Religion: The Basics

Malory Nye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134059461
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

From the local to the global level, religion is – more than ever – an important and hotly debated part of modern life in the twenty-first century.

From silver rings to ringtones and from clubs to headscarves, we often find the cultural role and discussion of religion in unexpected ways.

Now in its second edition, Religion: The Basics remains the best introduction to religion and contemporary culture available. The new edition has been fully revised and updated, and includes new discussions of:

• the study of religion and culture in the twenty-first century
• texts, films and rituals
• cognitive approaches to religion
• globalization and multiculturalism
• spirituality in the West
• popular religion.

With new case studies, linking cultural theory to real world religious experience and practice, and guides to further reading, Religion: The Basics is an essential buy for students wanting to get to grips with this hotly debated topic.

1
RELIGION

Some basics

The first defining moment of the twenty-first century occurred at around 9 am in New York on 11 September 2001. The shocking and unforgettable images of this world-changing event brought to us the nightmares of the modern world. Jet airplanes and tall steel and glass skyscrapers are key images of the modernity in which we all live. Through the instant media technologies of mobile cameras and satellite-relay, we were able to watch the horrific event as it happened. This modernity does, though, have within it many surprises: not only in the terrible scale of the mass murder, but also because of the motivations and cultural factors leading to the event. In the years since 9/11, it has become clear that religion is part and parcel of the unfolding of twenty-first-century history.

The contemporary world is shaped by religions: the ‘war on terror’, intelligent design, abortion clinic killings, Waco, conflicts and wars in the Middle East, India, former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, the Jonestown mass suicides, environmental summits, peace demonstrations—the list goes on. Hardly a day goes by when there is not some manifestation of religion (religious identity, religious practice, religious conflict) reported on the TV or in newspapers. To understand the contemporary world, as well as the past, we need a sophisticated understanding of religion.

This book is not specifically about any particular religious tradition (such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism), nor is it about any particular conflict or religious issue shaping our modern world. In this book I will seek to give some sense of how we can begin to understand the complexities of religious traditions, and how they shape (and are shaped by) cultures and events. Regardless of what our own religious perspective may be—whether we are not religious at all, profoundly faithful, or somewhere between the two—we need to recognise that in this contemporary world, religion does count. Religion and religions have an impact in both small and significant ways on the world today.

Our starting point for exploring this is to introduce the approach I will be using throughout this book. This approach is based on a simple but profound point: that what we call ‘religion’ is something that humans do, and so the study of religion is primarily concerned with people and cultures.

THE BASICS: RELIGION AND CULTURE

There can be no denying that the term ‘religion’ is complicated, and it is often taken to refer to a number of different concepts and practices. I will be leaving till later in this chapter a discussion of some of the problems of trying to define exactly what we mean by the term ‘religion’. For many, there is a clear idea that religion is something that involves going to church (or some other religious centre), reading and reflecting on certain sacred texts, believing and having faith, performing certain ritual practices, and (/or) living one’s life in a certain way. It is the case that religion often involves some or all of these things, but we also need to recognise that it can (and often does) involve a lot more. When we look at religion cross-culturally—in different contexts and societies across the globe—religion very often impacts on all levels of life, at both the individual and social level.

It is for this reason that we can talk about religion and culture. In many ways we can regard both of these as separate and distinct, but they also overlap and have an impact on each other. The culture in which a person lives is strongly influenced by the predominant religion (or religions) of their society. And similarly, the religion that a person practises will always be influenced by their cultural context and location.

This is why the approach I am introducing in this book can be described as the study of religion and culture. At the heart of this is the assumption that when we study religion, we should try not to analyse it as something abstract and set aside. Major religious traditions in the world (such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and others) do encourage practitioners to reflect on and engage with abstract and supra-mundane aspects of reality (for example, concepts of a god or gods). Indeed, we may find that practitioners of religions may consider the abstract and transcendent issues to be the most central aspects of their religion.

However, in all cultural contexts across the world, religion is integral to other aspects of cultural activity. Religion is what people do on a day-to-day level. To put this in another way, religion is nearly always both a set of ideas and beliefs that people can engage with (to some extent or other), and also the framework for their lived experiences and daily practices. The study of religion and culture therefore is about understanding how religion may be an important element of how people across the world may manifest their differences.

In this sense, the study of religion is comparative, or more accurately the study of religion is cross-cultural looking at religions across a range of different cultures. We should expect to look at more than one religious tradition (for example, the study of religion is not simply a study of Christianity), and we must also build into our approach a viewpoint that takes in the diversity of cultural locations across the world. It may be obvious to expect to find cultural differences if one looks at Christianity (in Europe), Islam (in the Arab world), and Buddhism (in China or Tibet). But any study of a particular religion will also need to be cross-cultural. For example, there are different cultural forms of Christianity (in the USA, in Latin America, in Poland, etc.), just as experiences of Islam in Saudi Arabia can be quite different to experiences of Islam in Malaysia, or Nigeria, or Scotland. Therefore, this study of religion and culture is about looking at cultural and religious diversity, in different parts of the world, as well as close to home in our own cultural location. It is about exploring how current and historical events are shaped by practices and influences that could be labelled ‘religious’, and how much of what we see and do is affected by such religiosity.

