Defining Religion

Religion is notoriously difficult to define, despite yeoman efforts by scholars like Clifford Geertz. This should really surprise no one because, like so many of the basic building blocks of our thought, it shares ranges of existences where its meanings vary, especially when it tries to move from popular parlance into more specialized academic usage. Besides, it just is no single thing. Its variation and its play is part of what makes it interesting to study.

I like that idea, that its movement, its flexibility, its shifts, make it worth studying.

For decades now, the category has troubled me. I have not been a fan of Geertz' efforts, nor those of many other scholars. I have never been convinced by the idea that somehow religion was different from other areas of human endeavor and, as a result, required its own concepts such as belief, symbolism, ritual, magic, liturgy, conversion, supernatural, god, spirits, evil, demons, transcendent, and so on. Other than marking something as religious and, despite the hearty efforts of scholars to work those concepts, I have never been convinced they had much to offer that was exclusive to religion. Furthermore, it has always seemed to me that the ordinary tools of social science should be applied to religion, that scholars should not take it as a special kind of thing, just because it said it was.

Nevertheless, not all that is defined as religion sees itself as special and unique. That may well be particularly the case where religion originally developed as a term and took utility, the West. I have long been a proponent that the only meaningful use of the term was as a self-descriptor that arose historically in a particular time and place with which it is inherently connected. At the same time, I had to recognize the importance of the category for marketing one's studies and for finding a niche in the academy and society, although it really was not all that useful in anthropology for most of my career. But it was elsewhere.

However, that marketing thing has spread and makes religion a social category to be dealt with. I mean that it is a jurisprudential category that establishes a field of behavior as different. Religion has become a space excluded from ordinary private and public law, and ordinary social behavior. Not only is this the case in the United States where religion as an exception--and yes I do mean to refer to Agamben and Schmitt--is established in the First Amendment to the Constitution, it is also the case throughout the world.

The Universal Declaration of Human rights establishes religion as a protected difference, just as it removes it from the ordinary particularity we anthropologists often demand, especially following Boas. It is declared a universal and made a right.

This is further made the case in other UN documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, and the 1989 Vienna Concluding Document. It has, as a result, become the matter of politics among nations, the actions of multilateral agencies, and cases brought before international and national tribunals on the basis these documents provide.
Therefore, religion now has a substance, as an exclusion. The problem, for jurists, is determining what qualifies an aspect of human life or an institution to qualify for that exclusion. Here they wrestle. And in their wrestling and decisions they will define religion. And the result may not be what Churches and other religious bodies of many sorts expect and use for their own self definition and action. But these decision will impact them, like a form of procrustean bed, and over time force them to fit whatever the issues come to be to qualify as a religion and thus be part of a universal exclusion, a human right.

No matter how we academics define and work the category, although we can expect our work to be drawn into the legal conflicts where useful, it has taken a substance as an absence whose boundaries must be defined.

Oh well. It will be lots of fun to observe this process and study its details. There is work to be done. Damn you Agamben anyway.

A Quibble with the Sacred

The great Latter-day Saint humanitarian and example, Lowell Bennion, was also a brilliant sociologist. The LDS Church took him from academics, but he left an important book which was one of the first introductions of the sociologist Max Weber, to a English speaking audience.

Printed in only 100 copies by Le Presses Modernes in Paris, this quantity was reduced by the war and chaos in Europe, Bennion’s Max Weber’s Methodology almost sank into oblivion. But his student Laurie DiPadova has published a chapter from it as well as an article on Bennion’s interpretation of Weber. Mary Bradford, Bennion’s Biographer, also discusses the book in her Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian.

Not only is Bennion’s sociology important for what he has to say about Mormonism in his analyses, he brings new light to the study of Weber. Bennion’s work developed independently from that of Talcott Parsons, who I believe was a student of Weber’s and used the master’s writings to bolster his own structural functionalist approach. For many Americans, Parson’s Weber was Weber until with the collapse of Parson’s school, other approaches, including interpretive approaches could be published.

Still sloganeering often passes for reading Weber, as most students probably only learn the five to ten sentence version composed of just a few ideas. Yet Weber is one of the most original and important sociologists and his work, even though a century old, still has enormous importance for those of us who study societies and deserves careful study. For me he is even more important because of his thoughtful approach to religion.

