development. Copyright 2003 Society for International Development (www.sidint.org). 1011-6370 (200312) 46:4; 2228; 039036.

. NB When citing this article please use both volume and issue numbers. SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

Thematic Section

Idealism and Practicality: The role of religion in development

WENDY TYNDALE
ABSTRACT Wendy Tyndale looks at religious groups, movements or communities working at the grassroots, very often at a distance from the leaders or institutions of their traditions. She takes as examples movements which show the effectiveness of faith as an inspiration and guide for work to improve life for the poor. These are different from faith-based NGOs, which, depending as they do on sources of funding from the West, tend to be inuenced to a greater degree by the views of professional western/secular development practitioners. She delves into some of the difculties of the relationship between religion and the mainstream development thinking in order to show the commonalities of both idealism and pragmatism on both sides of the divide. KEYWORDS grassroots; Nahdlatul Ulama; religious communities; sarvodaya (welfare of all); swadhyaya (discovery of self); World Bank; World Faiths Development Dialogue

The Golden Rule

Do not treat others in ways that you yourself would nd hurtful (The Buddha, UdanaVarga 5.18) In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you (Jesus Christ, Matthew 7:12) This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you (Mahabharata 5: 1517) Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself (The Prophet Muhammad, Hadith) What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour (Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a) Regard your neighbours gain as your own gain and your neighbours loss as your own loss (Tai Shang Kan Ying Pien, 213218) (quoted by Beversluis, 2002).

The Golden Rule is to be found in some form in all the religions and spiritual traditions of the world. It points us towards an understanding of development

Tyndale: Idealism and Practicality

which requires nothing short of a new world order in which generosity and caring are essential values, the community becomes more important than the individual and people relate to each other on the basis of cooperation rather than competition. We look at some of the difculties of the relationship between religion and the mainstream development thinking of our time in order to show the commonalities of both idealism and pragmatism on both sides of the divide. There are also, of course, many overlaps between the two worlds. Within the most powerful development institutions are some deeply spiritual people, of different religion traditions or none, some of whom exert considerable inuence. At the same time, it would be true to say that many of the religious institutions and their leaders have been drawn into the dominant consciousness of the industrialized societies, basing their trust more in what can be quantitatively measured or rationally calculated than in the power of the spiritual to transform both individuals and society. A different concept of development A.T. Ariyaratne, founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, sees development as a process of awakening for all. As he said in a speech to UNDP in 1997:
This awakening has to begin with oneself, with every individual, then extend to the family, the country, the nation, the world. The awakening must be an integrated whole where spiritual, moral, cultural, social, political and economic aspects of life are included.

developed and developing countries (and peoples) is a false one. Ariyaratne continues:
In the rst place the concept of poverty as used by macro organizations and national leaders and politicians is a very limited way of looking at the lives of people. In our concept of a good life, even those in the so-called developed world are poor in many respects. (quoted in Chowdhry, 2002)

Sarvodaya (welfare of all) has brought improvements to hundreds of Sri Lankan villages through work based on Buddhist values such as giving and service (shramadana). Many people from different religious traditions who are working in grassroots communities all over the world share Ariyaratnes view that development means a change which involves a dynamic coherence between the spiritual and the material, although they may express it in different ways. One implication arising from such an understanding is that the usual division between

The notion of poverty being multi-dimensional is now well accepted by development theorists. The World Banks study Voices of the Poor (Narayan, 2000) highlights that questions such as insecurity and social exclusion are just as much a part of poverty as a lack of income. However, faith-based communities go beyond merely pointing out that economic development will not work without other dimensions of life, such as the social and cultural, being taken into account. For them, the debate about development is a deeper one, related to an understanding of what it means to be human. One insight common to all religious traditions is that human beings are related to each other by virtue of a spiritual dimension that needs to be realized and personalized. Christian Aurenche is a medical doctor and Catholic priest who leads the Project for Human Promotion among mountain tribal people in Tokombr in northern Cameroon. It was his conviction that it is the way one human being sees another which allows people to ourish, to develop, which led to the transformation of a traditional clinic into a health programme run by the tribal people themselves and later into a multifaceted development programme for the region. The Hindu Swadhyaya (discovery of self) movement in India is built upon the same conviction, that what human beings need is dignity and recognition, which can only come from genuine mutuality and caring, not just from some political programmes of social justice. Swadhyaya has inspired thousands of villagers with hope and, in bringing spiritual regeneration, has given people the self-condence to work towards raising their material standard of living (Paranjape, 1996). If we see an essential element of development as being the realization of the human potential in each of us, the notion that experts from the

