Fictions and Contentions

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by Dr Brian W Nail in Critical Religion, University of Luxembourg

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Christian, Critical Religion, economic theory, economics, religion

The editors of a recent collection of essays entitled Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life begin their study with the following observation concerning the general state of political economy in the world today: “There is a growing consensus that the world today is in dire social and economic crisis that extends to housing, personal financial debt, and the absence of adequate health care and education, a crisis that finds increasing numbers of people vulnerable to dearth and death as the ability to secure daily life is eroded” (2011, p.1). In the book, scholars working in the fields of sociology, political science, and law examine the various ways that the recent financial crisis has contributed to an escalation of political violence that is not taking place primarily through acts of war or terrorism, but rather through a form of political violence that is being executed through the appropriation and privatization of society’s basic means of social reproduction. They define social reproduction as “the historically contingent processes by which we reproduce the conditions and relations of economic and social security. These include not only the technical means of reproducing the physical integrity of our bodies, but also the methods by which we reproduce ourselves as political subjects—that is the relations we legitimate” (2011, p.2). Although this crisis of reproduction is a global phenomenon, in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe, it is primarily being advanced through the ongoing implementation of a politics of austerity that has effectively shifted the financial burdens of the private banking and finance sector onto the wider population. Despite the fact that a number of economists have challenged the logic of austerity as a pathway to recovery, the narrative of profligate public spending and the need for greater sacrifices on the part of the average citizen continues to be a regular feature of the current government’s public discourse. What is perhaps most worrying about the ways that the crisis of social reproduction is currently taking place is the extent to which the underlying narrative of financial scarcity has become so difficult for many to contest.

For an outsider, finding a point of entry into the world of economic theory is no mean feat. Although there are countless introductory texts for the subject, macroeconomic theory often begins by elaborating a theoretical language that relies very heavily upon terminological agreement. As it turns out, like so many other disciplines, economists fail to agree upon the definitions of some of their most fundamental terms and concepts. Likewise, texts written from the perspective of micro-economics tend to move very quickly into the baffling world of econometrics and mathematical formulas that are also highly debated by experts in the field. Fortunately, the economic historian Mary S. Morgan has offered those of us who are less mathematically proficient a way of approaching the discipline through her assertion that economic theory is primarily a modelling science that relies upon visual and literary representations of the world which are essentially fictional. Although the curved lines in a classic econometric diagram of supply and demand may be based upon personal experiences of purchasing and some casual observation of market behaviours, according to Morgan, the lines of course do not reflect actual observations of supply and demand because such invisible phenomena are not there to be seen in the world. Instead, as Morgan suggests, “Each curve shows how economists imagine what consumers and producers imagine they might buy and supply at different prices; and what might cause these curves to shift.” There is therefore a double-layer of imagination reflected in these diagrams which reflects the highly speculative and fictional nature of economic modelling. According to Morgan, the answer to the question, “How do economists use models? is, in one sense, easy to answer: they ask questions with them and tell stories! Or more exactly: they ask questions, use the resources of the model to demonstrate something, and tell stories in the process” (2012, p.217-18). The narrative power of these fictive models enables them to function as epistemic instruments which present and represent the world to minds of those who rely upon them for evaluating and predicting behaviour in the so-called “real world.” There is a striking similarity between the way that Morgan describes the hermeneutic operations which characterize the ways that economists interpret their models and the notion of the self-interpreting bible which emerged during the time of the Reformation. When economists read their own diagrams, they entertain the illusion of self-mastery and self-presencing that accompanies the experience of reading an all too human text that has nonetheless been imbued with divine powers.

In addition to the fictive quality of the ways that economists visually represent economic behaviour, at a philosophical level, modern economic theory also relies upon a certain fictional description of human nature—the figure of “man” the rational maximizer of economic satisfaction also known as homo economicus. According to Morgan, this simplified depiction of the human in economic theory developed as the discipline became increasingly concerned with constructing explanatory models. Although the figure of homo economicus has been criticized and assailed from practically every vantage point in the humanities, and it has even been challenged by economists themselves who acknowledge it as an oversimplification of human behaviour, this fictional character remains popular, particularly among scholars of a distinctly neoliberal persuasion. In his book Economic Analysis of Law, the ever-prolific legal scholar Richard Posner begins his study with the assertion that “economics is the science of rational choice in a world—our world—in which resources are limited in relation to human wants. The task of economics, so defined, is to explore the implications of assuming that man is a rational maximizer of his ends in life, his satisfactions—what we shall call his ‘self-interest’”(2003, p.3). (It is worth noting that Posner insists on using masculine pronouns throughout his study; problematically, he claims that they “are used in a generic rather than a gendered sense.”)

In an effort to respond to one of the common criticisms of rational choice theory, which is that human consumption is rarely motivated by conscious calculation, Posner claims that “Economics is not a theory about consciousness. Behavior is rational when it conforms to the model of rational choice, whatever the state of mind of the chooser” (2003, p.3). It appears that Posner is capable of disregarding the fictional nature of economic analysis through his uncritical acceptance of the myth of homo economicus. The appeal of this myth for Posner as well as other advocates of law and economics is that it offers a simplified narrative of human behaviour which allows for a supposedly scientific approach to making legal decisions that may otherwise appear ethically complex when considered within the larger context of human social interactions. But when the maxim that what is economically efficient is most beneficial for society is introduced as a hermeneutic framework for making legal decisions such ethical and moral complexities apparently recede from view. Like lines upon a graph, the creation and application of law comes to represent a theoretical model of human life that exists in a supposedly scientific vacuum that is increasingly isolated from the complexities of everyday life and the reality human suffering.

The fact that theoretical abstractions have a tendency to disguise or otherwise disregard the complexities of human life is of course not a new insight for those working in fields which take seriously the particularity human subjectivity. And for scholars working in the fields of theology and religious studies, this has meant challenging in theory and in practice a great number of dogmas and philosophical traditions which have historically sacrificed the irreducible complexity of human life for the sake of elaborating highly debatable answers to life’s most perplexing questions. From the perspective of Christian theology, questions concerning the meaning and sources of human suffering, poverty, and evil have led many to abandon the project of theodicy altogether. And yet still others set out from strong ideological or theological positions to wager conclusive answers to such questions. Frankly, these people scare me.

Following David Cameron’s rather infamous opening speech at the annual Downing Street Easter reception, many Christians were troubled by his assertion that the Big Society was in fact invented by Jesus; others took issue with his proclamation that Britain is in fact a Christian country. Although I find both of these statements troubling, Cameron made another point that I find both insightful and disturbing. Commenting on the similarities between the challenges that churches face in Britain and the challenges facing political institutions, he suggests:

“We both sometimes can get wrapped up in bureaucracy; we both sometimes can talk endlessly about policies and programmes and plans without explaining what that really means for people’s lives. We can sometimes get obsessed by statistics and figures and how to measure things. Whereas actually, what we both need more of is evangelism. More belief that we can get out there and actually change people’s lives and make a difference and improve both the spiritual, physical and moral state of our country, and we should be unashamed and clear about wanting to do that.”

