The Importance of Religion

Meaning and Action in our Strange World

Gavin Flood

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444399042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Importance of Religion reveals the significance of religion in modern times, showing how it provides people with meaning to their lives and helps guide them in their everyday moral choices

• Provides readers with a new understanding of religion, demonstrating how in its actions, texts and world views religion is enduring and vividly engages with the mystery of the world
• Offers striking arguments about the relationship of religion to science, art and politics
• Engagingly written by a highly respected scholar of religion with an international reputation

Part One

Action

karma

aiva hi sa

siddhim

sthit

janak

daya

/
lokasa

grahamev

pi sa

pa

yan kartum arhasi//

It was by action Janaka
and the others reached perfection.
Looking only to grasp the world,
your obligation is to act.

Bhagavad Gita 3.20

Chapter 1

Clearing the Ground

As human beings we enter history through our actions which are unrepeatable and the consequences of which we can never completely predict. We can make amends but we can never take back what we do; we can never keep a broken promise and never retrieve good or bad done to others. This fundamental human truth exists at different levels and at different degrees of intensity; thus an act of marriage to a particular person at a particular time is unrepeatable, with significant consequences for those involved, although usually without large historical consequence. A government that goes to war, on the other hand, an action as the result of a number of decisions by a number of people, has considerable historical consequence that could affect thousands of people. The relation of action to history is complex and highly pertinent to the importance of religion in that religions mediate the human encounter with mystery through action and so can affect history. On the one hand we have macro-historical forces operating over large stretches of time – characterized as the long durée by the French annales school – in which human persons seem to be of little consequence,¹ while on the other we have subjective human action that impacts upon the world.

The human subject is both the consequence of history, the product of a certain time and space, language and culture, economic and social forces, yet also acts upon history and in some sense stands outside of it. We are both the products of history and its agents. In sociology this is formulated as the problem of which has priority, structure or agency? We are social actors as products of the social system and yet we act upon the social system to change it. My claim that religions express a human will to meaning needs to be located in the broader context of this complex problem. We need to present an account of the theorizing about religion in macro-historical terms and to locate religious practice in relation to this debate. While I would wish to make claims about religion that holds up across traditions, we first need to be historically sensitive to the conditions of late modernity within which religions continue to flourish. Although we will develop these themes in later chapters, we need to place religion not only in the context of the will to meaning, but in the context of the historical processes that have created our modern condition.

This understanding of religion as a cultural form that mediates the encounter with mystery needs to be located within the history of social theory. It is a claim of social realism in so far as the encounter with mystery is expressed as action and is a claim of religious ontology in so far as it reveals a truth about the nature of our strange world. In its purest or simplest articulation, the will to meaning is the human act itself framed by the imagination; we do things for a reason, which is conceptualized or represented in our minds, and which in turn is based on a pre-cognitive sense of bodily being. Religious actions are framed by a religious imaginaire and the purpose of such acts, the meaning of such acts, is directed towards a transcendent goal even when simultaneously directed towards the world. That is, the ultimate goal of many religions is a salvation or liberation that both transcends the world and is achieved only through and within it. The human encounter with mystery is mediated by action (and so the body) informed by a religious imagination. The Buddhist meditating in the morning along with the Moslem call to prayer are intentional actions driven by distinct imaginaries or ways of conceptualizing the nature of reality and the human place within it. People's actions have been driven by the religions they inhabit which, traditionally, have formed systems of total meaning. Historically, the majority of human beings have made sense of their lives through religions; religions have formed their daily behavior as well as their political actions, and in modernity religious people need to negotiate multiple identities which hold together the religious imagination along with advanced economic, technological, and scientific knowledge. People make meaning, as Hughes reminds us, from the meanings which are available to them.²

The importance of religion lies in the way religious action is a kind of mediation; the form in which people encounter mystery. People interact or dwell within the world through action and so action is also the point of intersection with history. This is not to conflate history with mystery, but clearly they are linked in temporality and the conundrum of time (Augustine's point that we experience time but cannot explain it). We live our lives through time within societies and within religions, and it is this complex relationship between history, society, and religion and the relationship of that complex to the particular subject, to subjective meaning, that will allow us insight into the nature of religion as mediation.

