Problems of Religious Diversity

Paul J. Griffiths

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119098188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Exploring Religious Diversity analyzes the philosophical questions raised by the fact that many religions in the world often appear to contradict each other in doctrine and practice.

• Analyzes the philosophical questions raised by the fact that many religions in the world often appear to contradict each other in doctrine and practice.
• Evaluates the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of the debates between religious and non-religious approaches to religious diversity.
• Contains a glossary that defines the book's key technical terms and how they are related to one another.

CHAPTER 1

Religious Diversity

1.1 Religion: Some Historical Remarks

There is no general agreement about what the term religion means. It follows that there is also no general agreement about how to decide when some pattern of human activity or belief is religious, how many religions there are, or where one religion ends and another begins. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus (among others) sometimes call their forms of life religions and themselves religious people. When they do, they may have relatively precise ideas about what it is to be religious; but such ideas tend to be derived by generalization from what they believe and practice as Christians, Jews, Buddhists (or whatever the case may be), and not to be widely shared (or even understood) beyond those communities. People who do not think of themselves as religious are generally less likely than those who do to have given much thought to the question of what religion is; and even where they have, perhaps forced to do so by professional need (constitutional lawyers with First Amendment interests, for example, or historians concerned to understand Hindu/Muslim hatreds in post-independence India) the views they arrive at are likely to be of use only for narrowly technical purposes.

The upshot is that the term religion is like art or pornography in being very difficult for native speakers of English to reach consensus about. Some of us, like terriers with rats, know religion when we see it and have deep feelings roused by it, but are quite incapable of offering a definition. Others, like people deaf from birth with music, can’t recognize it and have little interest in it. Yet others make a profession of writing about it and studying it, and yet are disinterested, like apolitical historians of politics or nonmusical musicologists.

There is much evidence of a lack of consensus about how to use the term religion and its derivatives. For native speakers of English at the end of the twentieth century, the adverb religiously often means something very much like habitually or seriously. We say that she follows the White Sox religiously, or that he reads the New York Times religiously. But in this sense almost anything can be done religiously. Neither does the adjective religious provide much more help. “They’re very religious, you know,” may mean that they frequently go to church, that they know the Qur’an well, believe that what the Pope says is true, derive beliefs about the proper uses of human sexuality from a study of the Bible, judge the political life of a nation in light of Confucian ideas about ritual, self-flagellate on Fridays, or are celibate. It’s not easy to see a common denominator here, and perhaps still less easy to say what it is even when there seems to be one.

There’s an almost equally wide variety of opinion among those charged with making legal or political decisions about what a religion is, or about which patterns of human activity are best called religious. Many nations have to decide whether some particular pattern of human association constitutes a religion. In the United States, religious institutions are exempt from certain forms of taxation, and religious practices are given some constitutional protection; in England, religious instruction is mandatory in state-financed schools; and in Indonesia, the state finds it useful to determine to which religion each of its citizens belongs, and to include that information on the identity cards that all must carry. Such situations require the state sometimes to decide whether some pattern of human activity and association is or is not religious, and it often proves very difficult for courts and other agents of the state to arrive at the necessary decisions. These difficulties are a direct result of a lack of clarity and consensus about what religion means.

Religion is not alone in being difficult in this way. Similar things could be said about poetry or politics, and of course about philosophy. Readers of a book about any of these topics are likely to benefit from some remarks about how the author understands the topic at hand if they are not to be forced to struggle through a pervasive and thick conceptual fog as they read. It is the chief task of this chapter to make some such remarks, and there is no better place to begin than with some remarks on the history of the term.

Augustine, thinking and writing in North Africa at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century, understood religion (composing in Latin, he used the term religio) to mean worship, those patterns of action by which people self-consciously turn themselves toward God in homage and praise.¹ There could, he thought, be right and proper (“true”) ways of worshipping God, just as there could be improper and damnable (“false”) ways of doing so. Since Augustine was a Catholic Christian, he also thought that Christian worship was, on the whole, identical with true religion, and that although true religion was not found only within the bounds of the Christian church, it was found pre-eminently and most perfectly there.

