Religion in the Contemporary World

A Sociological Introduction

Alan Aldridge

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665146
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

In the new edition of this widely praised text, Alan Aldridge examines the complex realities of religious belief, practice and institutions. Religion is a powerful and controversial force in the contemporary world, even in supposedly secular societies. Almost all societies seek to cultivate religions and faith communities as sources of social stability and engines of social progress. They also try to combat real and imagined abuses and excess, regulating cults that brainwash vulnerable people, containing fundamentalism that threatens democracy and the progress of science, and identifying terrorists who threaten atrocities in the name of religion.

The third edition has been carefully revised to make sure it is fully up to date with recent developments and debates. Major themes in the revised edition include the recently erupted 'culture war' between progressive secularists and conservative believers, the diverse manifestations of 'fundamentalism' and their impact on the wider society, new individual forms of religious expression in opposition to traditional structures of authority, and the backlash against 'multiculturalism' with its controversial implications for the social integration of ethnic and religious minority communities.

Impressive in its scholarly analysis of a vibrant and challenging aspect of human societies, the third edition will appeal strongly to students taking courses in the sociology of religion and religious studies, as well as to everyone interested in the place of religion in the contemporary world.

1

Defining Religion: Social Conflicts and Sociological Debates

Invited to declare their religion in their country’s 2001 national census, thousands of people in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom gave the answer ‘Jedi’ or ‘Jedi Knight’, after the characters in Star Wars. Many did so in the mistaken belief that, if enough people gave the same answer, their government would be forced to recognize Jediism as an official religion.

Asking questions about religion is notoriously sensitive, particularly in a national census, participation in which is a legal requirement on all citizens. Countries that include a question on religion in their census have therefore usually made the question voluntary, whereas all the other questions are compulsory. When people give presumably facetious answers, such as professing to be Jedi Knights, the authorities simply ignore it. Given the sensitivities and possible constitutional objections to asking about religion, many countries heave ceased to include religious questions in the census. France abandoned the practice after 1872, and the US Census Bureau did so after 1936. No other census topic, not even ethnicity or race, has been so controversial as religion.

In the United Kingdom, secularist organizations, notably the British Humanist Association (www.humanism.org.uk/) and the National Secular Society (www.secularism.org.uk/), argued that the 2001 census greatly overestimated the number of people who have a religious faith. According to them, the question, ‘What is your religion?’ is misleading, since it measures cultural identity rather than active religious faith. Yet, they argue, the government uses the inflated results – 72 per cent said they were Christian, and only 15 per cent said they had no religion – to justify the privileges enjoyed by religious organizations and the support they receive from the state, including the controversial state funding of faith schools. In the run-up to the 2011 census, people were urged not to say they were Christians merely because that was the faith of their parents. The British Humanist Association’s campaign slogan was originally, ‘If you’re not religious, for God’s sake say so!’, but this was judged to be potentially offensive, so the ironic reference to God was subsequently removed.

But is the contrast between active faith and cultural identity as sharp as the secularists maintain? Is cultural identity to be dismissed as merely a nominal allegiance? Defending its own use of the question, ‘What is your religion?’, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (www.abs.gov.au/) points out that religious organizations are major providers of services in schooling, health, community support and care for older people. This is so, one might add, in a country that is often identified as one of the most secular in the world. Many people access these services on the basis of their religious identity. Across the world, countless ‘nominal’ Christians send their children to Christian schools. Members of other faiths frequently choose a Christian school in preference to a secular one. If Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims and others aspire to faith schools of their own, it does not make them activists, still less fundamentalists.

Controversies about census questions on religion involve critical issues of religious identity and affiliation, and the relationship between religion and the state. They invite the crucial question: ‘How are we to define religion?’ One answer might be to determine the origin of the word. The first step is easy: ‘religion’ derives from the Latin word religio. But that simply invites the further question: what is the derivation of religio?

The answer to that question has always been problematic. Among the various suggestions offered over 2,000 years of scholarly debate, two stand out (Schott 2008: 105; King 1999: 35–41). The great orator Cicero (106–43 BCE) said that religio derived from relegere, meaning ‘to read again’ or ‘to retrace’. Religion involves retracing, studying, cultivating and transmitting the customs, practices and traditions of one’s ancestors. Cicero’s view is a classic expression of the perspective of the pre-Christian Roman Republic and subsequent early Empire. Religion implies cultural identity, so religion and culture are inseparable. The implication is pluralistic: every society has its own culture, and hence its own religion. The wise course is to tolerate other people’s religion, and to demand that they respect your own.

Against this interpretation, the Christian convert Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century CE, argued that religio derived from religare, meaning ‘to bind again’. Religion involves bonds of piety and devotion that tie human beings to God. Religion implies active faith. Religion and culture are not inseparable, as they were for Cicero. Religion is the transcendence of culture. True religion, which to Lactantius meant the Christian faith, puts fallen humanity into communion with God. It does not tolerate superstitious practices and false gods.