It feels strange to say that I mainly agree with the Prime Minister on this point. The only problem of course is that the world that he wants to create and the one that so many who are opposed to him would like to create are so very different. Perhaps it would serve Mr. Cameron well to remember that evangelism is not simply a matter of ideological fervour, it is a matter of sharing good news; in terms of the gospel story which presumably forms the basis of his notion of spiritual and moral health, to use the Greek term, it is a good news that is directed specifically at the anawim, who, as Terry Eagleton provocatively suggests, are “the dispossessed or shit of the earth who have not stake in the present set-up, and who thus symbolize the possibility of new life in their very dissolution” (2001, p.114). The good news means loving your neighbour as yourself, even when that neighbour fails to reciprocate in kind. The fact that the Prime Minister would have us disregard statistics and instead allow ourselves to be swept away by the spirit of philanthropy is an all too convenient ploy. When we look at the consequences of austerity for those who are most vulnerable in society, the numbers and graphs do tell a story that is worth reading. They tell a story of shifting geo-political relations, desperate attempts at securing the stability of a faltering banking and finance industry, concerted efforts at privatizing health care, education, and public housing, and most importantly a strategic attack on the advances made by labour movements throughout the twentieth century. Narratives of economic crisis and the myth of homo economicus have largely supplanted the narratives of equality, human rights, and social responsibility which emerged in the wake of the First and Second World Wars. Challenging the politics of austerity requires a thoroughgoing reassessment of the values that have thus far shaped the notion of political liberalism in western society and a re-examination of the fictions which necessarily bind us to the neighbour we so rarely see.

Works Cited:
Eagleton, Terry. 2001. The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. London: Penguin.
Feldman, Shelley, Charles C. Geisler, and Gayatri A. Menon, eds. 2011. Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Morgan, Mary S. 2012. The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Posner, Richard A. 2003. Economic Analysis of Law. New York: Aspen Law.

More than the One Ring? Tolkien, faith and critical religion

18 Sunday May 2014

Posted by Francis Stewart in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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C S Lewis, faith, Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, religion, Tolkein

Interest in the world of Middle Earth is riding high again with the successful Hobbit films currently being released by Peter Jackson a decade after his adaption of the longer story The Lord of the Rings. Both stories, and others (personally I am hoping Jackson takes on ‘The Children of Hurin’), were written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (J.R.R. as he preferred, or Ronald to his friends) whom many know was an Oxford professor of philology and mythology. What is perhaps less well known is Tolkien’s approach to his personal faith and his understanding of religion which he infused all his stories, indeed his created world of Middle Earth with.

J.R.R. Tolkien lost his father when he was 4 years old. His mother, Mabel, responded to his death by converting to Catholicism. This resulted in tension and ostracism from her Unitarian and Methodist family with the consequences that she moved her two sons to live in the countryside outside Birmingham and worked hard to sustain them. She provided their early education but succumbed to complications arising from diabetes when Tolkien was 12 years old. The Catholic Church took them in and provided for both boys’ education in good schools. For Tolkien, Catholicism took on “the place in his affections that she had previously occupied.” (Carpenter, 1977, p50)

As is well-documented, Tolkien began to create his world of Middle Earth, and indeed to write the beginnings of what would become ‘The Silmarilion’ during his time serving in the trenches in World War 1 (he was badly injured during the Battle of the Somme). His experiences in the war caused him to become focused on the questions of good and evil in man and the notion of forgiveness, with redemption being the ultimate expression of it.

After the war he was appointed first to Leeds then to Oxford where he remained for the rest of his career. He was joined by numerous scholars and writers the most famous probably being Clive Staples Lewis (C S Lewis author of the Narnia tales). Another was Charles Williams, a poet and author who was fascinated by Christian mysticism and alchemy. These men, along with various others at different points, formed the group known as The Inklings who met once or twice a week in a pub to discuss language, read their current writings and receive criticism and then to debate matters of faith and ideas. Of them all Tolkien was closest to Lewis and was devastated when Lewis turned from his agnostic path back to his Ulster heritage of Protestant Anglicanism.

Although a devout Catholic, Tolkien was critical of any notion of an absolute or universal religion and he frequently chided Lewis for treating religion as a sacred thing that existed in its own right and place in the world. Tolkien lamented that this was a childish understanding of faith. In one of his many letters (he was prolific as a letter writer) to Lewis in regards to his book ‘Christian Behaviour’ he takes Lewis to task for treating all Muslims are being the same as each other, while demanding that they recognise the variety that exists within Christianity. He refers to the use of Muslims as a counterfoil for Christianity as “a stinking red herring” (Carpenter & Tolkien, 1981, p60) by Lewis to disguise the presumption that religion exists because it exists and cannot therefore be challenged or altered. In the same letter he continues to reprimand Lewis for ignoring that irreligious folk live and behave in moral ways as determined by their laws, their society and their own conscience.

Partly in reaction to Lewis and partly because he genuinely believed what he was arguing, his own writings contain no explicit reference to religion at all, but rather they deal with vague matters of faith. He viewed this as a necessary form of freedom if faith was to survive and be relevant in the world (both the physical world he lived in and the imaginary world he created). So, for example, in a letter to W. H. Auden he outlined that he does not deal in absolutes such as good and evil but rather in perceptions. He writes; “The Eldar and the Numenoreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person to be an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants.” (Carpenter & Tolkien, 1981, p243) He reasoned that each acted according to their own perception and so for each their cause was right. He then continues to liken it to his current world of wealthy bosses who rule over the masses who must live in fear and squalor while the state (he later changes this to state-God) promises them that doing so will ensure “peace and abundance and … mutual esteem and trust.” (ibid p244) It is unknown how Auden responded to this as the letter resulted in a personal visit rather than a written response.

For Tolkien religion was a term he was uncomfortable with (and of course he would have known its etymology intimately in a variety of languages) and he did not want the concept of it to be overt in his writings and his imagination. He reasons for doing so were complex, they were bound up with the death of his mother, the experiences on the battle fields of the First World War, and his mistrust of a rising ‘secular’ state that he thought worshipped only ‘damned capitalism, money and power’. He wanted to create as realistic a world as possible, it was to be his gift to his country (to replace his lament that England has no mythology) and for Tolkien religion as a concept was a false one and so had no place in Middle Earth. This cue he took from Old Norse and Celtic mythology in which aspects of faith were suffused within everyday aspects of life rather than a separate institution. (Shippey, 2000, p174) In the midst of the phenomenal writings, the spectacular films there is an important message that continues to speak to the work, interests and purpose of Critical Religion.

Should Religious Studies Scholars Provide Expert Opinions in Court Cases?

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by Gabrielle Desmarais in Critical Religion, University of Ottawa

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Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian law, Critical Religion, expert witness, freedom of religion, law, politics, power, R v Welsh, religion, religious freedom, Syndicat Northcrest v Anselem

When contention arises in the courtroom, it is a common practice in many countries to call upon experts to help validate or discredit arguments, made either by the defendant or by the plaintiff. These experts, often professionals or scholars, can use the specialised knowledge gained in their field to clarify any points that may otherwise be misunderstood by the general public or the jury. In the case of conflicts dealing with religious freedom, a priest or other religious official may be invited to offer his or her expertise, but it is often the scholar of religious studies that is called upon. It is he or she that is responsible for provide a balanced, objective viewpoint on a variety of religious practices and beliefs, and to decide whether or not the practices or beliefs in question can be said to be “sincerely religious”.

While it is fairly standard to use scholars’ statements as expert opinions in court, I would like to suggest that this practice produces as many issues as it does advantages. Religious studies scholars can provide an unbiased viewpoint on matters relating to religion, but in doing so they are also participating in a system that reinforces the existence of “religion” as a sui generis category. They are made to speak about “religion” in an authoritative way, which in turn leads the general public to believe that “religion” is a benign descriptive label applied logically to groups of the same genus and not, as critical religionists argue, a historically and culturally specific term with political connotations and a term whose definition is still contested. However, the testimony of scholars of religious studies still serves a distinct and equalising purpose, and prevents the jury from being swayed by inaccurate stereotypes and unhelpful assumptions about particular traditions.

