secularism - what matters? bender and taves Flashcards
main discussion
o ‘things of value’ ‘secular’ ‘spirituality’ ‘religion’ as markers of value
o Indicate something meaningful
o May indicated something overvalued if associated with ‘superstition’
o Value – directly related to importance attached (not in the sense of ethics, law, linguistics, economics, etc.)
o How is value attached to things ‘secular’ ‘spiritual’ ‘religious’
o Resources, processes and structures that allow attribution
o and articulation of value are interesting
o ‘secular’ ‘religious’ divide is also significant – allocating to one of these categories is a process of attributing value
problems with main discussion
o This approach requires the embracing of paradoxes
o Value may be given in deeply thoughtful, reflective ways that can be clearly articulated
o OR value may be attributed in rather ambivalent ways
o We should not judge ambivalence as irrational
♣ This would be to reassume the secular-religious divide that assumes religion to be irrational
♣ Many religious practices arise from deeply reflective processes – so the assertion that they are irrational or unreasonable should be rejected
intro - definition of secularism and world events
- ‘secularisation, in classical version, narrates the decline of religious authority over all aspects of social life and its withdrawal into the space of private belief and private life’
o links it to intellectual developments
world events in 1970s e.g. RCC in Polish solidarity movement/Iranian revolution suggested that religion was very much still a significant force tion
contextual empahsis
- looks at how religion and secularism develop and interact
- secularism is shaped by history
- need to empirically and analytically look at secularity within various contexts – it can be linked to institutional processes
- emphasis on secularity in contexts can be seen in the importance of practice and ‘the context of embodied actions’ (5)
- secularism = study for sociologists and scholars of religion
charles Taylor
‘Charles Taylor (2007) invokes the “spiritual” (or “moral/spiritual”) when he refers to various incommensurate projects of value and meaning that take place within what he calls the secular “immanent frame.”
- Charles Taylor uses spiritual to show value
o Secularism has made religion a choice not something accepted
o God is an option - Need to understand processes of valuation
lived religion
- “lived religion” = ‘set of approaches and methods in the field of religious studies, with uncertain boundaries and much argumentation, which developed in the same time frame as the study of secular formations’ (12)
o emphasis on practice and institutions as shaping the world
o ‘Two elements of this approach are worth highlighting: first, the emphasis on practice as processes, where focus on a practice is not oriented toward isolating an object for study but rather calls attention to its embeddedness and relations within a range of settings and concepts…In addition, lived religion’s emphasis on practice engages “religious” actions and activities that move well beyond the clearly marked “religious” contexts on which generations of scholars focused their attention.’ (13)
move away from belief and enlightenment values
- ‘Te move away from belief as a central focus of investigation was prompted and reinforced by several intersect- ing views and evaluations. Primarily, religious studies and anthropology scholars both recognized the degree to which identification of belief (particularly, individual subjective belief) as the defining feature of religion is a reflection of a particular historical context, that of an Enlightenment- era infused with tacit Protestant presuppositions. e development of a universal definition of religion based on individual belief and (as many have since argued) the autonomous liberal subject who can have belief is, thus, a historically emergent one.’ (14)
key terms
o Experience
♣ Encompasses the secular and religious
♣ Christopher White develops the idea of ‘suggestibility’
♣ ‘While psychologists developed the term suggestibility as a way to explain and manage “religious experiences” in order to delimiting their authority and power, liberal Protestant believers found in the concept a new portal into understanding their tradition.’ (20)
♣ Jeffery Kripal looks at how experience is involved in the history of religions
♣ Bornstein looks at “volunteer experience”
♣ ‘experience…is thus both something that happens but also something that people shape, argue over, and strive to find’ (21)
o authenticity
♣ need to authenticate experience
♣ Redfield and MSF – examines what authentic life means
• Life = human not transcendent
o Authority
♣ What compels individuals to act?
♣ What brings thousands of people to Portuguese Boom Festival?