Relegere or religare: the choice is not neutral, but defines what religion really is. Any attempt to define religion is an act of power, and all definitions provoke counter-definitions. Academics, politicians, lawyers, religious leaders and their followers: all have an interest in how religion is defined.

Debates about the definition of religion carry ethical and political implications for society and for people of all faiths and none. At stake is not just the definition of religion, but the distinction between good and bad, and authentic and bogus. We can see this in the strongly pejorative tone of much of our vocabulary about other people’s religion: sects, cults, brainwashing, mind control, fanaticism, fundamentalism.

Failure to agree on a definition of religion is an inescapable social fact. Instead of deploring the failure, we should analyse it. This requires us to focus on the particular: not religion in the abstract, but this movement, these people, in that situation.

We begin with two examples. The first is a movement that has grown rapidly in many countries, but has also been unpopular and controversial: Scientology. The second case, the Baha’i faith, raises no problems in Western liberal democracies, where Baha’is are seen, in so far as they are noticed at all, as tolerant, peace-loving people who value education and give equal rights and status to women and men. In parts of the Muslim world, in contrast, the Baha’is are treated as heretics.

Scientology: authentic religion or imposture?

Scientology grew out of the therapeutic system called Dianetics, which was developed by L. Ron Hubbard and canvassed by him in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, before publication in book form as Dianetics: the modern science of mental health. (For an overview of the development of Scientology and key debates surrounding it, see the articles collected in Lewis 2009.) Dianetics involves a therapeutic relationship between an auditor and the individual – the preclear – undergoing the therapy. The auditor asks a series of questions, and the responses given by the preclear are registered on an E-Meter, a skin galvanometer similar to a lie-detector. From the E-Meter’s readings, the auditor can identify areas of stress caused by engrams, traumatic experiences in early childhood which the preclear has repressed into his or her subconscious reactive mind. The aim of auditing is to release the preclear from the harmful effect of these accumulated engrams by erasing them from the reactive mind, thus enabling the subject to ‘go clear’. A clear enjoys enhanced powers, such as higher IQ, better memory, and improved mental and physical health.

Scientology built a complex cosmological and metaphysical system on the basis of Dianetics. Human beings are in essence spiritual entities, thetans. Immortal, omniscient and omnipotent, thetans created the universe – made up of MEST (Matter, Energy, Space and Time) – but foolishly became trapped in their own creation as they deliberately shed their powers, eventually forgetting their own origins and status as thetans. When a human body dies, the thetan moves to the body of a new-born baby. Thetans have therefore occupied innumerable bodies during the aeons that have elapsed since the creation of MEST. The spiritual technology of Scientology builds ‘The Bridge to Total Freedom’, enabling the thetan to recover its lost powers by elimination of the reactive mind, so that the thetan can be at cause -that is, in complete control of the course of events in its life.

The development of Scientology from Dianetics had two crucial elements. First, Scientology adopted a centralized authority structure. Dianetics had been relatively free and easy: if a particular technique worked for you, fine – the customer was always right. As a result, various practitioners launched independently their own alternative versions of Dianetics, thus threatening Hubbard’s authority. He responded to this by developing a bureaucratic hierarchy and an internal system of discipline, designed to prevent the emergence of rival sources of authority within the movement.

Second, Scientology increasingly defined itself as a religion. Alternative practitioners and their followers were transformed from competitors into heretics. Greater emphasis was given to ritual, ministry, ethics, creed and similarities to the philosophical systems of Asian religions. Hubbard’s writings were and continue to be treated as sacred scripture, and are not to be criticized. Significantly, an esoteric body of doctrine developed around the story of Xenu, dictator of the Galactic Federation 75 million years ago, who dealt with overpopulation in his empire by paralysing billions of his subjects and transporting them to the planet Teegeeack (the Earth), heaping their bodies around volcanoes, and detonating H-bombs. The bodies were vaporized, but the thetans, traumatized, survived. The psychological consequences of this catastrophe, known as Incident II, have been fateful for humanity, and provide profound insights into the human condition. This is dangerous knowledge. It was revealed in 1967, thanks to Ron Hubbard’s heroic ‘plunge’ back through 75 million years. Scientologists do not divulge this knowledge to outsiders, and have to be carefully prepared to receive it, learning it in full only when they are initiated into the advanced status of Operating Thetan Level III (Rothstein 2009).

In its short history, Scientology has been caught up in a series of clashes with the authorities in several countries. An indication of the conflicts to come occurred in 1958, when the US Food and Drug Administration seized, analysed and then destroyed supplies of Dianazene, a compound that Scientology was marketing as effective in preventing and treating radiation sickness (Wallis 1976: 190–1). Dianazene proved to be no more than a straightforward compound of iron, calcium and vitamins.

Publication in Australia in 1965 of the report of a National Board of Inquiry, chaired by Kevin V. Anderson, gave rise to hostile media coverage and government-sponsored investigations into Scientology in many parts of the English-speaking world. Anderson condemned Scientology as an evil system that posed a grave threat to family life and to the mental health of vulnerable people. In the wake of this, the Australian authorities banned the practice of Scientology. In 1968, the UK government decided that foreign nationals would cease to be eligible for admission to the UK to study at or work for Scientology establishments; many were deported.