A common starting point in the study of religion can often be the search for ‘ultimate’ truths or answers. I will not risk disappointing the reader any further by stating clearly at this point that I will not be looking at such issues in this book. Some contemporary scholars have a keen interest in examining religions on a cross-cultural basis to discover which religion (from their view-point) has the best or most authentic truth. Very often such a search can be conducted from a pre-determined starting point, from a particular religious perspective (whether Christian, Muslim, or any other)—with the cross-cultural comparison perhaps being used to demonstrate the particularity and uniqueness of that religion. I will not be doing this here. Liberation, salvation, morality, belief, and many other such key concepts may be issues we wish to explore when we are studying religion, but we can speculate ad infinitum as to which set of ideas is closer to the ‘truth’. On a personal basis, we might prefer certain ideas and perspectives to others, but then we may all differ as to which viewpoint we think is actually ‘true’.

Many (not all) religions are practised in a way that presumes a reality beyond humans such as gods, deities, supernaturalism. But scholars have to adopt in their approach an element of academic neutrality in this area. Indeed this may also require an element of scholarly ‘agnosticism’, by recognising that in these studies we should only claim competence in the field of experience which is known: the human world. This is not to argue that there is no ‘supernatural’ or spiritual reality beyond this, but rather that there are plenty of other interesting things to learn and think about religion without presuming (or refuting) this alternative reality.

This is not a god-centred or faith-centred approach (theology); we are not looking for answers to questions about whether or not god (one or more) exists and what she or he is like. Instead it is a human-centred approach: the study of religion as a human practice, a type of activity that appears to be integral to humans. This is not to say that such human practices of religion are exclusively human creations: the cultural forms of religion that we can study may or may not be ‘divinely inspired’. And indeed many people practise their religions because they assume that they are divinely created. However, the exploration of whether there is a reality to such assumptions is the preserve of theologians, and the study of religion on such a religious (faith-centred) basis is called theology. In contrast, the focus of this book is the much broader cultural study of religion. The religious life is the cultural life, one’s religion (whether one pursues it fervently, indifferently, or in any other way) only emerges from one’s culture. From a distinctly human-centred perspective one cannot fully distinguish religion and culture.

RELIGION AND CULTURE

There are many approaches that could be included in this cultural study of religion. A central part of these relies on the idea that human beings differ from each other along broad lines, particularly in terms of differences of personality and culture. Generally it has been psychologists who have looked at personality, whilst it has been sociologists and anthropologists who have looked at culture. Even so, the way in which one lives one’s personality is bound up with one’s culture, and the way in which a person embodies and lives their culture depends, of course, on their individual or particular personality.

At the beginning of the twentieth century most scholars looked at personality as a reason for the existence of religion. Making some very broad assumptions that religion was purely a matter of believing in some spiritual entity, writers tried to explain religion as part of the process by which individuals either thought through ideas in a semi-rational way, or tried to come to terms with the emotional and psychic legacy of their childhoods.

The most famous of these thinkers was probably Sigmund Freud (1990a[1918]), who controversially proposed that religion is a misguided and unhealthy outcome of the problems inherent in a young boy working through, on an individual basis, his relationship with his father. But Freud ignored his own particularly cultural assumptions in putting forward such a theory. That is, his ideas about how humans become religious depended on ideas of behaviour specific to his particular culture. They also relied very heavily on a view which assumed all religions were similar to Christianity and Judaism. Freud made the assumption that religion is derived from the boy’s psychological process of making up a heavenly father-figure called god to compensate for relations with his own father. This simply does not apply to those non-Christian traditions that don’t image god as a father figure, or don’t even image god at all.

If personality has a place in understanding religion, that personality is itself culturally dependent in many ways. To extend the Freudian example a little further, the father-son relationship is something that we all take for granted. It is seemingly biologically defined, and although there are many different ways of being both a father and a son, we are surrounded by images of what an ideal father should be. But consider for a moment that in different cultural groups fatherhood can take different forms. Indeed the idea of fatherhood can change over time even in the ‘same’ culture. What is now expected of a father in Britain in the early twenty-first century is very different from what was expected in Freud’s late-nineteenth-century Austria. Although, we assume, biological fatherhood is the same everywhere, there are great cultural variations on what fatherhood is taken to be about.

This digression into the area of parenthood is simply to suggest that culture, and cultural difference, is a crucially important factor if we want to try to understand religion. Our assumptions are produced by the cultural world in which we live. Thus our culture gives us a worldview, a means of seeing and understanding the world, by which we live, and which may be radically different from those held by people living in cultures different to our own. Although as individuals we may interpret, live with, and reconstruct that world view in a way that suits our own personality and needs, we can never fully escape the parameters of our own particular culture.

