Worldview Religious Studies

Douglas J Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032150864
• eBook ISBN: 9781000579598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Worldview Religious Studies brings the study of religion, spirituality, secularism, and other mixed attitudes of life under the overarching scheme of worldview studies. This book introduces and defines worldviews more generally before establishing a framework specific to religious studies.

The drive for meaning-making is explored through ritual-symbolic activities, ideas of 'play', and the power of emotions to transform simple ideas into values and beliefs that frame identity and signpost destiny. Identity and its sacralisation are discussed alongside gift/reciprocity theory in their relation to ideas of merit, karma, and salvation in Eastern and Western traditions. This theoretical background is used to introduce a new classification of worldviews - natural, scientific, ancestral, karmic, prophetic-sectarian, mystical, and ideological.

Organised thematically by chapter, this book brings together familiar and unfamiliar authors, theories, and sources to challenge students and teachers of Religious Studies, Theology, and Ethics. It introduces worldview religious studies as a framework through which to re-think human endeavours to identify, cope and even transcend life's flaws and perils.

Part 1
Theories and Perspectives

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242437-2

Worldviews are shared perspectives on life that emerge as the human drive for meaning creates patterns of values, beliefs, and behaviours in response to natural and existential environments. They intensify everyday life experiences through ritual-symbolic events that foster identity and creative living, integrate individuals within society, inform mind-sets and lifestyles, and help people confront and transcend life’s besetting problems, especially death. Worldviews change whether slowly or through rapid revolutionary transformation.

Theory level, thinkers, and typology

Of the many potential academic framings of worldviews in economics, biology, history, law, politics, psychology, or theology, this book follows the interdisciplinary approach of Religious Studies especially drawing from anthropology and sociology, offering a provisional classification of different types of worldviews alongside high-, mid-, and low-range theories and scholars important for Religious Studies.

Thinking generally, high-range theories might include big-bang theory in cosmology, evolution in biology, continental drift in geology, the unconscious dynamics of mind in psychoanalysis, and plausibility theory in sociology, Gaia theory, and global warming in environmental studies, and Dialectical Materialism in Marxism. As for worldviews, high-level theories map how the world makes sense, how mid-range ideas spell that out, and low-range theories bring finer nuance. High-range perspectives are notable in small-scale societies and in mass populations with ideologically strong political leadership, e.g. Russia or China, but there we can also find small groups with their own worldviews existing in tension with the state, as with Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, or some Muslim groups in China. For teaching worldviews as part of Religious Studies, some speak of Big Ideas as a guiding framework, and this is reflected here in chapters two to five (Christopher, 2020:197).

Ecology and Environmentalism is fast becoming a worldview of its own while, in today’s Britain, the National Health Service (NHS) might qualify as either a dominant worldview or as a mid-range expression of the Welfare State. Certainly, there is research on the rise of welfare and health systems and a corresponding decline of formal religious adherence in modern societies (Granqvist, 2020:304–19). Mid-range theories include the sacralisation of identity in sociology, attachment theory in psychology, reciprocity theory, and rites of passage in anthropology. Amongst low-range theories we might include theories of conspiracy, embodiment, and cultural intensification. Theories of music also play an enormous part in relation to most worldviews and rituals in general (Spitzer, 2021), to death (Partridge, 2015), and to the inspiration of performers who influence millions (Bostridge, 2015). So, high-, mid-, and low-range theories concern their level of abstraction and not their worth. In this book, they reflect different academic disciplines, methods of analysis, and their subject matter, showing the interdisciplinary nature of Religious Studies.

Worldview and religion as deutero-truths

The problems some people find with ‘worldview’ and ‘religion’ may be simplified by defining each as a ‘deutero-truth’. Coming from Gregory Bateson’s notion of deutero-learning, this refers to a ‘second-order’ level of abstraction ([1935] 1958:293). Roy Rappaport uses it to help explain a term that easily ‘means something’ within a community even though a member would be hard pressed to define it (1999:304–8). For school-teaching, Mark Chater and Luke Donnellan’s comment resembles this when saying that ‘to most of us, worldviews are both familiar and strange’ (2020:118). Rappaport says, ‘as high-level generalizations, deutero-truths are low in specificity, or are even downright vague’ (1999:306). Indeed, ‘meaning’ is itself a profoundly complex concept at many levels of analysis not least for social science and religion (Davies, 1984). The same applies to the cognitive science of perception and ‘understanding’ of the world around us. In ways that are currently very imperfectly understood, each brain receives electrical impulses from key organs such as eyes, ears, nose, and skin and presents them to each person as pictures or representations of something ‘real’ and ‘out there’ even though things in the environment are ‘seen’, ‘heard’, and ‘understood’ differently by each person. However, society would not work and foster survival without some agreed-upon ideas.

