(Religion and The Social Order) Barbara Jones Denison - History, Time, Meaning, and Memory.-BRILL (2011)
(Religion and The Social Order) Barbara Jones Denison - History, Time, Meaning, and Memory.-BRILL (2011)
(Religion and The Social Order) Barbara Jones Denison - History, Time, Meaning, and Memory.-BRILL (2011)
General Editor
William H. Swatos, Jr.
VOLUME 20
History, Time, Meaning,
and Memory
Edited by
LEIDEN • BOSTON
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Denison, Barbara J.
â•… History, time, meaning, and memory : ideas for the sociology of religion / edited by Barbara
Jones Denison.
â•…â•… p. cm. -- (Religion and the social order, ISSN 1061-5210; v. 20)
â•… Includes bibliographical references.
â•… ISBN 978-90-04-21062-2 (hardback : alk. paper)
â•… 1. Religion and sociology. 2. History--Social aspects. I. Title.
â•… BL60.D46 2011
â•…306.6--dc23
2011018900
ISSN 1061-5210
ISBN 978 90 04 21062 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Contributors����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������������������� 265
PREFACE
Those things I still hold true today and will return to them in my own
contribution to this volume. I am pleased to say that I think we have
made some progress in this direction since I first gave that paper orally
about 35 years ago. The profession could do even better, however, and
there continues to be more interest in decontextualized data than is
warranted by goals like theory construction and accurate predictions
of future trends and developments.
I also want to thank my predecessor as Executive Officer, Barbara
Denison, for shepherding the book from what was at best a collage of
manuscripts into the volume that you now have in your hands. The job
was not an easy one and introduced difficulties none of us could have
imagined. Nevertheless, I am pleased with what we have on offer here
and hope you will be too.
Finally I want to thank both ASR and Brill for their continued com-
mitment to this series, which was founded by David Bromley, with its
first volume appearing in 1991, and edited by him through its first ten
volumes. With the completion of this number the series reaches vol-
ume twenty. As always, we welcome ASR members to submit propos-
als for future volumes, and I look forward to continuing with the series
in my editorial role for at least a few more years.
INTRODUCTION:
HISTORY, TIME, MEANING AND MEMORY IN THE
SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
1
╇ Marx’s phrase in its 1844 context carries a different meaning from that often
superficially assumed today. He states, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same
time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless con-
ditions. It is the opium of the people.” Although opium was coming under scrutiny as a
source of much social conflict and the eventual Opium Wars, opium at the time Marx
wrote was legal but not cheap, hence the context for his observation about religion,
which was consistent with his more general class-based social analysis: religion pro-
vided the poor with a transport from suffering to another realm analogous to that
provided by opium, which they could not afford. The decontextualization of Marx’s
work over time is itself a historical problem in sociology.
2 barbara jones denison
References
Kevin J. Christiano
After all, the only reason for life or a story is “What Happened Next?”
– Jack Kerouac (1995: 266)
1
╇ I am hardly the first to issue such a call for a return to historical thinking. For two
excellent published models, see Swatos (1977) and Kniss and Chaves (1995). Swatos,
for example, writes of “the necessity for a consciousness of the past in interpreting the
present” that “must not be lost” amid other methodological changes in the discipline
(p. 106). The latter two warn persuasively of research becoming dominated by “the
limits of cross-sectional analysis” (p. 177).
12 kevin j. christiano
Classical Sociology
Admittedly, few sociologists of religion have practiced their craft with
as acute a sense of history as did Weber. Whether his subject was the
persistent impact of a new economic ethic that was spread through
Reformation-era Calvinism (Weber 2001), the operation within reli
gious groups of ancient authorities or novel patterns of leadership, or
the social dimensions of common beliefs among the peoples of China
or India (Weber 1951, 1958), Weber fused sociological principles with
a historical sensitivity that seldom weakened and never disappeared.
The record of Weber’s achievement in this matter is uncontroversial
and his status as a principal forerunner of contemporary comparative-
historical sociology is undisputed. Arguably the best brief testimony to
the significance of Weber’s contributions as a historical thinker comes
from the pen of his fellow German, Karl Mannheim. As Mannheim
(1953: 218) described Weber:
clio goes to church 13
He does not study the past like an archivist, whose task it is to look after
ancient documents and who sees a big hiatus between “the yesterday and
the to-day”; he investigates the most distant past, e.g. Chinese and Indian
religion, or the economic system of Rome, relates all these historical data
to the present, and is most concerned with the similarities and differ
ences between the operation of social forces then and now. The great
problem that engaged the attention both of Sombart and Max Weber,
namely the rise and development of capitalism, was so worked out as to
provide a diagnosis of the contemporary situation. What are the roots of
Western society; whence do we come, whither are we going, and what is
our place in the present crisis? These are the questions that are latent in
Weber’s empirical investigations.2
In contrast, the role of Émile Durkheim as a historical sociologist of
religion is less clearly remembered, and therefore less likely to be cred
ited and communicated to each new generation of students and
researchers. Today, the work of Durkheim is framed in capsule as an
extensive treatment of what Mustafa Emirbayer (1996: 267) has called
“a mechanical and automatic unfolding of structural processes.”
Durkheim’s legacy as a scholar who grappled with changing histories
as well as with immutable structures has largely been lost to discus
sions in religion. Nevertheless, as Robert N. Bellah pointed out over
fifty years ago, “The historical, and indeed evolutionary, dimension is a
fundamental element in all of Durkheim’s sociological work” (1959:
447). The sociologist of suicide Jack D. Douglas agrees. Of Durkheim’s
publications, he notes, “His first works were historical, philosophi
cal, and very programmatic. The Division of Labor was deeply con
cerned with the historical trends of Western societies, and with the
great social problems of the day, as he saw them” (1971: 54). Aside
from the “uncharacteristic” hypothesis-testing style of Suicide, Douglas
further explains, “His earlier works, the work on Rousseau, The Division
of Labor, and The Methods, made use almost exclusively of historical
and philosophical methods. His later works on education and the
professions continued this trend …” (1971: 48, 47).3
2
╇ Translations of the works to which Mannheim is referring in this passage include
Sombart (1951) and Weber (1951, 1958, 2001, 2008).
3
╇ Douglas’s references here are to Durkheim’s works—among others Suicide (1951),
“La ‘pédagogie’ de Rousseau” (included in translation in Montesquieu and Rousseau
[1960]), The Division of Labor in Society (1933), The Rules of the Sociological Method
(1938), Moral Education (1961), and Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1958).
14 kevin j. christiano
4
╇In the original, Durkheim and Fauconnet (2002: 15) wrote: Or, qu’il s’aggise
de phénomènes sociaux ou de phénomènes physiques, le general n’existe que dans le
particulier. Ce qu’on appelle l’association humaine, ce n’est pas une société determine,
mais l’ensemble des caratères qui se retrouvent dans toutes les sociétés…
5
╇ In the original, the quotation reads: Parce que les savants spéciaux sont plus étroite-
ment en contact avec les faits, ils ont un plus vif sentiment de la diversité des choses et de
leur complexité, et, par suite, ils sont moins enclins à se contenter de formules simplistes
et d’explications faciles; mais, en revanche, comme ils n’ont pas pris, au préalable, une vue
d’ensemble du terrain à explorer, ils vont un peu au hasard, sans se rendre bien compte
du but à atteindre, ni de l’étroite solidarité qui les unit et qui en fait les collaborateurs
d’une même œuvre (Durkheim and Fauconnet 2002: 26).
6
╇ Much of this emphasis on the uses of history in the study of religion beyond soci
ology was to survive the century. Its course may be traced to the present day, for the
emphasis is evident in: (a) bibliographical overviews of religious history (e.g., Carter
1968, Gaustad, Miller and Stokes 1979, Wallace 1981, Marty 1982, 1993, Dolan 1987);
(b) historiographical critiques of religious studies including, e.g., in Canada (Clifford
1969, Moir 1983, Marshall 1993, 1994, Clarke 1997, Christie and Gauvreau 2003,
Noll 2006, 2007), Great Britain (Thompson 1976, Thompson 1979), and the United
States (Doherty 1973, Stout and Taylor 1974, Hood 1975, Dutler 1985, Marty 1986,
clio goes to church 15
No sooner was the cornerstone of history thus set for the sociology
of religion in the twentieth century than the latter tilted away from
a theory that was sensitive to time and contingency. Instead, around
Hackett 1988); (c) commentaries on the historical profession (e.g., Ellis 1969, Marty
1974, Zuckerman 1984)
7
╇ Something of the direction of change in religious studies in the first half of the
twentieth century can be seen by tracing the shifts in the title of one of the discipline’s
principal journals, based at the University of Chicago. First known as The Old and New
Testament Student, the periodical assumed the name The Biblical World in 1893. The
publication later merged with The American Journal of Theology in 1921, and ulti
mately settled on calling itself The Journal of Religion, the name that it retains to this
day (see Case 1921: 10).
16 kevin j. christiano
8
╇ Especially in the last years of his life, Parsons published several important, if
sometimes overlooked, sociological studies of Christianity (e.g., Parsons 1974, 1978;
cf. Robertson 1982, Tiryakian 1982). His deepest interest, though, was not in the his
tory of the church as a social movement so much as it lay in what Joas (2001: 131) has
termed the “quasi-structuralist analysis of Jewish and Christian myths.” This project,
for Parsons, formed part of a larger concern over how religious values were symbolized
in modern societies.
clio goes to church 17
leaders of this new wave, for the most part, “were utterly uninterested
in religion, not only as a subject in its own right, but also as a factor in
historical development” (Gorski 2005: 163).
The detailed studies of Myer S. Reed, Jr. (e.g., 1974, 1982) have docu
mented how the sociology of religion had already gone missing from
the broader discipline of sociology in the United States after the start of
the 1930s. More generally, “during the period between World Wars I
and II, religion,” as a major figure in the field described, it had “appar
ently been considered too insignificant a social force to warrant seri
ous attention (Glock 1959: 153).” Before the re-establishment in the
1950s and ’60s of quantitative analyses of religion in university-based
centers for survey research, much of what today would be called the
sociology of religion bloomed most widely beyond the ivy-crabbed
walls of the universities.
For Protestant Christians, in particular, the empirical study of reli
gion in the period between the wars was occupied almost entirely with
a well-intentioned concern over the viability of individual churches,
the availability of services (social and religious) for members of their
congregations, and the longevity of mainline Protestantism as a cul
tural force. For its part, the separate but unequal institutionalization of
a “Catholic sociology” in the 1940s kept alive scholarly interest in a
brand of “religious” sociology with a frankly confessional tinge (Reed
1982: 200). Yet these patterns of activity also cemented the estrange
ment of studies of religion from the sociological discipline, for “the
character” of the Christian impulse to explore the social world “had
been and remained defensive,” according to Reed (1982: 197). Whether
Roman Catholic or Protestant, religiously committed practitioners of
sociology—no matter if trained in technique and statistically inclined—
were not universally welcomed in the academic centers of sociology.
In the period before the 1960s, as one example, “it is quite likely,” Reed
observed, “that without the participation of religionists there would
have been precious little research done in the specialty” of religion
(1974: 167). Apart from that somewhat marginalized academic work,
the only sociology of religion in the United States to dirty its hands
with real data in the interwar era flourished outside secular schools: in
gatherings of clergy, the classrooms of seminaries, the meeting rooms
18 kevin j. christiano
╇9
╇ For a reflection on this history, see my review (1990) of the writings of the Rev.
Samuel C. Kincheloe, an urban sociologist and famed student of city churches.
clio goes to church 19
10
╇ There are, evidently, two versions of this concept. The first, in lay terms, is the
amount of feed corn a healthy hog would have to eat in order to gain one pound of
weight. The ultimate answer to this question—for those who, like the economic theo
rist John Maynard Keynes, may be raising pigs on the side (see Sorel 1987, 1996,
Skidelsky 2003: 521)—hovers around ten bushels. The second version is conceived at a
higher level of analysis: it refers to how many bushels of corn, on average, would have
to be sold to equal the price of one hundred pounds of live heavy hogs, on the farm or
at market (Wallace and Bressman 1923: 115–18, Taylor 1932: 93–97).
11
╇Wright was only one of several prominent statisticians who shared the
Department of Agriculture as a part of their professional background (Newcomb and
Avery 1982: 172–75). Another was Rensis Likert, creator of the scaling technique that
bears his surname. Eventually Likert, too, left the government—in his case for a posi
tion at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, which he helped to found
in 1946 (see Glock 1979: 33).
20 kevin j. christiano
╇To be sure, not all of the Research Branch’s studies dealt with sociologically
12
important questions. There were also those that probed such issues as “attitudes and
practices associated with trenchfoot” (vol. 2: 650) and “the laundry situation in
22 kevin j. christiano
Panama” (vol. 2: 647), for example (Demerath 1949: 88, Sudman and Bradburn
1987: S70).
13
╇ Prof. Nicholas J. Demerath (1913–1996) served aboard ship in the Navy in the
Pacific theater during World War II. At the time of this review (1949), he was a mem
ber of the sociology faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In addi
tion, he was probably the first contributor to Social Forces ever to quote from common
parlance a scatological eight-letter term that is synonymous with “nonsense” and have
it printed, uncensored, in the learned journal’s pages (1949: 89). Coincidentally,
Demerath was the father of my immediate predecessor as president of the Association
for the Sociology of Religion, N.J. (“Jay”) Demerath III, of the University of Massa
chusetts, Amherst.
14
╇ Demerath’s comparison is to W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s five-volume
classic, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–20).
clio goes to church 23
╇ Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–76) was instrumental in the work of the Office of
15
Radio Research, which was founded in New Jersey and, after several years, moved to
Columbia University in Manhattan (Barton 1982). Beginning in 1937, this organiza
tion conducted waves of inquiries about the composition of the radio audience, the
content and popularity for these appeals. In 1944, its broadening research program
prompted a change in name to the Bureau of Applied Social Research; Lazarsfeld
served as its director (Glock 1979: 24). Both Robert K. Merton and Charles Y. Glock
were affiliated with this survey-research organization early in their careers.
24 kevin j. christiano
the books (see, e.g., Glazer 1949) correctly viewed their publication as
a sign that the leading edge of scholarship in the social sciences had
moved away from a humanistic style of inquiry and toward an emula
tion of the variables-and-hypotheses mode of the natural sciences.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a young Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., by this
time already an award-winning historian for his book on The Age of
Jackson (1945), reacted neither positively nor passively. In one of the
more strident dissents, Schlesinger took the authors to task for their
seemingly strict adherence to rationalist protocols. Schlesinger
expressed a grudging admiration for the ingenuity with which the mil
itary researchers approached their assignments and for the candor
with which they reported their findings; he admitted, in consequence,
that the Army had probably found the results of The American Soldier
useful in its management of the war effort. Yet, in keeping with his
opinion that social scientists at large were “fanatical in their zeal and
shameless in their claims,” he excoriated the collaborators on the pro
ject for their “lack of originality.” Schlesinger estimated that “in the
1200 pages of text and the innumerable surveys,” he could find little
that was not conveyed “more vividly and compactly, and with far
greater psychological insight” in the battlefront jottings of the cartoon
ist Bill Mauldin or the dispatches of the war correspondent Ernie
Pyle (1949: 852–54).16 “As for history,” which was the Schlesinger’s spe
cialty, The American Soldier “almost achieved the tour-de-force,” he
said, of “writing about the American in World War II with practically
no reference to the historical context from which he came.” Instead,
contended Schlesinger, noting the technology of the time, “The indi
vidual human experience is supposed to vanish away in the whirl of
punch cards and IBM machines … One comes to feel, indeed, that the
American soldier existed, neither in life nor in history, but in some
dreary statistical vacuum” (1949: 855).17
The accounts of these two governmental initiatives, of course, omit
mention of activity in the private sector, where research on public
16
╇ For the wartime works of Mauldin (1921–2003) and Pyle (1900–45), see Mauldin
(1945) and Pyle (1943, 1944). For his part Demerath (1949:88) contended that “much
of the reading” in The American Soldier “is as lively as Mauldin and Pyle,” though he
added that “much is necessarily tough going, too.”