The issues that arise when a scholar of religious studies gives an expert opinion in a legal setting are varied. First, the audience are not specialists, and so the scholar must generalise and use “religion” in a general sense. This lends a notion of stability to the category of “religion”, and reinforces the idea that certain groups, practices and beliefs belong in the category, while others should be excluded. Second, validating whether or not something is or is not “religion” not only serves to reinforce the category in an abstract sense, but also has significant repercussions for those groups whose practices are dismissed as “not religious” and therefore cannot be protected by human rights provisions, such as that of Section 2(a) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In addition, the reliance on expert opinions in matters of “religion” implies that the scholar is more qualified to define a practice or belief as “religious” than the practitioner themselves, when the matter of “religion” is otherwise viewed as a personal and subjective decision by the court. The Supreme Court of Canada made a statement to this effect in the landmark case Syndicat Northcrest v. Anselem (2004):

The State is in no position to be, nor should it become, the arbiter of religious dogma. Although a court is not qualified to judicially interpret and determine the content of a subjective understanding of a religious requirement, it is qualified to inquire into the sincerity of a claimant’s belief, where sincerity is in fact at issue. Sincerity of belief simply implies an honesty of belief and the court’s role is to ensure that a presently asserted belief is in good faith, neither fictitious nor capricious, and that it is not an artifice. Assessment of sincerity is a question of fact that can be based on criteria including the credibility of a claimant’s testimony, as well as an analysis of whether the alleged belief is consistent with his or her current religious practices. Since the focus of the inquiry is not on what others view the claimant’s religious obligations as being, but what the claimant views these personal religious “obligations” to be, it is inappropriate to require expert opinions.

Curiously, although the court in Anselem claims that “it is inappropriate to require expert opinions”, expert opinions are still sought out in the very same case. This is because, as religious studies scholar and former lawyer Dr Lori Beaman writes in her book Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law (UBC Press, 2008), “[t]he expert voice is heard in religion… and is perhaps most visibly hegemonic in the collusion between religion and law.” (48) It is these experts that “act as gatekeepers in the discursive construction of religion”, determining the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate religion. (48) It has been historically deemed important by courts in Canada to determine that a “religious” belief is sincere, and not capricious or artificial. Therefore, the voice of the scholar of religious studies has the power to legitimise particular groups as “truly religious”; yet this decision is made with an illusion of objectivity, using a contested and unstable category as its basis.

Expert opinions are, however, still useful in the case of practices that while sincere, are easily misunderstood or seen as strange. This is often the case with new religious movements or syncretic religions. I will use another Canadian case to demonstrate this advantage. In the Supreme Court of Ontario case R v Welsh (2007), the court attempts to determine whether or not Obeah (a collection of folk practices, religion and sorcery originating in West Africa and flourishing in the Caribbean) can be considered a belief system or “religion”. The entire case rests on this decision, as the claimant can only argue that the actions of the defendant infringed on their right to freedom of religion if their practices are validated as “religion”. Helpfully, court aligns itself with the stance in Anselem, and sees itself as “reject[ing] a narrow, overly-precise definition of religion in favour of a broad perspective that could conceivably capture an array of beliefs that, like Obeah, fall outside of well-recognized religious boundaries.” (Para 28) The court recognizes, with the help of expert opinions, that “Obeah is a religious belief system that meets the Supreme Court definition of such in [Anselem] and thus warrants s.2(a) protection.” (Para 29)

In light of this information, should Religious Studies scholars provide expert opinions in court cases relating to religious freedom? I am still unsure what is to be done with the practice. While the instability of the category of “religion” gives the scholar (and thus the court) the ability to validate or dismiss practices based on a contested definition, the use of expert opinions can also be (and often is) beneficial to lesser-known traditions, and even to groups who regularly experience discrimination or prejudice, such as Islam. To cease the practice would leave these groups in a vulnerable position, but to continue advising the court under the illusion of objectivity may lead to misguided decisions. The issue is complex and multi-faceted, and it is my intention to treat the topic more extensively in my further research.

Modern Government, Sovereignty and the Category of Religion: Beyond the Post-Secular

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by tstack1970 in Critical Religion, University of Aberdeen

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Critical Religion, culture, government, post-secular, religion, secular, sovereignty

Having participated in a number of Critical Religion events, including two workshops held at Stirling, I can report that Tim Fitzgerald, Naomi Goldenberg and I have submitted for review the manuscript of a volume with the title Modern Government, Sovereignty and the Category of Religion: Beyond the Post-Secular.

The core argument of the book is that religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have marked out their sovereignty – as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. Our authors, selected from a host of contributors to seven workshops held between 2009 and 2012, bear out the argument through a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, moral philosophy, theology and religious studies, combining theory with the detailed empirical analysis of contexts as diverse as Japan, Mexico, the United States, Israel-Palestine, France and the United Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served to define the sovereignty of modern government.

Edith Doron spoke at an Aberdeen workshop in 2009 of the Abrahamic hut that she constructed while working at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Just tell me one thing, asked the anxious director, is this a cultural or religious exhibit? Similarly, employers and teachers alike find themselves deciding whether someone’s dress falls within the boundaries of acceptable “cultural” diversity or constitutes an inappropriate and perhaps illegal display of “religious” symbolism. There can be ambiguity and that can lead to controversy, such as when the UK Supreme Court in 2009 was asked to rule on whether Jewish Free Schools were deciding admissions on the basis of legitimate “cultural” criteria or were discriminating on the basis of “religion”. The distinction between “religious” and “cultural” is only one example of the range of ways in which we distinguish between religious and non-religious or secular. In the same year, The Times columnist Libby Purves complained of an Islington clerk who was allowed to refuse to perform same-sex civil partnership ceremonies on religious grounds. She should, wrote Purves, have “sighed, muttered a prayer, and found another job. The tribunal should never have rolled over as it did, agreeing to exempt a public servant from civic duty. Religion is religion, law is law”. Such controversies indicate that the distinction is anything but cut-and-dried. Only rarely, however, does the ambiguity lead us to question the categories themselves—to ask what we mean in the first place by religion and by culture or law or politics, and why we find ourselves moved to distinguish between them.

The volume is the fruit of several years of sustained debate in our workshops and conferences (including a major British Academy conference in 2010) about what happens when “religious” gets distinguished from “non-religious” or “secular”. Our debates have focused on the consequences of religious-secular distinctions. How and why do people – politicians, academics, peasants, managers, teachers, journalists, clergy, workers, lawyers – distinguish between “religious” and “non-religious” or “secular”? And what happens when they make such a distinction? Some of those consequences are very specific while others are general and far-reaching. The Brooklyn Children’s Museum director was clearly anxious about losing funding or visitors. Employees may have to think about what jewellery or clothing to wear to work. School pupils and their parents need to reflect on the uniform code, while Catholic or Jewish school boards may find themselves defending their admission policies. The Islington Civil Registry had to find another clerk to perform the ceremony, while taking back the clerk who was suspended. Those are specific consequences of particular ways in which “religion” gets distinguished from the “secular”. Our authors focus on the more general consequences of more structural or systematic religious-secular distinctions. The Islington Civil Registry was only applying a piece of legislation which defined the limits of “religious freedom” in administrative law, and was itself was likely modelled on legislation elsewhere. School uniform codes and admissions policies have a long and complex history; the case of Jewish Free Schools was only one episode of it. Beyond the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the broader history of museums has much to do with marking out a sphere outside “religion” in which objects can be displayed in ways that might otherwise prove sacrilegious.

