I had an encounter at work recently: a colleague decided to send me an email arguing that Catholics are unbiblical. It wasn’t totally out of the blue; there was an existing conversation about religion and public health, but this person went rogue and started broadcasting their sectarian beliefs about how Catholics don’t read the Bible properly – which, you know, I’m sure is just a standard normal workplace conversation. I had maybe two or three Bible verses quoted at me, and the charge was laid that Catholics depart from biblical truth, all over the company email.

So – in the first place, I think as a society we’ve broadly agreed that this sort of behaviour is embarrassing. You’re entitled to your beliefs, but it’s generally considered poor form to go after other religions or denominations, especially in the workplace. It’s like having an argument with the marketing department over who you vote for. It’s a bad idea. It comes off as antagonistic and you can get a reputation as a disturber of the peace. It’s also, in the context of religion and public health, pretty ill-equipped to deal with that domain’s core philosophical problems.

The big question in religion and public health is how you respect each individual’s right to their faith while also protecting the broader function of society as a whole. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds. In scenarios where they’ll die without a transfusion, should they be allowed to refuse treatment? As a society, we’ve said yes: generally speaking, anyone is allowed to refuse treatment for any reason. There are exceptions, but generally you can’t force someone to be treated against their will. If that means they’ll die, and they know that, it’s their choice. That rule changes when the person involved is a minor. In law, it’s generally held that children don’t have the capacity to make certain decisions. Kids are dumb. They run into traffic. Parents are therefore usually responsible for making healthcare decisions on behalf of their kids until they turn eighteen. Parents are responsible for their children’s welfare – and in the UK, that means parents are not allowed to deny their children life-saving medical treatment on religious grounds. That’s a real question that came before the courts – it’s explored in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act, which in turn is based on a real-life court case where appeal court judge Sir Alan Ward ruled that a JW kid had to get a life-saving blood transfusion against the wishes of the parents.

In that situation, in the interest of public health, the UK decided that being responsible for a child’s welfare means not letting them die for religious reasons. That sounds like a reasonable conclusion, but we shouldn’t let it detract from the underlying philosophical tension. If you’re religious, upholding your child’s welfare does mean adhering to the tenets of your faith. It’s upholding their spiritual wellbeing – potentially even their salvation. Who’s to say what welfare should look like? It’s a high-stakes conversation. What values and principles do we appeal to, and why should they be set above the values and principles of any other group at hand? In the case of the Alan Ward judgement, the child in question actually didn’t want the blood transfusion. He agreed with his parents: the transfusion happened against the wishes of the whole family. A few years later, once he was an adult, he ended up back in hospital in the same situation. He refused the transfusion, which was his right as an adult, and he died.

That’s ultimately the push and pull of religion and public health: legislation only goes so far. People have their beliefs, and eventually they’ll act on them. Back in 2021, we discussed the Catholic desire to assemble for Mass during Covid. Similar arguments cropped up across multiple religious groups, and in places they were followed by instances of lawbreaking and civil disobedience. In August 2021 the police fined a church breaching lockdown restrictions in Sydney, and the next month in Melbourne a Jewish congregation was fined for an illegal gathering in defiance of Covid restrictions. These are not hypothetical problems. They are complicated real-world issues, and they can’t be solved by starting a Bible fight.

I offer this longer preamble by way of introduction for our text this week. Johann Baptist Metz was a 20th century German Catholic theologian. He’s a fairly major figure in political theology in the second half of the 20th century, particularly influencing a bunch of liberation theology – he sits close to Jürgen Moltmann, another German theologian, albeit one working in the Reformed tradition. They both got drafted into the German army as sixteen year olds during the Second World War, so a lot of their stuff is impacted by their experience under the Nazi regime at such an early age. In 1981, Metz had an article published in CrossCurrents, an academic journal focused on public religion and social justice. Titled ‘Toward the Second Reformation: The Future of Christianity in a Postbourgeois World’, Metz’s article explores the state of contemporary Christianity. In essence, he argues that as times are changing, Christianity needs to change as well. We went through the first Reformation during the transition from feudalism into our current modern bourgeois world. As we move in turn out of that world, and into something new, Metz argues that the church “must succeed in eating, as it were, a second time from the tree of Reformation knowledge.”

