(Mis)Understanding Religion –– Part 1
Is everyone religious? Examining the modern misconception of religious neutrality and its pretensions in secular culture and scholarship.
Giulio Romano, “Chamber of the Giants (Sala dei Giganti)” (c.1532-1535). Fresco on ceiling in the Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy.
Religion has received a pretty bad reputation over the last several decades and it only seems to be getting worse. Its poor standing varies greatly in popular culture, politics, and academia for lots of different reasons. On one hand, it suffers from the sociopolitical tension to separate Church and State. While this used to mean that government would not meddle in religious observances, practices, and beliefs, it has become to mean just the opposite: Secularism must prevent religion from entering the political arena at all costs, and God is the quintessential hallmark of religion. And yet, while religion is supposedly ousted from governmental affairs, it is nevertheless free to express and, therefore, modify the social and moral framework of culture, which renders religious influence in the political sphere a bottom-up rather than top-down affair. When considering this, it seems that the desire to secure and preserve a strong secular society necessarily entails that the freedom of religious expression also be regulated, if not, progressively limited. This sociopolitical rule over religion has no doubt stirred up a whirlwind of religious characterizations, which have subsequently categorized (or blended) all religions together under one entity, the likes of which have spurred a flurry of different masks religion wears to further its blind pursuits.
For instance, it is normal nowadays to view all religions equally. Religions are seen as ideologies that are fundamentally the same but expressed differently, simply because, we are told, they fall under the same category of ‘unknowable, subjective, private beliefs’, entangled together in some mutual ambition beknown only to a religious observer themselves. Maybe you have heard that all religions mean well and share the same foundational message for how to become a ‘good’ person, or that religion is just a spiritual exercise, or that true religion is to embrace pluralism (all religions are equally true or, at least, equal). Of that, there is also a ‘spiritual but not religious’ movement full of those who are fond of religion but don’t like the establishment, colonialism, or “organized religion”.
Religion is also made out to be an integral part of cultural heritage or tradition, as a set of practices or rituals that work toward a spiritual goal, transcendence, or deity like Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, or even Indigenous culture. Insomuch an organized religion that immigrates, so to speak, from another culture such as India will have higher value than our own immediate culture (and so long as it isn’t our Christian heritage, the more the merrier!). In this, religion is painted in a generous light as a ‘sphere of influence’ on par with other spheres such as government, education, law, economy, and so on, one that is essential to a culture or society. However, organized religion is also paradoxically valued as detrimental to civilization and first-world nations by progressive secular society; viewed as a primitive, agrarian development. This also seems to be why, in my assessment, that the word religion is not even used to identify Indigenous beliefs and practices, due to the word having poor press in Canadian geopolitics, rather the word “culture” or “heritage” is used instead.
To top it off, religion is seen as conniving and wicked, a malevolent force out to get you. As some dying tyrannical bureaucrat who sits about idle, scheming on how to rip you out of the cushy arms of modern progress and science. Perhaps, you have heard that religion is stubborn, unreasonable belief, or that it is blind faith for an unfounded desire, or that it is a fabricated, fantastical, or mythologized display of historical events. It is also painted in very broad strokes to be wishful thinking, a pair of rose-coloured goggles acting as a sort of coping mechanism for our existentially lost world. To be secular, then, is to overcome these make-belief obstacles.
All this only skims the surface. No matter what you may have heard or believe, the scope of religion, religious belief and religious experience seems to touch, if not envelope, nearly every sphere of life, yet it is relegated and compartmentalized into a separate part of our daily life, as if daily life is secular and sacredness is subjective. And there may not be a good reason for it. In fact, there isn’t.