17
╇ A thorough summary and analysis of these and other contemporaneous reviews
of The American Soldier may be found in Lerner (1950). Later, before an audience of
sociologists, Schlesinger (1962) would soften somewhat the feel, if not the weight, of
his charges against quantitative social research.
clio goes to church 25
All of this activity did not preclude research in the sociology of reli
gion. At Columbia, Glock and a collaborator, Benjamin B. Ringer,
oversaw a vast national study of parishioners in urban congrega
tions of the Episcopal Church, an undertaking that was described three
decades later (Wuthnow 1985: 23) as “one of the first large-scale sur
veys ever to be conducted on American religion.” Begun in 1953, the
study did not receive a full treatment in print until 1967 (Glock, Ringer
and Babbie 1967). Yet this project, according to Robert Wuthnow
(himself a student of Glock and a veteran of important survey
research), “heralded qualities that were to become the hallmark of
Glock’s research style: carefully worded survey questions, indexes con
structed of multiple survey items to measure theoretical concepts, clar
ity of argument and presentation, [and] a concern for social policy”
(1985: 23).
These demonstrated abilities notwithstanding, one of Glock’s earli
est academic publications, a brief paper printed in Social Forces in
1951, bore no direct relation to the sociology of religion. Rather, it dis
cussed a favorite topic of his mentor (see Lazarsfeld 1962, Glock 1979,):
the structure and organization of scientific research centers. What is
more, Glock had a personal opportunity to put the understanding
that he derived on this subject into practice when he moved in 1957
from New York to the West Coast and ultimately designed and
directed the Survey Research Center at the University of California
at Berkeley. Over time, the productivity of the Center’s various person
nel was such that one fellow sociologist (Dynes 1973: 467) identi
fied bohemian Berkeley as “the new Jerusalem” and the San Francisco
Bay area as “the contemporary fertile crescent” for studies of religion
in the United States. The Center became a place of professional pil
grimage for graduate students and mature scholars alike, and from the
font of Glock flowed, starting in the mid-1960s, a series of landmark
studies that were rooted in surveys, many in collaboration with a deep
bench of junior authors (Dynes 1973: 467, Hargrove 1973, Mauss 1990:
362), such as Rodney Stark (b. 1934).18 The studies covered a wide
range of topics, among them the beliefs of members of American
18
╇ Aside from Stark, among the many graduates of the Berkeley program in this
period who went on to distinguish themselves primarily as sociologists of religion
were N.J. Demerath III (1965), Phillip E. Hammond (Glock and Hammond
1973), Armand L. Mauss, Ruth A. Wallace, and Robert Wuthnow (Glock et al. 1975).
28 kevin j. christiano
19
╇ Much of this research was funded through a continuing grant to the Survey
Research Center at Berkeley from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to pro
duce studies on the social causes of anti-Semitism.
clio goes to church 29
20
╇ In fairness, he proceeded to claim that in most instances neither did his fellow
historians!
clio goes to church 31
they may redeem the drudgery of research with a moving and enlight
ening account of some past experience, historians are poor tutors on
method. Truth be told, most of what methodological consciousness
historians possess, and sometimes ostentatiously display, is cribbed
from social scientists. And there remains within the historical profes
sion a large body of practitioners who are convinced, as was George
Caspar Homans, one of the earliest and most prominent of sociolo
gists to cross the boundary into history (1941), that the historical
method is but “the commonest of common sense” (1962: 7). Jacques
Barzun agreed, without apology. For the historian, he wrote, method
“is only a metaphor to say that he is rational and resourceful, imagina
tive and conscientious. Nothing prescribes the actual steps of his work”
(1974: 90).21 Rather, in the church of methodology, historians, like
Weber’s Calvinists, “endure a feeling of unprecedented inner loneli
ness” (2001: 60). No sacraments of technique exist to mediate for them
the saving grace of truth.
As a result, the methodological course that is plotted by most soci
ologists who examine historical actors and events is a somewhat hap
hazard one. At times historical controversy is at the center of a study’s
focus; at other times it is peripheral or almost absent.22 How does one
explain this seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of sociologists—
and sociologists of religion are not innocent here—to lead what looks
from a distance like a methodological double life? One explanation,
I submit, is that we feel justified in doing it because we are up to “bigger
things” than the fact-grubbing that we attribute to historians. We, the
customary excuse goes, we want … (“a hush descends”) to generalize
(cf. Calhoun 1996: 307, 310–13). But what would happen if sociolo
gists were to swear off that supposedly basic ambition, and the bad
methodological habits to which it leads?
These two seemingly warring commitments—deference on the one
hand to the particularity of any historical record, and the ambition on
21
╇ I am indebted to an essay by a former colleague at Notre Dame, Philip Gleason
(1987) of the Department of History, for bringing these insights to my attention.
22
╇Compare the similarly conflicted behavior of econometricians. One of their
number, Edward E. Leamer, employs religious imagery when he confesses that: “We
comfortably divide ourselves into a celibate priesthood of statistical theorists, on the
one hand, and a legion of inveterate-sinner data-analysts, on the other. The priests are
empowered to draw up lists of sins and are revered for the special talents they display.
Sinners are not expected to avoid sins; they need only confess their errors openly”
(1978: vi).
32 kevin j. christiano
23
╇ Thompson was reviewing a pair of new books in British history: Macfarlane
(1970) and Thomas (1971). The latter was judged much better, despite its author’s
enthusiasm for social science.
34 kevin j. christiano
24
╇ Calhoun, through his leadership role in the Social Science Research Council
(SSRC) in the United States, has lately examined religion on the world stage with occa
sional commentary and debate that is posted on the SSRC Web blog titled The
Immanent Frame.
25
╇ To Gorski, positivist or “deductivist” methodology has a normative valence: “It
prescribes what explanations should do.” In contrast, realist approaches are precisely
that: “Actual methods,” he observes, “should be derived from methodology. … meth
odology is descriptive. It simply makes explicit what scientists do” (Gorski 2004: 28;
emphases in the original).
clio goes to church 35
Historians, I believe, are fortunate in that they are largely spared the
radical leveling of mind that occurs when a mechanical technique of
inquiry is so widely learned and adopted in research that any compe
tent application of it to an intellectual problem, and its subsequent
publication, is equated with an arrival at knowledge. As the Beat prose
poet Jack Kerouac groaned in 1959, under the weight of the conform
ity stunting a quite different type of publishing, “Editors and writers
have been engaged on a campaign of systematic rejection of everything
except the most systematic manuscripts” (Kerouac 1994: 147). None
theless, the wise and worldly historian has not yet gone the way of the
maverick .400 hitter in baseball, whose demise the late Stephen Jay
Gould (1985) so gracefully analyzed.
Graduate education for sociologists is an invaluable process in that
it disabuses beginning students in the discipline of an abundance of
36 kevin j. christiano
bad ideas and steers them away from the acquisition of numerous bad
intellectual habits. However, at the same time that its undeniable rigor
bats out the bad, its obsession with technique too often beats down
inspiration and spirit, “all specific tendencies and tastes,” into what the
nineteenth-century Oxford rector Mark Pattison (1885: 89) termed
“one uniform mediocrity.” A century ago, Georg Simmel, a thinker
who is known now as much for his proven ability to foresee trends in
modern societies as for his status as the quintessential outsider to the
German academic fraternity of his time, also noted this fact:
[W]hat could be called superfluous knowledge is accumulating in many
areas of scholarship and science—a sum of methodologically faultless
knowledge, unassailable from the standpoint of an abstract concept of
knowledge, but nonetheless alienated from the genuine purpose and
meaning of all research. … The enormous supply of people willing to
engage in intellectual production and often gifted for it, a supply favoured
by economic factors, has led to an autonomous evaluation of all scholarly
work whose value is indeed often only a convention, almost a conspiracy
of the scholarly caste; all this has led to an uncannily fertile inbreeding of
the scholarly mind, the offspring of which, both inwardly and in the
sense of having a wider effect, is infertile. This is the basis of the fetishis
tic worship which for a long time has been conducted with regard to
“method”—as if an achievement were valuable simply because of the
correctness of its method. This is a very clever means for the legitimation
and appreciation of an unlimited number of works which are invalid for
the meaning and context of the advancement of knowledge, no matter
how generously the latter is framed (Simmel 1997: 71).
Certainly it is difficult to generalize about the hundred-or-so universi
ties in the United States that confer doctoral degrees in sociology.
Nevertheless, it is fair, I think, to characterize graduate curricula in the
discipline as centered more on formal concerns than on substantive
knowledge. Graduate school, it is widely held, can make a student a
sociologist; a sociologist of what, though, is considered to be merely a
matter of the student’s personal intellectual interests. It may well
be, then, that sociology ultimately qualifies as what the sociologist of
religion Thomas F. O’Dea (1970: 149) labeled more than forty years
ago “in a very important sense … ‘a second-time-through’ subject.” By
this designation he meant that useful and effective research in sociol
ogy assumes a high degree of existing familiarity with the contents of
some substantive area. Substantive expertise ought to come first; its
incorporation into some product that would be passably sociological
should await an adequate honing of subject-area knowledge. Absent
that preparation, O’Dea insisted, “a remarkable superficiality is
clio goes to church 37
�
unavoidable. ” To remedy this condition, he prescribed for students of
religion a deep background in history. “[I]mportant both to under
standing the present conditions and the historical setting” of religion
in society, he wrote, “is the study of history. A good substantive histori
cal background and some acquaintance with the methodological prob
lems of history as a discipline are most important” (1970: 150).
Nevertheless, one of the more lamentable aspects of sociology in our
age is that a tenacious parochialism, if not exclusivism, of technique
manages to linger in our midst. To be sure, those individuals who are
deservedly comfortable in their accomplishments, and the confident
institutions that they populate, are arguably more open than ever to a
variety of approaches to the study of societies and their religions. One
need only look at the leaders in our specialization and at their evident
ecumenism of method to witness this fact. They are satisfied, it would
appear, to augment social knowledge in their own ways. The insight so
generated can be taken, Reinhard Bendix (1984: 10) judged, as “a sign
of cultural enrichment and a basis for understanding …, even if it is
not considered a token of progress through knowledge.”
We were warned to be on guard against the tendency to omit history
when modern sociology was still in its “classical” period almost a cen
tury ago. In the last manuscript that Émile Durkheim was to draft
before his death (one that was published years later with annotations
by his nephew and student Marcel Mauss), he observed that
[H]istory is not merely the natural setting for human life, human
beings are a product of history. If one removes them from history, if one
tries to understand them outside of time, fixed and unmoving, one has
denatured humanity. This static human is not human anymore. This
is not just about secondary features, about incidental considerations of
his nature that he brings out over time; it is about deep and essential
qualities, of ways of acting and of fundamental thoughts (Durkheim
2002: 14).26
26
╇ This is my own translation. In the original, Durkheim wrote: [L]’histoire n’est pas
seulement le cadre naturel de la vie humaine, l’homme est un produit de l’histoire. Si on
le sort de l’histoire, si on essaie de la concevoir en dehors du temps, fixé, immobile, on le
denaturé. Cet homme immobile n’est plus l’homme. Ce ne sont pas seulement des aspects
secondaires, des caractères accessoires de sa nature qu’il met en relief au cours du temps;
ce sont des qualités profondes et essentielles, des manières de faire et des pensées fonda-
mentales (2002: 14). This quotation is drawn from a short section of Durkheim’s manu
script that Mauss incorporated from elsewhere in his teacher’s notes. The section,
labeled “Deuxième redaction” (Second Draft), is omitted from Mark Traugott’s transla
tion into English (Durkheim 1978), but is retained in a later translation by
H. L. Sutcliffe (Durkheim 1979).
38 kevin j. christiano
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44 kevin j. christiano
Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the work of Max
Weber will recognize that “meaning” (Sinn) is a crucial category for his
sociology. He writes that the task of the sociology of religion is “to
study the conditions and effects of a particular type of social action,”
namely, religious behavior, which can be understood “only from the
subjective experiences, ideas, and purposes of the individuals con-
cerned—in short, from the viewpoint of the religious behavior’s ‘mean-
ing’” (1978: 399). In a sense, for Weber “meaning” creates sociology out
of history. Meaning interconnects events that would otherwise be theo-
retically random—which is to say, there is no meaning in history. Events
simply happen. The “problem of meaning,” is not in events themselves
at all, but in the significances that people give to events. All “action”
sociologies of religion—that is, all approaches to religion that treat
religion as reflecting choice-making behavior, in spite of whatever
divergences they may have among them—experience this dilemma.
The problem of meaning is one of the most complex problems in
social science with particular significance for the study of religion
because the act of defining meaning (“the meaning of meaning”) is
self-Â�referential (“Meaning ‘means’ …”).
Other species besides humans can give meaning to events as well,
but lack the linguistic skills to communicate those meanings in a sys-
tematic and continuous way to others of their kind. For example, the
neighborhood cat gives meaning to our opening the back door because
she is often fed a little something when that happens, but she appears
unable to communicate that meaning to her friend cat from up the
street, who takes off as soon as the door opens. If she could have kit-
tens, she might be able to bring them to the door as well, at the right
age. Trusting her, they would learn about the door, but it is still unlikely
that the up-the-street cat would. Various animals have various amounts
of learning and meaning abilities, but it is difficult to sustain the argu-
ment that significant amounts of meaning can be carried by members
48 william h. swatos, jr.
Just over fifty years have elapsed since Kingsley Davis delivered what
later became his somewhat infamous presidential address to the
American Sociological Association on “The Myth of Functional AnalyÂ�
sis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology” (1959). The
speech was certainly gauged to mark the triumph of functionalism in
American sociology; yet latent in its imperialistic claims lay a chal-
lenge to find something better. Rather than settling the debate over
functionalism, Davis’s statement enflamed it, giving impetus to efforts
to articulate more clearly the weaknesses of the functionalist model
and the possibilities for alternatives. Yet there was something noble in
what Davis tried to do, even if he missed the mark in his final product.
Where I believe Davis went wrong was in emphasizing a particular set
of theoretical presuppositions rather than a methodological orienta-
tion. What Davis should have been talking about was the comparative
method or comparative sociology. I will address this particularly in the
context of the sociology of religion, but I think these comments can be
to a greater or lesser extent generalized further.
To consider the alternate viewpoint, I would say that a weakness in
sociological research generally, including the sociology of religion, is
that “the comparative method” is treated as a “special method” of soci-
ological analysis. By contrast, I would argue that all genuine scientific
analysis is in the same measure comparative analysis: we know what
something is only when we also know what it is not. While some short-
run ends may be served by a less comprehensive approach to knowl-
edge, the ultimate scientific goals of understanding and prediction
cannot be reached in other ways. With regard to the social sciences
50 william h. swatos, jr.
specifically, this means that any analysis that focuses on only a single
contemporary sociocultural unit is extremely limited in the kinds of
conclusions it permits us to draw—and this is true for descriptive as
well as explanatory analyses. To have long-run value, the sociology of
religion must be cross-cultural and transhistorical in its orientation.
Only from the standpoint of an overarching comparative methodolog�
ical orientation can any “special” methodology—participant observa-
tion, hypothetico-deductive models, path analysis, ethnomethodology,
phenomenological reduction, or survey research—be evaluated. From
the viewpoint of its own developmental history, furthermore, the soci-
ology of religion has a special “vocation” in this respect.
