This lecture was quite the eye opener as, believe it or not (pun unintended), I never really thought of all that makes us who we are. Well I did, just never put it all together. I used to identify with one of the characteristics at a time or perhaps two, for some reason. And yet, I am always interested in peoples’ origins, customs, journeys as well as their present.

Our identity is a dense combination of country, ethnicity, religion, culture, sexual identity, gender, history, education. Not only one of these characteristics.

When someone asks: “where are you from?”, what assumptions have they already made? This happened a lot to my ex-partner: she is mixed raced and so constantly asked: “where are you from?”. In India, people would say: “You have Indian face!”, sort of meaning: “you are lying, you are not British!” It almost seemed endearing, almost a way of their saying: “you are one of ours, you are welcome here!”, but still, not the truth. And yet, where one is born is only a small portion of who one is, especially if one was not born in the country of their biological parents and if one was brought up by different parents altogether as the case was here.

So, as professor Appiah explained in the lecture, a sense of self is shaped by nationality, gender, class, race, religion and by one’s family, the way one is brought up.

In this lecture though what’s being discussed more thoroughly is the religious identity. Here we understand that religion, a body of beliefs, is not only what we do (the practice), but also who we do it with (the community) and so it is not only a matter of orthodoxy (believing right), but also what prof. Appiah identifies as orthopraxy (behaving right). This is quite key, because believing in the scriptures does not make us of that religion, e.g. convincing ourselves of the principles of the Torah does not make us Jewish: fellowship is at the core of the religious experience.

Another key learning I took away from this lecture is that religious identities are transformed through history. Scriptures are open to interpretation, not just because they are translated from the original language and that in itself is an interpretation, but also because when they were written they reflected the culture of the time and as such they need adaptation as history progresses: “the story of sacred text is the story of their readers of shifting and clashing interpretations”.

Question: how do we adapt the scriptures whilst keeping their core values alive?

I often experience is an inclination to judge all religion and all spirituality in the name of science, in the name of what we can and cannot prove, but should we not at least take what’s good from religions, e.g. the principles of generosity and kindness, the sense of community and of supporting one another during hardship?

Reference

BBC Radio 4 – The Reith Lectures, 2016 Mistaken Identities At https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080twcz Accessed on 20th May 2022-05-29