Secularism & Religion
Given the plurality of world religions in the West, secularism is broadly identified by the absence of religious belief through what we, as humans, naturally, objectively, and universally share–––reason, morality, mathematics, physics, the material world, et cetera. It is mainly thought of as a necessary separation of God from the political structure and public space, which is in direct contrast to earlier centuries of Christendom and other cultures around the world like Hinduism. In turn, this view assumes religion is an independent sphere that can operate side-by-side other societal spheres of influence[1]. Historically, secularism did not openly oppose religion per se, it entailed a broad consensus or compromise among differing religious people, each putting their unique religious beliefs aside for a future ideal society (i.e., historical humanism). It stood as a meeting place or as neutral territory, so to speak, between varying religions, and was sustained by the immediate religions within society. That is, religion underpinned secularism. This distinction has all but reversed now; granted, unsurprisingly. Secularism is now seen as politically necessary to maintain a democratic society, even though its meaning has shifted from multireligious unity to a synonym for atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, or irreligious belief. But that is not because it was somehow neutral before.
As of late, the vast majority of religious philosophers – secular and religious alike – advocate that there is no consistent property that can properly be defined as “religious” and, therefore, cannot provide a precise, cohesive account for what constitutes a religion. That is a non-arbitrary definition that must state the set of characteristics uniquely shared by all the things of the religion being defined[2]. In other words, they cannot distinguish an essential aspect unique to religion itself that is also not secular; there seems to be a great amount of overlap between the two. And so, if most religious philosophers cannot identify a precise account of religion, as we can with, say, mathematics, then it not only deconstructs our understanding of religious belief, but it also deconstructs our understanding of secularism–––secularism is defined by religious neutrality. In other words, if there is no airtight constituent or account of religion, then secularism loses its clear boundary lines.
Now it should be said not all secular scholars are convinced that religion is ambiguous, illusory, or fabricated, there is still confidence in resolve. Ironically, this faith in resolution conserves, in a sense, that renowned adage: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) However, articulating a precise account of ‘what religion is’ and ‘what religion is not’ seems to require a different approach altogether. Let's take a closer look.
A Misguided Sociological Projection
From the Enlightenment through the supposed division of Church and State, modernization, and the economic upsurge of secularized bureaucracy, representative governments and the welfare state have seemingly reduced the social need for religion, pushing the “vestiges of superstitious dogma” to succumb to scientific rhetoric and political doctrine. In comparison to agrarian societies, post-industrial civilizations show an alarming decrease in religiosity[3]. Over the past several decades, evidence from eighty societies reveals that the rise of secular orientations in post-industrial nations typically derives from a lack of violence through social and physical security/protection. This entails that the nation has a great number of economic resources, policed communities, an increase of “Western” or secular education as well as the advent of the welfare state. This means that the technological transition from an agrarian to a post-industrial society should weaken the influence of organized religious institutions. In effect, then, this would render religion nothing more than a convenience store of ethics and values, a corner store in the big city, which comes across as non-essential for everyday livelihood[4]. Studies show that people tend to trust social norms, state recognition, and the status quo, so to speak, as one of the central means to obtain identity and self-definition[5]. In other words, this correlation suggested that with the vast dissemination of existential secularization, religion and the so-called Church were projected to diminish with industrialization. God would subsequently be reduced to an idea among theory. Prominent social analysts such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud predicted that religion overall would ‘cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society’. A thesis secular critics want to abandon.
Although organized religiosity declines in modernization, personalized religiosity – or spiritualism per se – increases in its absence, or better to say, in its place. As modern political scientists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart amended their global secularization thesis with the conclusion, “Organized religion is losing its grip on the public, but spiritual concerns, broadly defined, are taking on growing importance.” [6] With that in mind, another interesting factor that correlates to secularization is that since 1981 existential insecurity in post-industrial societies have shown a steady statistical rise in individuals ‘often’ thinking about their meaning and purpose in life[7]. Religion points one way and culture says another –– sort of. And that is the issue. These studies only account for a socially accepted characterization of religion, scoping details through the lens of “iconography” or behavioural practices and have not seriously considered what actually constitutes a religion or a religious belief or experience.
What is Religion and Religious Belief?