So – I don’t want to get too caught up in these terms of bourgeois and post-bourgeois. We can pause at the idea that Metz sees a need for reformation – a Second Reformation, he says, on the same scale as the first. He outlines how this reformation would need to manifest across Catholic and Protestant denominations, to fix what he sees as their respective errors, and in the section on Catholic reformation he says this:

“The Protestant model of the invocation and discovery of grace in freedom is familiar to us all, being spread out before us in the history of the Reformation up to the present day. It involves the freedom of the individual person who, in the presence of his gracious God, is no one’s slave and servant. As we know, this ‘freedom of the Christian person’ led also, in a highly complex causal interplay, to the political freedom of the bourgeois citizen.”

He’s touching here on the historical connection between the Reformation and the modern democratic subject. Obviously the idea with democracy is that everyone gets a vote, and everyone’s allowed to follow their conscience and make their own decision, and then the government is meant to be built up from the majority of votes. Under this system, there’s weight and value placed on the decision of each individual – as opposed to a heredity system like monarchy, where the ruler just happens to be the right person’s crotch goblin. There’s something similar happening in the Reformation, Metz suggests, where the freedom of the individual is asserted over and against the centralized rule of the church. In both cases, power moves away from a central core and into the hands of each individual, who becomes empowered to choose but also thereafter morally responsible for the things they decide.

Once you understand that transition, so much of our modern day snaps into focus. In our post-Reformation society, people have the courage to stand on their convictions, to be bold and assertive about the contours of their faith and identity. They’re also sometimes really smug and annoying about it. We all know people who have a strong sense of their own freedom before God, but who don’t really extend that same freedom to anybody else. They have their beliefs, and they feel proud and strong in their faith, but they don’t understand that other people have the same liberty. They see difference as a threat, undermining the validity of their own convictions. I’m not sure whether it’s insecurity in what they believe or a refusal to credit other people with the same freedom they enjoy – in either case, the behaviour is tiringly familiar. They start getting angry at people who vote differently to them, or who have different philosophies, and sometimes they send work emails making very specific religious claims that probably shouldn’t come up in the workplace. It’s all behaviour stemming from the Reformation.

This isn’t an article against the Reformation, of course. Metz doesn’t argue that this change is a bad thing. He’s worried about individualism and our cult of self-obsession, and he sees how that grows out of the developments of the Reformation – but he’s not a regressive. He’s not trying to go back. He wants the Reformation to move forward, to happen again. He talks about the value of “freedom as liberation”:

“that process in which the individual experiences himself, not in isolation but in the solidarity of community, free in the presence of his God. In this process, it is ‘a people’ which becomes free, experiences itself as called forth and liberated to become the subject of its own history in the presence of its God. It is not the isolated history of freedom of the individual which is in the foreground here, but a history of liberation in solidarity.”

It’s a focus not on my freedom, on the freedom of the individual, but on our freedom. It’s recognising our interconnections and mutual dependency, the way we become free not for ourselves but for each other. Metz talks near the end of the piece about poor churches in the third world, which he sees as the bearers of this new reformation. “In their central forms of life,” he says, “these communities are seeking from below, from the grass-roots level of church and society, to bind together mysticism and politics, religious and societal praxis, and to assimilate into their eucharistic table fellowship the fundamental social conflicts and sufferings surrounding them.” Religion and public health is, again, a really productive lens for this conversation. Regardless of the beliefs of this or that sect, there are things that plague all of us. Climate change is everyone’s problem. Covid affected everybody. Suffering and oppression are non-denominational. It’s not bad to have your individual beliefs, but we can’t get stuck in this bourgeois consumerist religion. Our freedom has to get a little broader.