Is Religion Growing or Shrinking?
This is another
question there is no point trying to answer.[1]
One thing that DOES seem to be shrinking in North America is confessional affiliation
particularly in reaction to the politicization of confessional Christianity in
the United States among other factors. This could reflect one of two things:
the disappearance of religion or the escalating privatization of it. I think
the latter is far more likely and the reason I think this is that I am a
scholar of religion by trade. This means I am trained NOT to make any simple
connection between ‘religion’ as a category of behavior and institutional
affiliation with churches or explicit
belief in a particular deity or deities. Once this semantic adjustment is made about the
word ‘religion’ it is plain that there is probably as much of it about as ever
if not more. It may even be the case that religion CANNOT disappear as it is
structurally basic to the conduct of human society. Some mythic, theological or
religious pattern or narrative lies at the basis of any culture we can identify
as human no doubt because humans, first and foremost, are symbolic animals. It
can do so in the form of explicit belief or be the tacit, even occluded, foundation of explicit
discourses and institutions. The former varies by time or place but the latter
remains (relatively) constant. The study of religion is the study of how these
structures shape and direct human behavior consciously or unconsciously. It is
the study of how certain social constellations produce them but ALSO the study
of how they are produced by them (there is no mono-causal process here but a
kind of circularity resembling the hermeneutic circle). As such, it matters
little to the scholar of religion whether her subject is to be found in a
church or an amusement park. Her job is to note the patterns of discourse and
action that reveal the religious dimension of the phenomena she studies.
How, though, did our
putative scholar get to the point of saying that religion has no necessary
connection to God or the Bible given that that is what both boosters and
knockers of religion assume in popular and even some academic discourse? Well I
will give you the simple version of why scholars have come to speak in what
looks like an arbitrary, even perverse, way where common language is concerned.
If you are to have an academic discourse about something you need to define the
domain of that discourse (and by doing so we construct the object of that discourse). If you want to study religion, rather than the
confessional standpoint of A religion (as one would in a faculty of theology),
you have to say what religion is. This is not hard if you are taking a
Euro-centric perspective. If you are NOT taking a Euro-centric perspective it is
well-nigh impossible. Confuciansim, Buddhism, Jainism and many, many antique
and indigenous ‘religions’ have features not readily assimilated to Judaism,
Christianity or other religions known in the west. Plus what does one do with a
vast tangle like ‘Hinduism’? Taking all these traditions and abstracting the
general idea of ‘religion’ from them is a dubious enterprise at best. Far more
productive is thinking in terms of structural analogies but when one does this
one finds that the things we consider ‘religions’ have many structural
analogies with things we consider ‘non-religions’. This is as much as to say
that like the difference between erotica and porn or between a dialect of
English and a non-English language like Scots the boundary between religions
and non-religions is fuzzy and contested.
Nonetheless, from
time to time I have to teach a subject called ‘religion’. How do I determine my
domain on a semantic level? Well I do so beginning from the concept of a
spectrum. I note some of the features things we typically call religions
possess. Religions, for instance, often embody their understanding of the world
or their self-understanding in myths, narratives, sagas, legends or ‘official
histories’. This we may refer to with Lyotard as the ‘narrative language game’
recognizing that narratives have their own rules and formal structures and
their own criteria of legitimation or de-legitimation. They also employ creeds,
doctrinal statements and formulas such as the four noble truths or the five
pillars of Islam. These formulas encode basic attitudes to reality and practice
often in simple forms for ready dissemination and memorization. Religions also have a public or social
dimension involving worship, sacrifice, ritual and so on. Some religions also
cultivate the notion of unity with, or even absorption into, a divine principle
or deity as in the Bacchic rites of antiquity or in Sufi or Catholic mysticism.
This is often figured in erotic terms as human language about unification with
the other will always tend to be. Most if not all religions refer to some basic
structural principle or absolute which can be figured as God, Fate, Dharma,
Maat, Karma, Logos or so on. In secular discourse we find analogous concepts in
natural selection, the dialectic, the invisible hand of the market and other
such irreducible, properly basic principles of order. In philosophy we find
such concepts as the stoic logos, the Platonic good, or Brahman. In some
traditions we find this role being played by a paradigmatic human such as Jesus
of Nazareth, Siddartha Gautama or Kung Fu Tzu. In philosophy Socrates stands as
such a figure. In yet others we have demi-gods, heroes, ancestors, ghosts,
nature spirits or trickster figures like Crow or Coyote. Most religions, indeed in SOME sense ALL religions have some kind of authority structure that
offers moral or ritual guidance and articulates the standards of behavior that
define a community. Even the Unitarian church has parking lots and if I park in
a handicapped space SOMEONE will tell me to move. These authorities might also
articulate and enjoin doctrines and theological concepts proposed for belief or
at least external adherence. Religious traditions also embody their sense of
the sacred in arts like sculpture, architecture, music, poetry or dance.