1
╇ Throughout my career I have viewed Weber as a Marxist “revisionist”—in the
sense that he wrote after and with a consciousness of Marx—and I think it is worth
noting, in view of “Marxist humanism,” that what Marx himself claimed to be doing in
52 william h. swatos, jr.
his analyses was scientific history. It was the scientific (i.e., empirical) quality of his
work that he felt made it superior to (e.g., Hegel’s) philosophy. It is an error to oppose
Marx and Weber as “humanist” and “scientist” respectively. Both thought they were
doing science—and proud of it.
the history of meaning 53
that the historian ought not to write about the history of theology or
physics … without knowing theology or physics” (1950: 255) should
not the same be true for a sociologist, especially inasmuch as sociology
is considered a “generalizing science”? How can one generalize without
knowing specifics? Unless the sociologist has at least mentally traveled
the terrain upon which his or her conclusions report, the sociologist
has no business pretending to tell us what we should expect to see or
why it is there. Specifically, the sociologist of religion has the obligation
to know doctrine, practice, and religious history—or to collaborate
proactively with those who do have this expertise—before proceeding
to applications of concepts leading to “explanations.”
I am not arguing that the sociologist of religion must become a reli-
gious person before being able to do an acceptable research project.
That is as equally naïve as the cursory treatment given to religion in a
great many survey analyses, including those that purport to measure
religiosity and its correlates. Indeed, this is where the travel metaphor
becomes most helpful. The traveler normally is not a citizen. The
traveler comes not to settle but to learn about, to imbibe, to be enriched
by, to know and understand the nature of the place that is the object of
the journey, and the traveler normally brings along a guide or guides—
persons or books—to aid in accomplishing the purposes that drove the
adventure from the outset. From this the traveler is capable of doing
several things: describe the terrain, both physical and social; test,
and if need be revise, preconceptions about the nature and character of
the site of the visit; compare this site to others that have been seen.
On the basis of these comparisons, it is possible to review and perhaps
modify more general concepts regarding those interests or concerns
that motivated the travel in the first place. Of course, these things do
not take place in a social vacuum; rather, they involve interactions with
fellow travelers and present possibilities for creative dialogue (cf. Lipset
1968: 26–27).
Robertson (1975), and I (1976), among others, have each tried to say in
his own way in response to this is that church-sect theory in sociology
of religion went sour because it failed to take into account the specifics
of which Troeltsch himself was clearly aware in his work. Not only was
Troeltsch’s scholarship greatly misrepresented, but church-sect as a
useful tool for future comparative research was considerably lessened
in value as it was taken out of the historical framework in which
Troeltsch used it. As soon as this ahistorical decontextualization and
concomitant reification occurred, church-sect theory was in trouble.
Only when Troeltsch is returned to his proper place as an historical
theologian does his work really make a valuable contribution to our
own endeavors as sociologists (cf. Nelson 1975).
The context of church-sect theory, however, can make us aware of
the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. An interdisciplinary team
of a sociologist of religion and an historian of religion could speed
analyses tremendously. Bringing in economic historians, sociologists
of culture and cultural geographers could enrich the analytical con-
tours even further and provide results that would multiply the time
investment significantly. This type of collaboration also can free soci-
ologists from the onus of working in a “borderline area,” where their
expertise might be called into question. There is sometimes criticism
of sociologists of religion from intradepartmental peers based upon
the personal religious interests of so many professionals in the spe-
cialty; yet because of the frequent failure of sociologists, theologians,
or church historians to work together in their research, sociologists
who do not have a “religious interest” may be criticized on the grounds
that their concepts and/or research instruments are naïvely conceived
and/or applied. Might not the use of such an interdisciplinary approach
as this speak to some of these problems in a positive way? Might not
this approach open to general sociological theory and research a new
sub-area of investigation without requiring extensive prerequisites in
the sociology of religion? Might not this approach, finally, offer the
possibility for insights from new sources of stimuli that are sorely need
if the sociology of religion is to be considered an important contribu-
tor to understanding human behavior at the start of the twenty-first
century?
A second example surrounds the role of quantification in the study
of religion. There is no question that quantification simultaneously
summarizes data efficiently and allows them to be manipulated by
scholars at significant distances from each other. Even Max Weber
the history of meaning 55
himself, for example, believed that die verstehende Soziologie was but
second best to quantitative analysis. Yet, as one review in a Contem
porary Sociology symposium at the height of the debate over Time on
the Cross in the 1970s pointed out, “No methodology for developing
data and no analytic tools for evaluating data can be made sufficiently
automatic to obviate the judgment input” (Record and Record 1975:
363). Put differently, quantitative analysis does not in itself “unbias”
research—or the conclusions drawn from research. The fact that a
scholar has chosen a quantitative route to approach a problem does not
by that choice make the research inherently superior to a qualitative
study. How the researcher does the study, operationalizes the variables,
chooses the sample, and so on all figure into an evaluation of the
results. Quite simply, any “tool” is only as good as the person using it.
This same principle can be applied in assessing such strategies as
content analyses or computer modeling. Before the widespread avail-
ability of computer technology, content analysis was an extremely tedi-
ous and time-consuming task, particularly if one wished to use it
comparatively. By contrast, the ability to program a computer to select
key words while “reading” materials reduces the onus of this method.
But the computer, too, is a tool. What it puts out depends entirely upon
what the researcher inputs and requests for output. We tell the com-
puter what words and phrases are important in a document; and even
when this difficulty can be overcome with further technological devel-
opments, the reseacher would still be the one who would select the
documents to feed into the computer in the first place—documents
that are themselves selectively preserved accounts of other human’s
perceptions, experiences, and so on. Content analysis serves to give a
work the appearance of being the product of greater objectivity, hon-
esty and industry on the part of its author, but without careful replica-
tion, including other sources as may become available, none of these
qualities is actually guaranteed.
Most historical research is thus essentially qualitative in character—
field studies in the past rather than in the present. Yet it is here that in
practice sociologists have parted more significantly from historians
than anywhere else, for the sociologist has a methodological con-
sciousness that demands more explicit delineation of strategy or design
than the historian is often likely to give. Just as a good sociologist
would not blindly accept the conclusions of something called a “Â� survey”
without asking about such things as sampling frame, questionnaire
design, the context of its administration, and methods of statistical
56 william h. swatos, jr.
Virtually all of the figures who are introduced as the pioneers of “mod-
ern sociology” gave considerable a considerable amount of their time
to the study of religion: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel. Durkheim
was admittedly confused a bit about history by not recognizing that
the Australian Murngin had as much history as the rest of us, hence it
was really facile to think that by studying the Murngin of the nine-
teenth century he was actually connecting with people of thousands of
years prior But each of them thought that religion mattered in history,
and each of them saw religion as playing a crucial role in the turn
toward the modern, even as they anticipated that the modern would
transcend the constraints and “superstitions” of prior eras. Although
in some case or other each of the founders probably got one or another
part of his analysis of the role of religion in society wrong, each also
made a fundamental contribution to the understanding of human
social life by examining the religious dimension of one society or
the history of meaning 57
Photography would have a role by the U.S. Civil War, but not with
action, and only after a relatively lengthy development and printing
process. Newsreels came by World War I, but without sound. By World
War II, sound was added, but still with heavy editing. A lot of history
fell onto the cutting room floor. One argument for why American
opposition to the Viet Nam/Cambodian conflict was so much more
intense is that by then there were much more direct news feeds from
the field into American living rooms. In the current era of Iraq/
Afghanistan, we are now treated to death-as-it-happens, up-close-and-
personal. With the easy availability of photographic technology and
relatively little instruction, we can now send live photography around
the world in just a little over an instant. As a result of this, the construc-
tion of “history” has changed dramatically in two ways:
On the one hand, students today who wish to study twentieth-�
century and forward have a wealth of direct-materials-contact with
that period. Whereas history from the nineteenth century back
depends primarily on reading supplemented by artistic renditions of
“scenes,” history from this time forward increasingly becomes more
and more infused by images drawn from “what actually happened.”
At the same time, however, the notion of “actual” happening itself is
not as crystal clear as it might seem, for we have learned that every
“seeing” is seeing from one perspective and not another. This is true
not only from a psychological standpoint, but also a physical one—no
single person can be on two sides of a river or a street at the same time,
and being in the middle of the river or street is not the same as having
a perspective “from both sides.” Nevertheless, at least in some cases—
and more and more so all the time—it is possible to have a “scene”
simultaneously “covered from all sides” by multiple devices channeling
into a multiplex screen center. Preserved, these can later be analyzed
from the different perspectives. Students will more and more be able to
see and hear more and more of “what actually happened” from differ-
ent simultaneous perspectives.
As a result, history-as-it-happened will be more and more immedi-
ately available across the time span from when it happened until when
it is accessed. Other things being equal, we should expect that a s� tudent
in 2110 will be able to have “immediate” access to events in 2010. This
does not mean per se “the end of history,” but certainly it will mean a
change in “history” as we have known it. The interpretive aspect of his-
tory will take increasing primacy as history, while the factual aspect
becomes primarily a catalog of actual depictions of actual events as
the history of meaning 59
my utility wiring, and so on. But these people are more akin to the
people who manufactured my mailbox and built my house than are
the agents who have carried mail or placed phone calls. With those
people we had to share much more of a meaning system—they had to
be able to read the addresses on our mail, for example, or understand
our language when we had to place a call. The reverse of this still occurs
for me, for example, when I have to take a return receipt written in
French or Spanish and go back to the post office and explain that they
were supposed to have me sign it before the mail was delivered. Because
the postperson doesn’t know French or Spanish, the communicative
system breaks down. By contrast, if someone wants a receipt of an
email by email, the whole transaction takes place without any third-
party interaction.
When we come to the matter of religion, then, where meaning is not
merely functional as it is with enabling the mail receipt, there is no
specific reason to situate meaning in time or space. It is function, not
meaning, that binds my local community together, while meaning
takes place entirely elsewhere. The religious institution no longer binds
physical but rather spiritual communities across time and space—
moral communities in Durkheim’s sense—who may live in proximity
together (hence form a local religious body, but without any particu-
larly functional association among themselves in practical affairs) or
who may not. Hence in urban areas it is not unusual for a person to
drive or walk past one or more church of the same denomination in
which he or she worships before arriving at that place he or she calls
“my church.” These churches are “communities of meaning” wherein
the members individually (though not without social context, of
course) define what is meaningful and then seek that meaningfulness
through shared experience with others. These communities of mean-
ing are cathectic in one way or another to the participants involved
such that they can engage relationally in a common experience, but
not necessarily in a common life that extends beyond the experience.
The dramatic increase of both interest and participation in pilgrim-
age religiosity in the last quarter century also reflects this shift. Pilgrim�
ages bring together diverse groups of people to share a common
experience—and then depart. During the pilgrimage activities them-
selves thresholds are crossed and the phenomenon Victor Turner calls
communitas emerges. Part and parcel of communitas as Turner under-
stands it is transiency. In pilgrimage communitas “breaks out,” and
people have “meaningful experiences” of an extraordinary character.
62 william h. swatos, jr.
This entirely upends the life of the historic parish church where, for
example, the congregation was often seated by social ranking—in part
because of pew fees. So whereas the historic parish church articulated
the social structure of the community, pilgrimage creates a momentary
community most significantly characterized by anti-structure. There
is, of course, a structure, but it is a structure that deconstructs the rou-
tines of ordinary life to open alternative contexts of encounter that are
at once both inside and outside of time, within our reach but not our
grasp, to which “meaning” may be ascribed as a result. This meaning,
however, is not at all necessarily the institutionally prescribed meaning
that has been historically associated with pilgrimage as defined by the
rules of religious authorities or authority structures, but rather one
that is personal, developed far more in the context of self-actualization
than that of institutional recognition.
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Doubleday.
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Typology.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6: 64–68.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
——. 1968. “History and Sociology.” Pp. 20–58 in Lipset and Hofstadter, q.v.
—— and Richard Hofstadter (eds). 1968. Sociology and History. New York: Basic
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Marshall, T.H. 1964. Class, Citizenship, and Social Development. Garden City, NY:
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Nelson, Benjamin. 1975. “Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and George Jellinek as
Comparative Historical Sociologists.” Sociological Analysis 36: 229–40.
the history of meaning 63
Record, Wilson and Jane Cassels Record. 1975. “Review Symposium: Time on the
Cross.” Contemporary Sociology 4: 361–66.
Redfield, Robert. 1960. The Little Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robertson, Roland. 1975. “On the Analysis of Mysticism.” Sociological Analysis 36:
241–66.
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Swatos, William H., Jr. 1976. “Weber or Troeltsch?” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 15: 129–44.
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the Royal Historical Society 21: 101–18.
CHAPTER THREE
Peter Beyer
1
╇ Since this was in the late 1970s, that theory was represented in Luhmann’s earlier
works, above all Luhmann 1977.
2
╇ One publication that eventually came out of this work was Beyer 1984.
historical observation in the sociology of religion 67
twentieth century and revived only after the Second World War, pre-
dominantly in the form of the sociology of religion subdiscipline,
which, as Jim Beckford has argued (1989), both insulated itself to a
large degree from the rest of sociology and was in turn largely isolated
by it. The sociology of religion was, as it were, concerned with some-
thing that belonged more to traditional societies than to modern ones;
correspondingly, anthropology, the sister discipline to sociology whose
purview was these traditional societies, never had any difficulty mak-
ing the analysis of religion or the religious an integral aspect of all its
endeavors (see, e.g., Tylor 1881, Boas and Benedict 1934).3 That was
one side of the “liminal” status of the sociology of religion. The other
was that it nonetheless sought to be “real” sociology, a characteristic
that reflected itself in methodological orientations: historical methods,
oriented as they are to the past, where traditional societies are located
temporally, were mostly ignored. Present-oriented qualitative and
quantitative methods like survey research, participant observation,
interviews, and to a lesser degree content analysis, were the favored
methods. Statistical analysis, probably because it is deemed to resem-
ble most closely the techniques of the “hard” (read: “real”) sciences,
had a very favorable position. Thus did the sociology of religion
attempt to understand the present reality of religion through methods
designed for the present.
The history of religion in this context was relevant predomi-
nantly through the lens of the passage from traditional to modern
societies, thereby subsumed and refracted in notions such as the irra-
tionality of religion as opposed to the rationality of modernity, the
progressive secularization of modern societies, modern religion, and
modern consciousness, and the locating of present religion away from
the most powerful features of modernity, in voluntary organizations,
in private and privatized belief and practice, among marginal (often
deemed more traditional) populations, and in minority or sectarian
religious movements. Historical methods, with their focus on the gen-
eration of data through the textual analysis of things written by people
long since dead (and to a small degree the analysis of artifacts and
archaeological data) and with their constant need to weave the facts
3
╇ For a recent, broad and, for the present analysis, indicative overview of the social
sciences more generally, see Porter and Ross 2003. The virtual absence of even discus-
sion of religion or the study of religion is manifest. For the problematic relation of
history and the social sciences, see, from that volume, Revel 2003.
historical observation in the sociology of religion 69
together imaginatively out of very partial evidence, did not and could
not have the kind of relevance of data generated from present people
with hard and reproducible techniques. And in any case, what did or
did not happen in the traditional past was not particularly relevant for
understanding religion under modern circumstances.
As illustration of this tendency, one can look at the content of the
main journals in which sociology of religion research was published.
Here cannot be the place for a detailed analysis, but a summary state-
ment of what one finds in two of the currently most well-known, the
indicatively titled Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion4 and
Sociology of Religion (previously Sociological Analysis), can serve as
illustration. Looking at the topics, theories, and methods used, histori-
cal subjects and the use of historical methods are not absent among the
various contributions to these periodicals since the 1960s, but they are
rare and overwhelmed by studies on contemporary religion, using
qualitative and quantitative methods that generate data from interac-
tion with living people. The past, to the extent that it is important at all,
is almost entirely so as a partial aid to understanding the “real” topic:
religion in the present.