Plural-disciplines

This book takes worldviews as overarching ways of embracing religion, spirituality, secularity, and wellbeing, acknowledging the corporate human drive to make sense of life as new political, economic, and cultural values prompt adaptation of behaviour and thought. Worldviews are shaped by and give shape to the way food, shelter, schemes of kinship, child-rearing, education, and health care are organised. So too with patterns of history, myth, scientific images, ethics and aesthetic creativity in music, dance, art, literature, and architecture. Athletic and sporting activities also make their presence felt. These mental, material, and behavioural endeavours respond to life’s trials, hardships, and sense of mortality in distinctive ways, often under the controlling influence of invoked supernatural agents of ‘religion’. Though the term ‘religion’ is sometimes academically questioned, this book retains it within its title Worldview Religious Studies, where ‘worldview studies’ is a model of knowledge qualified by the notion of religion, just as other worldview studies might be qualified through politics, economics, science, medicine, or ecology.

Being ‘human-curious’

As for ‘worldview’ so for ‘culture’ and ‘lifestyle’, each has two forms of reference. One describes everyday ‘taken for granted’ actions, thoughts, and sayings. However, if circumstances prompt a group to think about itself, then they gain explicit significance and move towards the second, more abstract theorising of anthropology, sociology, or Religious Studies (Hoggart, 1996). One way of considering such self-understanding and interest in others is to think of people as being ‘human-curious’, with every community having wise people who exemplify this. Shamans, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, as well as myth-makers, story-tellers, novelists, film-makers, and web gamers, all do this. As do actors and heroes who perform society’s prized insights. Moreover, innovators, reformers, and revolutionaries periodically transform established ways of doing things. And Worldview Religious Studies is the same, focusing on ‘religion’ as a form of meaning-making adopted by sizeable groups of people owning ideas of supernatural forces, gods, ancestors, spirits, or a single deity. Some scholars dislike the term ‘religion’, criticising it as a western intellectual term that makes sense in some historical–geographical contexts but not in others, especially if imposed on others. They sometimes prefer to speak of spirituality; of people being ‘spiritual but not religious’; of secular values, folk belief, implicit religion, or of ‘nones’, a term designating people who tick the ‘none’ box in surveys on religious membership (Lee, 2014). Even these western-derived categories seldom exhaust how people think about their lives and can impose ideas on people.

Worldview conflicts, political and theological

The following chapters will include both familiar and unfamiliar theoretical ideas to encourage critical thinking in Worldview Religious Studies, to consider social changes, crises, and developments, as well as more static situations. Rein Raud, for example, not only entitles his book as Asian Worldviews but gives as its subtitle, ‘Religions, Philosophies, Political Theories’, making it perfectly clear how those three domains interplay within many Asian contexts, not least that of China (2021). Much the same could be said for the emergence of many forms of Christianity that rose out of Judaism, spread throughout Europe and then across the world through military imperial conquests, commercialism, and evangelism.

To take only one example, divisions in Christianity often prompted new narratives of the Bible catalysed by politics and established religion as with the Protestant Pilgrim Fathers, dissenting from England’s formal state religion and establishing an American colony in 1620. Their favoured biblical motif of a city on a hill became a later US self-image as a beacon of democracy for the whole world (Matthew 5:14). By contrast, the late eighteenth-century French Revolution sought an end to Monarchy and its intrinsic sense of divine right of kings, despite the military hero Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation (1804) that ultimately led to a Republic separating church and state and fostering the notion of laïcité, established by law in 1905, to distinguish between the secular state and religious involvements. That complex worldview, for example, now poses issues with Muslim citizens in the early twenty-first century over religious dress in public places and institutions. Another extensive ideological transformation emerged as Russia developed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the 1920s and endured until 1991. Then, from the second decade of the twenty-first century, Orthodox Religion regained a position in public life, often in a degree of co-operation with Russian political agents.

From the late eighteenth century until present times, various Protestant European States, notably the Dutch, French, German, and British, established Empires across the world, not least in different parts of Africa. These benefitted economically while also engaging in missionary activity of their own denominational forms of Christianity, much as Catholic Spain and Portugal had previously done in South America (Yates, 2004). One aspect of European power and colonisation that sustained the growing workforce on plantations in America’s southern states and in the West Indies concerned forced slavery, with multitudes of black Africans being shipped across the Atlantic at notable cost to their health, loss, and enduring racial disadvantage in the USA. Christian theology and associated church alliance with state powers sustained this, and something similar underlay the notion of Apartheid in South Africa. While some Christian leaders came to object to these practices, deep racial problems endure. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2021, originating in the USA with the abusive treatment of black citizens, usually by white police, show ongoing forms of worldview that find resonance in wider cultural commitments to the rule of law, human rights, and the value of individuals.