23

development 46(4): Thematic Section

developed countries, or even from the elite of the developing ones, somehow know better than others how to dene the good life (let alone how to reach it) is out of place. When, in 1979, the medical doctor Hanumappa Sudarshan went to live with the Soliga people in the Biligiri Hills in the Indian state of Karnataka, he had in mind the three requirements of a worker set out by his Hindu mentor, Swami Vivekananda: to feel the pain of his brothers and sisters as his own; to nd a remedy for their ills and act upon it; and constantly to question his true motives. It took three years before the Soligas were condent that he understood their needs but the result of Sudarshans patience has been the creation of the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (Tribal Welfare Centre) and its expansion from a small health programme to a large integrated development scheme. Sudarshan has been constantly on the watch against sliding into charitable or paternalistic attitudes towards the Soligas and he is fully aware of how much he has learnt from them. Many things that he had earlier dismissed as superstitious, for instance, such as their dance to welcome the rst rains, he now knows are positive stimuli. Here, he says, I have learnt to appreciate beauty and understand the regenerative power of love (quoted in Usha, 2003). However, Vivekanandas injunction to find a remedy for peoples ills and act upon it avoids the danger of merely feeling good and changing nothing. Vivekananda exhorted his monks to combine immense idealism with immense practicality. You must be prepared, he said, to explain the intricacies of the shastras (religious texts) now and the next moment go and sell the produce of the elds in the market (quoted in Usha, 2003). The point that people from these grassroots movements make is that immense practicality is only effective if the workers are prepared to work alongside the beneciaries and not for them, to adopt their agenda and not impose one. The conclusion reached by workers in Tokombr is that it is absolutely necessary to work in the eld and live on a daily basis with the future beneciaries . . . instead of staying in ofces to think up a programme which will be applied to people who will feel they are strangers to it! (Zikra, 2003). It is impossible for most people from development institutions to live among the poor for any length of time, but if diversity were accepted at the heart of the planning process and exible approaches adopted to evaluation, it would not be at all impossible to nd ways of adopting their agenda. The challenge of modernization and the global economic order The kinds of groups and movements we are looking at are often deeply resistant to the modernization project that is being promoted through the global economic system. Their resistance is not to science and technology as such, but to the attitudes and values such as dependence on consumer goods, a lack of collective responsibility and the trivialization of lifes purpose, which the globalization of capitalism is seen to bring with it. This is how the Thai Buddhist and social activist Sulak Sivaraksa puts it:
The over-reliance on quantitative and structural frameworks, most notably in the domination of economic models for engineering human and social well-being, is contradictory to the belief that spiritual transformation must accompany material transformation in order for progress to occur. . . . Science and technology do have the potential to improve health and living conditions but it must not be within a framework of promoting materialism as the goal of existence. (Sivaraksa, 2002)

Sivaraksas position is based on intimate knowledge of how destructive modernization has been for the small farmers in Thailand. According to Jane Rasbash who works with him:
In Siam alone after four decades of development, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to an unprecedented scale. . . . Insidiously, indigenous values are destroyed and replaced by the values of the market society everything and everyone becomes a commodity: daughters are for sale, HIV is spreading everywhere. (Rasbash, 2003)

24

Fishing villages in India have suffered from the same kinds of destruction. A network of Catholic priests and nuns in the state of Kerala have shared the pain of traditional sher people who have been robbed of their livelihood by industrial fishing vessels owned by multinational companies. An