The word religion has a relatively obscure origin. Whatever may be the etymological origin and definition of religion, the word re-legere is first identified and adapted from Cicero’s writings meaning, “to retrace or to reread”. Early Christian scholar Lactantius believes it derives from the Latin re-ligare meaning, “bind back” and later appropriated by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas devoting it to mean, “bind back to God”. If we magnify the latter connotation, the literal meaning of religion would only concern soteriology, the Christian doctrine of salvation, which is explicitly divergent from many religions or socially accepted characterizations and resemblances of religion that have no such protocol or belief. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here when I say Christianity is not the only religion!
Attempting to define or unify a single essence of religion, to articulate its properties, or to identify behavioral characteristics that are distinct from secularism, has all proven to result in a very ambiguous description. In fact, it is so prevalent that citing an encyclopedia might be the best way to prove the point. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the bulbous consensus among religious philosophers to date:
In any case, this entry will assume that morality is a set of customs and habits that shape how we think about how we should live or about what is a good human life. The term ‘religion’ is much disputed. Again, we can learn from the etymology. The origin of the word is probably the Latin religare, to bind back. Not all uses of the term require reference to a divinity or divinities. But this entry will use the term so that there is such a reference, and a religion is a system of belief and practice that accepting a ‘binding’ relation to such a being or beings. This does not, however, give us a single essence of religion, since the conceptions of divinity are so various, and human relations with divinity are conceived so variously that no such essence is apparent even within Western thought. The ancient Greeks, for example, had many intermediate categories between full gods or goddesses and human beings. There were spirits (in Greek daimones) and spiritual beings like Socrates's mysterious voice (daimonion). There were heroes who were offspring of one divine and one human parent. There were humans who were deified, like the kings of Sparta. This is just within the culture of ancient Greece. If we included Eastern religions in the scope of the discussion, the hope for finding a single essence of religion would recede further. Probably it is best to understand ‘religion’ as a term for a group of belief/practice amalgams with a family resemblance to each other, but no set of necessary and sufficient conditions tying them together.
It concludes with, “… [T]he revival of interest in divine command theory, when combined with the revival of natural law theory I already discussed, shows evidence that the attempt to connect morality closely to religion is undergoing a robust recovery within professional philosophy.”[8] However unexpected such an account may sound, it remains the most common interpretation and conclusion, and it has been for quite some time. One would suppose that with such a radically different take on what religion means that it would eventually affect everyday presupposition, dialogue, and usage. But, as usual, the status quo seems to have all the answers chalked out; they just so happened to have outlined the body they desire to kill. Problem is, they don’t have a body at all.
You can also download the full PDF here.
Matlock Bobechko | January 15, 2017. Revised on September 5, 2022 – 9:00 AM EST
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 1-4.
[2] Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (by Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 9.
[3] Attend weekly religious services: 44% versus 20%; Pray daily: 52% versus 26%; Religion to be very important: 64% versus 20%; extracted from Conflicts and Tensions: Why Didn’t Religion Disappear? Re-Examining the Secularization Thesis, 256. Robert F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris.
[4] Robert F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Conflicts and Tensions: Why Didn’t Religion Disappear? Re-Examining the Secularization Thesis, 255.
[5] With this context in view, by proposing our own identity solely based on an interpersonal ethic, which assumes there is no intrinsic value, only earned value a posteriori (knowledge gained by experience), and therefore justifying a lack of objective value from birth and near death, will we not choose the identity more socially favourable? From a secularized rationale, if it is in our best interest and transparently practical, then there is no reason why we ought to choose otherwise! Why and why not carry the same weight.
[6] Robert F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Conflicts and Tensions: Why Didn’t Religion Disappear? Re-Examining the Secularization Thesis, 257.
[7] Averaging between a 10-20% increase in USA, Sweden and Japan, amidst 22 other nations. Conflicts and Tensions: Why Didn’t Religion Disappear? Re-Examining the Secularization Thesis, 257. Robert F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris.
[8] Hare, John, "Religion and Morality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/religion-morality/>.Emphasis Added. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 65–7.
Good post.
“... a corner store in the big city, which comes across as non-essential for everyday livelihood”
We see this in our politicians who are at political odds with their own proclaimed faith traditions. Catholic Prime Ministers and Presidents who disregard their own informed morality to prioritize the backwards church-state separation.