So, too, with the twentieth century’s Great War in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and the Second World War of 1939–1945 whose Nazi force in Germany revealed virulent ant-Semitism, with the Third Reich’s desire for an empire of pure-blooded people that would last a thousand years: it ended in 1945. The post-war division of Berlin between the victorious USA, UK, and USSR allies soon led to the ‘Cold-War’ (1947–1991) between the Soviet Union and western Democratic Nations and marked a new worldview-style division of political regimes. Another political upheaval, the rise of the People’s Republic of China (from 1949) marked the development of its still-growing worldview rooted in a distinctive, centralised, socialist ideology. This included the transformation of Tibet, whose own form of Theocracy embodied in the Dalai Lama constituted something of its own worldview. His migration to India in 1959 left the land under the rule of the People’s Republic of China.

The Second World War transformed the world on an even grander scale through the scientific-engineering work generating the atomic bomb and its devastating use by the USA on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The subsequent atomic arms race, and the Cold War between the USSR and the USA and their respective allies from around the late 1940s to 1990s marked the twentieth century in ideological terms, some seeing the peril of atomic and nuclear warfare as having restrained ultimate mutual destruction, even though limited conventional warfare continued in many world contexts. To speak of an atomic-nuclear worldview is to highlight the complexity of the ‘worldview’ topic, one affecting high-level political regimes but probably not affecting ordinary attitudes. However, the Cuba Missile Crisis of 1962, involving a stand-off between the USSR and the USA, raised just such concerns, not least amongst teenage generations born into a relatively ‘safe’ world after 1945 but now emotionally alerted to international political dangers with countries able to devastate the civilised world.

Conclusion

These historical cases prompt debate and dispute, whether over political power or, in quite a different fashion, over the intellectual force of, for example, the big-picture of evolutionary development of the later nineteenth century. Just as some Christians adopted versions of evolution with, potentially, some divine influence, others advocate a ‘Creationist’ view reckoned to be more directly expressive of biblical ideas. Such historical notes are reminders of how societies are influenced by their own history and contemporary reflection, and of how they can be imposed on others, something that remains true for ideas of worldview and for ‘religion’ itself, as the next two chapters show.

1 Framing worldviews

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242437-3

Introduction

This chapter’s brief account of how the worldview idea has occurred in the study of religion highlights key theoretical issues surrounding the cultural dominance of western philosophical theorising, the way ‘worldview’ has been used to bolster one major psychological innovation, and the perennial issue of the relationship between social groups and their members captured in the idiom of ‘individual-society’. It also introduces the idea of ethnography as a ‘worldview’ study.

Philosophy, sociology, and social worlds

In terms of background history, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) developed a philosophical approach to human groups, their worldviews, and the scholarly need to ‘understand’ people through the very fact of being human ourselves. A late essay (Dilthey, 1911) offered a triple classification of worldviews typified as ‘naturalism’, ‘idealism of freedom’, and ‘objective idealism’. His concern to develop a scholarly approach to social science as the expression of the human ‘spirit’ (Geisteswissenschaft) is often captured in Max Weber’s idea of verstehen or the ‘understanding’ one thinker may intuit of other people’s circumstances.

Weber (1864–1920) focused on the sociological interplay of practical, ethical, and economic behaviour underlying different societies, captured in their distinctive ‘orientations to the world’ – his version of ‘worldview – rooted in a ‘basic “drive” towards meaning’ that, in terms of this study, easily takes the form of ‘the need for salvation’ (Parsons, 1966:xxxii, xlvii, xlix). Weber’s abstract analysis of a group’s ‘orientation to the world’ stands as a clear theoretical notion and is less likely to be found in everyday conversation unlike ‘worldview’ that easily carries an ordinary usage. This is a reminder that some terms have both ordinary and technical-scholarly significance. Parsons detects in Weber’s work – and this would include his orientation to the world – an ‘emphasis on differentiation’ that approaches key issues through some binary distinction, one focusing on change and the other on maintaining the existing order of things. One example would be interpreting the need for salvation with either ‘asceticism’ or ‘mysticism’ as its practical response (Parsons, 1966:xxix, li). More broadly speaking Weber’s sociology of religion encompasses a series of orientations to the world embracing diverse contexts, occupations, and social classes, from shopkeepers to soldiers: these and others follow ‘different roads to salvation’ (Weber, 1964:151–65). Weber used the technical idea of an ideal type to capture and compare key features of religious traditions, such as prophets and capitalists, and also ideas of religious ethics as a combination of emotional and ideological aspects of life, as discussed later between ordinary and technical usage of ‘worldview’ as these will arise throughout this book.

Psychology and Freud’s ‘Question of a Weltanschauung’

Unlike Weber’s social dynamics and orientation to the world, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) focused on the dynamics of conscious and unconscious awareness. He sought to establish psychoanalysis as its own scientific activity and worldview. Influentially straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Freud abandoned biology to develop his own theory and practice of Psychoanalysis to explore human behaviour through its conscious and unconscious mental processes, shepherding the world...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART 1 Theories and Perspectives
• PART 2 Worldview Types
• Bibliography
• Index