This equation of religion with worship was not unique to Augustine. It was almost standard in the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, and it became the ordinary understanding of religio among those Christians of late antiquity who thought and wrote in Latin. This understanding of the word is evident, too, in the etymology of religio most commonly given by Latin-using intellectuals (Christian and otherwise) in late antiquity.

This etymology derives religio from re + ligare, “to bind back,” or “to rebind,” meaning to re-establish by worship a lost or broken intimacy between God and worshippers. There is another etmyology, defended by a minority both ancient and modern, which derives religio from re + Iegere, “to re-read”; but this etymology has entered less deeply into the soul of the West.²

Relgio, however, was not a word of great importance to the philosophers and theologians of late antiquity. Neither was it of much importance to Western Christians. This was in part because there is no significant biblical term (in Hebrew or Greek) naturally and consistently rendered by religio (in Latin) or religion (in English).The King James Version of the Bible (1611), for instance, uses religion or religious only five times in its rendering of the New Testament from Greek, and for three different Greek terms. Jerome’s Latin version uses religio and its derivatives only six times, also to translate a number of different Greek words (and not always the same ones as those rendered with religion by the translators of the King James Version).

From the time of Jerome (fourth century) until the Renaissance (fifteenth century), Western Christians had little occasion to think or write about those things that we now usually call religions. Islam did not come into existence until the seventh century, and until the Renaissance was most often thought of by Christians as a Christian heresy rather than a non-Christian religion; the religions of India, China, Japan, Africa, and America were effectively unknown until the sixteenth century; and Judaism, in spite of the many lively Jewish communities in Europe, was a topic of interest to Christians largely as a precursor to Christianity, a preparation for the gospel. The result was that Christianity was rarely, if ever, thought of by Christians as one religion among many: Christians did not, before the modern period, have the idea that there is a type called religion of which there are many tokens or instances – Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and so on (just as there is a type called currency of which there are many tokens – dollars, euros, pounds, deutschmarks, and so on). The idea that religion is a type with tokens is largely a modern invention.

Insofar as there was a standard use of the term religion in Europe between the effective end of Roman hegemony in the fifth century and the cataclysm of the Reformation in the sixteenth, it was to denote the activities and members of the monastic orders. These were typically called religious orders, and their members were simply the religious. ‘This usage has survived, in somewhat attenuated form, in the Roman Catholic Church, where it is possible still to hear people speak of the religious life and mean by it life as a vowed member of a monastic order.

The modern (post-Reformation) understandings of religion differ from these premodern uses most dramatically in that they see religion exactly as a type of which there are many tokens. One influence upon the acceptance of this idea was the pressing necessity in the seventeenth century of creating political forms of life in Europe that could peacefully accommodate a wide variety of Christian groups with incompatible understandings of what it is to be a Christian, and often with a deep hatred of one another. After the Thirty Years’ War in Europe (1618–48) and the Civil War in England (1642–8), in which such differences showed themselves clearly in large-scale and long-lived violence, it was clear that the political forms which had served Europe fairly well for the preceding millennium would no longer do, and that any new ones would have to find a way of dealing with the violent splintering of Christendom brought about by the Reformation.

The political solutions that emerged were of two kinds. The first affirmed the idea that a sovereign state could and should accommodate only one Christian group, and that your religion (now it began commonly to be called that) should therefore be determined by geography, by where you happened to live. Calvin’s Geneva provides one instance of this solution, as does the English settlement of 1688; both use the idea that there are many religions, and that the state should establish and give special privileges to just one among them. The second kind of political resolution used the idea that the state should be neutral or even-handed with respect to religion (which usually meant neutral with respect to the various brands of Protestant Christianity; Jews and Catholics were usually beyond the pale, and Buddhists and Muslims did not even enter into consideration). The passage of the First Amendment to the American Constitution in 1791 provides an example here. This second kind of political resolution, like the first, required (usually in very explicit terms) the view that there are many religions.