The situation was very different in the other discipline, a disci-
pline that also had antecedents in the 19th century, but really came
into self-identity and clear institutional expression as a discipline only
in the post-Second World War era. I will continue to call it religious
studies, but the ambiguities about its own identity can be seen in
the fact that it has never had a stable title, referred to by other names
such as comparative religion, the study of religion, in other languages
as the “science of religion” (e.g. Religionswissenschaft, Sciences reli-
gieuses, sciences des religions), and notably, as still reflected in its pre-
mier international academic society (the International Association for
the History of Religions/IAHR), the history of religions. In terms of
methods, practically speaking, historical methods dominated, but with
the significant addition of philological and philosophical/theological
methods; and a relatively unsuccessful attempt to develop phenome-
nological method as a characteristic method for the discipline. Indeed,
one could go so far as to say that, until relatively recently, religious
4
╇ This journal has never been focussed only on the sociological study of religion,
including other disciplines, especially psychological studies, as well. Sociology none-
theless dominates throughout the now fifty years of its publication.
70 peter beyer
5
╇ A number of “world religions” texts from the 1960s to the 1990s could serve as
illustration. As an example, which I used in my own teaching of this course in the early
1990s, when it was typical, see Noss and Noss 1990.
6
╇ I attempted such a survey on the different but related note of “religious diversity,”
itself another indicator of change in disciplinary focus in recent decades (see Beyer
2000).
historical observation in the sociology of religion 71
╇ This conclusion would also affect the non-human sciences, like physics or biology,
7
but it is not necessary to enter into this wider discussion for the point being made here.
72 peter beyer
8
╇ This may manifest itself not only in often trenchant criticism of the colonialist,
the modernist, the core, the West, and so forth, but also in a characteristic “neologiz-
ing” writing style. See, as well known examples from other disciplines, Spivak 1988,
Bhabha 1994.
historical observation in the sociology of religion 73
9
╇Significantly, perhaps, the more recent updating of Eric Sharpe’s Comparative
Religion (1986) betrays a much more favorable attitude to the contribution to the study
of religion of sociology; the suspicion of reductionism seems to have greatly
attenuated.
74 peter beyer
how religion can be studied in the present has a direct relevance and
applicability for how it should be studied for all times and places. One
might go so far as to say that this trend in religious studies considers
the present more as the standard for the past rather than the other way
around, as it used to be.
The transformations within the discipline of the sociology of reli-
gion have been equally as evident, although they have understandably
taken a different form, albeit sometimes with similar shifts in empha-
sis. Perhaps the prime indicator is the decline, not in the secularization
thesis itself, but in its seeming self-evidence: the idea that modern
societies tend toward the decreasing power and importance of reli-
gion, and that therefore the study of religion in those societies will
always be accompanied by the implicit question of how they manage to
maintain themselves, how they handle the secularization pressure
from their environment, or even why they (continue to) exist at all, has
now to be demonstrated for particular circumstances. It is no longer
something that applies by default with the possibility of exceptions.
In terms of theory, the rise in popularity of religious market theory
such as represented in the works of Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and
Larry Iannaccone is symptomatic (Finke and Stark 1992, Stark and
Finke 2000). This rise coincides with the rise of the Christian Right in
the United States (although this correspondence should not be con-
strued as a causal relation). In that context, the theory explicitly rein-
corporates history in its very structure: religion works basically the
same in all places and times: The conditions for “vital” religion today
are the same as they were yesterday. They are the same for the United
States in the 18th as in the 21st century, Europe in the Middle Ages,
and today in Japan, China, and the Muslim world (Stark and Iannac�
cone, 1994). The modern/traditional qualitative hiatus is erased.
In parallel with this American-centered development, sociologists
of religion in Europe have engaged in a similar move: not that Europe
is all of a sudden less secularized than it was thirty years ago, but that
secularity is now seen with a different lens—as, on the one hand, an
excep�tion (Grace Davie [2003] influentially speaks of European excep-
tionalism where the discipline used to be obsessed with American
exceptionalism)—and, on the other hand, as merely a different form
of religion, for instance in Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s phrase, as a “chain
of memory” rather than as something simply gone or absent (1993,
cf. 1999).
In parallel—and here parallel with transformations in religious
studies which indicate the shorter distance between the two that has
historical observation in the sociology of religion 75
Conclusion
What emerges from this sort of analysis? Perhaps the most critical
conclusion that one can draw is that the disciplines in which we work
are simultaneously social structures that very much impinge on what
it is that we as practitioners are willing and able to see—yet entities that
are constantly transforming themselves in an evolutionary, if not tele-
ological, sense. Disciplinary structures and orientations of what is now
the past are not simply and not even essentially earlier stages in the
onward march of knowledge and progress. We do not see better than
we did before; we do not see farther because we are standing on the
shoulders (read: the disciplinary realities) of past dwarfs and giants.
But we do see and observe differently. If there is a lesson to be drawn
from the transformations that I have been discussing here, it is that we
must from time to time in our disciplinary existences stop and take
stock of where we have been and how we got to where we are, and to
realize that what seems obvious now is no more likely to be obvious in
the future than what seemed obvious in the past. The constant incor-
poration of history and, in consequence, of historical method is one
historical observation in the sociology of religion 77
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Immigrants to Canada: Gender, Age, and 2nd Generation.” Journal of International
Migration and Integration 6: 171–99.
——. 2006. Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge.
——. 2008. “From Far and Wide: Canadian Religious and Cultural Diversity in Global/
Local Context.” Pp. 9–39 in Religious Diversity in Canada, edited by L. Beaman and
P. Beyer. Leiden: Brill.
——. 2011. “Differential Reconstruction of Religions among Second Generation
Immigrant Youth in Canada.” Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion 1: 1–28.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Boas, Franz and Ruth Benedict. 1934. General Anthropology. Boston: Heath.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. (1997). Religion and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Davie, Grace. 2003. Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern
World. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
Esler, Philip F. 1994. The First Christians in their Social Worlds: Social-Scientific
Approaches to New Testament Interpretation. London: Routledge.
Fichter, Joseph H. 1975. The Catholic Cult of the Paraclete. New York: Sheed and Ward.
Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners
and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 1997. “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category.”
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——. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Flanagan, Kieran and Peter C. Jupp, eds. 2007. A Sociology of Spirituality. Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate.
Gooren, Henri. 2010. Religious Conversion and Disaffiliation: Tracing Patterns of
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historical observation in the sociology of religion 79
Elijah Obinna
Uke Ogo (the elders and leaders of the village). Each Uke Ogo serves his
village for a period of seven years before being promoted to leadership
at the clan level, first as Ekpu Uketo, later as Essa, and finally as Ndie
Ichie (the retired elders). Each of these groups will be discussed further
in order to demonstrate how their roles complement each other and
infuse social order within the indigenous community. However, it
must be pointed out that there is often some fluidity in the functions of
families, compounds and villages: matters affecting families could be
discussed at the village assembly. What is important in every level of
discussion and decision making is the need to respect and to be fair
not only to the individual members of the society but also to maintain
a cordial relationship with the living dead Nnochewo (ancestors).
Ancestors
with sacrifices (Iwuagwu 1998: 100). They are seen as dispensing both
favors and misfortune: thus ancestors could be accused of being capri-
cious and of failing in their responsibilities. However, their actions are
often related to possible lapses on the part of the living and are seen as
legitimately punitive. In the ethnographies dealing descriptively with
indigenous beliefs, it is often held that Africans see the powers of the
elders as derivative from the power of the ancestors (Kopytoff 1971:
129–42). Although complex, it appears rather that the powers ascribed
to the ancestors are the palpable powers of the living elders. Further�
more, among the Amasiri, elders by their position hold direct powers
due to their age; this may not be seen necessarily as re-projections
from the ancestors. The elders’ attitudes (dead or alive) seem ambiva-
lent. They both punish and exercise benevolence, and they play promi-
nent roles in restoring amity within their lineage. It is therefore my
contention that an understanding of ancestors as elders is necessary,
and if that is the case, there should be nothing ambivalent about elders
exercising authority among the Amasiri.
In regard to the processes of acquiring authority by the elders, Fortes
argues thus: “the personality and character, the virtues or vices, success
or failure, popularity or unpopularity, of a person during his lifetime
make no difference to his attainment of ancestorship” (1965: 133).
Similarly, Kopytoff (1971: 138–39) argues that none of those virtues
mentioned by Fortes makes any difference in the authority invested in
eldership. He insists that what matters is the status ascribed to the
elders—dead or living. Fortes’s understanding is that people simply
acquire, upon death, the power to intervene in the life of the living.
Similarly, Kopytoff argues that, rather than acquiring new powers, the
ancestors continue to exercise those powers that they already had while
alive. While Fortes’s and Kopytoff ’s points are helpful, it suffices to
argue that the powers acquired and appropriated by ancestors are
dependent on the approved life pattern of such elders while they were
alive among their kin group. Therefore among the Amasiri the right of
being an ancestor depends largely on one’s life in the present.
The Elders
Within Amasiri, eldership confers power upon a person over his or her
junior—he or she can curse or bless in the name of his or her ancestors.
In an interview Omezue Egwu (2008) argues that although women
88 elijah obinna
When there are disputes over land ownership, Ndi Ichie are often con-
sulted, and their evidence is expected to be taken seriously.
Furthermore, the Essas (highest indigenous leaders) form another
group of elders and serve as the supreme judicial authority among the
Amasiri on all matters of custom. The Essas run a court system and
adjudicate on matters; however, their functions can both complement
and run in conflict with the government judicial system. Until a dec-
ade ago several cases were withdrawn at the request of the Essas (from
the civil courts) to be handled by them. They preside over cases involv-
ing individuals, families, and villages. Around the age of 75–80 the
Essas retire from active roles to join Ndi Ichie. Next to the Essa is Ekpu
Uketo, who serve as assistants to the Essa group. The Ekpu group serves
as the messengers of the Essa and are often younger. People graduate
from Ekpu Uketo to the Essa group. At the village levels are the Uke
Ogo also called Ochi ali (custodians of the land). This group mobilizes
their people for communal work and also serves as custodians of cus-
toms at the village levels. When they consider it necessary, they can
suspend a ritual or call for a ritual performance. Next to the Uke Ogo is
Uke Ezi, which serve as the assistant group; they deal primarily with
sanitation, peace keeping and maintenance of order at the compounds
(Oko 1993: 46).
At the Umudi (patrilineal) family level, the most elderly male serves
as the head and is often charged with the responsibility of offering sac-
rifices on behalf of the other members of the family. In addition to this,
he is also involved in settling family disputes, always attempting to pre-
vent his family from taking cases to other levels that could expose their
family to ridicule. As already shown, elders (by their age) rule among
Amasiri. In some cases, however, Christians and uninitiated males into
the Ogo society may not play such leadership roles. In such instances
the next in order of seniority within the family, compound, village, or
clan would lead. The Ogo society plays a central role among Amasiri;
it is the group or institution into which every male is expected to be
initiated. Initiation into the Ogo society serves as a form of incorpora-
tion into adulthood and basis for social mobility. Thus the uninitiated
males are often looked down upon, and even Christians who may have
been initiated are perceived as aliens and traitors to whom the leader-
ship of the community may not be entrusted. This dynamic highlights
the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of indigenous leadership struc-
tures within Amasiri.
90 elijah obinna
Title Taking
Age Grade
The eburu (age grade) appears inseparable from the life of the
indigenous Amasiri. The age grade system is a cultural factor of the
people that seems to constitute a way of life and a mark of identity.
Within Amasiri the age grade forms the basis of belonging to and
acceptance within the clan. The origin of age grade can be traced to
the early days of inter-community clashes, slave raiding and kidnap-
ping which constantly threatened the security of indigenous commu-
nities. In order to secure the clan from both internal and external
aggressions, the clan divided itself into groups according to when each
person was born (Nna Atu personal interview 2008). In the early days
of Amasiri, the strength and prestige of any age group was based on
the extent of its effectiveness in its defense of the clan against hostile
neighbors.
The age grade system used to grow out of the many years of associa-
tion between age mates as boys—some through group hunting, play-
ing together, or their initiation into the Ogo society, as often those who
were born around the same time were initiated at the same period.
Until twenty years ago wrestling was also central in the formation of
age grades. Oko (1993: 63–66) summaries this formation process of
age grades among the Amasiri thus:
Normally during wrestling contests, there is the first group called “nchifu
ogbo.” These are children between ages of two and say seven. They will all
crowd the wrestling arena. Each child is free to challenge any other child
there, and before you know it, one has emerged the champion and is
leadership and party politics among the amasiri93
carried shoulder high … This will continue until a named age grade will
begin their turn. On the above note, and without being told, one will
automatically know which age grade one belongs to.
Wrestling has always served as the key sport among the Amasiri. It is
usually held during the Omoha festival in March of every year. Those
who formed a particular age grade were usually born within a period
of three to five years (depending on the village involved). However,
since the 1990s there has been less emphasis on wrestling, as such peo-
ple born within a range of three years identify themselves and start
meeting informally as an organization often called “Boys no Name.”
After a period of about five to seven years of such meetings, they gain
recognition by the elders and are guided to choose their name. The
names of age grades are usually reflective of specific historical events
linked to period of their birth or a representation of the philosophy of
that grade. For instance those born during the period of World War II
chose the name Ngwogu, meaning weapon of war. Others include,
Igbemgbo (bullet box), Soja (Army or Soldier). This choice of names
enables the indigenous Amasiri to locate themselves within a global
historical map.
The age grade is one of the oldest institutions used in the adminis-
tration of indigenous communities like the Amasiri before and after
the emergence of the British colonial administration. The system has
been graphically described as “that method by which communities
organize themselves for work, war and government” (Maduka 1993:
64). The age grades serve as the traditional “police” of each village.
Furthermore, they also serve a means of allocating public duties and
distributing public goods. Through its internal code of conduct, the
age grade serves as a means of guarding public morality through the
censorship of its members’ behavior. The system has shown itself as
the most potent vehicle for accelerated community development
among the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria. More than government, age
grades are responsible for most infrastructural development of the
Amasiri. Age grades are involved in the construction of roads, bridges,
culverts, hospitals, schools, and other social amenities (Agwu 2007: 3).
Thus the age grade among the Amasiri remains an instrument of local
administration as well as a medium of community organization and
development. The security and judicial processes are also vested in the
system, and it is the pivot on which the socioeconomic well-being of
the community and its members revolves. Under this �system, ages
grades below the age of forty concern themselves with clearing the
94 elijah obinna
paths, streams and public squares and in enforcing the decisions of the
elders and village assemblies.
The age grade system serves as a sociopolitical institution as well as
an agent of development. Among Amasiri their activities are closely
supervised by the elders. There are, however, protective attitudes by
several age grades toward safeguarding their names. As such, each age
grade often puts in place some rules and regulations to guide the
behaviors of its members (Oko 1993: 63). The age grades also serve as
a means of economic and social empowerment of their members. This
is often done through the disbursement of loans to enable their mem-
bers to start off or improve their trades. Furthermore, the age grade as
well as one’s family will often support any individuals who face abuse
or unnecessary attacks from their neighbors or false accusation, espe-
cially of stealing. Thus the age grade not only provides a means for
social control, but also serves as a platform for distributing public
goods. Admittance to several indigenous leadership groups follows
active participation in the age grade system, which is preceded by ini-
tiation into the Ogo society. Maduka (1993: 61, 65) further under-
scores the political role of the age grade among the Igbo thus:
In a sense, age grade is a political front without a political symbol. That
is, age grade can be involved in politics without assuming a political
party stand; it can also influence political direction … When age grades
pull their weight effectively and collectively, they can influence political
activities of the town and reset the hands of the political clock … Age
grade no doubt is a political pressure group especially in deciding who
goes for what post in politics outside or within the communities.
Maduka’s comments draw attention to the complex roles of age grades
within indigenous communities. As explained earlier, the grades are
effective instruments for indigenous administration, and since many
who contend for political posts belong to them, it would be expected
that the individuals are guided by the moral codes of their age grades.