While many people will see symbols and models of and for reality as important keys to understanding religion, and others will look at beliefs and rituals as structures of meaning, Bennion deftly says “Weber considers religions [...] as a type of authoritative group (“Herrschaftsverband”). They represent authoritative associations which enjoy a monopoly of authority supported by the ability to give or withhold salvation (“Heilsgüter”). All religions and political groups are based in the last analysis on authority or power.” (Bennion 1992, p 40).

This approach shifts the focus from notions of the transcendent and supernatural, aka God, and rituals and symbols as means of representing it, to the social process by which power and authority are exercised.

Bennion takes us then to Weber’s types of authority, and here just a simple usage of Bennion’s as he referred to Weber stopped me in my reading tracks.

In discussing Weber’s “charismatic form of authority” Bennion uses the German word ausseralltaegliche, which he then translates as magical or supernatural. The German word stopped me. I have been reading and teaching Weber’s charismatic form of authority for three decades yet a nuance in the German had never been available to me. The word außeralltägliche, as it is found in Weber, and not in the conventions of English typography, is a composite made of of täglich, or daily, and außer, which means beyond or outside of. No problem, charisma is easily something outside or beyond the daily. A charismatic person does seem invested with some extraordinary quality, to use the more idiomatic English.

However, the shift from this sense to magical and supernatural left me thinking.

Bennion is right in his choice of words, they do come from Weber. The sacred easily comes to mind when we speak of the supernatural. Yet the word sacred is generally more attached to the work of Durkheim or Eliade, than Weber. As DiPadova notes, one of Bennion’s strengths is how he brings the two into conversation.

Bennion wrote: “Important for the understanding of Weber [...] is his distinction between the sacred and the profane. Profane is that which is of everyday occurrence; sacred are those unusual (ausseralltaeglicche) happenings which are easily adaptable to magical and supernatural attributes.“ Bennion 1992, p 43-44)

It seems to me there is a nuance here that separates this thinking from Durkheim’s (and Lord knows Eliade’s). Durkheim, in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life uses the distinction between the sacred and the profane as a defining characteristic of religion and sees important social life in the setting apart that which is defined as sacred from that which is taken as profane.

In Durkheim’s way of describing this, it is all too easy to forget the Latin meaning of profane as the ordinary, the normal. Weber’s täglich forces us to see this simple meaning of the every day, the ordinary.

Though potentially present, this meaning of the everyday is also lost in the English translation of Weber’s Economy and Society, on which, in the German, Bennion draws. The English version says “The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman,or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” It is the shift from extra-ordinary, in order not to lose the notion of the daily, to the supernatural and superhuman that I find an interesting analytical opening, if we keep in mind these are in relationship to the ordinary, rather than things in and of themselves.

But how is it said in German? Here we start seeing some differences. Not that the English is wrong, it is not. Rather that the translators picked and chose among nuances, leaving out some I think are important.

The first section of what in German is a long and complex sentence the translators broke up and reformulated says “»Charisma« soll eine als außeralltäglich (ursprünglich, sowohl bei Propheten wie bei therapeutischen wie bei Rechts-Weisen wie bei Jagdführern wie bei Kriegshelden: als magisch bedingt) geltende Qualität einer Persönlichkeit heißen, [...]”

In a more literal translation, this passage says “‘charisma’ should be called one who shows an extra-ordinary, golden [or valuable] quality of personality.” The parenthetical part speaks of something that springs from the point of origins, such as in a prophet, a therapist, something that points to the transcendent, a hunting leader, a war hero, deemed magical.”

This set of ideas removes the sacred from the transcendent, per se, and takes it, instead, into the domain of leadership in times of difficulty, healing, claims to the origin point, and so on to speak of the relationship between them and followers which makes them seem transcendent and magical. In other words, it refers to the relational and power dynamics that create the separation of the sacred from the profane, rather than seeing them as a structure of classifications that generate relationship.

Although it would seem that this simple change should be something obvious to social scientists, in my experience it is generally not. Bennion’s usage of Weber’s original German, after his insistence on religion being an organization built on power and coercion, emphasizes to me that the sacred needs to be thought of in these relational terms, rather than in the absolute terms it normally wears. Thank you, Lowell Bennion, who unfortunately I only met in passing. I look forward to learning more from your work.

Lowell L. Bennion, “The Business Ethic of the World Religions and the Spirit of Capitalism”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. 6:1:39-74, 1992

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der Verstehende Soziologie (1922) http://www.textlog.de/weber_wirtschaft.html

Max Weber (Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds.), Economy and Society, (University of California Press, 1978)