Tyndale: Idealism and Practicality

economic and political model which involves the accumulation of wealth and power by a few to the exclusion of the large majority is unacceptable to these Christians who understand development, above all, as freedom for the poor and the oppressed. They thus helped to found the, now secular, National Forum of Fishworkers to lobby the government and international organizations for the sher peoples rights (Tyndale, 2002). Do these examples merely show how retrograde religious groups are in clinging onto crumbling realities that are no longer viable in the modern world? Many people from the world of development hold this view. The people backing the Thai farmers and the Indian shing communities would argue, however, that rigidity and inflexibility belong rather to those who contend that the modern secular world in its present form is both natural and inevitable, forgetting that it is merely the result of a political and economic model which is far from God-given and could, with the necessary political will, be changed. Indeed, it is often the case that faith-based groups working with the poor are characterized by their readiness to shed what is no longer relevant to society within their own traditions and to accept from modern science what is useful. The Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulama, for instance, the worlds largest Muslim organization with 35 million followers, promotes traditional Sunni Islamic values, thought and practice, largely through a huge network of schools, but it has also been bold in incorporating attitudinal changes with regard to women. It has even reinterpreted the Koran and Hadith in such as way as to lead to a fatwa (religious opinion) in favour of family planning (Candland, 2000). Religious movements from the perspective of development institutions James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, is fond of telling people how, when he presented a proposal for a dialogue with the religions of the world to the board of the World Bank, he was voted down by 24 votes to none. An informed guess for the reason for this would be the link between religious groups and political conflicts in many parts of the world, even if the underlying causes of those conicts often has more to do with economic issues than with doctrine or religious observances. Many other development organizations, including many NGOs, would share the perception of religion as an anti-developmental force. Sometimes this is because religious groups foster superstition, rigidly conservative values (towards women or democratic decision-making, for example) or other-worldly views which are inimical to material change (some of the Central American Pentecostal churches see even improved cooking stoves as the work of the devil). These are real problems which are encountered not only by secular organizations, but also by other religious communities which are trying to bring about social improvements. There is, however, another reason why religious and spiritually inspired groups are often perceived as an obstacle: because, as we have seen, they have a different vision of what development is about from that of mainstream development theorists. Moreover, even when they share the same goals, they may have different ideas about how to reach them. One well-known area of conict has been the battle against the spread of HIV/AIDS where religious groups have usually insisted on awareness-raising and education as means to change peoples behaviour rather than the dissemination of condoms, which they see as tantamount to giving people a licence to indulge in pre- and extramarital sex. The Catholic Church has been in the forefront of this controversy but it is by no means alone. The Muslim organization Sarkan Zoumountsi (chain of solidarity) which works with impoverished communities in Yaound, Cameroon, refused to accept nance from certain international bodies for their campaign against AIDS because they did not share the same vision of the subject, even though they shared the same objectives. Sarkan Zoumountsi also fell out with the European Union on the issue of micro-credit when, following the Muslim laws against usury, it refused to charge interest on its loans. The aim of our association, explain its leaders, is certainly to seek development, the well-being of individuals in society, but