Throughout these turbulent years, the Church of Scientology continued to affirm its identity as a religion, and frequently took its case to court in an effort to assert its legal rights and to qualify for the tax concessions granted in many countries to recognized religions. One country in which the Church of Scientology has so far failed is Germany (Boyle and Sheen 1997: 312–14). The German authorities regard Scientology as a threat to the democratic principles on which the state was founded after the defeat of Nazism. The Weimar Republic, which collapsed in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor, is judged to have been suicidal. In particular, Weimar politicians were too relaxed about democratic liberties and too indulgent towards undemocratic elements such as the National Socialists who cynically exploited the very freedoms they would then destroy. The Federal Republic is not about to repeat this self-destruction, but will be robust in its own defence. It takes firm measures to prevent what it sees as attempted Scientological infiltration of public agencies and private industry and commerce. Some German companies have dissociated themselves from Scientology, so that their business will not suffer. Scientologists experience widespread discrimination, ostracism and intolerance. Above all, Scientology is denied the status of a religion. The prevailing official view is that Scientology’s religious claims are bogus on two counts. First, they are no more than a smokescreen for the movement’s lucrative commercial activities. Scientology’s therapies are expensive. They are sold to clients who are engaged on a never-ending quest for higher states of being, a process aptly described as ‘the exchange of wealth for status’ (Bainbridge and Stark 1980: 134). Second, Scientology claims to be a religion allegedly in order to secure democratic freedoms that it does not merit and would abuse. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/) produces an annual report covering the following threats to democracy in Germany: right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, Islamic terrorism, terrorism by foreign nationals, espionage, and the activities of Scientology.

These reports contend that, despite professing to be an apolitical body that respects democratic freedoms, Scientology has a sinister agenda. Its long-term goal is to expand its membership and influence in order to achieve a society founded on Scientological principles. Such a society would not hold free and fair elections, would cease to guarantee basic human rights and would discriminate against people who were not Scientologists.

In support of these allegations, the reports quote extensively from Hubbard himself. The implication is that Hubbard’s writings are like Hitler’s Mein Kampf: they reveal what would be in store for Germany if the movement were to achieve power. In response, the Church of Scientology contentiously compares its predicament to that of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and has repeatedly appealed to the United Nations to intervene with the German authorities on its behalf.

Scientology has also had a mixed relationship with academic researchers. On the one hand, Roy Wallis gave graphic accounts of attempts by members of the Church of Scientology to discredit him personally and professionally, and to subvert or suppress his research findings. On the other hand, Scientology has also sought scholarly support for its campaigns for recognition. In 1996 I received, unsolicited, free copies of papers written by 22 distinguished academics.All of them concluded that, like it or not, the Church of Scientology qualifies as a religion.

Baha’i: world faith or apostasy?

The origins of the Baha’i faith lie in a radical religious movement within Shi’a Islam that began in Iran and Iraq in the 1840s under the leadership of the prophet known as the Bab (in English, the Gate). In some respects the Bab is to Baha’is what John the Baptist is to Christians: John prepared the way for Jesus, the Bab prepared the way for Baha’u’llah (a title meaning Glory of God). From the end of the nineteenth century, Baha’is began to spread their faith to the West, gaining converts in the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany. There are now more than six million Baha’is worldwide. (Smith 2008 provides a clear and comprehensive overview of the Baha’i faith.)

Baha’is believe that God has sent a series of prophets with a divine message for humanity appropriate to each stage of human cultural development. These prophets include Adam, Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the Bab and Baha’u’llah; through them, the divine plan has been progressively revealed. The prophet for our own age is Baha’u’llah; his successor is not expected for another thousand years. Baha’is say that the world’s great religions contain prophecies that have been fulfilled in Baha’u’llah and in the Baha’i faith, which is destined to become the major worldwide religion, uniting humanity in a shared theocratic system.

Neither the values nor the activities of Baha’is have caused any problems to Western liberal democracies (McMullen 2000). The faith is peace-loving and law-abiding, opposes superstition and racial prejudice, supports education and science, is committed to environmental protection and sustainable development, upholds family values, and promotes equality of women and men.

In many Islamic countries, by contrast, Baha’is have been seen as heretics, apostates and undercover agents for the Western powers. Persecution of Baha’is has been severe in the country where the faith had its deepest roots: Iran. The Baha’i faith is doctrinally offensive because it does not recognize Muhammad as the final Seal of the Prophets and the Qur’an as the absolute and definitive word of God that has existed for all eternity. In this perspective, Baha’is are apostates; that is, they have wilfully abandoned Islam – the crime of irtidad or ridda. Although the death penalty for apostasy is not mentioned in the Qur’an, it is in the Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet and his companions) and is recognized by Islamic law.

After the overthrow in 1979 of the regime of Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, many Baha’is were arrested, tortured and executed. Their property was confiscated, their institutions closed, and their burial grounds desecrated. These actions had popular support. Baha’is were considered to be not only apostates, but also unpatriotic and...