Unexamined Faith

A trader of religion distributing the Gita

My last post was: When Religion Becomes a Weapon. It dealt with the malicious use of social media by people who claim to be defenders of their religion and god(s). If social media was their weapon in that post, scripture is in this.  

Three decades ago, Tracey Emin installed a work of art at an exhibition at the South London Gallery. She called it Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. The British press screamed about Tracey Emin’s scandalous new “exhibition of promiscuity.” But if you actually went to the gallery, you wouldn’t find a painting or a scandalous photo. You would find a small, ordinary camping tent sitting on the floor. To see the artwork, you would have to physically lower yourself, crawl through the zipped door, and sit on a mattress inside.

And what was inside? Lit by a single hanging bulb, the interior walls were softly lined with 102 names hand-stitched into the fabric. It wasn’t a libidinous shout; it was a quiet, claustrophobic sanctuary of memory. The list of people Tracey Emin slept with contained names of her own mother, grandmother, twin brother, and aborted foetuses.

The public that condemned her notorious and rebellious hypersexuality hadn’t bothered to go in and check what her “Tent” actually contained. They assumed that the list contained the names of 102 men she had slept with. After all, she was a rebel artist who started sleeping with older men right from the age of 13. But her present artwork was about the “intimacy of sleep” (in Andrew Marr’s words).  

Reading about Emin in Marr’s book on the Second Elizabethan England, I was poked to draw an analogy between her experience and what happens with religions today (at any time, in fact).

People judged and labelled Emin without even bothering to check what her list of 102 contained. The same happens with religion and scriptures. Believers hardly go in and experience religion and hardly bother to read the scriptures, let alone reflect on them. And so we have all this violence and fanaticism and what not, in the name of religion.

If it is absurd to condemn a work of art based entirely on its title, consider how we approach the ultimate text: scripture. Across the globe, millions are ready to argue, fight, and even go to war over books they have never actually read, let alone meditated upon.

The holy book is not a guide for living today. It is a totem: a sacred object that can mean many things including divinity and communal identity. Like a tribal badge. People don’t read it and get enlightenment. Instead they brandish it like a flag to show which ‘team’ they belong to.

Just as people judged Emin by a single title, religious folks often rely on isolated, out-of-context soundbites passed down by influencers or polarising leaders, completely ignoring the overarching themes of compassion, justice, or mysticism.

The most terrible and shameful irony is that people engage in ungodly behaviour (hatred, violence, abuse) to defend a God whose core commandment in those very scriptures is love and humility.

If Emins’ shrieking, moralistic critics had done a little inquiry into her life, they would have come to know about the sad background that made her what she became. She came from what Marr calls “the down-at-heel seaside town of Margate.” She was a child of unmarried parents. Her Turkish Cypriot father had no less than 23 children whom he acknowledged, and many others whom he didn’t know. Margate in the days of Emin’s childhood was a place of fairgrounds, discos, cheap pubs and a great deal of underage sex.

Emin wrote in her memoir later how much she yearned to be “touched” by a loving man. Too many men touched her – but only lust, no love.

Too many devotees touch religion. Only fever of fervour, no experience of the divine.

Tracey Emin's 'Tent'