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After the Future

Quote of the Day: T.M. Luhrmann

In this morning's NYT: The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science,…

In this morning's NYT:

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

In fact, you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon. As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, “to believe” meant something like “to hold dear.” Smith, who died in 2000, once wrote: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”

To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

That belief often is more like a flag, that it is in other words deeply entwined or embedded in cultural identity is precisely what I understand faith not to be. Faith derives rather from a eureka experience that all that the construction we call the world is not real, that it is a collective fantasy, and that something else is more real. And so the problem with faith is that it tends in those in whom it takes hold to alienate them from the world and its norms and its collective delusions. They are drawn to that which instinctively they know to be real, and repelled by that which they know is not. But the challenge for them is to overcome that alienation and to relate to the world but on terms that are subversive of its norms and collective delusions. Those who are prodigies of this kind of subversion we call saints.  

Comments

5 responses

  1. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Beautifully put, Jack. The saints are the backbone of the resistance. And the New York Times and its ilk is a big part of what needs to be resisted. If it were real journalism, the writer of the piece would have balanced Durkheim with, say, Underhill or Maréchal (writing at the same time), someone who could explain the experiences of mystics. But it’s the Times, so. . . yeah right.

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  2. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    T.M. Luhrmann is a Stanford anthropologist. My comment on her quote is not a knock, because I think what she describes is true for most people who think of themselves as religious. Any religion from the beginning of time is something 99% of people are acculturated into. Choosing (or rejecting) a religion is something that only comes after the Axial Age, i.e., post-Buddha & Socrates, and that’s really the point she’s making. The choosing is more of an intellectual’s activity–or it’s a matter of switching allegiance to a different flag, as it was for so many who found themselves all of a sudden Lutherans after the Diet of Speyer in 1526 (and later at Augsburg)–‘cuius regio, eius religio’. The average Joe could care less and went with whatever their betters told him was ok. It was only the intellectuals who cared one way or the other whether he was Lutheran or Catholic, Anglican or Roman. There’s order in the world and God is its foundation–the rest is detail for the scholars and politicians to argue about. And for many living in the heath, the old religion, an atavistic animism, had more a hold on their everyday imagination.
    But always within the larger context of acculturated religion there were men and women of faith, which shares some elements but is different from a Socratic critique of the conventional gods. My reading of Socrates and Plato is that they saw the critique as a means to an end–the end being a disembedding, to use Charles Taylor’s term, from a given world of cultural meanings so that one could break through to an intuition of Being that lies behind it.
    Buddhism is barking up a similar tree. And so are the medieval mystics like Eckhart pointing to that kind of experience of Being, which I believe to be very real, more real than the dreamworld in which we live. But I don’t think that faith, not at least in the Christian sense, is about having those kinds of pleromatic mystical experiences. In fact I’d argue that they are regressive because of the way they obliterate a sense of the Self.
    So what is a progressive Christian mysticism? One that nurtures the development of free selves in communion. We were not created to be obliterated by an encounter with the Godhead, but rather to become substantive enough, to have enough ontological density, that in our encounter with the godhead, we could enter into communion with ‘it’, face to face, person to person.
    And so Christian mysticism is a very ordinary, everyday–and fallible–kind of thing, that is available for anyone with a heart supple enough to be responsive to the movement of grace in the world. The ‘eureka moment’ about which I wrote might for some involve a dramatic Road to Damascus moment–or the it might be gentler and take hold of someone gradually. But the essential identifier of the man or woman of Christian faith is this sense of alienation that I described in the post. There has to be a disembedding from the herd, from the world of given meanings, and with it an ability to discern the great truths that are expressed in the Scriptures, but also to discern when the devil is quoting them. That’s what I don’t see in the evangelical movment, at least not among it’s leaders. But for the person of faither, while there is alienation there is also a reaching out to be in communion; it’s not the communion of the acculturated herd or hive, but a communion of free spiritually individuated selves. They must live under a flag, but for them flags don’t matter much. Or rather they do matter insofar as they create one of the most obstinate barriers to the kind of communion to which the gospels point. The Thirty Years War was an absurdity that can be explained by flags, but not by a fidelity born of an encounter with the spirit of the gospels.

