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Notes on the Sociology of Religion

March 7th, 2008 Posted in Religion

A bright moment, religious scholars welcoming Derrida into their midst

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We attend mystery when it appears, sometimes as threat or danger, sometimes as pleasure, sometimes as a promise of a long Methuselah-like life.

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In earlier civilizations religion was anchored within specific tribal groups. But with the Romans and Greeks and since religions have stretched toward the universal. Large masses of peoples from different cultural and biological traditions now share beliefs, rituals, and identity. Anthropologists have to go further into the forest and up the mountain now to find distinctive tribal specific ideologies and rituals. Modern religions tend to trump ethnicity–are larger and more global. This is not to deny that small breakaway modern groups are constantly building new faiths or revisions of the old and jumping immediately to the universal stage. As every soldier in the revolutionary French army was a potential general, every cult leader has the potential to influence all humanity. That doesn’t mean they are sure to pass through indifference, inattention, and active resistance and repression. The process of the cult toward the universal is not guaranteed and it can stop, reverse, or end anywhere along its line of development. My tendency is to treat religions as group identifiers based on adherence to a system of belief, ritual, and morality. It overlaps, cooperates and/or competes with other identifiers such as ethnicity, nationality, social class and other similar distinctions.

Many members feel that their belief system is literal, that the statements of belief and the narratives of past events, and the statements about the presence of what others might call imaginary beings are real, actually exist. Unlike science and craft where proof is material the religious test is faith alone. There are frequent claims of physical proof but acceptance does not depend on this level of test. So actions and behaviors of people committed to religious beliefs are within a reality that faith has established. Outsiders may argue that the religious realm is entirely within culture, entirely anchored in consensus but religionists see the field as independent of this limit. The validity of the system and its existence will continue even without believers. In form it is very like science except that the preferred method is revelation for those to whom the narrative and the field are vouchsafed. The received word is accepted and followed by those who come after. From the sociological perspective ideology, political theory, theology are similar in that they all share an implacable moral element that insists on its own way.

The problem: early narratives pushed toward universal knowledge and anchored the story in theories of the origin and history of the universe and on descriptions of the physical world that later were challenged by the results of scientific investigations. For example for some religions the center of the solar system and of the universe is the planet earth. This understanding has been challenged by physics. The origin of the species and the evolution of life that some religions have asserted can be explained by the creation myth, the deity inventing the whole thing a few thousand years past, was contradicted by the observations and theories of biologists and geologists. Religious faith in some instances has given locations for the realms of spirits, up for heaven and down for hell, but neither astronomy or geology confirm this. In any case up and down are related to where one’s head is. The seasons switch with hemisphere and so do the loci of these mythical places. Science has proved to be the greater magic by the accuracy of its predictions and by the practical results that follow from its insights. So over time religious faith has retreated toward its most solid realm, assertions about the unknowable–the ultimate origin and the distinction of good from evil. The pragmatism of science, even here, challenges. If it is unknowable, do not make up a not provable answer, simply live with the mystery. The question of morality is anchored within consensus and perhaps psychology. But if morality is not an unconditional and universal in itself it is relative to the group and its history. Here is the rub. For all of us are conditioned by the received civilization we share so there is a very general resistance to the idea of morals being within consensus alone even if it is. On questions of murder, while we do recognize exceptions, we all tend to agree, secular and religious alike, that our abhorrence is beyond the consensus. And then there are the oceanic perceptions, the moments of wonder and awe, the mysteries, the intuitive perceptions which are contested with psychology and sometimes not, and the issues of life and death with which we all continually struggle.

But questions of faith and proof and so on aside, religious institutions and social organizations exist and are viable. Millions adhere, participate and find pleasure in the rituals, present their children with pretty or frightening pictures, appreciate the availability of another field for social life, and find a certain meaning in life and time they might otherwise crave if it were not available. The religious field and its participants continue

