Individualized Religion

Practitioners and their Communities

Claire Wanless

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350234123
• eBook ISBN: 9781350182523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on ethnographic research, this book explores individualized religion in and around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Claire Wanless demonstrates that counter to the claims of secularization theorists, the combination of informal structures and practices can provide a viable basis for socially significant religious activity that can sustain itself.
The subjects of this research claim a variety of religious identities and practices, and are suspicious of religious institutions, hierarchies, rules and dogmas. Yet they participate actively in an overlapping and cross-linking informal network of practice communities and other associations. Their engagements propagate and sustain a core ideology that prioritizes subjectivity, locates authority at the level of the individual, and also predicates itself on ideals of sharing, mutuality and community.
Providing a new theory of religious association, this book is a nuanced counterpoint to the secularization thesis in the UK and points the way to new research on individual religion.

1

Introduction

Alongside the apparent decline of traditional religious institutions in Britain, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of more personal (and personalized) forms of religious expression. Despite this, individualized religion as a phenomenon in its own right remains under-researched and poorly understood. At the same time, however, individualized religion has received what might be regarded as something of a bad press, both in the academic literature and in wider discourse. Much (though not all) of the writing about individualized religion tends to the view that such forms of religion are structurally self-defeating, or trivial, or both. Because these deficiencies are often cited as contributing to the overall decline of religion in the UK and other Western societies, it would seem imperative to improve our understanding of this milieu. The main purpose of the research on which this book is based was therefore to provide both empirical evidence and theoretical tools to aid the study of individualized religion, and to inform ongoing debates about its place in the wider religious landscape.

It is worth beginning by establishing the sense in which I am using certain key terms. First, following what has become fairly common practice, I do not attempt to define what I mean by the term ‘religion’, but instead use it as a kind of family-resemblance term to denote activities, ideas and practices that look something like a common-sense understanding of what religion entails. Specifically, I am using it to relate both to such activity when undertaken in a group or organizational setting and when undertaken individually. It is worth noting that this is a more inclusive usage of the word than would be common among my research participants since many of them would use ‘religion’ to refer to religion specifically as it is understood and practised within (usually but not always Christian) institutions. I refer to this latter, narrower concept of religion as ‘institutionalized religion’, or Christianity. I adopt this wider terminology because unlike my participants (who for the most part want to make their own practice as distinct as possible from an institutional milieu that they tend to mistrust), I want to avoid prejudging the existence of any distinction between institutionalized religion and individualized religion beyond the structural differences arising from their respective levels of individualization.

In this book, I use ‘individualized religion’ to pick out the kind of religious activity in which the individual and their personal experience are the primary unit of consideration and site of decision making. Many authors have identified an increase in the predominance of this kind of practice, but among the most influential has been Paul Heelas, whose terminology evolved from ‘self-spirituality’ to ‘inner-life spirituality’ (Heelas, 1996, 27, 33), and then later with Linda Woodhead to ‘subjective-life spirituality’ with its additional connotations of a contemporary subjective turn in the ways that religion is practised and organized (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005, 2–7). Grace Davie’s concept of ‘believing without belonging’ also invokes a shift towards greater personal direction by people over the ways in which religion plays out in their lives (Davie, 1994, 107). For Steve Bruce, it is in part the individualization of religious institutions that has led to their ongoing decline in social significance (Bruce, 2003, 61). All these, and the many other formulations of religion as individualized, carry their own contexts and connotations. To chart a way through I have settled on a formulation that allows engagement with each, while allowing for their differences in emphasis. For the purposes of this book, therefore, individualized religion is religion where subjective experience is prioritized, and authority is placed primarily at the level of the individual practitioner. The prioritization of subjective experience speaks to a placing of how things appear to the individual practitioner as above how others tell them things are. The positioning of authority at the level of the individual then affords the practitioner the right to act on their religious impulse in ways they see fit rather than in ways that others tell them are correct or appropriate. While both of these can be seen as important by practitioners, neither of them is a binary. It is possible, therefore, to conceive of a spectrum of individualization, with any particular instance of religious practice being individualized to the extent that it prioritizes subjectivity and places authority at the level of the individual.

One further point to note here is that, when talking about individualized religion, there are two ways in which the term may be used. First, it could be used in a static sense, simply as an indicator of activity that fits the conditions discussed above, to whatever degree. Alternatively, it could be used in a dynamic sense to describe a process whereby pre-existing religious forms or institutions become more individualized than hitherto. Both of these senses are important, and both are used in this book. However, it is important to bear in mind with respect to questions about (for example) how individualization of religion affects its functional viability, that the answer may not be the same in each case, since the assumptions underlying the initial status matter. As we shall see later on, when discussing arguments around secularization theory, this distinction is key.