♣ Secularism leads people to question issues of authorities
♣ People still question whether humanitarian actions are “religious” or “secular”
♣ Authorities = linked to socio-political setting
♣ Some prefer to view authority in a community rather than individual setting
♣ Different types of authority – e.g. religious, scientific
♣ ‘Peter Redfield’s description of the challenges that Médecins Sans Frontières faces in establishing its secular humanitarian goals shows how a secular organization that develops genealogically from earlier, more “spiritualized” humanitarian organizations works to establish a new form of authority for its activities.’ (27)
1 - Joseph Jastrow
o Religion arises from irrational human elements
Science, on the other hand, can teaching people to control their irrationality
1 - suggestibility - Christopher white
- Suggestibility – measure of impressionability a person had
o This was higher in religious people – especially, apparently in US and in Evangelicals!
o Also used in understanding how crowds could be irrational and how they might be controlled
o Troubling behaviour in children was addressed with ‘suggestion theory’ aimed at managing this
o Similar approaches aimed at controlling ‘primitive’ groups
o The advertising industry developed as an interesting spin-off– suggestion could be used to persuade people to buy things without them necessarily making ‘rational’ decisions
o psychological category of suggestibility was reworked by religious individuals in order to reform religion by arguing that ‘scientific discourses sometimes associated with secularisation actually were used to develop new ways of being religious’ (62)
o force of science can have a positive effect on the significance of religion
o suggestibility = how impressionable a person is (seen significantly in American evangelicals)
o is suggestibility too reductive a concept when applied to religion?
1 - Christopher - more to faith than suggestibility
- Many agreed that there must be more to religion
o Suggestion was part of ‘faith’
o Other qualities also – emotional urgency, sense of certainty
o In preaching and worship (two classic ‘means of grace’) were good environments for suggestion to serve a positive purpose – so here it is a positive element of human behaviour
o In improper contexts suggestion produces inappropriate or poorly formed belief – leading to people overriding conscious choice in making ethical decisions - Important to see here that ‘suggestion’ is now used in the discourse about good and bad religion – it is no longer simply negative, and a manifestation of human weakness
1 - Gustave le Bon, The Crowd
o Crowds are primitive or allowed people to return to primitive behaviour
o Crowds somehow behave unconsciously – methods applied in alarming ways by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and others!
o Anti-Semitism was also to be understood on this basis
o Preachers and politicians used this also to implant or suggest ideas producing automatic responses in people
o Crowds are contagious – overriding doubts, indecision, contrary ideas and impressions
o Crowds hypnotise people into action
o A preacher suggesting the need for repentance and conversion was another good example
1 - George cutten on suggestion accounts
o Suggestion accounts for illegitimate religion and religiousness
♣ He suggested that women, children and southern ‘negros’, and evangelicals were particularly susceptible to it
♣ In his opinion ‘negroes’ combined ‘dense ignorance and weak will with vivid imagination and volatile emotion’
♣ Emotion was to be supressed using self-control
o Some of these ideas are offensive, and clearly illogical, but we can see that suggestion is now deeply embedded in discussions about types of religion, not the science-religion dichotomy
o Other psychological studies correlated personality traits with particular religious styles
1 - Starbuck on suggestibility
o Links between willpower, suggestibility and intelligence
o Conservatives
♣ Seeking to preserve tradition
♣ Susceptible to suggestion
♣ Making them more likely to preserve doctrines and practices of an established faith tradition
o Radicals
♣ Less suggestible (see the tests in the article)
o Therefore: conservatives are intellectually inferior and promote reconstruction of religion and its symbols
o Is there a correlation between their conclusions and the scientific outlook??
2 - summary of Meyer
- relationship between religion and modernity has emerged in the face of ongoing secularisation
- ‘in the case of Ghana… we encounter a modern secular state that witnessed, after the turn to democracy and the liberalization and commercialization of the hitherto state-owned media in 1992, the emergence of a heavily pentecostalized public sphere in which much emphasis is placed on spirits. Spirits, it appears, elude confinement to the category of religion and appear in all kinds of settings, including politics, economics, and entertainment. Spirits, in other words, are not just there, as signs of a traditional past, but reproduced under modern conditions.’ (88)