The role of age grades in deciding who represents their communities
remains ambiguous, in view of the observable “God fatherism” within
contemporary party politics of Amasiri. Abiola (2007: 1) describes the
phenomenon of God fatherism thus:
“God fatherism” is a kind of politics whereby an influential person in a
popular ruling party will assist someone to emerge as the governorship
candidate of the party at all cost and either by hook or crook; he will help
him to emerge victorious irrespective of whether he or she is a popular
candidate or not. The elected governor on capturing the reins of power
leadership and party politics among the amasiri95
will then be dancing to the tune of the God father that assisted him or
her in winning the election because he controls the state power remotely;
as they say that “he who plays the piper dictates the tune.”
Abiola’s point is crucial and demonstrates in part the clash of power
between the indigenous leadership structures and contemporary poli-
tics. However, Abiola fails to underscore the complex nature of such
Godfather-and-son relationships. The romance between the Godson
and Father is sometimes transient because of the often overbearing
attitudes of many Godfathers to office holders and attempts by some
Godsons to assert themselves once elected into office. Contemporary
processes of party elections have become more complex over the years
among the Amasiri; however an informant affirms that elected office
holders often attempt to maintain a cordial relationship with their age
grades as a way of maintaining local relevance (Obasi personal inter-
view 2008).
Arunsi and Ugoji (1993: 57) in discussing the Edda—a neighboring
clan to the Amasiri—observe that members within age grades try to
abide by the rules and regulations of their age grades for fear of being
ostracized, suspended or fined for breach of laws. Within Amasiri, it is
often said that nobody is above his age mates, implying that every
member of an age grade is equal before the law irrespective of educa-
tion, wealth, or public offices. Isu (personal interview 2008) insists that
not even the executive members of any age grade are supposed to
impose their decision on others. While Isu underscores the indigenous
solidarity, such an assertion also often plays out differently in real life
situations. An understanding of the power structures within Amasiri
requires a grasp of the social processes of power. These include the
ability of a group or an individual to exert influence over others and
the status that confers influence. While there is often the pursuit of col-
lective solidarity, yet it appears that indigenous titles and some other
virtues enhance an individual’s degree of influence within the indige-
nous structures. Such influence is often demonstrated when villages or
clans meet in their public assemblies.
Village Assembly
which focuses on what parties can or should do; and the descriptive
definitions, which address party traits, such as the collective nature of
parties and the various aspects of a party’s activity, including selection
of candidates, participation in elections, and so on (Maor 1997: 3).
Political parties are thus a combination of collective team and com-
mon impulse of passion or interest. They are systems of interdepend-
ent activities characterized by high degrees of rational direction of
behaviors toward ends that are objects of common acknowledgment
and expectation. Political parties seek to attain and maintain political
power within government usually by participating in electoral cam-
paigns. They are different from other social groups, such as labor
unions and other associations, because of the unique functions they
perform for the state. This system is also different from the indigenous
leadership structures among Amasiri due to its complex inclusiveness
of youths and females (Ugbo personal interview 2008). As outlined
earlier, before the arrival of the missionaries and colonial administra-
tors, the Amasiri were ruled by their elders according to indigenous
laws and customs. Small cases were handled locally by the family
heads. Other serious cases were referred to the village and yet more
serious matters were attended to by the Essa and Ndi Ichie at the clan
level. Unlike the colonial structures, these processes were rarely
imposed and derived from mutual consensus.
The indirect administration by the colonial government created
space for the constitutions by which Nigeria was governed. However,
there was limited participation of Nigerians in the process of bringing
the constitutions into being. In this category fell the Lugard’s constitu-
tion of 1914, the 1922 Clifford’s constitution, and the 1946 Richard’s
constitution (Okonkwo 1961: 243–269). The amalgamation of the
southern and northern protectorate in 1914 marked the beginning of
efforts in sociopolitical engineering. Furthermore, subsequent consti-
tutional amendments saw increased political consciousness among the
Igbo. The formation of The National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon
(NCNC) in 1944 and other political parties, in some cases serving
ethnic interests, and gave rise to Local Government Reforms in the
Eastern region of Nigeria. Since the 1960s, at least several political par-
ties have been formed and reformed. The electoral voting zones were
created according to populations, forgetting the contested nature of
Nigerian census counts (Baur 1994: 381, Adogame 2005: 133). Further�
more, the Igbo consensus system was affected by the British political
system. Okpara (1993: 307) notes that the roles which power brokers,
102 elijah obinna
one can deceive a community. The villages and clan often ostracize
anyone who brings disaster or bad luck to the community. Such
persons are known through confession or divination, and when that
happens, the community avoids the person until the prescribed per-
sonal or communal sacrifices are made. Ostracism is the most dreadful
punishment an individual can be given. It feels like dying, so individu-
als often try to avoid it as well the embarrassment it will cause other
members of one’s family. The elders, being aware of the possible rejec-
tion of their leadership and even sanction if some forms of irregulari-
ties are endorsed among them, also aspire to be as transparent as
possible. Contemporary efforts to maintain social order may not dis-
miss the roles of the indigenous agents and structures highlighted in
this chapter, rather there should be an incorporation and collaboration
for the sake of maintaining social control and for effective distribution
of public goods. Against those who claim that indigenous institutions
are irrelevant in modern societies, this chapter has argued that they
are dynamic and progressive structures of continuing vitality and
influence.
References
——.1993. “Ethical Values in Igbo Tradition of Politics.” Pp. 9–19 in The Igbo and the
Tradition of Politics, edited by U.D. Anyanwu and J.C.U. Aguwa. Enugu: Fourth
Dimension Publishing.
Kopytoff, Igor. 1971. “Ancestors as Elders in Africa.” Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 41: 129–42.
Maduka, R. O. E. 1993. “Age Grade Factor in Igbo Tradition of Politics.” Pp. 61–70 The
Igbo and the Tradition of Politics, edited by U.D. Anyanwu and J.C.U. Aguwa. Enugu:
Fourth Dimension Publishing.
Maor, Moshe. 1997. Political Parties and Party Systems: Comparative Approaches and
the British Experience. London: Routledge.
Mbiti, John S. 1975. African Religion and Philosophy. London: Heinemann Educational
Books.
Mbon, Friday M. 1991. “African Traditional Socio-Religious Ethics and National
Development: the Nigerian Case.” Pp. 101–109 African Traditional Religions in
Contemporary Society, edited by J.K. Olupona. Minneapolis: Paragon House.
Nieuwaal, A. van Rouveroy van. 1999. “Chieftaincy in Africa: Three Facets of a Hybrid
Role.” Pp. 21–47 in African Chieftaincy, edited by R. van Dijk and A. van R. van
Nieuwaal. Hamburg: Lit Verlag.
Njoku, Raphael C. 2005. “Missionary Enterprise and Socialcultural Change in
Igboland, Southern Nigeria: Realities, Myths, and Continuities, 1900–1960.”
Pp. 75–96 in Religion, History, and Politics in Nigeria: Essays in Honour of Ogbu
U. Kalu, edited by C.J. Korieh and G.U. Nwokeiji. New York: University Press of
America.
Nolte, Insa. 2002. “Chieftaincy and the State in Abacha’s Nigeria: Kingship, Political
Rivalry and Competing Histories in Abeokuta During the 1990s.” Journal of the
International African Institute 72: 368–90.
Nsugbe, Philip O. 1974. Ohafia: A Matrilineal Ibo People. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Nwaubani, Ebere. 1994. “Chieftaincy Among the Igbo: A Guest on the Centre-Stage.”
International Journal of African Studies 27: 347–51.
Oko, Anthony I. 1993. Amasiri: A Legacy. Onitsha: Nap Publishers.
Okonkwo, Onuzulike. 1961. History of Nigeria in a New Setting: from the Earliest Time
to 1961. Ontisha: Tabansi Bookshops.
Okpara, Enoch E. 1993. “Personalities, Manifestoes and Voting Behaviour among the
Igbo.” Pp. 298–308 in The Igbo and the Tradition of Politics, edited by U.D. Anyanwu
and J.C.U. Aguwa. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishing.
Olisa, Michael. 1992. “Igbo Politics and Governance.” Pp. 161–77 in Groundwork of
Igbo Histor, edited by A.E. Afigbo. Lagos: Vista Books.
Ottenberg, Simon. 1958. “Ibo Oracles and Inter-Group Relations Southwestern.”
Journal of Anthropology 14: 295–317.
——. 1982. “Boys Secret Societies in Afikpo” Pp. 170–84 in African Religious Groups
and Beliefs: Papers in Honor of William R. Bascom, edited by S. Ottenberg. Meerut,
India: Archana.
Pateman, Carole and Charles W. Mills. 2007. Contracts and Domination. Cambridge:
Polity.
Ray, Benjamin C. 2000. African Religions: Symbols, Ritual and Community, 2nd ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Shipton, Parker. 2009. Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa.
London: Yale University Press.
Stanley, Brian. 1990. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and the British
Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Leicester: Apollos.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are Always a
Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talbot, Percy A. 1969. The People of Southern Nigeria. London: Frank Cass.
110 elijah obinna
Trotha, Trutz von. 1996. “From Administration to Civil Chieftaincy: Some Problems
and Prospects of African Chieftaincy.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law
37(8): 79–107.
Uchenna, Victor C. 1965. The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria. Chicago: Holt, Rinhart and
Winston.
Vaughan, Olufemi. 2000. Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modem Politics.
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester.
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Pluto Press.
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edited by R.S. Katz and W.J. Crotty. London: Sage.
Informants (Pseudonyms)
Atu, Chukwu (Nna), 07/07/08. Age 85, member of the Ndi ichie (retired elders) group.
Egwu, Agu (Omezue), 15/06/08. Age 78, holder of the highest title and a member of
the Essa group.
Eke, Ogeri (Madam), 12/07/08. Age 73, member of the Osumkpa women leadership
group.
Etta, Oko (Osuu), 02/08/08. Age 65, holder of the second highest title for men and a
member of the Ekpu uketo group.
Isu, Agu, (Nna), 29/06/08. Age 80, village Ogo society ritual leader and a member of
the Ndi ichie group.
Izu, Agha (Omezue), 31/07/08. Age 80, holder of the highest title, former spokesper-
son of the essa group and currently a member of the Ndi ichie group.
Obasi, Idam (Hon.) 01/08/08. Age 45, politician and immediate past political office
holder.
Okonta, Festus (Chief), 06/08/08. Age 65, retired civil servant and a member of the
Amasiri Council of Chiefs.
Ugbo, Francis, 27/06/08. Age 35, community youth leader, self-identified as a political
activist.
CHAPTER FIVE
Pen-Hsuan Lin
The only laws that are directly related to religions in Taiwan are The
Supervising Temples Act passed in 1929 and The Temple Registration
Regulations passed in 1936. The former is a law (Qu 1989: 39–4, 1997:
439–510, Huang 2000: 87–89), whereas the latter is an administrative
rule. Temples become “eligible” only after they fulfill the requirements
of The Supervising Temples Act or The Temple Registration Regulations
and get a registration certificate.
The Supervising Temples Act is composed of thirteen articles with a
focus on supervising properties of temples. It claims that all properties
are managed by the trustee monk/nun.
Generally speaking, The Supervising Temples Act is the product of
the “period of political tutelage” during the early period of the Republic
of China. “Supervising” in the sense found in the regulation sug-
gests that the major purpose of the government in its enactment was to
development of religious legislation in taiwan113
prevent people from running off with temples’ property. The exclusion
of Christianity and Catholicism from having to have this type of super-
vision is indicative of the unusual status of these two religions at that
time. Several major issues arose from the problematic nature of the
basic principles of this regulation discussed above. According to Qu
Haiyuan (1989: 42), there are four major problems identified in The
Supervising Temples Act in terms of its basic principles. The first prob-
lem is the violation of equality defined in The Temporary Provisions
and the Constitution because The Supervising Temples Act is concerned
only with temples and not churches. Second, the idea of supervision
over religions violates the principles of separation between religions
and politics, which undermines religious freedom. Third, its focus on
the properties of temples sidelines the religious aspect and even
attempts to make religion a material entity, while failing to address
other aspects of religions and temples. Fourth, this regulation targets
Buddhist and Taoist temples exclusively, and ignores other folk reli-
gions, something that causes practical problems when dealing with
certain issues and leaves it open to charges of religious inequality.
Today a difficulty arises because of the different backdrop of the early
period of the Republic of China as contrasted to the current social and
political context in Taiwan as it affects actual situations as they occur
in Taiwanese society. As a result, a great deal of religious administra-
tion is based on interpretations made by the MOI and the Taiwan pro-
vincial government. A fifth problem is the unclear legal status of
religious organizations.
The legal status of temples as defined in Article 6 of The Supervising
Temples Act is as follows: “Ownership of all property and possessions
will be retained by the temple and managed by the trustee monk/nun.
Trustee monk/nun refers to any monk or nun who has management
authority, whatever their title or ranking may be. However, they can-
not take charge as trustee monk/nun if they are not citizens of the
Republic of China.” That a temple is a juridical person can be inferred
from the words saying “ownership of all property and possessions will
be retained by the temple” because only natural persons and juridical
persons can be a subject of this right and can retain property. However,
the article does not clearly point out that a temple is a juridical per-
son, as are social organizations and financial organizations. In fact, a
temple is not a juridical person in a real sense and is only treated as a
quasi-juridical person or a juridical person-to-be. Therefore, any tem-
ple that follows The Supervising Temples Act cannot enjoy the status of
114 pen-hsuan lin
a juridical person. Many large temples who can earn money from the
sale of sesame oil and which retain significant possessions have regis-
tered as a “juridical Person.” In this way, they can become “juridical
persons of a financial group of charity, education and culture” in order
to qualify for tax breaks.
The Supervising Temples Act prescribes that all properties in temples
are managed by the trustee monk/nun and the trustee monk/nun is the
person responsible for temples. However, most of the temples do not
have clergy as their trustee monk/nun. In practice, the Department of
Civil Affairs of the Taiwan provincial government and the Department
of Civil Affairs in the MOI has published many official documents
to provide administrative interpretations from the 1950s to the 1980s.
In those documents, it is possible for a layperson responsible for the
temple to be made effectively the trustee monk/nun. Originally, the
person responsible for the temple was another form of trustee monk/
nun, whereas later on, the person responsible and trustee monk/nun
became two separate positions in a temple, and in some cases the latter
may even answer to the person actually responsible. Some documents
also stipulate that a General Members Assembly must be established,
which would wield overall power in temples of both folk religions
and Buddhism (Department of Civil Affairs, Taiwan provincial gov-
ernment 1991, Huang 2000, Ministry of Interior 2005).1 A General
Members Assembly, however, is not prescribed by The Supervising
Temples Act. In actual fact, very few of the articles in The Supervising
Temples Act have been implemented for one reason or another, and
the administration mostly followed the rules released by ministries in
the government or the current interpretation for The Supervising
Temples Act. At the present time, Buddhism is appealing to abolish this
act and liberate itself from the requirements of administrative rules or
interpretations concerning the General Members Assembly.
Since the act is only adapted to Buddhism and Taoism, there is a
general conception that Catholicism and Protestant Christianity are
not regulated by the legal system. As a matter of fact, Catholic and
other Christian institutions are bound by civil law and must register as
juridical persons. Only then can they be the subject of right to retain
properties and qualify for tax breaks. However, civil law is designed to
encompass all juridical persons and is not specifically aimed at �religious
2
╇ Social associations such as the China Buddhist Association, the Taoist Association
of the Republic of China and the Buddhist Temple Association of the Republic of
China usually include associations as their members, while these are the headquarters.
However, some religious organizations also include individuals as their members.
Some organizations of this type are called “societies” and focus on research on reli-
gions. The name “society” can also sometimes apply to Tibetan Buddhist associations
with individual members.
116 pen-hsuan lin
In all, before the establishment of new religious laws, the legal status
of religious organizations can be categorized as follows:
1. Ordinary temples (folk religions and Taoism) that followed The
Temple Registration Regulations and have a temple registration
certificate. Large temples registered as juridical persons can get
tax breaks according to Article 2 of The Standards for Income
Tax-free Institutions and Organizations of Education, Culture
and Charity.