25

development 46(4): Thematic Section

not at any price, for in Sarkan Zoumountsi we take action following the great guide, Islam (Sarkan Zoumountsi, 2002). These sorts of attitudes are seen as irritatingly irrelevant by many people in development agencies who are impatient to improve the conditions of life for impoverished communities as quickly as possible. There is, however, an increasing realization among development workers that the imposition of agendas from the industrialized countries creates resistance (and can even contribute to armed resistance). There is awareness, too that sustainable development without the full cooperation of those to be developed is impossible, which means having to take local cultural and religious customs and beliefs into account. Why do development agencies want to work with the faith communities? In 1998, James Wolfensohn and Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, inspired the foundation of the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) as a dialogue on development and poverty among people from the different religious traditions and between them and the multilateral development agencies. The UN has been in dialogue with religious organizations for a long time and now the Inter-American Development Bank and, even if somewhat timidly, the IMF, as well as bilateral development agencies such as the Swiss and the British, are all showing some interest. One trigger for this may have been the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancellation of the unpayable debt of the most highly indebted countries, which demonstrated how powerful a force religious organizations could be if they chose to lobby together on a single theme. Some of those interested in the dialogue view the religious institutions as purveyors of moral values which are important for bringing a fairer deal for the poor onto the development agenda. Others show more interest in practical cooperation. The work round the Millennium Development Goals, for instance, has led to more attention being paid to the health and education services provided by religious institutions. Some of these, such as the madaris (Muslim schools) in Pakistan, are held in deep suspicion, but the work of others is being valued as never before, particularly in Africa where religious schools and health services amount to 40 or even 50 per cent of the total in many countries. A recent evaluation of service delivery by religious not-for-profit health-care providers in Uganda shows that they hire qualied medical staff below the market wage; are more likely to provide pro-poor services and services with a good public element; and they charge lower prices for services than for-prot facilities, although they provide a similar (observable) quality of health care. These ndings suggest that working for God matters, the authors conclude (Reinikka and Svensson, 2003). An interfaith comment on the draft World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People reveals that working for God does indeed matter, and in ways which are not necessarily conducive to a market-led agenda for the provision of services. Faith groups providing services emphasize the importance of peoples participation in planning and running them, the need to make services accessible to all, including the very poorest, and also the religious value of any work of service to others, which explains the motivation of those who are willing to work for lower wages than are the norm (WFDD, 2003). Surveys such as the World Banks Voices of the Poor have also aroused interest in faith groups, as they show that no other organizations are more firmly rooted or have better networks in poor communities than the religious ones and that religious leaders are trusted more than any others. Faith-based organizations are thus seen as essential agents both for inuencing the opinions and attitudes of their followers and for carrying out development work at the grassroots. Their inuence is recognized as a potentially key element in the solving of conicts, even though, or perhaps because, religious groups are often seen as the cause of them. And there have been many cases of such work. At a national level, the Catholic Church played a leading role in bringing about peace after 30 years of internal conflict in Guatemala, for instance. Locally too, religious groups have been effective peacemakers. When, in 1998 there was a dispute in Yaound between one

26

Tyndale: Idealism and Practicality

tribe of Christian persuasion and another of Muslim allegiance, Sarkan Zoumountsi managed to resolve it and even ended by building a footbridge over the canal which divided the two communities. Interfaith organizations such as the World Conference on Religion and Peace have been able to play an inuential role as well, for example in Sierra Leone. Development agencies also recognize the high quality of much religiously inspired development work at the grassroots. However, they perceive two major deficiencies. One is that the religious organizations are strong on vision but weak on practical strategies for attaining the kind of equality and well-being they dream of; the other is that their community development work is carried out on such a small scale that it will never make a significant contribution to the fight against poverty. These two criticisms are closely linked to each other and reect much of what is at the heart of the debate today. To those religious groups that are involved in the struggle for survival of impoverished communities, it is the development agencies themselves who seem out of touch with reality. They would agree with the assessment of the Buddhist philosopher, David Loy, that: Economists live in an idealized, one-dimensional world of statistics and equations which do not accurately reect human values and goals in the world we actually live in (Loy, 1999; 2003). The religious communities do not see it as their role to come up with national or international strategies for development but they do point out that the values which should underlie such strategies are to be found in the programmes they are running or supporting. The second requirement by the development agencies, that the religious groups should scale up their programmes is also controversial as it could, in the opinion of some, lead to an increase in bureaucracy and a more distant relationship with the beneciaries who might then have less input into making decisions. Many would ask whether indeed it is possible to scale up community development work which is based on very different values from those of the dominant development model and still to survive. The route to successful development People in the development and religious worlds share much sincere commitment to bringing about better conditions for people living in material poverty. In many cases, as in the ght to combat HIV/AIDS, their goals are also shared, even if they disagree about the way to achieve them. However, unless an intense and specic debate is carried out about the nature and purpose of development and ways of achieving it, joint action might well end in development agencies hoping merely to use the religious organizations as a new tool to advance the attainment of material well-being. This is unlikely to succeed from the point of view of either side. Perhaps the main topic for debate should be what it means to promote goals of people-centred, sustainable development within a hostile macroeconomic framework. The assumptions of the dominant economic model need to be made explicit so that alternatives can be seriously considered. The focus must be on the over-developed as well as on the developing world and on the best way of improving institutions, mechanisms and techniques at all levels with a view to bringing about changes which are practical but also desirable and meaningful to those who need them most. In order to be able fully to contribute to this debate, people from the different religious and spiritual traditions who work with the poor urgently need to clarify their own thinking and to find out where they agree and disagree. This process will be difcult but, if carried through into an energetic interfaith dialogue on poverty and development, it will enable them to form a powerful lobby. It will also give them enough condence to be open to learning from development agencies about strategies which have worked well and less well, for instance, or about techniques which could make their work easier and more effective. A challenge to development experts, from NGOs or government agencies, is to recognize that whilst abstraction, analysis and summary are all one valid way of understanding reality, experience and intuitive knowledge are equally important. A genuine combination of scientific and technological know-how with spiritual insights about the

