think it wants to be friends with right now?

And, returning to our passage, if it can be read as an exposé of the different ways that we tend to pretend, and perform, what is its invitation to us, personally, today? I need to read it again and think about this one!

*

Liz: Thinking back to the feeling that was in the group when we read this passage, it was striking how quite quickly it felt like there was nothing more to say. Once we had found ourselves struck open with the text, just being in it felt enough. It was a more bodily response than the intellectual stimulation of chewing around ideas - and that’s what’s been most powerful for me with the way we have been reading the Bible together over these years.

When I try to read it alone, it tends not to work - the language can seem opaque, and I get frustrated that I don’t know the entire context for the whole book. Reading it together, I also often feel frustrated! But inevitably that’s just a period at the start of our gathering when I feel confronted, bewildered, angry at the centuries of ‘Christianity’ as opposed to ‘Jesus following’ as you put it, Vanessa.

At the end of each session I invariably feel ‘well, that was the most relevant, powerful and useful thing I’ve read this week’. And I feel that without calling myself a Christian or even particularly a follower of Jesus (the more I know him, the more I like him, but following Buddha brings riches too, as does remembering my place as a creature in the natural ecosystem - I don’t think what Jesus points at is in conflict with either of those perspectives, but I can’t see myself picking one over the others).

So yes, I am finding this practice of reading the Bible together - in the way we do, insisting on emotional and bodily response, and just about banning any cleverness - one of the most enriching things I do. And my hunch is that it’s open to anyone, whatever their relationship to faith. I suppose my sense is that this book isn’t about ‘faith’ - but is describing the reality of human life. And that it doesn’t have a monopoly on that - but wow, it’s got a lot that really helps.

It would be easy to feel annoyed - ‘why didn’t anyone SAY this book was so valuable?!’. Because despite (because of?) growing up in a Christian family and a society shaped by Christianity, I got the impression that the Bible was pompous, pious, irrelevant, judgmental, oppressive, and a tool to beat people into conformity. This group has shown me that it is the opposite of those things - with Isaiah 58 naming that so clearly, the gap between shielding oneself with the performance of ‘goodness’ while being full of hypocrisy, and actually being with that ‘spring whose waters never run dry’.

In my work leading an organisation, I see how easily the practicalities of bureaucracy, however well-meaning, seem to take us away from that spring - at least when the cultural habits of modernity shape our practices of stewardship.

And as you’ve both said, this is present in our wider society. Re-reading the passage after Dougald’s comments made me think of the moral injury doctors and nurses experienced during covid - the people directly doing the hands-on care being hampered by the impossibility of the systems they were working in. And that example can be extrapolated to so much of how we live.

Bringing us back to the context of the US inauguration we read Isaiah in, I think the life that supporters hope for in the Trump regime is related to that disconnect between the aloof structures recent generations have made for efficient care of large populations, and the felt reality of care in their lives.

*

Dougald: I’m struck that, after three years of these strange little Bible study sessions, this was the first time you’ve felt the pull to invite us to continue the reflection and take it out in public, Vanessa – and that, as you’ve reminded us, Liz, what happened this time around was that we arrived at a place where there was “nothing more to say”, a kind of broken-open stillness. I wonder if there’s a connection between those things?

There’s something very personal for me about the journey we’ve been on together, which makes me cautious about saying anything too emphatic about the part the Bible might have to play for others in these times. There’s something here that is a part of my inheritance, a large part of what formed me, and whether I like it or not, it has called me back at this stage in my life. I’ve been a guest around a lot of other tables and learned from them, but there’s something here that is home for me. And, in the next breath, I know how alienating that may sound to many people for whom my work has mattered, almost a betrayal. Because plenty of people have found anything but hospitality in their experiences of churches and Christianity, and there are plenty of bits of the Bible that can be waved around in ways that absolutely fit the impression you grew up with, Liz.

But the practice of coming together and sitting with parts of this book, noticing what it does to us, noticing how often what’s happening in what we read is people being called into question, broken open, taken deeper – or people misunderstanding each other, or making heartfelt promises only to break them five minutes later, or taking the secular language of power or the earlier understandings of sacred language and turning these wildly inside-out... Maybe a practice like this is a more helpful starting point than “belief”, for some of us, given the way that belief has come to mean possession of a set of cosmic certainties. For me, this is a way of staying with the trouble of my own tradition, rather than ceding it to the loudest and most obnoxiously confident voices that claim to speak for it, however powerful they might be.

So I guess my answer to your question about whether it’s worth people weaving this book into their lives is, “Your Mileage May Vary”! But if I come back, again, to the experience of our gatherings, it often feels as though there’s a moment when the text breaks open and becomes a vessel, a space inside which it’s possible to sit for a while, maybe even to dwell. And the Bible is certainly not the only book in which I find such a space – there are certain essays of John Berger, for example, that offered me this kind of space as a young man in ways that were not far from life-saving. But that so many have been able to climb inside this book, often in the worst of times, maybe contributes to a sense that that space is waiting for us, if we approach it from a certain angle.

Only it doesn’t ever seem to be a cosy space, even when it offers refuge and relief. There’s almost always something costly, a challenge, a letting-go that’s called for, that sense of ‘Oh dear...’. So when I come back to the passage we read, that’s how I’m meeting it now. The question becomes: is the work that I’m doing a part of this yoke-breaking, this way of showing up that unlocks a hidden abundance? And how much further might I have to lean in, how much more daring and vulnerable might I have to become, what else would I need to let go of, for that to be true?

*

Vanessa: I think we may have found that place of ‘broken-open stillness’ again, so I won’t say any more. Thank you both so much.

Please do share this conversation with anyone that might find it interesting.

If this is the first time you have come across my writing, you might like to read this Welcome piece, which will give you an idea of where I am coming from.

Thanks for reading this far!

1. Liz recorded her section from inside a cupboard on the island of Malta.

2. Better known as the ‘new testament’ - I don’t personally feel comfortable talking about ‘old’ and ‘new’ testaments because it too easily falls in to the fallacy that one replaces the other...the new making the old somehow redundant or secondary. I feel ok using the word ‘second’ because the ‘new testament’ is just that...second.

3. James 1:27

4. Micah 6:8

5. ...for reasons I explain in this piece,

6. At the moment I tend to write ‘G_d’, rather than ‘God’, or the more familiar Jewish practice of writing ‘G-d’. This is for my own sake. I have nearly lost my faith multiple times in my life, most significantly so in recent years. So this allows me to underscore the value I now place on the not-knowing. In time that may change, but right now it is helpful for me, even if not for you!

7. David and I became friends through our strange shared obsession with the Bible. I recommend reading any of his books, particularly his most recent, or subscribing to his publication, if you want a way in to the Bible that is alert to the times and sensitive to the spirit of the book(s).