2. Buddhist temples: Ordinary temples who have the temple regis-
tration certificate and large temples registered as juridical per-
sons for the sake of qualifying for tax breaks.
3. Catholic and Christian organizations: Some individual churches
registered as local juridical persons according to civil law and
national churches registered as national juridical persons.
4. Social organizations of a religious nature: national religious
organizations and headquarters registered as national social
organizations following the Civil Associations Act, such as the
China Buddhist Association, the Taoist Association of the
Republic of China, and the Yi Guan Dao Headquarters of
the Republic of China after the ban on Yi Guan Dao was lifted.
Some newly developed religions such as the Unification Church, Soka
Gakkai Association, Family for Love, and others were banned by the
government during the Martial Law Period (Lin 1996, 2003). In 1987,
around the end of the Martial Law Period, those religions were in fact
teaching in public even though they were not able to register with the
Department of Civil Affairs in the MOI and therefore were not included
in official statistics.
Before the late 1990s, all types of newly developed religions took the
following two forms: First they applied to the Ministry of Education
for registration as a foundation (financial juridical person) and were
then supervised by the Ministry. This kind of organization is called
a juridical person of culture and education administratively or with
“culture and education” in their names because they focus on culture
and education. There was one disputed case where a Buddhist monk
called Miaotian first applied to the Ministry of Education for registra-
tion as the Culture and Education Association of Yinxin Zen, but it
turned out to focus on religious activities.3 The second type is to apply
3
╇ Now all religious activities held by this organization are in the name of the Taiwan
Zen Buddhist Association.
development of religious legislation in taiwan117
4
╇ Da Yi Jiao, which had held many religious activities under its original name of
Scientology, was established in this period. They then registered as a new religious type
to became the twenty-seventh official religion in Taiwan.
5
╇ In the past, Buddhists thought that many problems confronting all the Buddhists
were caused by The Supervising Temples Act. As a result, they appealed to abolish this
legislation and thought that all the problems would thereby be solved. However, they
now realize that supervision of temples was not what they had expected. As the monk
Jinxin has pointed out, this regulation did not interfere with religious preaching or the
staff in temples. The problems facing all Buddhists were aroused by the administrative
orders from the MOI or the provincial government.
118 pen-hsuan lin
6
╇ About 400 temples out of 10,000 in Taiwan have registered as juridical persons.
7
╇ Discussion about the drafts of religious legislation for every year is based on the
different versions of drafts provided by the MOI.
development of religious legislation in taiwan119
8
╇ In 1969, there was also a “Draft of Temples Management Act” in Taiwan. This was
not, however, made general knowledge, nor was it implemented.
120 pen-hsuan lin
person they were to be was not entirely clear. The articles specified that
all the approved temples and churches have to decide their own stat-
utes and boards of directors, from which we can infer that temples
and churches are more likely to be considered financial juridical per-
sons. All the newly established temples and churches are required to
seek the approval for their proposal by the department supervising
them. A proposal shall include the following: purpose, religion, name,
adopted teachings, doctrines, ceremonies, rituals, intended temples,
the address of the headquarters, public welfare, etc., but the exact pro-
cedures of how the proposal is to be examined are not clear. The super-
vision of property and possessions mostly follow the principles in The
Supervising Temples Act.
This draft was being drawn up when the Non-Party Movement (the
opposition movement before the DPP) was rising and the Presbyterian
Church in Taiwan (The Presbyterian Church of Christianity) was
actively involved in Taiwanese politics (Qu 1982, Lin 1991). Therefore,
articles in the draft convey obvious political elements (Jinxin 2001).9
For example, Article 7 prescribes that “preaching should be in public
and in the language of Chinese, with translation needed for people
who do not understand Chinese.” This article is considered as primar-
ily concerned with Presbyterian Churches, especially those in the
south, where people mostly speak Taiwanese in churches, and a small
number of churches for minorities use bibles in the aboriginal lan-
guage. Another example is that Article 4 declares that “temples and
churches are concerned with teaching their religious doctrines and
holding religious ceremonies and activities. Furthermore, no doc-
trines, ceremonies and activities shall violate law or public customs.”
This article is just a declarative one without any substantial content and
was likely to be related to the involvement of the priest or minister in
social and political activities.
In addition, Articles 12, 19 and 20 are noticeably intrusive into the
autonomy and freedom of religious groups. Article 12 prohibits four
kinds of people from being the director of the board or person respon-
sible for the temple or church. The first type is “those who have com-
mitted sedition or treason and have been convicted or whose arrest has
been ordered and whose case is still pending.” The fourth type is “those
who have violated religious regulations and been punished.” Article 19
9
╇ The senior Buddhist monk Jingxin believed that this article interfered with reli-
gious activities.
development of religious legislation in taiwan121
states that “temples and churches which have violated laws, national
policies and committed public nuisance will be punished by the super-
vising office via warning, retrieving the approval, rearrangement and
dismissal.” Article 20 prescribes that “the director the board of the
temple or the church or the trustee monk/nun and priests who violate
the law or regulations and do harm to the interest of the temple or the
church will be replaced or be fined from NT$1,000 to NT$3,000 by the
supervising office.” That the supervising office can relieve the director
of the board and the trustee monk/priest is a serious imposition on the
autonomy of religious organizations. The most likely group to feel the
force of the stipulations in these articles under the political circum-
stances of the day was the Presbyterian Church, with a good deal of its
members and practitioners being involved in the Formosa Incident of
late 1979.
The political environment was still not favorable in 1983 when The
Draft of the Protection of Religions Act was put forward, despite the fact
that this was at the end of the Authoritarian Period in Taiwan. There
are more articles in The Draft of the Protection of Religions Act than
the former two drafts. The Draft of the Protection of Religions Act
recognizes religious organizations as public juridical persons and
clarifies the procedure of building up a church. The procedure in this
draft is more complicated than that defined in the former two drafts
and is closer to the procedure of building up a social organization
(Articles 6, 7 and 8). Article 8 prescribes that the proposal for founding
a church shall include the purpose, the name of the church, the reli-
gion, beliefs and doctrines (including the classics/scriptures), the
number of practitioners, religious commandments, the nature of cer-
emonies, blueprints for development, the total funds required, as well
as where they are to be sourced. More information was required in the
case of local churches, including a document of consent from the
church organization it came under and any information concerning its
related business affairs. Of this, the requirement for the disclosure of
information concerning classics and scriptures, as well as for the num-
ber of practitioners, runs counter to the reality of how religions develop
in their early stages. At this point, after all, the religion does not neces-
sarily have either a classic or, indeed, any formal practitioners.10
10
╇ Quite simply, for example, most of the Buddhist classics and the New Testament
of Christianity came after Sakyamuni and Jesus Christ.
122 pen-hsuan lin
The stipulations in Article 13 appear for the first time in this draft. This
article states that “priests defined in this regulation are those who take
preaching as their professions, who have been examined and have reg-
istered in their churches, and whose information is filed with the MOI.
Anyone found without being examined and registering shall not be
able to preach.”
This does not make logical sense, for it is surely impossible to lay
claim to any practitioners prior to the actual founding of a religion,
and yet registration is required to precede the undertaking of any reli-
gious activity. Similarly, before official registration, there would be nei-
ther any priests nor religious activities, and therefore no practitioners.
This is like the paradox the chicken and the egg: the legislation seems
to be making it impossible for any church (religious organization) to
emerge. The Protection of Religions Act seems to have opened up a
horizon for long-lasting problems for the founding of new religious
organizations, and its stricter procedures and requirements compared
with the former two drafts have logical flaws that make the situation
unworkable. In a word, all the regulations in this draft are aimed at
standardizing religious organizations, institutions of a spiritual and
inspirational nature, to bring them in line with other new social organ-
izations. For example, classics often emerge following the initial found-
ing of a religious organization or as the result of a particular inspiration.
The requirement of the existence of a classic as a prerequisite for
the foundation of a new religious organization, again, runs counter to
religious logic. Nonetheless, the most important problem of the third
draft related to the licensing system for the foundation of a new reli-
gious organization, which presents an obstacle to religious freedom
(Qu 1997)11.
The Draft of the Protection of Religions Act was met with strong
opposition, and this was mainly because of the blatant political agenda
behind it, when compared to the previous two drafts. This agenda is
particularly apparent in Articles 11, 13, 14, 20, 23 and 26. Article 13
not only prohibits religious organizations from holding any religious
activities without first registering in line with the legislation, but it
also declares that preaching should be aimed at spreading religious
11
╇ Take Japan as an example: Before 1945, the licensing system was active in Japan,
and from 1945–1951 the registration system was predominant before the Laws of
Religious Foundation. After this law, a qualifying system was carried out.
development of religious legislation in taiwan123
12
╇ “In public” is a term included in all the three drafts, mainly directed at the Yi
Guan Dao at the time.
124 pen-hsuan lin
with The Supervising Temples Act in its unequal treatment toward reli-
gions, as Buddhism and Taoism were treated differently from other
religions: the act was applied only to Buddhism and Taoism, as well
as to newly-founded religious organizations. What is also indicated is
that other articles had strong political motives and were targeted
mainly at Christianity/Catholicism. In addition, articles related to
property and organizations were the target of overwhelming objec-
tions because they were not applicable to Buddhist teachings and
conventions.
After the failure of all three pieces of religious legislation, the
administrative offices stopped researching and sketching out draft
legislation related to religion. This does not mean, however, that noth-
ing was being done concerning legislation in this particular area.
In 1988, the MOI entrusted Professor Qu Haiyuan of the Academia
Sinica to work on a research project for “Research on Religious Laws.”
He finished the project in 1989, concluding that, given the chaotic
nature of the legal system relating to religious affairs at the time, a
three-way approach should be adopted: namely, the scrapping of the
Supervising Temples Act, the complete revision of the current religious
regulations, and the drawing up of new legislation. His suggestions,
however, went largely ignored. Subsequently, Professor Wu Ningyuan
of National Sun Yat-Sen University was commissioned by the MOI to
conduct another piece of research, which produced a proposed 37 arti-
cles for the Draft of Act on Religious Organizations. Again, these were
never adopted. No other progress had been made in religious legisla-
tion since.
In 1992, members in the Legislative Yuan were re-elected to form
the Second Legislative Yuan. From 1993 to 1995, Xiao Jinlan and 45
other legislators proposed The Draft of Religious Juridical Persons Act
(Second session, Second Legislative Yuan); Chen Qingbao and 20
other legislators proposed The Draft of Religions Act (Third session,
Second Legislative Yuan); Zhang Jianhua, Hong Yuxin, Huang
Zhaoshun and 32 other legislators proposed The Draft of an Act on
Religious Organizations (Fourth session, Second Legislative Yuan);
Zhang Jianhua and 32 other legislators proposed The Draft of Religious
Organizations Act (Fourth session, Second Legislative Yuan); Chen
Qingbao and 20 other members proposed The Draft of Religions Act;
Zhang Jianhua and 32 other members proposed The Draft of Religions
Act; and Xiao Jinlan and 45 other members proposed The Draft of
development of religious legislation in taiwan125
13
╇ Although this event was very controversial, it was the latter two scandals that
caused the biggest problems.
14
╇ Song Qili, formerly Song Qianlin, was born in Gaoxiong, Taiwan. As a result of
the scandal in 1996 Song Qili was accused of fraud and received a seven-year sentence.
In 2003, the Superior Court thought that his thought and actual behavior were more
to do with religious beliefs and had little to do with the court. The Superior Court
eventually acquitted Song in the absence of any victims or evidence of fraud. On
August 26, 2004, the Supreme Court withdrew the verdict (the part related to Song
Qili and another defendant), and returned it to the Superior Court of Taiwan. On
November 29, 2005, the Taiwan Superior Court concluded that it could not be proved
whether or not Song Qili possessed special powers, and the judicial authority could
not find anyone to prove the charges against him. The scandal was concerned with
religious beliefs and was beyond the reach of a court. No proof had been found that
Song Qili was guilty of fraud, and the two defendants were pronounced innocent.
126 pen-hsuan lin
15
╇ Before the Song Qili scandal broke out, nobody knew that Song Qili’s AppearÂ�
ance Association in the Republic of China was a religious group, as this group was
registered as a people’s group in the Department of Social Affairs. However, after
the scandal, many religious people rejected the idea that Song Qili’s Appearance
Association in the Republic of China was a religious group, believing it just to be
acting in the name of a religious group. This is not to say, however, that Song Qili’s
Appearance Association did not constitute a religious group, or at least a “semi-
religious group.”
development of religious legislation in taiwan127
16
╇ Article one of The Supervising Temples Act, stipulates that “all religious buildings
of monks, preachers and abbots all belong to temples no matter how they are named.”
But an Executive Yuan interpretation defined “religious buildings” as buildings with a
roof with a traditional ridge. Temple registration was impossible to achieve for build-
ings with non-traditional ridges. And “plotting out a part of the architecture as reli-
gious buildings” refers to mansions in cities or one floor of apartments. (As land in the
cities was not easy to obtain, many Buddhist temples were situated on one floor of a
building. These temples therefore were not able to gain the certificate of registration as
temples or to become places where legal religious activity took place.)
128 pen-hsuan lin
those that have not applied for foundation according to the legal sys-
tem yet still accept donations. Chapter Nine consists of supplementary
articles. Article 40 stipulates that religious organizations have to apply
to the government department supervising them when they set up reli-
gious training institutions, and Article 41 states that they are required
to supply ossuary towers with the remains of the late priests, registered
disciples or their relatives. Ossuary towers of this type are to be
regarded as religious buildings. Article 42 stipulates that religious
organizations or places providing for spiritual propitiation without
approval from the government may not accept donations from their
disciples or members. Article 43 states that the hiring of administrative
staff by religious organizations should be carried out in line with the
Labor Standards Act.
In the articles in these pieces of legislation there is far less evidence
of political motives and strict controls as compared to those in the for-
mer Draft of Temples and Churches Act and Draft of Protection of
Religions Act, and this is due to the end of Martial Law in Taiwan and
changes in the political climate. Instead, the basic idea behind the new
legislation is to clarify the legal status of religious organizations, to put
all religious organizations under the supervision of a single govern-
ment department, and to give religious organizations the status of
“non-profit foundations.” In addition, the new law intended to solve
many practical problems, such as classifying all bodhimandala in the
city and ossuary towers as religious buildings. There are, of course, still
some similarities between the old and new laws. For example, Articles 7
and 15 stipulated that anyone convicted of custodial sentences or
who is subject to any disciplinary punishments is barred from being
the originator or the delegate of a temple, a church or any religious
social organization, unless said sentence or punishment has already
been served. This barring also includes anyone who has been deprived
of official rights that have yet to be restored. The supervising depart-
ment retains the right to dissolve any religious organizations that
threatens established customs or public order. The competent authori-
ties who are actually supervising the religious organization are mainly
responsible for donations and curtailing religious activities that inter-
fere with the peace. They are also responsible for ensuring that reli-
gious organizations and places for spiritual activities cannot receive any
donation if they have not registered as required by law. This draft of the
law was proposed after the Song Qili event, a time when there was a
push to clean up the chaos surrounding religious activity. The law had
development of religious legislation in taiwan129
other fish to fry, however, and also addressed some of the legislative
principles more at home in the Authoritarian Period. After several
revisions, the Draft of Religious Organizations Act by the Department
of Civil Affairs became the basis for the later Draft of Religious
Organizations Act by the Legislative Yuan.