This book, then, has two primary aims. The first is to elucidate the concept and phenomenon of individualized religion. In doing so, it reports on my ethnographic research on individualized religious practitioners in and around Hebden Bridge (a former textile town in West Yorkshire, northern England), and utilizes data and theory derived from that research. However, the book also engages with the specific question of the social significance, functional viability and transmissibility of individualized religion, with particular respect to its treatment in discussions around secularization. Examining in detail the theory behind the use of notions of individualized religion in these debates not only helps advance those discussions but also sheds new light on individualized religion as a phenomenon in its own right.

Before I set out the overall argument of the book and summarize the chapter structure, I shall therefore begin by briefly setting out my arguments with respect to secularization and secularization theory. Note that my aim here is not to provide a counterargument to the secularization thesis, but to add nuance to the debate by showing how emergent forms of religiosity with radically different logics of organization may have the functional capability to have social significance and to transmit themselves over time.

Is individualization a secularizing phenomenon?

The details and emphases of the various arguments behind the secularization thesis are complex (see Chapter 2), but the vi ew that individualized and non-institutionalized forms of religion are structurally unsuited to social significance and to transmission is a common theme. Among the most rigorously argued cases for this is that put forward by Steve Bruce in his 2011 work Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Bruce, 2011, 112–19). Bruce argues that as religion becomes more individualized, it becomes harder to maintain commitment, since there is no ‘external power that the group can mobilize to press the weaker members to do what is right’ (Bruce, 2011, 114). Consensus becomes difficult to maintain without recourse to coercion, which means that the movement cannot work together successfully (Bruce, 2011, 114). The eclecticism of the individualized milieu leads to a lack of cohesion in which elements of religions become removed from their spiritual content, co-opted and trivialized (Bruce, 2011, 116–17). And finally, because there is no commonly accepted set of religious truths, there is no inherent impetus to evangelize (Bruce, 2011, 117–18). Bruce argues that these structural features are inherent to individualized religion precisely because of its individualized status, and that they tend to mitigate both against socially significant practice and against transmission (especially intergenerational transmission) (Bruce, 2011, 19, 117–18).

This argument is proximally framed with respect to moves towards individualization of formerly less individualized religious institutions. This is because it is primarily intended as part of an analysis of how religious institutions and edifices in Britain have lost social significance and the ability to transmit themselves over time. To that extent Bruce’s argument is not only sound but compelling, and I agree with him that in this sense individualization is likely a secularizing phenomenon. The reason that it works for such cases is because they concern institutions whose existence is bound up with their respective institutional identities, structures and truths. When such an entity opens up, and allows its members freer rein to develop their own behaviours and ideas, then it does indeed seem plausible that the consequent challenge both to the institution and to the culture and truths that it maintains could be profound, even perhaps existential. Bruce’s analysis therefore serves as a very good explanation of how and why religious institutions have lost their social significance and their ability to transmit their ideas and practices over generations in the UK and similar societies. As he rightly argues (e.g. Bruce, 2011, 47–8), such institutions will find it difficult to contain increasing numbers of adherents who see their involvement in more individualized terms without challenge to the organizational structures, and consequently their capability to act as institutions or to self-sustain. However, Bruce makes it clear that he intends this argument to also apply to individualized religion more broadly, including the more static sense of cases of religious activity predicated on individualized structures. Even in such cases, he regards the epistemic individualism that underpins individualized religion as ultimately undermining of its ability to sustain itself over time (Bruce, 2011, 113, 119). I find this usage of the analysis more problematic, because it misses the very real likelihood that social significance and onward transmission of individualized religion outside of and independent to traditional institutions might occur in very different, more individualized, ways and be predicated on different, more subjectivized, social and cultural forms.

The basic underlying incompatibility here is between activity that prioritizes subjectivity and institutions that predicate themselves on claims to objectivity. By ‘prioritizing subjectivity’, here, I mean activity that affords primacy to subjective points of view. By ‘claims to objectivity’ I mean acceptance of an internally accepted objective religious viewpoint that is best known to, and promulgated by, key institutional authorities and that is given precedence over subjectively held views. Individualized religion, by my definition, prioritizes subjectivity and takes the individual as a prime location of religious authority. In this milieu, how things seem to individuals is of prime importance, even if others disagree. Traditional religious institutions on the other hand commonly (though not universally) predicate themselves on internally recognized objective religious truths in the form of dogmas, doctrines and accepted practices. They then also tend to contain institutional structures, ideologies and agents that act as holders of religious authority and that can (in theory at least) override an individual’s view. All of these would be (and are) undermined by moves towards greater levels of individualization. However, if individualized religion is to be taken seriously as a religious structural form, it must be acknowledged that those involved in it will do things in ways that make sense to them. If an individualized religious milieu were to exist that could have social significance and sustain itself and its ideas and practices over time, this clearly would be done in ways that also prioritize subjectivity and place authority at the level of the individual. Institutions and forms such as those of institutionalized religion would not be able to maintain themselves over time, but this would likely matter neither to practitioners nor to the survival of the milieu. A primary goal of the ethnographic investigation on which this book is based was to investigate whether feasible routes for this to take place might exist, both in theory and in practice.