What, then, do we mean when we talk of culture? And with respect to the subject of religion, where does culture end and religion begin? What is the difference between the two? Particular religions are shaped by particular cultures, and of course the same occurs the other way round—most cultures are largely shaped by their dominant religions. To take an example of this, many people understand the concept of Christianity from their own particular perspective. If I was a Christian in a particular place (for example, a Southern Baptist in the US), then my frame of reference for all Christians and Christian practice would be from this viewpoint. However, we can see from the contemporary world, and from history, that there have been many different manifestations of Christianity in many different cultural contexts: such as in medieval Europe, Viking Norse settlements at the end of the first millennium, and native (Indian) Catholics in contemporary South America, to name a few examples out of many. No one would suggest that all these forms of Christianity are the same—the experiences of being a Christian in each of these contexts are extremely different, at the level of language, dress, lifestyle, and many other areas of daily practice.

Thus Southern Baptists in contemporary America practise a form of Christianity embedded within the wider context of English-speaking American cultural life. These churches’ use of television as a central medium for the distribution of information and church life is closely related to the way television has become an essential and very powerful component of broader American cultural life. At the same time, the ‘Bible Belt’ areas of the US, where the Southern Baptists dominate, are also culturally influenced by the Christian values of the church: from the strict ethical code on heterosexual monogamy, to the emphasis on personal achievement and success as means of demonstrating one’s moral and social character. Thus the religion strongly influences the culture, and the culture is itself the medium through which the religion is experienced and practised. In other words, the ‘religion’ is not some free-floating thing that exists outside of the cultural setting; to understand it we must also understand that context.

RELIGION AND RELIGIONS

This now leads us to the fundamental question that I raised earlier, of what do we mean when we use the term ‘religion’? What is the term referring to? The answer to this is not straightforward, since—as a starting point—the term works on a number of different levels. That is, we can consider the following four statements:

• Statement 1: ‘religion is an aspect of most cultures’
• Statement 2: ‘Buddhism is an important religion in Tibet’
• Statement 3: ‘a mosque is a religious building for Muslims’
• Statement 4: ‘meditation is a religious action’

The first two statements use the term religion as a noun, although in two different ways. That is, we move from talking of ‘religion’ in statement 1 to ‘religions’ in statement 2. The third statement uses the concept of religion as an aspect of something else, that is as an adjective for a type of building (a mosque, which is a religious building). The fourth use is specific to a type of action—meditation, which some may consider to be a type of religious practice.

These differences are expressed in Table 1.1, which maps out the different uses of the term into noun, adjective, and also possibly as a verb. In the table we move through the idea of religion as: i) a common and quite general aspect of humanity (found in most, and maybe all cultures), through to ii) specific religions (particular traditions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, on so on), and then on to the term as a descriptor of something—whether it be iii) adjectival or iv) as a verb. The last column, referring to ‘religioning’ is perhaps an unusual way of talking about the subject area, but it indicates an element of religious practice that we will come back to later in this book—that religion is something that is often done in practice. Hence, we could suggest that when a person practises their religion (whether through meditation, prayer, or through their daily life routine), they are doing a practice called ‘religioning’.

RELIGIONS: PARTICULAR TRADITIONS

From these meanings, we will take the second use of the term religion-as-a-noun, that is, to refer to the category of religion that describes particular traditions, such as Buddhism or Christianity.

Table 1.1 Religion, religions, religious and religioning

To start off doing this, though, we can often see an element of confusion between this use of the term and the first use. That is, particular religions may often be conflated with a singular concept of religion as a universal. Or, to put this another way, what we understand the universal experience of religion to be is often shaped by our own particular religion. Thus, as Morton Klass points out, the fictional Parson Thwackum (an Englishman) was of the opinion:

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.

(From Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, quoted in Klass 1995: 17)

From this perspective what everybody else has is not ‘religion’, or at least what they have is only considered to be religion if it looks like his own experience of religion.

Of course, this is not a very useful starting point; we cannot assume that the experience and practice of religion in different parts of the world, and in different historical times, will be similar to our own. Instead we have to be prepared to learn how to apply and adapt our concept of religion into these other contexts. And we must be ready for the possibility that our concepts and expectations of what religion is may not fit.

We therefore need to break down the concept of religion (as general) into religions (as specific traditions), and so it is of course very common to talk of a number of different religions in the world. So, for example, there are Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, each of which is distinct. A very influential way of describing such differences is called the ‘world religions’ paradigm. This approach looks at discrete, bounded religions—each different from the others—as the basis for making sense of the vast range of religious practices in the world. Thus, scholars have learnt to talk about particular world religions—Christianity, Buddhism, etc.—which exist as bounded blocs of humanity.

I will explore below some of the problems with this world religions approach. But first, what is this approach saying? In particular, what is it that makes particular religions different? In most discussions of distinct world religions, the differences are primarily . framed in terms of each religion having certain characteristics, which can be clustered in particular areas:

• major texts (sacred books)
• foundational ideas, ‘beliefs’, and worldviews
• particular histories and leaders
• and very often a sense of having a distinct ide...