THE SECULAR
Meanwhile a secular field has developed for those people without an exaggerated concern with theology. These seculars have slipped out from the religiously organized field. The escape turns on a variety of processes: The multiplicity of apparently equally valid religions in itself dilutes the consensus. The rise of the secular state which does not legally require religious participation. General knowledge of the success of science and of the progressive retreat of the religions before it. The availability of alternate fields of sociability and ritual in sports and other associations and activities. A general adult skepticism about religious narratives and stories which has always been there going back to the beginning of religious discoveries. Now people are not pressed as stringently by the force and fraud of established cadres. Civil rights include the informal–personal authority to think and believe for self. The physical and verbal attacks recede. A realization that morality is anchored in personality and civilization and can govern one’s life and behavior without committing one to the whole religious package. The morality and behavior of the famously religious is notoriously spotty and contributes to doubt. Pedophile priests, sexually promiscuous ministers and rabbis, sexual perversions of evangelical leaders. Economic and political crimes committed or condoned by religious believers. Yet being secular does not mean a refusal of appreciation of religious myths and rituals. These offer aesthetic pleasure and a participation in the shared civilization without implying faith and universal certainty. Everyone shares in the perception of mysteries but some allow them to persist without explanation while others close out with appeals to imaginary presences and figures.

There is, I suspect, a large part of the people who hover about the religious space without worry, guilt or particular concern about the stories and the rituals. They can go in and out of the active religious field or reside indifferently in either the religious or secular realm depending on mood, opportunity and the social group with which they hang-out. They carry a lot of salt with them to drop on the various sermons and theories and appreciate life and the world as it unfolds around them in whichever direction.

TRUE BELIEVERS
At the extremes are the true believers and the unctuous ones who claim to believe but don’t. These are the cadres and their shock troops. The professionals make their living this way and define their whole lives around this vocation. They might be more reasonable if they had another trade as well. With something else they would not be so threatened by the dialectical negation. The close followers, the volunteers, are something else. For some commitment is a defense against psychological breakdown. But this is a general problem–all sectors of society can be used for this personal defensive function. For the others and for the cadres themselves there is a very strong commitment to tradition. They want to reproduce a world that is exactly similar to the one in which they were nurtured, a very difficult and ultimately impossible task, and the struggle to maintain the religious reality is part of this never ending project Others have latched onto a new belief, perhaps a new cult, and they want to project it out into the future as the preferred reality. There is a strong need to maintain or to project an illusion as real. It must feel at times like trying to carve and perpetuate an ice sculpture in the noonday sun in the tropics. Someone offering an ordinary sociology can identify with this experience.

On the opposite side the seculars hardly have a cadre in place and, if there were, most seculars do not give them any attention. A few very active atheists, a few small specialty publishers and that is it. In the United States secularism turns on the discovery of tolerance. The European immigrants from many different nations and with several religions in tow after an initial period of trying to impose one way over the others eventually extricated themselves from the problem of religious contentiousness by resolving not to establish a specific religion as officially sanctioned. The tolerant step meant freedom of religion and by extension freedom from religion–and some religious cadres still argue against this. Freedom of and from religion became a founding principle and still strives to become and remain a human right. So the secular center is not anti-religious but religiously permissive. Regardless of own beliefs, one is tolerant of the beliefs of others so long as they are not in themselves actively anti-secular, that is intolerant The movement that grows from this is an attempt to separate the religious realm in all its variety from the secular. Any public function under the aegis of government in any of it forms or manifestations should be free of religious intrusion. No particular view is to be favored, as all join together, and each one of us is free to believe what he or she wants. Of course each of the several religions is thwarted in its claim to universality, but the thwarting has always been there in the original multiplicity. And the extreme anti-religious are thwarted as well since under secular tolerance they forgo any attempt to reject the religious other. The beauty is that in the public space we try to avoid those irresolvable issues. In fact we all rejoice in the rituals and inner security of the others. We do not impose on the other.

SECULAR OLNEY IN PHILADELPHIA IN 1930s
In my childhood, the neighborhood of Olney in North Philadelphia, 1930’s, a large number of people loved to play Pinochle, the working man’s Contract Bridge. They liked it as much as, for some even more than, baseball. Our particular group of families met frequently on Saturday evening at someone’s house to play–for the pleasure of it, no gambling. In religious and ethnic identity we reflected the mix of the street–Irish, Italian, Jewish, Cuban, Old American. No religious test, the only requirement an interest in the game and in the sociability. A bright secular moment.

STRUGGLE AGAINST SECULARISM
This cornerstone of the American way has been fought against and traduced and undermined and refused by the fundamentalist religious cadres rather consistently since the earliest settlements and especially since the acceptance of the constitution by the states. There has been a constant attempt, with considerable success, to impose, using state power, particular religious beliefs and practices on the general population, directly contravening the constitution.