The complex relationship between history, society, and religion has been analyzed in critical sociology since its inception with Compte in the nineteenth century. In the classical sociological terms of Durkheim, religion can be distinguished from society and yet explained by it: religion is social effervescence that functions to bond a community, the glue of the social group. But two other sociological traditions, those of Marx and Weber, have been especially significant in their explanation of and impact on religion. In particular two processes need to be discussed as they impact upon religious action, namely reification and rationalization. Reification is emphasized in a theoretical trajectory beginning with Marx and developing into the Frankfurt School while rationalization is emphasized by Max Weber and Weberian sociology. Traditionally the way these processes have been theorized have been at odds: on the one hand the Marxist trajectory sees religion as the consequence of the social economy and the reification of social and political relationships, on the other hand the Weberian tradition sees religion as directly affecting the social economy through the process of rationalization. The contemporary, global condition of modernity and global capitalism can be seen as the result of these processes. We need therefore to understand the claim that religions mediate the encounter with mystery, firstly in the context of historical process and secondly in the context of subjective meaning.

When understanding religions in terms of historical process there has been a general skepticism towards religion: religion is no mediation of mystery but rather an illusion that keeps us bound and trapped in an unjust world. On this view, religion does not develop from within the real but is rather an ideology imposed upon the real that takes us away from it. Ideology in Karl Marx's sense is “false consciousness” that keeps people entrapped within their social conditions. The counter-argument to religion therefore proceeds from a consideration of reification as a feature of the contemporary human condition, to a consideration of how processes of rationalization have contributed to this reification. The counter, counter-argument is that religions offer alternative conceptualizations or antidotes to reification and provide subjective meanings that cannot be reduced to ideology. This is not simply a normative claim about religion but also a methodological claim about how we understand religions, how any “science of religion” needs to proceed.

In clearing the ground for what follows we need then to discuss firstly the idea of reification, that one of our problems is that we turn ideas into things, and secondly rationalization, that reality can be explained in terms of our reasoning about it. Modern sociology has attempted to explain religion in terms of these processes but in so doing it has missed an important point that religions provide subjective meaning through action. Through action religions mediate the human encounter with the mystery and strangeness of the world.

Reification: The Marxist Legacy

Developing from Hegel, Marx identified alienation as the key experience of the individual in relation to the socio-economic processes in which s/he was born and religion as ideology being instrumental in this alienation. For Hegel, alienation was the Spirit departing from itself (from the condition of “being in itself” to the condition of “being for itself”), moving through the historical process, through the stages of art, religion, and philosophy, to its final self-realization as the “in and for itself” at the end of history. Religion in this view is part of the manifestation of the Spirit. Marx famously reversed this idea claiming that religion was not a manifestation of Spirit, an idealist position, but rather a product of matter. Religion, along with ethics and traditional German metaphysics, was a representation of material reality, but a false representation that was mistakenly taken to be real. To overcome alienation we must give up religion as people's illusory happiness in order to establish the conditions for real happiness, which is to abandon the condition which needs illusions. Some of Marx's best “sound bites” concern religion: it is “the sigh of the oppressed creature” and “the opium of the people.”³ Religion does not speak from the real but on the contrary is an illusion or ideology that he defined as false consciousness. Indeed, religion is the opiate of the people that gives us succor but in the end keeps us deluded, in slavish thrall to the capitalist industrial machine. This is a familiar story which develops into the twentieth century Marxism of Lukács, Gramsci, Mannheim, and the Frankfurt School.⁴

The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács developed the thesis that there is a disjunction between experience and social reality that needed to be resolved. In an early work, The Theory of the Novel, the self is alienated or estranged from the world and experiences life as fragmented; in its reflecting on the world, the “I” creates an image of itself and sees the world not objectively, but purely as a broken reflection. This “elevation of interiority” fragments the subject and creates a disjunction between self and world.⁵ Lukács identifies the human need for meaning but because he accepts the Marxist critique of religion, this meaning cannot be located in any transcendence and nor can it be found in the current, modern conditions of the subject whose relationship to the world is dissociated.

The retreat into metaphysics cannot give us real meaning because the retreat from the material world is illusory. Drawing not only from Hegel but embedded within a neo-Kantian tradition that has privileged the subject of knowledge, the central problem Lukács deals with is the relation of subjectivity to history or of the human s...