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  3. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    You’re right of course that most people couldn’t care less about faith and simply follow a religion, or lack thereof, automatically. Most people never wake up, never go through that disembedding experience, though it’s available to everyone. Religion and faith are often far apart. Perhaps that will begin to change in a pluralistic world, where religion becomes less pervasive but more intentional.
    About the cultivation of the self, of which you speak, I am less convinced. I increasingly suspect that it is not the same thing as the cultivation of the soul, which may be the superior path. I’m suspicious of discourses of selfhood, because they always seem to end up in a wild and brutish celebration of power, of autonomy, of “sovereignty” — i.e. to preclude communion with others, with the world, with God, all of which is based on relation, on obligation, on mutuality, and not on the shrill assertion of rights and individuality, the highest ethical discourse of which we seem anymore capable. Reality is intersubjective, but selves necessarily objectify everything which is not the self. Or so would go the argument for my self-soul distinction. I know I’m not the first to make it. (Maybe I should go back to Taylor to remind myself of the virtues of selfhood.)
    On the other hand I think you’re right to distinguish between a communion of free and distinct persons versus the communion of the herd. About the mystics and saints in this regard there is much to be said. Evelyn Underhill pointed out — powerfully, for me — that the saints who report the most ecstatic encounters with divinity in the end do not annihilate themselves, but return to the world to be active in it, powerful presences among their fellows in this life. And when I thought about it, I realized it’s true. The great saints have for the most part also been great movers and shakers. Sometimes that action has been primarily through the medium of their writings, which they would not undertake without some hope of reaching others, but just as often it has come through in more tangible, immediate, socially foundational activity. I think the language used by many saints can be misleading and make us often imagine them to have been reclusive misanthropes either too wrapped up in their selves or inhumanly forgetful of them — Simeon Stylites types. But the more I study the saints and read between their lines, and the more I think about what sainthood really is whether canonized as such or not, the more I see that’s not at all the case.
    People who are born into a religion almost always seem to lose it in adolescence, in the modern world for sure but probably in any world (related to what you said about the old animistic practices). Most never find it again, but those that do often refer to it as “conversion” rather than as a “return.” I think that speaks to the great difference between religion and faith.

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  4. JP Avatar
    JP

    Secular Americans have a religion.
    Everybody has a religion and believes in something.
    It’s basically a form Protestantism that ignores the existence of God and essentially serves as the established religion.
    An offshoot of Unitarianism maybe?
    Progressive Unitarianism?
    So now when you send your Catholic child to Harvard, they “lose” their old religion and become converts to whatever branch of protestant is running things these days only they don’t call it a “conversion”.
    They still seem to have “religious tests” only they don’t call them “religious tests”.
    These are the same people who freak out when you tell them that they actually believe in an offshoot of Christianity because they don’t “believe in God”.
    It’s still their religion.
    The only true conversion that I’ve ever seen resulted in said convert immediately running off and becoming a monk.

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  5. Steve Allison Avatar
    Steve Allison

    I enjoyed the post and the responses to it very much. There are a number of things regarding all that which have simmered in my mind the last couple of days. One relates to what was said regarding the nature of belief. That is quite a gem from Wilfred Cantwell Smith where he explains what belief meant to our 16th and 17th century forbears. I think I get that it relates to the German lieve which is love and so it makes a lot of sense that to believe means to hold dear. I have a pet peeve with a prominent journalist who continually criticizes the attempts of main stream journalism to cover religion. And, that they do not get what “believers” are doing and find important. But I have the impression that what he means by believers are those who must and do hold to the facticity of certain magical tricks. Whereas, “holding dear” allows for more breathing space and flexibility between the literal and the experienced and the real. That is helpful to me.

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