27

development 46(4): Thematic Section

meaning of human life, as well as grassroots experience of what actually works in practice, is what is needed to illuminate the way ahead. It is only thus that the immense idealism combined with immense practicality required by Swami Vivekananda will be achieved.

Note The WFDD case studies cited here are available on the WFDD website (www.wfdd.org.uk) and will be published by WFDD in an anthology during 2004.

References Beversluis, Joel (2002) Golden Rules for Peace, paper presented to the United Nations, 4 January, available at http:// global-forum.org/goldenrule.html. Chowdhry, Kamla (2002) The Sarvodaya Shramadan Movement in Sri Lanka, available at www.wfdd.org.uk/programmes/ case_studies. Candland, Christopher (2000) Faith as Social Capital: Religion and community development in southern Asia, Policy Sciences 33: 35574. Loy, David (1999) Buddhism and Poverty, Kyoto Journal (Summer 1999). Loy, David (2003) The Great Awakening: Buddhist social theory, Chapter 2. London: Wisdom Books.

Narayan, Deepa (2000) Voices of the Poor: Can anybody hear us? Washington, DC: World Bank. Paranjape, Makarand (1996) Spiritual Sites as Sources of Social Transformation, paper presented at the Silver Jubilee International Conference on Social Criticism, Cultural Creativity and the Contemporary Dialectics of Transformation. Madras Institute of Development Studies, 48 December. Rasbash, Jane (2003) Engaged Buddhism in Siam and South East Asia, available at www.wfdd.org.uk/ programmes/case_studies/. Reinikka, Ritva and Jakob Svensson (2003) Working for God. Washington, DC: World Bank, available at http: //econ.worldbank.org/ view.php?type=5&id=26991. Sarkan Zoumountsi (2002) Study of the Organization and Functioning of a Development Association: The case of Sarkan Zoumountsi in Yaound, Cameroon, available in English (and the original French) at www.wfdd.org.uk/programmes/ case_studies/SarkanZoumountsi.

Sivaraksa, Sulak (2002) Presentation to the World Leaders Meeting on Faith and Development hosted by the World Bank and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, Canterbury, UK, 68 October 2002. Tyndale, Wendy (2002) National Forum of Fishworkers: A spiritually inspired movement for alternative development available at www.wfdd.org.uk/programmes/ case_studies/shworkers. Usha K.R. (2003) Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (VGKK) available at www.wfdd.org.uk/ programmes/case_studies/VGKK. WFDD (2003) The Provision of Services for Poor People: A contribution to WDR 2004 available at www. wfdd.org.uk/programmes/wdr/ WFDDWDR2004.pdf. Zikra, Etienne (2003) Tokombr: A project for human development founded on faith available (and in the original French) at www.wfdd.org.uk/programmes/ case_studies/Tokombere.

28