Sometimes this will involve specific cultic objects or ritual/liturgical
actions but the arts can also perform this function in the broader society as
when a European or North American composer debuts a sacred work in a concert
hall. Some religious also foster a speculative relation to the absolute as in
Pagan Neo-Platonism, Medieval Scholasticism or the Vedanta.
NOW, no one religion
is likely to embody ALL these features at any given time or place. Nor is it
likely to express all of them at the same level of intensity. The religion of
Ancient Rome may have expected ‘belief’ in some vague sense but at nothing near
the intensity of an early Christian and was far more concerned about religion
as a social bond. Technically at least, one did not need to believe anything
about Jupiter or Mars to participate in the public cults. Some protestant sects
are profoundly opposed to speculative philosophy or are iconoclastic towards
art. Unitarianism is very loose in regards to things like doctrine while
Catholicism is comparatively strict. Some religions, such as Theravada Buddhism,
do without deities. Some spiritual persons have a private, personal meditative
practice while many Jewish people view religion as in its essence communal.
However, anything we call a religion must have at least some of these features
in some configuration. This means that calling something a religion is to some
degree always a judgment call. Something that has most of these features
expressed at some level of intensity or some of these features expressed at a
high level of intensity can legitimately be called a religion. Religion is a
set of behaviors that range across a spectrum from intensely involving to
routine and pro-forma. These behaviors can be understood explicitly as
religious but they do not need to be. If I apply the criteria set out above to
Arsenal football club we might be surprised at how high it scores on the scale
though if someone says ‘Arsenal is my religion’ we tend to take that as a
metaphor. Subcultures like Raving or Gaming may also score high on this scale
as do pop culture phenomena like Disneyland. Secular humanism itself my score
surprisingly high as it has a deity like structural principle
(natural section), a paradigmatic individual (Charles Darwin), public rituals
organized exactly as protestant churches are, founding narratives about the
‘march of science’ and the slaying of the primitive dragon of superstition and
so on. One might make a similar claim about Marxist-Leninism. Whether or not
one wants to call these things ‘religions’ may simply be a matter of personal
preference.
One clear
implication of this is that things like 'secularity’ are necessary legal
fictions but do not designate actual distinctions in the world, or at least do
not do so very clearly or readily. This is because there is no clear line to be
drawn between a secular phenomenon and a religious one. The binary is not
stable as Derrida himself pointed out in an excellent essay on the matter. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/711139?journalCode=ci)The
other will always infect and subvert the same. ‘Worldliness’ will invade the
sphere of religion and the world will take on a religious valance. This is
indicated by the fact that the ‘secular’ itself began as a Christian
theological construction. For an ancient Roman the thing we designate by the
word ‘secular’ would be precisely the sphere where ‘religion’ would express
itself. This is true of the Islamic world as well. These ideas are historical
constructions not simple givens. ‘Secularity’ is not what is left over when you
subtract religion. As to why this matters I will say that a global, pluralistic
society will not necessarily construct the ‘sacred’ or the ‘secular’ in the
forms to which we have become accustomed as I realized one day when an academic
paper on indigeneity was prefaced with the burning of sweet grass. That is an
epochal change for a university if such events become more than temporary
anomalies. It means, if we are serious about it, that however secular space is
constructed in the future it will not be by simple exclusion. THAT, though, is
for another essay.
[1]
For one thing it is not a numerical question. An energized religious minority
can have an outsized influence on politics or culture as indeed can a political
one. It was a small elite that made the middle ages an ‘age of faith’ not the
general population (which was profane as you please as we can read in Chaucer).
Plus, people can be poor interpreters and reporters of what their beliefs
actually are making surveys only a rough and ready guide to what is going on in
the general culture. Self-knowledge is a learned skill which is why the Delphic
oracle had to issue an injunction on the matter. People may tell pollsters what
they WISHED they believed or thought they were EXPECTED to believe. If we could poll medieval
farmers I’m sure that to a man and woman they would call themselves Christians.
Yet most of them, to hear the complaints of the literate clergy at least, would
scarcely betray a hint of these beliefs in their day to day behavior or
conversation. There are also, I have observed, people who don’t realize quite how
religious they sound.
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