But it was not only the division of Christianity into many different and often warring groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that contributed to the idea that religion is a type with many tokens. Almost equally important was the vast increase in European knowledge of the history, languages, and practices of non-European civilizations. Beginning in the fifteenth century (and increasing almost exponentially in the sixteenth and seventeenth), reports of the habits and practices of the Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the inhabitants of Meso-America began to be available to the literati of Europe. The earliest among these reports were written by Catholic missionaries for the use of the church in its efforts to propagate itself; but these were soon followed by work sponsored by the European states with interests in empire-building – first the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, and later the English and French. By the seventeenth century, grammars and lexica of hitherto exotic and unknown languages (Sanskrit, Chinese) began to become available, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries works in these languages were translated in ever-increasing numbers into those of Europe.

Much of the information gathered in these ways seemed to European intellectuals to reveal forms of life and patterns of belief both deeply like and importantly unlike Christian forms and patterns. The Indians wrote hymns arid prayers to many gods, and seemed to worship images and statues of them; the Chinese had temples, sacred works, and a highly developed ritual system; and so on. It began to seem natural to European historians, philosophers, and theologians to think of these forms of life as the religions of India and China, and also to think of Christianity as the religion of Europe. It was then not difficult to move to the more abstract theoretical view that there is a type called religion of which there are many tokens; and this was effectively the standard position by the eighteenth century, though with many deep disagreements about how best to understand what religion is, and how best to account for the variety of religions. These are disagreements with whose legacy we must still deal.

Parson Thwackum, a character in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, first published in 1749, provides a good example of the type-token way of thinking about religion, and of the deep insularity and exclusivism which often accompanied it (Fielding treats Thwackum satirically, and does not here endorse his opinions):

When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.³

Religion thus became a term of art for European intellectuals, and one that proved endlessly fascinating, prompting the painting of many theoretical pictures. Some of these depicted a single ur-religion from which all others had descended (the Christian version of this tended to depict non-Christian religions originating in the linguistic chaos that followed the destruction of the Tower of Babel described in Genesis 11); others, like David Hume in his Natural History of Religion (1757), offered theories of religion according to which every token of the type could be accounted for by appeal solely to psychological and sociological variables, and so without any reference to God; yet others offered evolutionary views, according to which the variety of religions could be accounted for by such mysteries as the progressive self-revelation of spirit in history (Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy Of Religion, presenting an argument of this sort, were first given in 1821). And so on, into the twenty-first century.

This particular history is uniquely European, and the use of religion as a term of art is intimately, even symbiotically linked with it. It should therefore not be surprising that intellectuals uninfluenced by this history tend to lack a term of art anything like religion. Premodern Christians, as already indicated, were largely innocent of it; and it is on the whole true to say that non-Christians (except where they have been influenced by this same history) also lack it. Even if it’s reasonable to judge that (say) both Buddhism and Christianity are tokens of the type religion (and on some understandings of religion it is no doubt reasonable so to judge), it does not follow from this that Buddhists naturally think (or should think) of Buddhism in this way. There is an indigenous Buddhist lexicon that will do some of the same work for them as religion does for us. But there is no close match and no reason to expect one. The desire to philosophize about religion and to think of religion as a type with tokens is very much a product of a particular European history.

One result of this peculiar European history and the intellectual work that has gone along with it is precisely the variegated and complex understanding of religion we now have. The desire for religious tolerance produced by the political pressures of early modernity has now been written into the constitutions of most democratic states, but usually without much consensus about what a religion is. The large amount of theoretical thought about the nature of religion and about the proper way to think of the relations among various tokens of the type has not led to any deep consensus among those who engage in it. And the range of uses given to religion in ordinary language is, as already indicated, very broad indeed and not capable of easy resolution into a coherent whole.

I’ll give the novelist Walker Percy the last word on this matter: “a peculiar word this in the first place, religion; it is something to be suspicious of.”⁴

1.2 Religion: A Definition

In this situation, what to do? This is, after all, a book on the philosophical questions raised by religious diversity. Are we condemned to not knowing what we are talking about? Fortunately not. The best solution in a situation like this is to offer a more or less stipulative understanding of religion, one that is somewhat responsive both to the history that has made it necessary for us to have some understanding of what we mean by religion, and to the meanings and uses currently given that term in intellectual and political life. Such a definition should also be such that it will serve the needs of the enterprise for which it is constructed; and since the enterprise here is an exploration of the philosophical problems raised by religious diversity, the stipulative definition offered should make it possible fruitfully to explore those questions. It is with these constraints and needs in mind that I offer the following definition of religion. It is not the only possible or single best definition; it is merely one that, while being (I hope) adequately responsive to the historical and lexical context mentioned, will be appropriate and useful for the topic of this book.