You can see how distorted this attack on secularism is if you notice that beliefs and rituals that are considered universally established as true always require imposition on some of the people by state power and force. It is as though a law of physics, say the law of gravity, would require state power for it to work. Pragmatically if it works it works whatever the form and whatever the actions of the state. What we have is a series of theologies that, like theories of social class, are assertions of how things should be and are not statements of how and what reality is. Neither religion or science should require state power for its existence. In your private space, in your voluntary behavior, believe, within civilized reason, what you will. Let each person freely chose for him or herself.

The universal religious history is a contest among the several faiths for dominance. Some might argue that this is associated with a more fundamental struggle of socio-economic classes or ethnic groups or nations. Within a unitary, multi-religious and multi-ethnic state this struggle continues but now extends to the attempt to influence and control the state itself to the advantage of particular groups. Religion, in these struggles, takes a political form. In the multi-ethnic and multi-religious and in the secular state the hard edge of conflict of belief that was so destructive over past centuries has led to a general tolerance and the divisions are no longer stark and approaching the inhuman. So an accommodation of sorts has been realized and what we experience now is a residual resistance.

In the USA secularism only requires the definition of two conceptual places that separate the overt religious activity from the secular. This does not mean that the faith and beliefs of the religious are denied, only that overt expression in a coercive and intrusive way is avoided. Separate, that is, church from state. This has always been the point and the resolution.

Oppression of the religious side, separate from one religious group suppressing another, a general suppression of religion by the state has been part of the radical bourgeois revolution in France early in the 19th century followed by the radical workers revolution in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Established religion was seen as an important adjunct of the old order of nobility and king and rejected as part of that order. The taking over of property and wealth of religious orders probably made this attack process even more attractive. In these overthrow cases the new order tended to replace the pageantry and ritual of the old by new forms, some would suggest they are religious-like forms, of the new state and its ideology.

In the USA this anti-religious movement never occurred. The struggle against the past here instead was first against the British Imperials and then against the plantation system. And a great flowering of religious invention became an important American pattern.

SECULAR HOLIDAYS AND RITUALS
We must note certain select near universal holidays based on the historical mythology of the state that unify all citizens–in the secular state the citizen takes the place of the communicant in the religious community. In the USA days like Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, Martin Luther King Day have some official sanction–post offices and governmental offices closed, banks closed, schools closed. They are the state’s analog of the religious call. In other words the secular state adapts or invents festivals and memorials and commemorations of its own. Some of these are residuals and carry-overs from particular religions. Christmas, New Years, religious sentiments on official money, religious officials in the military, imposing religious concepts within the state pledge of allegiance and so on.

SECULAR NATION-STATE
In any case the trend toward the secular state continues at least in the advanced industrial states in the western tradition. It is permissive toward private religious belief and makes no heavy oppressive actions against religions but its very secular nature with permissiveness toward the self development of the free individual allows the movement of the people away from the various faiths to proceed. Historically, without the oppressive force of the state and the associated propaganda in support, the religious organization and the people tend to part. And this attrition is what worries the several religious cadres. We should note that in some nation-states religion continues to be established and the old state sponsored religious repression of the non-believing other is in place. I have been, in my American fashion, shading the analysis toward the pallid and innocuous but under it all it is a very serious and, in some awful way, deadly conflict.

END OF COLD WAR
The end of the cold war which, like a magnet near a field of iron chips, had set a world pattern to which all other lines of difference were subordinated, that we all so happily greeted after we emerged from the shock of the collapse of the social form that had dominated our lives for so long, ushered in the return of ethnic and religious conflict. It had been there all along, and if not ignored it had been diverted into the conflict in ring center. Tito dies, the cold war ends and Yugoslavia turns into a miniature of the old Balkan hodge-podge, a poorly resolved remainder of the fall of Imperial Turkey. In fact the whole Middle East and beyond to south east Asia, another part of the Turkish disintegration, becomes energized with the old lines of conflict, the differences in peoples and religions replacing the supposed world-wide struggle of social classes. But it goes beyond that–a world-wide resurrection of this long neglected front. As usual with religion and ethnicity everyone is whistling a different tune.

I am suggesting that the forms of these different risings of ethnicity-religiosity are the same–basically an almost last ditch resistance to the relatively new and continually emergent secular social order. Certainly each expression of this reactionary revolt is vastly different but the aim of overthrowing the secular order of capitalist and socialist democracy with associated technology is the same: to use the state to impose a fundamental religious formula upon the people.

Notes on the Sociology of Religion

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