Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
So said Marx, and it seems that Russell T Davies would agree, judging by a recent Doctor Who episode, Gridlock. The story was centred around a giant traffic jam in New New York on New Earth of the future. The Doctor and Martha arrive in the undercity to find it far from the sunny, shiny place that the Doctor brought Rose. People are leaving for the motorway in search of a better life, but are never heard of again… Martha is kidnapped, and the Doctor give chase, and we discover that the whole thing is a giant gridlock – people have been trapped on the motorway for literally years, with no way off, and no help from the city above.
This then leads to one of the oddest and most interesting moments in this series of Doctor Who so far. All the many inhabitants of the motorway join together in singing a hymn, The Old Rugged Cross:
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame;
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain. So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown. O that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me;
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary. In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died,
To pardon and sanctify me. To the old rugged cross I will ever be true;
Its shame and reproach gladly bear;
Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.
In one way, it’s quite a moving moment – the people coming together in community to express hope in a better future. Martha is moved by what she sees, and joins in with the singing. But on the other hand, the people of the traffic jam are curiously uncurious about what has gone wrong, and aren’t taking the initiative to try and get themselves out of their sorry situation. The Doctor watches, but seems rather disturbed by what he is seeing. These two sides of the religious hope of the masses are quite deliberate on the part of writer Russell T Davies, who discusses this point with David Tennant on the commentary available to download from the BBC Doctor Who website.
On the one hand, faith can have a positive impact in bringing people together – Davies had originally envisaged the situation on the motorway as being much darker, with pirates and cannibals and the like, but instead wrote this as a testimony to the human capability to come together and imagine a better future. Similarly, in context, Marx’s aphorism that “religion is the opium of the people” isn’t entirely negative: religion provides comfort and helps people to bear the pain of their existence.
But, according to Marx, religion is a false comfort, and one that stops people from understanding their situation and acting to improve it – and again, this is what we see in Gridlock. In Christianity, hope is meant to motivate us to action, rather than give us an excuse for inaction. Because we know that God is real and powerful, the kingdom of God is not just an empty wish, but an inevitable reality. We know that it is worthwhile working towards the kingdom; we know that as we live with God as our king it is not futile, but part of this irresistible transformation of the cosmos. Rather than propping up unjust systems and a corrupt status-quo, Christian hope should help overthrow them.
The question that stories like this raise for me is this: what is the difference between active hope and passive hope? What distinguishes them, and how can we make sure that our hope is one that acts as a basis for action? I don’t have any answers yet, and it’s something I hope to think through.
Though as Davies points out, their hopes of a saviour prove not to be entirely mistaken, because the Doctor does in fact turn up and save everyone! The messianic imagery in last series’ episode New Earth was even more blatant – humans being kept in darkness and suffering, until the Doctor turns up to free them, and who saves the day by wading into them to heal them all with a healing touch (of a special cocktail of medicines) to create a new humanity.
The Face of Boe is also another God-like figure. Impossibly old and deeply wise, he has appeared and disappeared, Aslan-like, in the Doctor’s travels. In this story, he sacrifices himself to save the people of New New York, allowing the sky to split open (well, the roof of the motorway), and all the trapped souls ascend up into the light. It’s interesting just how much the series draws on Christian imagery and themes, despite (or maybe because of?) Russell T Davies’ secular humanism.
On a slightly different note, it’s an interesting irony that the idea “religion is the opium of the people” should be presented through a piece of mass entertainment. These days it is the media, far more than religion, that is our opium.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Western society is, in almost all ways except the purely material, far more impoverished than ever before: community and family life have broken down, democracy is lost in spin and image, we’ve completely lost touch with the very idea of the transcendent existence of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, we make our own personal happiness our goal but what do we have to be happy about?
All we have left is our toys, which don’t make us really happy, but provide enough of a distraction to stop us thinking about it, easing the pain of our disjointed modern existence while stopping us from taking action to really change things for the better. Perhaps it is the religion of worshipping the stars of the celebrity rather than celestial variety, of leisure and consumption and entertainment that really need questioning.