In the volume, we concentrate mainly on the category of religion as it has crystallised in modern times, by which I mean the past three centuries, roughly, of Europe’s struggle to establish the world order under which we live. There are lively debates about the possible pre-modern roots of what we mean today by “religion”. My co-editor Naomi Goldenberg, for example, draws on Daniel Boyarin (2004), S.N. Balagangadhara and De Roover (2007) and other scholars who trace our modern concept of religion further back into the history of Christianity. Goldenberg even suggests that its roots lie in ancient Greek ways of classifying cults. I accept that our modern category of religion was already in gestation before the modern period. Indeed, I argued in a previous publication (2012) that the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta, writing in 1590 of the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the Americas, took an important step toward our contemporary sense of “religion” by distinguishing Aztec “religion” from other, implicitly “non-religious” things that Aztecs did. It was only a step, however, and I believe that the category continued to develop in the centuries that followed. Of course “modern” is a gross generalization for the period, especially if one takes a global perspective as we have done. Our authors make it abundantly clear that modernity has had no single history. But the historical processes of this period – state-building, colonialism, capitalism – have connected up places in a way that warrants generalization.

Our authors show that the category of religion has played a key role in this modern period. Religious-secular distinctions are written into the entire fabric of modern life, such that to figure out the category of religion is to figure out much of what passes for modernity. Or at least, to take religion for granted – to assume that religion is an object in the world, independent of the category – is to miss much of what modernity has meant. To take religion for granted is, to begin with, to mistake for history one of modernity’s foremost origin myths, the Wars of Religion story. Religion was the cause of the 17th-century European wars, we are told, and the wars ended when European powers decided to tolerate religion instead of fighting over it. William Cavanaugh (2009) and co-editor Tim Fitzgerald (2007) have argued that the modern idea of religion was itself a product of the wars; in my terms, that it was an important stage in the gestation of what we mean today by “religion”. They have shown, moreover, that the category of religion developed in tandem with many other categories, such as tolerance. It was not just that people decided to add “religion” to the list of things that they tolerated. The idea of “tolerance” was transformed in the process – religion was the first object of the modern idea of tolerance.

We converge on one key aspect of the modern history of “religion”: the role of modern government in shaping the category. “Modern government” is another gross generalization, but there are important similarities in how governments have gone about the business of governing in these past three centuries. Governments everywhere have been caught up in colonialism and capitalism, which have pushed them to develop the extraordinary power that they now have at their disposal. Governments have not only appropriated functions that were exercised by other institutions, such as schools and law courts, but they have created an array of functions that did not exist previously, such as healthcare. Scholars have observed that governments exercising such functions have classified populations by gender, race, class and region and treated them accordingly. Less attention has been paid to the way in which governments classify institutions, practices and persons as “religious” and “non-religious”. Just as with gender, race, class and region, it is not that governments have simply applied religious-secular distinctions; governments have, our authors contend, played a key role in developing religious-secular distinctions in the first place. A 2007 volume edited by Fitzgerald highlighted the role of colonial encounters in shaping the modern idea of “religion”, and Fitzgerald went on to argue in his 2009 monograph that global capitalism is another arena in which “religion” has been forged. Our authors pay attention to the colonial and capitalist dimensions of modern government’s concern with the category of religion, while including other dimensions such as gender politics (Goldenberg and Finn), immigration policy (Nillson), church-state conflict (Stack), and peace-making (Israel).

Our authors treat many different aspects of government but emphasise how modern government has used the category of religion to stake its claim to sovereignty. Although Foucault (1980: 121) famously suggested that sovereignty was a thing of the past (“cutting off the King’s head”) and that modern government relies instead on disciplinary measures, it seems more reasonable to conclude that discipline and sovereignty have developed in tandem. The term “sovereignty” has been used in many ways historically and in recent years, but I mean it in the sense of the power to authorise. To have sovereignty is to decide what is and is not legitimate, as well as who can legitimately deviate from the general rule and when. Sovereignty in this sense is not new. Medieval European free cities, for example, were somewhat autonomous in their government, and burghers were allowed to trade in goods that were normally reserved for the Crown, yet the Crown claimed to authorise the activities of towns and cities by issuing them with royal charters. In the past three centuries, however, governments have extended the reach of their authority, as scholars such as Agamben (2005) have argued. They have appeared, on the one hand, to concede sovereignty by allowing for democratic representation. On the other hand, governments have created labyrinthine rules and regulations for any and every area of life, including health, education and the economy, while retaining the authority to decide what exceptions can be made.

We show in the volume that “religion” comes during this period to designate an extraordinary range of practices and institutions that government is unable to control directly, including some on which government is heavily dependent. Government is dependent on such institutions both for the business of governing (Owen and Taira list the roles performed by The Druid Network in prisons and hospitals) and for displaying its own sovereignty (Goldenberg and Finn point to the role of churches in state ceremonies). As such, these institutions pose a potential threat to governments’ sovereignty, but governments try to contain the threat by claiming to authorise them as “religion” and by policing the boundaries of that category. Thus government continues to rely on these institutions that it cannot control directly, while performing its sovereign ability to “authorise” these institutions in the first place. What government recognizes and thus admits as “religion” is subject, of course, to innumerable institutional struggles.

Trevor Stack

Lest we forget or are forgotten

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Francis Stewart in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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art, Christian, Critical Religion, Northern Ireland, religion

In 2013 Richard Harries’ “The Image of Christ in Modern Art” was published. In his book he outlines four specific criteria for considering a piece of modern art as being ‘religious’. They are:

All genuine art has a spiritual dimension, just by being good art.
It is possible to point to the work of believing Christians regardless of their subject matter because it is still an expression of faith.
It expresses or evokes certain characteristics associated with the Christian faith such as redemption, forgiveness and loving kindness.
It is related to in some way, traditional Christian iconography. (Harries, 2)

Harries exploration of modern art having to come to terms with and express a seismic rupture as well as contend with expressing faith in an increasingly secular society is laudable and the book is recommended on that basis (it would make an nice companion piece to Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind for undergraduates). However, there are a number of areas where issue has to be taken with the treatment provided within the text. For the purposes of this posting I am going to focus on the four criteria and relate them to the specific context of Northern Ireland.

The first criteria immediately rings alarm bells, what is genuine art? Can art exist that is not genuine but false? A quick read through the introduction and first chapter quickly reveals that what Harries means by good art is high art, there is an added layer of exclusivity to the art under consideration. Why then does high art have a spiritual dimension, and low art, by implication, not? The third criteria could have a blog posting on its own on the basis of why are those qualities associated with Christianity alone, when they exist in other contexts including secular ones? However Harries does make it clear he is only dealing with ‘Christian art’ and the Christian faith so I leave that for another time.

It is with the second and fourth criteria that I want to focus in on. Both assume that personal faith, religion to be a distinct and separate thing capable of motivating an individual by force or will. The fourth criteria further assumes a timeless quality and universalism to iconography and its images and symbols. Neither seem to realise, or acknowledge, as Nietzsche did that art is the highest form of expression of the human spirit (The Birth of Tragedy). As such an expression it carries a clear intent for the artist regardless of how well that translates to the viewer. What the viewer interprets comes from his own perspective. Finally, art and artistic expressions are not encapsulated forms of religious expression. In his posting Per-Erik Nilsson argued that:

religion and secularism are contingently articulated categories bound to power and ideology … these articulations have been used to legitimate Western politics and expansion (colonialism, neo-colonial politics and imperialist ambitions).

In Northern Ireland we have a long tradition, on both sides of the divide, of painting wall murals. These are often imbued with what Harries would consider elements of traditional Christian iconography or imagery. Below are two such, the first from Hopewell Crescent in the strongly loyalists Lower Shankill area of Belfast. It depicts Martin Luther nailing his treaties to the Wittenberg door and has a banner stating in German “Here I stand. I cannot help it. God help me. Amen” (Camera did not capture the Amen which is lower down).

Hopewell Crescent, Lower Shankhill Road, photo © Francis Stewart

The second is from the nearby Republican area of Divis Street. It depicts the Virgin Mary standing over a dying hunger striker who is saying his rosary and contains the script “Blessed are those who hunger for justice.”

Virgin Mary watches over a hunger striker

Are these forms of Christian art as Harries would perhaps argue (although given they are not high art he may well desist) or are they rather an example of Nilsson’s articulations of categories bound to power and ideology? I would argue for the latter, there are clear political messages in both – the giving of one’s life through starvation for a cause one believes in, and a defence of the very essence of Protestantism, which in this context means a defence of one’s community and right to remain British.

What I would argue about these murals is that they are a means of remembering the past and ensuring that one’s current struggles are not forgotten. Tom Shippey (writing of the works of Tolkien, but none the less pertinent) reminds us:

The very fragility of record in such societies makes memory all the more precious, its expressions both sadder and more triumphant. (Shippey, 97)

The religious imagery, if one can call it that, is used in these murals as a means to an end there is no distinct religious or spiritual impulse behind them. They serve the purpose of telling the past when those in authority or power will not listen. I do not agree that those in weaker positions are voiceless, they are perfectly capable of speaking; those in positions of power must learn to listen. Michael Marten reminds us:

What we need is a realistic exploration of ‘historically specific acts of resistance’ to avoid silencing the subaltern. (Marten, 231)

In creating these murals, the people of Northern Ireland are finding a way round the deaf ears of those in power. They are telling and retelling their history, speaking of their hopes for the future, speaking out against injustices done on them and in the process adding to the further division of the country and the re-entrenchment of their own communities. These are not forms of spiritual or religious art but an engagement with critical religion in that they demonstrate the entire interdependancy of religion, secular, political and power and the tangled web they weave.

——

Richard Harries, The Image of Christ in Modern Art, (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013).

Michael Marten, “On Knowing, Knowing Well and Knowing Differently: Historicising Scottish Missions in 19^th and Early 20^th Century Palestine” in Ellen Fleischmann, Sonya Grypma, Michael Marten and Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Transnational and Historical Perspectives on Global Health, Welfare and Humanitarianism, (Kristiansand: Portal Books, 2013) p210 – 238.

Tom Shippey, J.R.R.Tolkien Author of the Century, (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

Contextualizing yoga: modern practices in a western world

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Sihaya in Critical Religion, Erasmus University of Rotterdam

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Buddhist, Critical Religion, Hindu, religion, spiritualities, yoga

For many people across the world yoga is a way of ensuring a healthy life away from sedentary habits, a way of decreasing stress and increasing general wellbeing. However, the religious or spiritual element present in the practice of yoga may scare people who are concerned about religious purity or the integrity of their beliefs. Some might believe that yoga contradicts their religion, others might think of it as devil’s work. But is modern yoga a form of spiritual or religious practice?

Yoga as encountered in the West, is foremost based on Hatha Yoga and as such places emphasis foremost on bodily postures, breathing exercises and meditation. Indeed ‘yoga, as it appears today, is a recent interpretation of an ancient practice’ (Hoyez 2007: 114) which originates from the Indian subcontinent. Because of its origins yoga has often been thought as ‘hindu’, a term that is in itself very broad.

Image © M.T. Vaczi

Yoga stems from the Vedas, the holy texts composed around 1900BC, which also form the basis of three major religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. Patanjali’s ‘Yoga Sutras’, dating from approximately 2000 years ago is considered the first text that distinguishes Yoga from other systems of thought and religious practice. In his book Patanjali advocates a complete and complex way of life and not only a set of physical exercises. His ‘eight limbs’ of yoga, which still inform practice today, include abstentions (development of compassion), observances (awareness of ourselves and others), bodily postures (chanelling energy), breathing practices (controlling life force), abstraction (managing the senses), concentration (focusing) and meditation (total absorption) (Alter 2005). Each school of Yoga builds upon these elements, combining and interpreting them in a specific manner.

Often thought as an elaborate form of gymnastics, modern western yoga has lost most of its original philosophical underpinnings and has taken distance from most of its religious roots. Yoga has become a western practice whose popularity has been made possible by the process of individualization and its formation of ‘new-age’ spirituality, but also by the commodification of urban wellbeing. After becoming global, yoga has become increasingly decentralized and the Indian influence has been gradually lost. We live in a time of ‘indigenous yogas’ with a baffling diversity of styles and types, often adapted to specific local circumstances (Hoyez 2007) that highlight foremost wellbeing, health and internal peace. Furthermore, emphasis is placed foremost on its physical aspects while its spiritual or religious parts are contrived, if present at all. The specific combination of these factors makes modern yoga resemble more a therapeutic practice (Hoyez 2007) than a spiritual or religious one.

However, modern yoga is a therapeutic system of bodily exercises that also voices philosophical, cultural or political concerns. Furthermore, it is experienced as an active form of changing one’s life to the better. It emphasizes on self-realization (Alter 2004, De Michelis 2004). As such, modern yoga has constructed an alternative form of being religious or spiritual which creatively picks up and repackages a few elements of the Indian traditions while combining them with specific global and local concerns. For example, in yoga discourse, the consumption of raw- and super-foods is connected as much to the formation of a healthy body, to maintaining a good world energy, contributing to fair trade and to sustaining ecological system. These concerns are both extremely varied and tailored to specific audiences: yoga games targeting children require players to perform postures imitating animals while yoga for older adults yoga will make use of props for attaining some bodily postures (Patel el al. 2011). While children yoga will ‘play’ with the ‘inner child’, older adult yoga allows one to ‘find the right energetic balance’ and ‘age youthfully’. Furthermore, yoga can be practiced as a form of union with the ‘universe’, ‘God’, ‘nature’ or ‘oneself’, depending on the inclinations and beliefs of its practitioners. Some yoga classes use a borrowed religious imaginary: the yoga mat becomes a prayer mat while some postures recall prayer. Some classes include the chanting of Hindu sutras, others refer to a ‘life force’ or ‘energy’. A session may include a greeting of ‘namaste’ or a gesture of prayer. There might be a moment of meditation or time for chanting the ‘Om’ considered as the primordial sound by both Hindus and Buddhists. While these might be considered spiritual activities, they do not come to the fore in every yoga practice. Some classes and schools of yoga may make no overt reference to spirituality at all.

Nevertheless, modern yoga makes both physical and inner, ‘spiritual’ transformation possible, as yoga practitioners explained to me. Modern yoga, they highlighted, works through the effort of the body and ends in a general feeling of ‘feeling good about myself’. Yoga practices create an awareness of the self and a possibility of directly ‘improving’ one’s life. One realizes that ‘there is something bigger out there’. One ‘learns’ what are one’s possibilities, and through repeated exercise, learns also to ‘deal with that terrible pain’ and ‘overcome one’s limits’. Yoga offers its practitioners a permission to be happy ‘as I did the best I could for myself’ but also creates the feeling of ‘being in control’ and being in touch with ‘something bigger’. However, some of the practitioners I have been talking to have not described their experience as necessarily religious or spiritual, rather as an encounter with the ‘real self’ that requires no belief, but ‘just happens’.

This baffling inner diversity of practices points out that yoga is far from being a unitary phenomenon. Although most forms of yoga have their roots in the Indian subcontinent, each different school and group works with a specific interpretation of what yoga is, tailored to the more immediate concerns of western practitioners. The religious or spiritual content of yoga classes does not only depend on each yoga school’s approach, but also on the personal aspirations and capabilities of yoga practitioners. As such, western yoga practices have a different view of spirituality and make different use of religious elements then ‘Indian’ yoga, where the ultimate goal is moksha or liberation. Furthermore, western yoga can mainly be considered as a form of physical exercise that increases general wellbeing. In order to ensure and expand the state of wellbeing and relaxation, spiritual and religious practices may be used or hinted at. However, in the context of western modernity, yoga’s goal of ultimate liberation transforms foremost into the celebration and glorification of the self.

—–

Alter, J. S. 2005. Modern medical yoga: struggling with a history of magic, alchemy and sex. Leiden: Brill.

De Michelis, E. 2005. A history of modern yoga. London: Continuum.

Hoyez, A.-C. 2007. The ‘world of yoga’: The production and reproduction of therapeutic landscapes. Social Science & Medicine. 65 (1): 112-124.

Patel, N. K., S. Akkihebbalu, S. E. Espinoza, and L. K. Chiodo. 2011. Perceptions of a Community-Based Yoga Intervention for Older Adults. Activities, Adaptation & Aging. 35 (2): 151-163.

Strauss, S. 2005. Positioning yoga balancing acts across cultures. Oxford: Berg.

Critical Politics

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Timothy Fitzgerald in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Tags

categories, church, Critical Religion, economics, India, Japan, John Locke, politics, religion, secular

Our blog ‘critical religion’ receives contributions from many people, and they usually have the terms ‘critical’ and ‘religion’ in them somewhere. Some are much more clearly theorised than that. My own understanding of ‘critical religion’ is specific. For me, ‘critical religion’ is always about ‘religion and related categories’, because I argue that religion is not a stand-alone category, but is one of a configuration of categories. On its own, ‘religion’ has no object; it only seems to do so. Religion is a category that is deployed for purposes of classification, but it does not stand in a one-to-one relationship with any observable thing in the world. In modern discourse, ‘religion’ works as half a binary, as in ‘religion and secular’ or ‘religion and [secular] politics’. When we talk about religion today, there is always a tacit exclusion of whatever is considered to be non-religious. If, for example, we talk about religion and politics, we have already assumed they refer to different things, and to mutually incompatible ones at that. Politics is secular, which means non-religious. Religion is separate from politics. If the two get mixed up and confused, then there is a problem.

One thing to notice here is that there has been a massive historical slippage from ‘ought’ to ‘is’. What started in the 17th century as an ‘ought’ – viz. there ought to be a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘political society’ – has long become an assumption about the way the world actually is. In public discourse we have become used to talking as if ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ refer to two essentially different aspects of the real world, that we intuitively know what a religion is and what politics is, and we imagine that if we wanted to take the trouble we could define their essential differences. And yet of course the rhetorical construct of ‘ought’ keeps appearing, as for example when we insist that a nation that does not have a constitutional separation of religion and politics is undeveloped or backward; or when Anglican Bishops make moral pronouncements that seem uncomfortably ‘political’.

But what does ‘politics’ actually refer to? If the meaning of a word is to be found in its use, then we surely all know the meaning of ‘politics’. We use the term constantly. We have an intuitive understanding about what politics is. If we didn’t, how would we be able to deploy the term with such self-assurance? How, without understanding the term, would we be able to communicate about our shared and contested issues? We discourse constantly about politics, whether in private, or in the media, in our schools and universities, or in our ‘political’ institutions – and we surely all know which of our institutions are the political ones. Careers are made in politics. We join political parties, or we become politicians, or we enrol and study in departments of political science, and read and write textbooks on the topic. How could there be a political science if we did not know what politics is? There are journalists and academics that specialise in politics, journals dedicated to politics, distinct associations and conferences for its study, and thousands of books written and published about politics. Historians research the politics of the past. There is a politics industry. There are commercial companies that analyse and provide data on the topic of politics. Media organisations employ many people to produce programmes dedicated to politics and to political analysis, discussion and debate.

Yet the ubiquity of politics is our problem. For politics and the political is so universal that it is difficult to pin it down. Are there any domains of human living that cannot and are not described as being political, as pertaining to politics? If we try to find some definitive use of the terms ‘politics’ and ‘political’ by searching through popular and academic books, newspapers, TV representations, or the discourses on politics on the internet, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that everything is politics or political. We can find representations of the politics of abortion, the politics of hunger, church politics, the politics of sectarianism, political Islam, the politics of universities and university departments, the politics of medieval Japan, the politics of the Roman or the Mughal empires, the politics of slavery, class politics, the politics of caste in colonial and contemporary India, the politics of Native Americans in the 16th century, the politics of ancient Babylon, the politics of marriage, the politics of Constitutions, and so on and on. And we surely know that politics is as ancient as the hills.

This apparent universality of the political, its lack of boundaries, seems to place a question mark around its semantic content. If we cannot say what is not politics, then how can we give any determinate content or meaning to the term? This lack of boundaries can also be seen in the problem of demarcating a domain of politics from other domains such as ‘religion’ and ‘economics’. If we try to find a clear distinction between politics and religion, we find a history of contestation, but one that only seems to go back to the 17th century – a point to which I return in a moment. We find claims that politics and religion have – or ought to have – nothing to do with each other, yet in contemporary discourse we find many references to the politics of religion, and also to the religion of politics.

The term ‘political economy’ also points us towards this problem of demarcation. Some universities have departments of politics, some have departments of economics, and some have departments of political economy. How are they distinguished? This is especially perplexing when one finds books written by specialists on the politics of economics, as well as on the economics of politics. Add in works on the religion of politics and the politics of religion; or the religion of economics and the economics of religion: we seem to have a dog’s dinner of categories. You notice these things when you read outside your normal disciplinary boundaries.

It is also of interest that all of these can and are described as sciences: viz. the science of politics, the science of religion, and the science of economics. We cannot in practice easily if at all distinguish between the categories on which these putative sciences are based. Yet all of them have their own specialist departments, degree courses, journals, associations and conferences.

Another point is that all these ‘sciences’, based on concepts so difficult to distinguish and demarcate, are ‘secular’, in the sense of non-religious. Describing a science or discipline as secular reminds us that we have another demarcation problem. If all secular practices and institutions are defined as non-religious and therefore in distinction to ‘religion’, we need to have some reasonably clear understanding about what we mean by religion to be able to make the distinction in the first place. Without such an understanding, how would we know what ‘non-religious’ means? This paradox is magnified when we consider that for many centuries ‘secular’ has referred mainly to the ‘secular priesthood’ in the Catholic Church, and the priesthood are hardly non-religious in the modern sense.

We thus find that in everyday discussions and debates, and also in the more specialist discourses, we deploy concepts with a largely unquestioned confidence that on further consideration seems unfounded. Speaking personally, I entered academic work through religious studies, also known as the science (or scientific study) of religion, the history of religions, or the plain study of religions. Yet I cannot tell you what religion is, or what the relation between [singular] religion and [plural] religions is. I have made it a point over many years of tracking down a wide range of definitions of religion, and found them to be contradictory and circular. There is no agreed definition of the subject that so many experts claim to be researching and writing about. I suggest this is the situation in politics as well. Attempts that I have read to define politics, for example in text-books written for students of politics, seem always to be circular in the sense that they define politics in terms of political attributes, just as religions are defined in terms of religious attributes.

I suggest that the perceived self-evidence of politics as a meaningful category derives from an inherent ambiguity – and in this it is a mirror-image to religion. On the one hand, the term ‘politics’ generally simply means ‘power’ or ‘contestations of power’, and since power is probably one of the few universals in human relations we can see why it might appear intuitively convincing. However, on that understanding, it is difficult to see what is not about politics, because it can surely be argued that all human relations have always been about contestations of power. We gain such ubiquity at the expense of meaning. Surely, political science has a more specific and determinate meaning than power studies? You might just as well say that the study of politics is the study of humanity.

Our sense that there is a more determinate nuance seems justified when we discover that the discourse on ‘politics’ has a specific genesis in the English language in the 17th century. Though we can find a few (probably very few) references to ‘politicians’ in Elizabethan drama, ‘politics’ is even rarer, and I cannot find a sustained discourse on politics as a distinct domain of human action earlier than John Locke’s late 17th century distinctions, developed in his Treatises on Government, between ‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. Here Locke explicitly distinguishes between man in the state of nature and political or civil society on the one hand; and also between politics and religion on the other. In his religion-politics binary, Locke links politics to the outer, public order of the magistrate and governance, and religion to the inner, private relation of the individual to God. (What he means by ‘god’ is itself a conundrum, for the evidence is that, like Newton, he was a heretic, either a Unitarian or a Socinian. ‘God’ is another of those endlessly contested categories. If you try to define ‘religion’ as ‘belief in god’, you find yourself in another infinite regress of meanings).

It seems significant that this politics-religion binary is a modern, Enlightenment one, because Locke was arguing against the dominant understanding of Religion at the time. For his own reasons he wanted to reimagine ‘religion’. When the term religion was used at all (rarer than today) it meant Christian truth, and there was no clear sense (despite Locke’s claims) that Christian truth was not about power, or that it was separated from governance. The King was the sacred head and heart of the Christian Commonwealth, and what fell outside religion in this dominant sense was not a neutral non-religious domain but pagan irrationality and barbarity. In other words, what fell outside religion in the dominant sense of his day was still defined theologically and biblically in terms of The Fall. His privatization of religion to make way for a public domain of political society was an ideologically-motivated claim about how we ought to think about religion, not a neutral description of some objective facts.

It was especially in his attempt to legitimate new concepts of private property, and the rights of (male) property owners to representation, that Locke needed to completely revise people’s understanding of ‘religion’ as a private affair of the inner man (women were not much in the picture), in order to demarcate an essentially different domain called political society. This new binary found its way into written constitutions in North America, and is now naturalised in common speech and common sense. Today it seems counter-intuitive to question the reality of politics as a distinct domain of human practice. But this rhetorical construction was deeply resisted. Even the French Revolution did not succeed in formally separating religion and the state until the end of the 19th century. England was an Anglican confessional state until well into the 19th century.

Locke’s formulation was thoroughly ideological but has become naturalised through repeated rhetorical construction until now it seems to be ‘in the nature of things’. I suggest that, whenever we use the term politics with intuitive ease we catch ourselves and ask, in what sense am I using the term? Am I using it in the universal sense of ubiquitous power and contestations of power in all human relations? Or as referring to a specific ideological formation of modernity underpinning a historically-emergent form of private property-ownership and representation of (male) property interests? The elided slippage between the historically and ideologically specific formulation, and the empty ubiquity of ‘power’ as a universal in all human relations, lends the term its illusory quality of intuitive common sense.

Marian apparitions – a challenge to established categories

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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Tags

Christian, Critical Religion, market, modernity, pilgrimage, religion, strong religion

Emile Zola noted in 1892 about the newly built Lourdes basilica that its effect was “very shimmering but not especially religious”. The aesthetics of the Lourdes complex, with its mix of architectural styles and generous use of electric lights, was only one of many elements of the Marian apparitions that did not sit well with critics. Interestingly it was not only the reactionary politics behind the Marian cult but particularly the modern aspects like the consumerism or use of mass media at Marian apparition sites that were criticized by many liberal and progressive observers as unworthy of a true religious spirit.

But it would be misguided to simply continue the 19th century tradition and label these aspects as aberrations of an otherwise pure religiosity. As Suzanne K. Kaufman has shown, republicans used the controversy around Lourdes to construct a dichotomy between an acceptable private, nostalgic religiosity and its debased modern public forms in order to “relegate its practices to the margins of modern political and economic life”. (80)

The background for this was that the developments at Lourdes and other Marian apparition sites challenged the monopoly of the secular world view for presenting viable visions for modernity and progress. Marian apparitions showed that reactionary values could go very well with modern technology, mass media and the market. The apparitions themselves were also highly political, not only in the sense that they brought existing tensions to the fore as in the case of violent clashes between Catholics and state troops following claims of Marian apparitions during the German Kulturkampf, but innately through the messages conveyed by the seers to the people.

Academia is increasingly taking “strong religion” (Almond et al. 2003) into account, yet the preconceptions about what the term is supposed to designate are strongly influenced by militant Islamism and its scripture based forms of fundamentalism that dominate the news since 9/11. Marian apparitions, however, are not primarily rooted in scripture but distinctively modern. Mary, the mother of God, appears in the here and now with a message tailored to the circumstances of the time, often choosing places undergoing drastic transformation: Fatima called for a bulwark against communism, La Salette summoned to a disciplined Christian life on the brink of the 1848 revolution. The still on-going messages at Medjugorje that started a decade before the Balkan war spread the message of peace as did the apparition of Mary in Kibeho, where one of the major genocides of the Rwandan war took place.

At Lourdes, the Assumptionists realized the political potential of the Marian apparition site when they chose the National Pilgrimage as their key instrument for driving forth their mission of re-Christianizing French society from individual to government. Also, what is overlooked when speaking in derogatory terms about the devotional kitsch associated with Marian apparition shrines is that these mass produced items could powerfully forge and express identity as they served as “a rival set of emblems” (Blackbourn, 1993: 27) to the omnipresent national symbols of allegiance like the Tricolour.

Of course, the status of Marian apparitions is highly contested. Catholics are not obliged to believe in any of the accepted apparitions, and not only rationalists may find it difficult to believe that God sends Mary today to speak on day-to-day politics. Yet one should keep in mind that those who write off Marian apparitions as degenerated forms of religion and hence as imagined have an agenda, too. Religion, politics, modernity and the market do not come in neat boxes, and we should be wary of anyone trying to package these terms according to their needs. Marian apparitions are an underestimated phenomenon of modernity that can shed new light on the contested conceptualisation and construction of religion from the 19th century onwards.

—

Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World, by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan. University of Chicago Press, 2003

Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by David Blackbourn. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, by Suzanne K. Kaufman. Cornell University Press, 2005

The elephant in the room – religion and the peace process in Northern Ireland

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Francis Stewart in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Catholic, Critical Religion, culture, Northern Ireland, peace, Protestant, religion, violence

Since its legal inception in 1921 Northern Ireland has been plagued with violence and dispute. This blog does not provide the forum or indeed space to fully explore the myriad causes for the violence. Suffice it to say that it is a conglomeration of perceived imperial action by the UK through both military and political means, a monochromatic entrenchment of the past, cultural clashes and a severe identity crisis. Conspicuous by its absence from the list appears to be the question of ‘religion’.

Certainly when the Good Friday Agreement was created, and subsequently voted in within two referenda in both the North and South of Ireland, religion was not a factor in what was to be the proposed peace process. In fact religion is mentioned once, in the third section of the lengthy agreement under the headline of ‘human rights’. The salient part of the sentence confirms ‘the right to freedom and expression of religion’, frankly so vague as to be virtually useless given the situation it was linked with and intended to move beyond.

Inferences from this statement would seem to indicate two things, the first being that religion has no part to play within the peace process or indeed any lasting peace within the province, and second, that religion is a homogenous construct and practise within Northern Ireland. Both are significantly problematic and both will, ultimately, ensure that peace remains nothing but a cracked glass waiting for the final knock to shatter it (see also, Susan Mckay, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, (Blackstaff, 2006)).

Removing religion from a peace process that has in part, certainly within the media, been explained (away) as a violent, religiously-motivated conflict, seems naïve at best and disingenuous at worst. Paramilitaries on both sides of the divide frame their actions and indeed perspective through their religious understandings. Republican paramilitaries who died were given the last rites where possible and a Catholic funeral (with military overtones). Loyalists paramilitaries often utilised mottos such as ‘For God and Ulster’.

John Brewer, David Mitchell and Gerard Leavey have just released a book (Ex-combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland, London: Palgrave, 2013) that documents the role religion played in the lives of paramilitaries from both sides of the divide. It focuses on religion as a motivating factor in choosing to pick up a weapon or join a paramilitary organisation, religious experiences of imprisoned paramilitaries, and the relationship between paramilitary members and the churches.

Various religious ideologies are wrapped up in the conflict: loyalist wall murals quote Old Testament scripture, whilst Republican murals espouse New Testament ideas such as that of laying down one’s life for another in connection with the hunger strikers. The interviews by Brewer et al reveal the range of religious ideologies and personal faith that existed for paramilitary members (chapter 4 in particular). Ignoring the role of religion and the religious dimension in the conflict prevents a full understanding of what actually happened and why. By extension it prevents the development of a useful model to understand the ongoing concern of extremism within certain interpretations of Islamism.

So why is religion, and its varying interpretations, not discussed more substantially in the Good Friday Agreement, nor addressed seriously – or even included – within the ongoing peace process? Brewer posits that the answer may lie in the source of the structure of the agreement itself, that is within the field and purpose of transitional justice, which is often not amenable to religion playing a role (pp 160) as it interferes with the American cold-war triumphalism in which it was created (pp vii). I don’t disagree, but it does not provide enough of an answer.

Let’s push the idea further; perhaps its exclusion is also based on the possibility that inclusion of religion within both the reality of the conflict and the peace process would necessitate an acknowledgement that religion is significantly more important to identity construction and defence than is perhaps comfortable. Religion is intangible, difficult to understand and virtually impossible to define. Other factors that cause or contribute to conflict are significantly easier to categorise and even develop pathways to either re-route or correct or legislate for or against.

A uniform concept of ‘religion’ is in itself problematic and erroneously assumes a common understanding and agreement as to what constitutes religion. Fitzgerald has argued that the term ‘religion’ is a Western construct with a particular agenda that includes exclusionary aspects regarding what is and is not ‘religion’. It has the potential to exclude those who hold strong opinions on both ethical matters and issues of faith yet would not self-identify as ‘religious’. In other words the term ‘religion’ is both constructed and constrictive, and in a situation such as that in Northern Ireland it is arguable that the problematic nature of the term is a contributing factor to the conflict.

The tantalising question arises: if we allow for a less constrictive understanding of religion within a situation such as Northern Ireland, what possibilities for reconciliation emerge? To answer that, even partially, requires a clear framework on which to set about addressing the question of religion. Refusing any boundaries or encouraging a general relativism is just as damaging and problematic as assuming too narrow an understanding.

A framework which enables a broad critique of religion and a variety of religious understandings and approaches is a necessity. Understandings of religion in Northern Ireland are so intrinsically linked to the character of the people and the very landscape itself (not just the murals but also how cities such as Belfast are physically carved up through permanent peace lines) it is possible to overlook the place of religion outside of institutions so vocal and prominent during the conflict. A study of grassroots organic approaches to peace is called for, but it cannot be limited to one framework or approach, it must be made from a variety of different approaches and ideas. In Northern Ireland we have a saying, ‘grasp the nettle’, which means do what needs to be done – a very apt approach that studies into the peace process need to take on board with regards to the place of religion.

Tibetan self-immolation between religious practice and political statement

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by Sihaya in Critical Religion, Erasmus University of Rotterdam

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Critical Religion, moral, politics, religion, self-immolation, Tibet

The first self-immolation in Tibetan society in the modern era took place in exile in Delhi, India in 1998 as a Tibetan Youth Congress hunger strike was broken up by Indian police. Since then, five more Tibetans have set fire to themselves in exile and a growing number continue to do so in what is considered the occupied territory of Tibet. Since February 2009 more than 100 Tibetans have set themselves of fire within the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). The slogan gathering all these acts of self-sacrifice are gathered in the image in an article published in The Economist last year of ‘Tibet on Fire’. According to such a view self-immolations enact the ‘burning issue’ of the Tibetan issue in order to remind the world about the situation of Tibetans and their long history of exile. But are self-immolations political acts or are they the expression of religious ideals? While the self-immolations have a clear political goal, dramatically calling for attention towards Tibetans from the western world they are also religious acts, deeply embedded in Tibetan Buddhism. That seems to be a paradox, because how can a religion that deeply discourages of violence agree with such an extreme form of suicide?

It cannot be contested that self-immolations are political in nature. Indeed many initiators of such acts call for unity within Tibet: You must unite and work together to build a strong and prosperous Tibetan nation in the future. This is the sole wish of all the Tibetan heroes. In the view of those who agree with this political statement unity is needed in front of the divisive policies of the Chinese government and also in front of the disagreement of how to approach Tibetan independence from exile. The latter extrapolates between the non-violent approach which for the past half of a century has been advocated and implemented under the authority of the Dalai Lama and the more impatient approach of Tibetan youth who feel that non-violence is not an answer.

Violence committed towards the self is not only the middle way between these two options, as it might at first seem. It is a practice that is embedded if not encouraged by Tibetan Buddhism and its ideas of ultimate giving, selflessness, sacrifice of the self for the others. The religious expression of these ideas is the ritual of gCod where the symbolic sacrifice of the body is used as a way of severing attachment to existence (Stott 1989). But an even more pronounced expression of the value of self-sacrifice can be found in Shatideva’s Bodhisattvacharyavatara, a text often taught at public occasions by the Dalai Lama. This text explains in details the attributes and actions of a bodhisattva, the enlightened being who is working for the benefit of other. Here the exchange of the self for others is a main idea:

At the beginning, the Guide of the World encourages/ The giving of such things as food’ Later, when accustomed to this,/One may progressively start to give away even one’s flesh. (Shantideva and Batchelor 1999:63)

In this perception the renunciation to the body and to the flesh symbolizes the renunciation to the self. The self, accompanied by a feeling of individuation is considered the highest impediment on the spiritual path. In order to reach enlightenment the self and its importance must be diminished, destroyed. This can be done through meditative practices but also rather literal forms of self-sacrifice. While in order to attain spiritual benefit renunciation to the self must take place as an offering to the benefit of other, it is foremost the one who makes the sacrifice who reaps the benefits. In this way, as the Dalai Lama turns the argument around, caring for others is the way of being truly selfish. Thus, by sacrificing oneself one can be truly selfish: through thinking only of others and sacrificing the self for other, one can actually reach high spiritual attainments (The Dalai Lama and Cutler 1999).

However, it is not the promise of spiritual attainment that motivates Tibetan self-immolators. Rather it is the ideal of collective freedom and independence that motivates these acts. Although these two seems like articulating a political goal, transforming self-sacrifice into a political act, once more religious and political goals are crossfertilizing each other. Many Tibetans who have contributed to a burning Tibet express a wish for Tibetan unity, wishing to be free to practice Tibetan Buddhism and listen to the teachings of the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile, however, they become heroes who apply in practice the ideal of the bodhisattva while fighting for their rights towards religious practice. With this attitude self-immolations make a superior moral claim upon collective freedom and independence, making it difficult for the Chinese to respond.

Although self-sacrifices through fire are not unique either to Asian cultures nor to Buddhism, the specific intersection of political and religious goals in the Tibetan context is unique. Tibetan self-immolations are actions taken for the welfare and benefit of others. This presents a special case to Talal Asad’s approach in which he considers the religious and political as mutually defining each other (Asad 2003). The case of Tibetan self-immolations throws light on the way categories of religion and politics are constructed and implemented as a transnational political statement made with the help of acts of compassion. The heroism of Tibetans rests on moral superiority of their political statements backed up by religious principles of ultimate giving.

Bibliography

Asad, T (2003) Genealogies of religion, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London
Santideva and Batchelor, S. (1999) The Bodhisattva’s way of life, LTWA: Dharamsala
Stott, D. (1989)  Offering the body: The practice of gCod in Tibetan Buddhism, Religion  19:3
The Dalai Lama and Cutler, H. (1999) The art of happiness, Hodder Paperbacks: Londonreligion

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