A religion, then, I shall take to be a form of life that seems to those who inhabit it to be comprehensive, incapable of abandonment, and of central importance. When I use religion or its derivatives (religious, religiously, and so on) in what follows, I shall have this understanding in mind. But it needs further clarification, and that is best provided by making a few continents about its constituent terms.

Let’s begin by considering what a form of life is. This I shall take to be a pattern of activity that seems to those who belong to it to have boundaries and particular actions proper or intrinsic to it. For most married people, marriage is a form of life in this sense. It is bounded in the sense that there are patterns of activity and particular actions outside it, not intrinsic or proper to it, without which it can perfectly well continue to be what it is; there are also patterns of activity and particular actions intrinsic and proper to it, without which it cannot continue. The division between the former and the latter marks the boundary of the form of life called marriage (perhaps better, “being married”) – or so it probably seems to many married people. When I teach a class at the university that pays my wages, I am (it seems to me) engaged in an action that is not intrinsic or proper to being married; it falls outside the boundary of that form of life, and this is true even though it may be related causally to being married (perhaps I am caused to do it in part to earn money to support the children who are the product of my marriage). By contrast, making love with my wife, sharing a bed with her and living with her and our children, talking with her about our children’s peccadilloes and possible futures – all these are (it seems to me) activities proper to the form of life that is marriage: they fall within its bounds.

Another example: I play squash, and this (it seems to me) is a form of life, even though rather a circumscribed one. There are particular actions proper and intrinsic to it (hitting the ball), there are its hallowed places (the court, the locker room), its sacred implements (the racket and ball), and its appropriate dress. The patterns of activity closely associated with these places and things fall within the game of squash; those not so connected (the vast majority of the things I do) fall outside its boundaries.

There are no natural or inevitable ways to individuate forms of life. There will always be many (perhaps infinitely many) possible ways of cutting the cake. I might, for example, want to connect my playing of squash with my occasional workouts in the gym and my occasional bicycle rides with my son, and say that they all belong to the form of life called taking physical exercise. It might seem to me that this is the natural thing to do if I’m questioned by my doctor about how much exercise I take. At other times and in other situations I might want to think of playing squash and riding a bicycle as separate forms of life. In spite of this fluidity in our drawing of lines between one form of life and another, it remains true that most of us most of the time work with a fairly stable understanding of how many forms of life we inhabit and where their boundaries are; and that many of us could, if pressed, say a good deal about what these are and about the actions proper to each. In my own case, the first few forms of life that come to mind are being a Christian, being a husband, being a father, and being a writer.

Recall that according to my definition religion is a form of life in the sense given, but one with three particular defining characteristics: it seems to those who belong to it to be comprehensive, incapable of abandonment, and of central importance. A word now about each of these.

First, comprehensiveness. If a form of life seems to those who belong to it to be comprehensive, then it seems to them to take account of and be relevant to everything – not only to the particulars of all the forms of life they live in, but to everything in the strict sense. How can this be? For example: a Brahmin (a high-caste Hindu) who attempts seriously to live as such might see his Brahminism as providing a frame for all the other forms of life he belong to. If he is married, he will understand the fact of his marriage, together with all the particular activities that constitute it, as in large part prescribed by (and in every particular framed by) the theoretical perspectives on marriage enshrined in the relevant ethico-legal injunctions found in the texts and traditions that are authoritative for Brahmins. The same will be true for his mode of dress, the physical posture he adopts while defecating, and what he does to make a living. There will be no form of life and no particular action or pattern of action that fails to seem to him to be a proper part of his Brahminism. And not only this: the form of life which is orthoprax Brahminism will (or may) seem to those who belong to it to provide an account of absolutely everything – of the nature of the physical uni...