It is important to recognize, however, that religion does not necessarily sharply divide itself into institutional and individualized forms. By contrast, practitioners may involve themselves in institutions while also maintaining more individualized aspects to their practice, and most religious contexts would be expected to have a rich and complex combination of subjective and objective aspects. Adherents therefore likely negotiate between subjectivity and objectivity in multiple and sometimes inconsistent ways. My ethnographic focus on practitioners that have a strong emphasis on subjectivity is in part a heuristic device intended to shine a light on these complex relationships more widely.

It will be useful here to examine Bruce’s specific sub-arguments with respect to commitment, consensus, cohesion and evangelization in more detail, providing suggestions as to what alternative potential routes to social significance and mechanisms of transmission may be available to practitioners operating in an individualized milieu. First, Bruce argues that increasing levels of individualism lead to increasing difficulties for an ideological movement in extracting commitment from adherents (Bruce, 2011, 114). The sense is that if people do not feel that there is some external driver to instil commitment, adherents will be less likely to put the effort in that is required to keep the movement running. While this argument does make sense, it does so for a movement that is coterminous with a specific set of institutional or community structures, to the extent that if they fail the movement itself could also be said to have failed. However, if a movement is structured along individualized lines, then its members’ commitment will be to the values and ideas that they perceive as important, and not to specific social or institutional structures. Any commitment that a member will have to groups or their proximal goals will likely take the form of direct commitment to those goals, to the higher purpose of the movement as that member perceives it, and to personal relationships with other group members. Groups and other social structures of various kinds might well be used by such individuals in order to engage and work together, but in themselves would be relatively expendable. If an individual were to cease to find a social structure conducive to the aim to which that individual is committed, or if s/he had personal difficulties with other group members, then that individual might well be likely to move away from that group. Enough people moving away might even mean the end of the group. But crucially, this need not constitute the end of the movement, since those individuals would be free and potentially willing to create new replacement groups built on the lessons of what has gone before. An alternative model of commitment that might therefore exist in an individualized milieu is one in which commitment is not to institutions or specific structures, but to ideologies, goals and personal relationships. Commitment to any kind of structure of engagement is likely to be temporary and contingent on its utility as perceived by its individual members, and to transfer readily to any successor structures. Commitment is not something that is instigated into adherents by officers in spite of the adherents’ personal proclivities, but instead is something that arises from those adherents’ personal proclivities. Crucially, in this context, people’s ability to work together, and therefore have social significance on a large scale, can transcend both the life and the extent of any particular group structure.

Bruce’s arguments about consensus and cohesion (Bruce, 2011, 114–17) are subject to critique on similar grounds. He argues that consensus equates to group discipline (i.e. acquiescence to a movement’s claims of objective knowledge), and is broadly something to be engineered through the control of members (through coercion, inspiration or manipulation). In individualized contexts, inability to wield such control successfully arises from the freedom of the individual to decide for themselves what to think and how to behave, and especially their perceived freedom to leave the group at will. Bruce argues that this leads to an inherent weakness in the movement, which is ultimately likely to lead to its failure. He does acknowledge that individualized religion tends to form different kinds of structures, and indeed suggests a pattern of serial and changing memberships (Bruce, 2011, 115). However, because he is identifying socially significant religious movements with functioning institutions, he sees this as a sign of social ineffectiveness (Bruce, 2011, 115–16). But far from being a weakness, this kind of social engagement can in fact be a strength, since it allows for a community as a whole to be more flexible and responsive in its thinking and its activities. Consensus in this context can arise not from acquiescence to a set of objective religious truths, but from a shared ongoing sense of negotiation that uses a range of tools to create a common ground of values, core ideas and relationships. These tools can include (for example) the use of ambiguity and vagueness, acceptance of contradiction, acceptance of contingency, use of shared non-verbal experiences and a focus on shared proximal goals. Arguably this common ground is what more accurately defines the boundaries of the movement – although its own flexible and crowd-sourced nature suggests that these boundaries are likely to be fuzzy, open and diffuse. Social and institutional structures may rise and fall within this common ground, but the potential social strength of the movement as an ongoing cooperative entity likely depends not on the continued existence of those groups but on the life course of the common ground of shared values, ideas and relationships.

Similarly, Bruce’s argument about cohesion (Bruce, 2011, 116–17) suggests that in the absence of external authorities, religious elements (such as meditation) can become divorced from their religious underpinnings, and that they are then likely to become trivialized. This constitutes a claim that eclecticism tends to lead to religious dead-ends. However, the levels and multiplicities of engagement that the current research shows are open to individualized religious practitioners indicates that, far from inhabiting dead-ends of trivialism, practitioners are able to use religious elements in numerous novel ways, and in effect create a relatively fertile environment of experimentation and productive discourse and praxis. There is therefore every possibility of significant religious strands emerging and/or sustaining themselves over time. Lack of cohesion is not a weakness of individualized religion with respect to its religious and social sign...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theorizing individualized religion
• 3 A community of incomers
• 4 A diversity of practice
• 5 Individuals and their practice
• 6 Individuals in community
• 7 The importance of individualized religion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright