The trouble with defining religion

As promised I carry on my mini-series of blog posts, which will present my view on religion and politics - something that may be of interest in the running up to the Swedish election, but also hopefully interesting in general.

This part is regarding the trouble of defining religion. Now, you may think that I'm kidding, right? - I mean, everyone knows what is and what isn't religion. This may at first seem like a straight forward deal that can be discussed in a matter-of-factly fashion, and if someone doesn't can't define religion then it must just be some scholars who are trying to stir up debate over nothing, in order to stay employed by their academic institutions. However, I would argue that the problem of defining what counts as religion runs deeper. I will give a short background, and then connect these to William Cavanaugh's argument in the book The Myth of Religious Violence.

One common way to deal with definitions of religion is to order them into the sections substancial and functional. The substancial mode of defining religion deals in what people believe, feel and think on the inside. Religion is then anything that evokes this special "spiritual" feeling, or makes you reflect, pray or worship in a heartfelt personal way. But in order for a substantial definition to deal specifically with religion the said beliefs must be directed towards something transcendent - a god or something of that magnitude. However, there are a great many things that are usually referred to as religion that doesn't comply with this seemingly straightforward (and very Swedish) take on religion. The classic example - because it happens to be one of the "world religions" is Theravada Buddhism. Even though Mahayana Buddhists generally view Buddha as divine or transcendent (at the very least in comparison to the rest of us humans) and therefor offer prayer to Buddha, the Theravadan branch is more "atheist" if the expression can be allowed. This is probably also part of why Buddhism was for a long time not judged as a religion in Sweden, but a philosophy.

Next, we have the functional definitions of religion. These define religion by modes of acting. Yes, there may be something systematic that referes to some wise being (even though we must include non-transcendent beings such as Buddha), but more importantly religion is about performance. Church, synagogue and mosque attendance for example - and what people do within these spiritual spaces: religions is that which have some sort of ritualistic(ish) behavior attached to it and that gets people to engage with their surrounding community in a certain way. Problem is here, that instead of being too narrow a definition - this is instead too wide, as there is no way to exclude other doctrines who bears heavily on how people lead their lives - such as political ideologies. The usual argument goes: why isn't Marxism counted as a religion with the help of such a definition?

The answer is, unfortunately, unhelpful. The respons such as that in William Cavanaugh's book, is that this renders the definitions of religion useless. But I think Cavanaugh is getting ahead of himself. How does Cavanaugh arrive at his conclusion about the usefulness of the definitions? The answer is that he beforehand has selected a number of religions (the world religions at the very least) that must be fitted into the definition. And when we find something else, like a political ideology, which fits the perspectives we've choosen - we fault the perspective instead of applying the tools at hand for the study of that which we've circled as being religion. I will return to this shortly, but first I will make a short excursion which is not unimportant in terms of the use of religion "as a theoretic tool".

There is another argument in Cavanaugh's book that deserves both attention and merit, which is his historical argument around the construction of religions in the plural. In early Christian writing - such as Augustine - religione ment the true worship of Christ. And other modes of worshipping other gods (which the ancient world was ripe with) was not deemed another religione. The concept of religions was in fact constructed at a much later stage in order to compare the Christian belief to the believes of people who were soon about to be colonized and conquered around the world by Europeans. In the first order religious comparison was applied so that the European expedition could claim: "These people have no such thing as a religion" only to impose their own ways of believing and acting out faith in a proper manner by force. Once the people had been conquered the Europeans incidentally discovered that they locals did indeed have some sort of belief system in place. Handy then, that the Europeans could apply a comparative perspective where we could argue for the superiority of the Christian religion above the local variant - something that gave missionaries the legitimacy they needed.

The next shift came about in the era of Enlightenment. Before this, the faith of the ruler was to be the faith of the ruled (subject). The outcome of the various struggles in at the time where nation-states started to form, was a mode of being where religion was not part of the measures used to control the people. It turned into a division where the church would be the benevolent caretaker of souls, but the nation-state would require the lethal allegiance of the people. In short, the rise of the nation-state produced a shift in what people were willing to kill or die for. Before, it was the church, now it was the nation. Bare in mind also, that the nation-state wasn't always ruled by the people in this era (more often than not it wasn't), and especially not by any women inhabiting the nation.

So where does this deeply problematic history of religions AND problems of definitions lead us? I want to return to the argument above where I felt that Cavanaugh goes awry. I would argue that this history and its host of problem is told in Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence gives us reason to think of the construction of various "secular" political ideologies are playing into exactly the same register as religions do.

What political ideology effectively does is point to something that it percieves as the good life (and society). This goes for religions as well. Furthermore, political ideologies does not back this up by empirical proof: "Look, here is the perfect marxist/socialdemocratic/marketliberalistic country" and then everyone jumps on the bandwagon. The goal is a utopian goal, an idea or ideal - something to strive towards. This, again, goes for religion as well. The intertwined history of the two - religion and politics - should also make it clear that the transfer of power between them has not produced a clear cut Robin Hood type of power-to-the-people effect, from evil to lesser evil. One of Cavanaugh's points is that in any type of violence - religious or no - there are always a host of components at play who are greatly important; ideological/religious, cultural, socio-economical etc. To extrapolate the "religious" ingredient and to say what this consists of, clearly separated from the other disciplines, is in his view not possible.

For me, this is another way of displaying that religion is not separable from ideological utopian societies and modes of being. Furthermore, religion is not to be excluded from debates about the good in life because of its especially violent or irrational elements, as Cavanaugh succesfully shows that no such elements can be extrapolated. But as I've said I disagree with Cavanaugh on one point: the point where functional definitions of religion is rendered useless by their entanglement with political ideologies. Instead, we should compare these to each other on their shared merits and acknowledge their messy intertwine-ment (is that a word?). We might just want to call it something else. If politics and religion is inseparable, we may want create a new field instead of moving everything from one of them into the other field (thus creating unnecessary confusion). My suggestion is that we call this new field poligion.

Sincerely and theologically yours

Jonatan