Even so, Christian organizations such as the Presbyterian Church
in Taiwan have concerns about religious legislation. A public docu-
ment named “Proposals about the Draft of Religious Organizations Act
from the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan” was released on January 25,
1999. In this document, the Presbyterian Church argued that “in order
to spread religious freedom, our Church believes it inappropriate to
set up legal restrictions, and unnecessary to regulate religious activi-
ties by law.” The Presbyterian Churches in Taiwan put forward eight
specific suggestions for the draft, including the proposal that reli-
gious organizations should be named as religious juridical persons
but not financial juridical persons, and that it is inappropriate for local
churches to register as religious juridical persons independently
because they belong to their headquarters. The Presbyterian Church
also suggested that the board of directors should be elected accord-
ing to its own religious system and that the current board should
not nominate the future ones. Other suggestions concerned the
arrangement of land for divinity schools, the transfer of property
in religions, and tax breaks for donations. The Christian churches’
concerns about the draft were quite clear, but more important, they
brought up the fact that there are also many issues that need to
be addressed concerning Christianity, and that these require new
legislation.
The idea in the past that only Buddhism needs religious legislation
to solve practical problems seems problematic. In the past, Christian
organizations questioned the underlying political motivation in reli-
gious legislation and robustly opposed the legislation as a result. Their
attitude showed that they have never thought of dealing with their
problems via religious legislation. In the past, the only law related to
religions was The Supervising Temples Acts, which was concerned only
with Buddhism and Taoism. Therefore, Buddhism has always claimed
that it was unequal because Catholicism and Protestant Christianity
were not subject to any restrictions. But in fact, since The Supervising
Temples Acts is not applicable to Catholicism and Christianity, they
had to be regulated by the laws for financial juridical persons. At the
very least, they needed to achieve the juridical person qualification,
130 pen-hsuan lin
17
╇ The fact that The Supervising Temples Act applied exclusively to Buddhism and
Taoism meant that it had violated the constitutional right of equality in religion.
However, Protestant Christianity and Catholicism were actually regulated by the Civil
Law and the Monitoring Rule of Legal Entities of the Civil Affairs Ministry Business
Financial Group issued by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Some of these rules were actu-
ally stricter than some articles in The Supervising Temples Act, and the article stipulat-
ing that property disposition needed to be checked and approved by the authorities
concerned was the same in both The Supervising Temples Act and the Monitoring Rule
of Legal Entity of the Civil Affairs Ministry Business Financial Group.
18
╇ In the related paperwork of the bill of the Legislative Yuan, the draft of Religious
Law put forward by Xie Qida mentioned that the initiation of the draft was actually
commissioned by Xiyuan. Xing Yun also mentioned this point.
19
╇The public hearing of the Third Session of the Fourth Home and Nations
Committee (on Religious Law) includes its statements in the minutes of the Home and
Nations Committee of the Legislative Yuan based on the public hearing held by the
Law Governing the Legislative Yuan’s Power.
development of religious legislation in taiwan131
20
╇ Although the Draft of Law on Religious Groups had not been passed, the amend-
ment of the ninth article of Law of Private Schools was passed on March 23, 2004. The
first item of this article stipulated that “in order for private universities and colleges or
religious legal entities to cultivate priests or religious workers and to award them their
degrees, they may apply to the Ministry of Education based on related laws; if checked
and approved, they may set up religious training schools.” This problem has been
solved. In 2006, Fo Buddhist Training School of Guang University set up by Jingyun
was checked and approved by the Ministry of Education. It contained the Department
of Buddhist Teaching. Thus, Fo Guang University became the first comprehensive uni-
versity that applied to set up a Buddhism school. On April 8, 2007, Dharma Drum
Buddhist College, the first college that registered with the Ministry of Education as an
independent institute was established and recruited the first batch of candidates for
Master’s degrees in August 2007. Dharma Drum Buddhist College is located in Jinshan
Township of Dharma Drum County, and was established by Shengyan. Its predecessor
was the Chung-hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies. Chang Jung Christian University
established by the Presbyterian church applied to the Ministry of Education in March
2007 and was approved to set up the Christian Training College. It began to recruit
students in 2008 and became the first Christian Training College in Taiwan and
included a Department of Christian Teachings.
21
╇ JinXin (2001) thought that since this draft was initiated by the religious affairs
committee, it should be considered a people’s draft. However, since certain views of the
Ministry of Finance and the Executive Yuan had been added to the committee, it was
actually half public and half official.
development of religious legislation in taiwan133
22
╇ These amendments are generally speaking carried out in accordance with the
amendments put forward by Taiwan Christian Presbyterians and the China Buddhist
Temples Association.
134 pen-hsuan lin
23
╇ This article was added because of the following reasons: first, one of the members
argued that the draft had not touched upon the religious disorder in society; second, it
had been the case for a long time that disciples were trapped into losing their money
and being accused of sexual offenses in so called “spiritual places.” “Fraud” here means
cheating for money in the name of religions, and “interference with proper customs
and sexual independence” here means offending disciples sexually in the name of reli-
gions. Gambling refers to the Mark Six and poker in some temples and shrines.
24
╇ The religious affairs committee is regarded as an organization that succors the
needy, as in the Japanese Laws of Religious Juridical Persons. When an administrative
office imposes unfair punishment on religions, it must be approved by such an organi-
zation that helps the needy. But in terms of functions, this is different from the
Religious Deliberation Committee, whose approval must be gained if a new religion is
to be founded.
25
╇ For example, Jin Xin (2001) claims that this draft has formulated no articles to
stop activities by malevolent religious organizations and no articles concerning the
separation of politics from religion. Xing Yun (2001) also agrees that the government
should provide a clear definition of malevolent religious organizations. We can see
here that Jin Xin’s understanding of the separation of politics and religion is flawed,
because in a society in which the two were separated there would be no laws in which
“malevolent religious organizations” were defined and their activities are banned.
Since “A letter concerning toleration” by John Locke, the question whether it is right or
wrong for government and state powers to interfere with religious beliefs has emerged,
and the separation of politics and religion seems to protect religious freedom. What Jin
Xin means by the separation of politics and religion refers to the popular understand-
ing of “pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” That is
to say, religious organizations should not interfere with each other or participate in
political activities.
development of religious legislation in taiwan135
From the latter part of 2001, the draft of the Religious Law proposed by
Xie Qida was delivered to the Legislature, and the draft Religious
Organizations Act by Executive Yuan was handed over to the Legisla�
ture. The draft of Religious Organizations Act was then given priority
status for review in the fourth (2001), fifth (2002–2004), and the sixth
(2005–2007) Legislatures. However, it has yet to be passed, and remains
at the first reading stage.
During this period, legislators Shen Zhihui of the People First Party
(PFP) and Huang Shaoshun of the Nationalist Party (KMT) proposed
drafts of the Religious Organizations Act, in the fourth and fifth con-
ferences of the Legislature, respectively, although there was no signifi-
cant difference between their drafts and that of the Executive Yuan.
The draft proposed by Xie Qida in the fourth conference was raised by
Qiu Taisan of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Qiu
Chuangjin, also of the DPP, in the sixth conference. This draft was
placed in competition with that of the Executive Yuan. In general
terms, Xie Qida’s version, as proposed by Qiu and Qiu, was simply too
ambitious, seeking an overhaul of religions in Taiwan through legisla-
tion. Their version was very theoretical and advocated the “rationaliza-
tion of institutional religion,” the “institutionalization of folklore
136 pen-hsuan lin
26
╇ Before Aum Supreme Truth’s sarin gas attack, in Japan’s “law for religious juridi-
cal person,” the competent administrative rights were limited. Basically the religious
groups were completely self-regulated. The goal of self-regulation was achieved
through the “announcement” in the regulations of religious juridical person. After the
Aum Supreme Truth incident, the law for religious juridical persons was revised and
several rights were granted to the competent administrative department, giving it
more powers to regulate.
27
╇ Article 8 of the The Regulation of Supervising Temples stipulates: the real estate
and legal property of the temple cannot be dealt with or changed without the temple’s
decision and the permission of the administrative officer.
140 pen-hsuan lin
Conclusion
28
╇ In answer to criticism of the proposal “the regulations which should be applied
for the Executive Yuan officer for permission in fact violate the principle of clarity in
laws,” the Executive Yuan added three items to Article 19 when the draft of the
Religious Organizations Act was delivered to be examined to the Sixth Legislature
Conference. These included the ideas that “the voting table should be attached to the
first permission, and the examination procedure and other procedures to be followed
are made by the central competent administrative department.”
development of religious legislation in taiwan141
References
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Etiquette and Custom. Nantou: Department of Civil Affairs, Taiwan Provincial
Government.
Department of Civil Affairs, Ministry of the Interior. 2006. Statistics of Temples
Investigated by Municipal Governments in 2006. Unpublished document.
Huang, Qingsheng. 2000. Operations and Management of Temples. Taipei: Yongran
Cultures.
Jiang, Canteng. 1990. “Where Should Policies of Supervising Religions in Taiwan be
Heading Toward?” China Times (March 20: 11).
Jin Xin. 2001. “On Religious Laws and Administrative Management.” Pp. 73–112 in
Monographs on Religions (Volume Three): Legal Institution and Administrative
Management of Religion. Taipei: Ministry of the Interior.
Lin, Benxuan. 1991. The Conflicts between Politics and Religions in Taiwan. Banqiao:
Daoxiang Press.
——. 1996. “State, Religions and Social Control: Analysis of Suppression on Religions.”
Thought and Words 34(2): 21–64.
——. 1997. “International Comparative Study of Religious Law” Pp. 703–24 in Social
and Political Analysis of the Religious Change in Taiwan, edited by Q. Haiquan.
Taipei: Laurel Press
——. 2001. “Analysis of Current Religious Legislation in Taiwan.” Thought and Words
3(3): 59–102.
——. 2003. “Cared by the Seniors: Construction of the Sacred in the Process of
Conversion.” Pp. 127–48 in The Sacred of Religions: Phenomenon and Explanation,
edited by H. Lu, D. Chen and L. Changkuan. Taipei: Wunan.
Lin, Rongzhi. 2001. “Analysis of the Relationship between Practices and Legal
Regulations of Temple.” Pp. 113–42 in Monographs on Religions (Volume Three):
Legal Institution and Administrative Management of Religion. Taipei: Ministry of
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144 pen-hsuan lin
Jonathan Eastwood*
*╇ This chapter rests in part on research conducted in Caracas in the summers of
2007 and 2008 and Mexico in the fall of 2008. I would like to acknowledge the support
of a Fulbright Grant as well as a Lenfest Grant and funds from the Office of the Dean
of the College at Washington and Lee University. I would like to thank the Venezuela
Academia Nacional de la Historia for granting me access to the collection of politi-
cal pamphlets Controversias religiosas. I would also like to thank Roberto Blancarte,
Marta Eugenia Garcia Ugarte, Carole Leal, and Julie Skurski for helpful suggestions in
the initial stages of this research, and to Liah Greenfeld and Nicolas Prevelakis for
extensive conversations that have helped to shape my thinking on the issues under
consideration here.
146 jonathan eastwood
1
╇ It is of little difference whether or not this process is characterized as “seculariza-
tion” or simply as the transformation of religion’s place in society (Lambert 1999,
Gorski and Altınordu 2008).
2
╇ There has been a huge outpouring of writing by social scientists and historians on
religion and Latin America in recent years. The vast majority of this work cannot be
considered here. For an important work by an historian bearing on questions of secu-
larization, see Voekel (2002).
nationalism and state secularization in latin america147
3
╇ For a notable exception see Lynch (1986).
4
╇ For examples see Blancarte (1992), Ivereigh (1995), and Donís Ríos (2007). Cf.
Levine’s (1981) important comparative analysis of Colombia and Venezuela in the
20th century and Mecham (1966), an indispensable source for the comparative analy-
sis of church-state issues, for an overview of specific countries in the region.
148 jonathan eastwood
6
╇The conceptualization of this final stage is much indebted to José Casanova’s
(1994) analysis of religion’s confrontation with modernity. The approach more broadly
is indebted to David Martin’s path-breaking work (1978). The various paths through
which the stages developed here are traversed could be considered variations on
Martin’s “Latin pattern” (2005: 70–73).
150 jonathan eastwood
�
specific historical junctures change the conditions or possibilities for
subsequent social developments. As Mahoney (2000: 508–509) notes,
paths can be either “self-reinforcing sequences” or “reactive sequences.”
I depart slightly from Mahoney’s helpful conceptualization of path
dependence. Mahoney emphasizes that path dependence as a mode
of explanation is appropriate when the initial stages of an historical
process are contingent and when the subsequent stages of the process
exhibit determinism. He draws this conclusion from a review of the
use of the concept of path dependence in economic history (e.g., North
1990). In such usage the goal is to employ the concept of path depend-
ence to explain institutional developments that defy theoretical expec-
tations (e.g., within the framework of classical economics, institutions
that do not promote or achieve maximum utility). Mahoney (2000:
517–26) capably shows how path-dependent explanation can serve the
same theoretical purpose in several major paradigmatic sociological
traditions as well.
I embrace a view of human social life that requires some small mod-
ifications to this conception of path-dependence if that concept is to be
used at all. Most fundamentally, I see the near infinite complexity of
human societies as rendering all explanations probabilistic in charac-
ter (Lieberson and Lynn 2002). Thus in my view there is an element of
contingency built into all explanations, and historical paths should not
be viewed as deterministic sequences but probabilistic ones.7 Differ�
ent elements in an explanatory strategy can provide greater or lesser
degrees of certainty about the probable validity of a given explanatory
element. In the case at hand, for example, there is considerable contin-
gency built into the process of path selection (satisfying Mahoney’s
first criterion). While several key variables profoundly influence the
probability of path selection in Stage A (core vs. peripheral status in
the colonial system, degree of hegemony of nationalist discourse,
organizational strength of the church and the state, the political organ-
ization of landowners and the military), their relationships cannot
fully explain path selection but rather leave space for the agency of
political and religious leaders who make contingent choices. For exam-
ple, Páez’s leadership in Venezuela (Deas 1985: 522) contrasts sharply
with that of Santa Ana in Mexico, in important ways that decisively
7
╇ In another piece (Mahoney and Villegas 2007), Mahoney acknowledges that a
number of historical sociologists do treat historical explanations as probabilistic, even
if this is not a majority view.
154 jonathan eastwood
8
╇ Although in subsequent work I intend to trace these historical paths f� urther in time.
Stage A and Stage B are the heart of the model, however, because, as Pierson (2000)
and Mahoney note, path-dependent explanation puts considerable causal weight on
“the early stages of an overall historical sequence,” as Mahoney puts it (2000: 510).
nationalism and state secularization in latin america155
9
╇ It is important to note that this need not imply ecclesiastical endorsement of
democracy. In many cases, the Church is very much split on this question. What is
truly in dispute at this stage is organizational supremacy (as in previous stages).
On variation in national hierarchies’ responses to authoritarianism, democracy and
pluralism see Gill (1998).
156 jonathan eastwood
10
╇ Bolívar was not among the most important leaders at this time, these places going
to older figures like the Marques del Toro and Francisco de Miranda.
nationalism and state secularization in latin america157
He served the first presidential term, and then the intellectual José
María Vargas (notably not a veteran officer of the wars of independ-
ence) would be elected president, taking office in 1835. He ran up
against the resentments and fears of a number of independence-era
heroes, particularly in the east of the country. There, figures like the
brothers José Tadeo and José Gregorio Monagas as well as Santiago
Mariño would lead a “Revolution of the Reforms” (Pino Iturrieta 1993:
50–51). Their program, which echoed a failed insurrection of 1831 that
had been put down by Páez, included a range of inconsistent claims
and constituencies: it was federalist, yet it also yearned for a reincorpo-
ration into the Bolivarian vision of Colombia and at the same time it
expressed a desire to protect religion from the state. The common
denominator here was a desire not to be dominated by Páez and his
associates, particularly civilians like Vargas, in Caracas (Lombardi,
1982: 166). Páez restored Vargas to power, though he would resign a
year later in a dispute about how to handle the punishment of the con-
spirators. Most of the remainder of the “conservative oligarchy” period
would see either Páez or his collaborator General Carlos Soublette in
the presidency. Much of this period—the 1830s in particular—was
characterized by an economic boom, as coffee cultivation yielded con-
siderable profits (Lombardi 1982: 175–76).
By the 1840s, however, two developments, one economic and one
political, signaled a coming shift. A precipitous decline in coffee prices
on the international market caused economic difficulties and the bank-
ruptcies of many farmers (Lombardi 1982: 178–80, Deas 1985: 512,
522–23). This contributed to the growth of political opposition and the
emergence of a “liberal” party, led by Antonio Leocadio Guzmán,
editor of the influential paper El Venezolano and himself a former gov-
ernment minister under Páez, now alienated because of his marginali-
zation at the hand of conservative government minister Angel Quintero
(Gil Fortoul 1967b: 241, 247, Pino Iturrieta 1993: 53). Commentators
have noted that there was little ideological difference between the con-
servatives and the liberals (Lombardi 1982: 179, Pino Iturrieta 1993:
24, 56–57); rather, these were parties whose primary function was to
link social networks and mobilize them politically, providing ideologi-
cal cover for political action.
As public dissatisfaction with the status quo grew, Páez supported
José Tadeo Monagas as a candidate in the 1848 elections. Monagas
was victorious, but unfortunately for Páez and his associates, the
�
new president moved quickly toward the liberal camp, and Páez was
nationalism and state secularization in latin america159
(Tinker Salas, 2009). State revenues soared, allowing for the expansion
and strengthening of the state, but also embedding in it a number of
weaknesses as Venezuela became a classic example of oil dependence
(Coronil 1997, Karl, 1997).
Venezuela’s small middle class grew, and by the 1920s social condi-
tions conducive to the development of social movement and modern
party organizing had emerged despite extensive state repression. The
“generation of 28” laid the intellectual groundwork for the later devel-
opment of a variety of Socialist, Social-Democratic and Christian-
Democratic parties that would come to flourish in the latter half of the
20th century. As the authoritarian regimes of López Contreras and
Medina Angarita (following Gómez) aimed to liberalize, a coup d’état
was brought by a coalition of officers and political organizers, bringing
to power Romulo Betancourt and Romulo Gallegos in a three-year
period of social-democratic government. This government, opposed
by the Church (Levine 1981: 77), was itself overturned by a military
coup, bringing the right wing dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez into
power. Pérez Jimenez governed until 1958, when he was himself forced
from power, and preparations were made for a long period of demo-
cratic government. During this period, described by supporters of
President Hugo Chávez as the period of “Punto Fijo” democracy (the
major political parties had reached a power-sharing accord known as
the pact of Punto Fijo), the social democratic party Acción Democrática
and the Christian democratic party COPEI competed vigorously with
each other but agreed to work to marginalize parties on the radical left
and right. For a number of years, social scientists pointed to their suc-
cess in doing so as evidence of “Venezuelan exceptionalism,” since the
country managed to resist the wave of bureaucratic authoritarian gov-
ernance that spread through the region by the 1970s (Levine 1994,
Ellner and Tinker Salas 2006). Much of this has been called into ques-
tion by the decline of the Punto Fijo system and the rise of the Chávez
government, but a discussion of these issues would take us well afield
of our core questions.
This schematic summary of Venezuelan political history should be
sufficient for readers unfamiliar with that history to turn now to the
question of the relationship between church and state in Venezuela.
At the point of Venezuelan independence, there was considerable
heterogeneity of views about the proper role of religion in public life.
Some Venezuelans, like Bolívar, regarded religion as a matter of indi-
vidual conscience: in other words, they accepted the terms of religion’s
nationalism and state secularization in latin america161
11
╇In Mexico, by contrast, the hierarchy was consistently loyalist, though local
priests were split on the issue (Staples 1994: 223).
162 jonathan eastwood
12
╇ Rodriguez Iturbe (1968: 68) notes that nationalism was among the causes of this
effort to assert patronage rights. Bolívar’s relationship to the church has been the sub-
ject of considerable discussion. For a penetrating analysis of this issue with ecclesiasti-
cal history see Straka (2004).
13
╇ It is important to note that not all opposition was anti-national. Andrés Rosillo
(1824: 8), for example, argued against the idea of the patronato inhering in sovereignty
itself because of the legitimacy of popular sovereignty as the basis for temporal power.
It was the notion that spiritual power rested on the authority of the people that
appeared a Protestant heresy.
14
╇ This toleration was subject to some controversy, particularly the famous incident
of the publication of the anti-toleration tract La serpiente de Moisés and subsequent
trial for sedition of its publisher in Caracas in 1826 (Watters 1971: 113–14, Aveledo
2004).
nationalism and state secularization in latin america163
15
╇See articles on “Sistema Electoral,” El Universal, December 3, 1848 and on
“SoberaÂ�nia Popular” (multiple installments during the month of December, 1848),
likewise in El Universal, as well as articles under the recurrent subject “Los principios
nationalism and state secularization in latin america165
╇ See, for example, Documentos oficiales (1830) and Noticia razonada (1831).
19
nationalism and state secularization in latin america167
20
╇ The ecclesiastical hierarchy responded by again asserting that this was based on a
mistaken understanding of the sources of sovereignty. It might be legitimate for a sov-
ereign to dominate “religions de institución humana” but not the only religion insti-
tuted by God himself (Representación sobre patronato eclesiastico 1832: 5).
168 jonathan eastwood
The trouble started only following the Falcón years, when Antonio
Guzmán Blanco came into office. Guzmán Blanco asked for an imme-
diate Te Deum to be sung in support of his successful “revolution.”
Guevara y Lira demurred, arguing that it would be inappropriate to
celebrate while so many of those who had lost in the conflict were suf-
fering, and asked Guzmán Blanco to consider releasing some of them
from prison (Watters 1971: 187–88, Donís Ríos 2007: 113–14). Without
trial or even the citation of some law that had been violated, Guevara y
Lira was immediately ordered exiled (Donís Ríos 2007: 114–15).
Over the next several years, the Guzmán Blanco administration
would implement many of the anti-clerical reforms common to late
19th century Catholic societies: the closing of the seminaries so dear to
Guevara y Lira, the closing of convents for women, the establishment
of civil registries and civil marriage, among others (Donís Ríos 2007:
133–34). Moreover, he proposed, though never enacted, legislation to
create a schismatic national church, which would have wrested control
entirely from the Roman hierarchy (Donís Ríos 2007: 134–35).
Historians disagree about the degree of anti-clericalism in Guzmán
Blanco’s administration. Some, like Mary Watters (1971[1933]: 183–
213, cf. Rodríguez Iturbe 1968: 143–54), have depicted it as an espe-
cially ferocious assault. There is little doubt that Guzmán Blanco acted
out of enmity for the Archbishop and that he was determined to estab-
lish clearly once and for all the state’s dominance. At the same time,
Manuel Donís Ríos (2007: 129–30) has suggested that, when compared
to the liberal assault on the church in places like Colombia or Mexico,
Guzmán’s policies seem less extreme. After all, the church remained an
established church, and in the years after the crisis, the Church gradu-
ally recovered, adjusting itself to its new, more limited, role in
Venezuelan society. Indeed, the reforms actually implemented were no
more radical than elsewhere in the region or in Europe (Donís Ríos
2007: 130). By the close of the 19th century the Church’s position was
recovering somewhat (Mecham 1966: 108). The state would continue
to exercise patronage until 1964, but it would also continue supporting
the church.
In Mexico, the immediate political context in which the church and
the newly independent state would enter into conflict was quite differ-
ent. First, the Church was more powerful there (Lynch 1986: 534).
Independence was achieved as a result of the efforts of a coalition of
groups, many of whom had previously opposed separation from Spain.
Their fundamental goals were (a) in some cases, to protect the rights of
Spanish-born Mexican residents and (b) to preserve the interests of the
nationalism and state secularization in latin america169
Church and the Roman Catholic faith. Indeed, this was perhaps the
most important of the “three guarantees” of the Plan of Iguala, under
the banner of which Agustin de Iturbide, previously loyal to Spain,
spearheaded the final separation (Bazant 1985: 423, 428, Cumberland
1968: 126–30). It seems that many who supported Mexican independ-
ence did so not because they believed that Mexico was a nation in the
sense of being a “sovereign community of equals” (Greenfeld 1992),
but because they made the pragmatic choice that their way of life and
their religion would be best served by a conservative and independent
regime, hopefully with a European monarch at its head, though in the
end, Iturbide himself was crowned Emperor.21 Iturbide’s government
antagonized both conservative and liberal interests, though, and it fell
in 1823. In 1824, a fairly liberal/federalist constitution was passed, and
in 1829, the liberal Vicente Guerrero took power. He was displaced
by a rebellion and then killed, leaving the conservative Antonio
Bustamante in power. He was removed from office by a subsequent
rebellion led by Santa Anna, who then left the liberal Gómez Farías
largely in charge of government between much of the period from1832
to 1834.
This was when the first wave of secularizing reforms was attempted
in earnest (Callcott 1926: 84–100, Bazant 1985: 436–37). Thus the con-
text is one of (a) political instability and distrust and (b) a government
led by the Vice-President, a liberal whose views were not shared by
perhaps the majority of the society’s members, and certainly not by
other, powerfully situated actors. Gómez Farías went farther than Páez
did in Venezuela, and he moved more quickly (Mecham 1966: 348–
53). Like Páez, he asserted the right of the state to exercise patronage.
He refused to use the state’s authority to collect tithes. He attempted to
establish secular education. He confiscated some Church property and
tried to restrict the political speech of priests. In short, his reforms
went well beyond what many important and highly situated actors
were willing to accept, and Santa Anna himself took back the reins
of power in 1834 (Callcott 1926: 100–110, Mecham 1966: 353–54),
reversing many of these reforms and declaring himself a defender of
the church (though on his own terms). As Staples (1994: 233) notes,
while the church did not always dominate the state, its views were an
important factor in Mexican politics.
21
╇ The question of the precise distribution of political loyalties in this period is a
complex one (see Rodríguez O. 1994).
170 jonathan eastwood
22
╇ Lynch (1986: 539) also notes that nationalism had not established full hegemony
in Mexico and sees a connection between this and the Church’s possessing defenders.
nationalism and state secularization in latin america171
There is clear division in Stage A between two polar sets of cases: those
characterized by profound state victory, such as Argentina and Vene�
zuela, and those characterized by successful ecclesiastical self-defense,
Mexico. There are also the intermediary cases, such as Bolivia, Colom�
bia, Ecuador, and Peru where the picture is murkier.
Interestingly, this pattern is consistent—with the exception of the
placements of Bolivia and Peru into the mixed pattern—with what one
would expect given the terms of our core hypothesis. Nationalism
seems to have emerged earliest and most forcefully in peripheral cases
(e.g., Argentina, Venezuela) and it was weakest in the colonial core
(e.g., Mexico, and especially Peru and Bolivia). Thus one would expect
it to exert a greater level of conceptual hegemony in the former cases,
depriving defenders of the church of their most precious ideological
resource: a community of influential persons who accepted a religious
conception of sovereignty (a resource still available in Mexico even in
the middle of the 19th century and perhaps later). However, the seem-
ingly anomalous early patterns in Peru and Bolivia are easily explained
23
╇ Many date the modus vivendi from 1929 but I am persuaded by Blancarte’s (1992:
21) argument that there was no real modus vivendi until the 1930s.
172 jonathan eastwood
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——. 2006. “Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration.”
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Post-Communist Poland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Not much has been written about the interface of religion and devi-
ance. One of the first questions we need to ask is, “What is this inter-
face?” A few possibilities come to mind. One is deviant forms of
religion itself. Another may be deviance in the actual practice of spe-
cific religious rituals. There are probably more possibilities. This chap-
ter focuses on public constructions of various forms of deviant
behavior, viewed as such by researchers of deviance and criminolo-
gists, within a specific religious community, and tries to understand
their meanings and implications. The specific community on which I
will focus is the ultra-orthodox—Haredim in Hebrew—in Israel.
The Context
1
╇ The analysis presented in this chapter focuses on the dominant and hegemonic
Jewish majority of Israel. While Israeli Arabs constitute about 20% of the population,
180 nachman ben-yehuda
their impact on the processes described here have been marginal. However, the pro-
cesses described in this chapter threaten to erode the egalitarian base on which Arabs’
participation in Israeli democracy is conceptualized. Jewish theocrats have absolutely
no desire to allow Arabs to share power. (Comprehensive details and interpretations
underlying this chapter may be found in Ben-Yehuda 2010)
2
╇ On the Haredim, cf. Friedman 1977, Katz 1977, 1986, Samet 1979, Shilhav and
Friedman 1985, Levi 1988, El-Or 1990, 1991, Heilman and Friedman 1991, Heilman
1992, Landau 1993, Ravitzky 1993, Neuberger 1994.
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?181
3
╇ Which, for example, makes the application of the concept “civil religion” in the
Israeli context particularly problematic.
4
╇ Some tendencies to break this hegemony in some areas took place in 2001 and
thereafter.
182 nachman ben-yehuda
Deviance by Haredim
5
╇ In fairness, it must be added that next day the General Director of the Ministry of
Education appeared on the same channel and stated that “Secular teachers are not
prevented from teaching in religious schools.”
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?185
met the accusations that “we are all punished from heaven because
of you” and “we are tired of financing your drugged sons who sit in
prisons, and all the yellow secular Tel Avivians who ran to Jerusalem
from the Iraqi Scuds,” and “the seculars murdered the Jews in the
Holocaust.” (Ha’aretz, March 22, 1998: 5A). On December 1, 1996, Moshe
Ehrenshtein, previous Mayor of Bnei Brak, and deputy chair of the
center of Agudat Israel, stated that “Many Rabbis state that all the
troubles in the country are caused because the Sabbath is not
observed”(Ha’aretz, December 2, 1996: 7A).
Another area where we can witness numerous claims-making activ-
ities is symbolic demands, some successful in bringing about action,
others just by making the claim itself: El Al may not fly on Saturday,
not because of commercial considerations, but because of a religious
interpretation. El Al is the only airline in the world which does not fly
for a day and a half every week, a condition that costs the company
some $50 million a year (Ha’aretz, May 11, 1997: 2G, Ha’aretz, July 7,
1998: 3C, Ha’aretz, July 8, 1998: 2C). Another incident involved dino-
saurs. In August of 1993 Tara, which manufactures various milk prod-
ucts, tried to market a new milk product and used as a promo for the
product, as well as a graphic representation on the product, images of
dinosaurs. Ultra-orthodox authorities raged and threatened to boycott
Tara’s products. The reason? The very idea of dinosaurs represents a
severe blasphemy because it provides a different sequence for the
dating of life on the planet from the one implied in the Bible, not to
mention the implications for the despised concept of “evolution.” The
result? Tara changed its advertizing for the product (Ma’ariv, business
supplement, August 11, 1993: 2).
There are also continuous threats on the Israeli Supreme Court by
theocrats. (The chief justice has 24 hour bodyguards.) Rabbi David
Yoseph (son of Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph), an important religious figure,
and the rabbi of Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem, stated that the
court is the “genuine enemy of the religious people”(Ha’aretz April 25,
1998). Rabbi Yeshaya Rotter, a Shofar for ultra-orthodox Rabbi Shach
(a very prominent Haredi figure) stated that “if we had the power,
we would have been obligated to go to war against the secular judges...
We have no positive attitude toward these judges.” He compared the
Supreme Court to Sodom and added that the ability to force all
Jews to behave according to the strict Halakhic rules (that is, become
ultra-orthodox) is indeed a test from the Messiah. In February 1998
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?187
Physical Violence
As can be expected, violence does not stop at the verbal level. Some
illustrations of direct actions:
Ultra-orthodox Jews attacked conservative Jewish women who
came to pray at the “wailing wall” by throwing heavy physical objects
on them and calling them “Nazis” (Ma’ariv November 13, 1996: 10,
Ha’aretz November 13, 1996: 9A) Almost a year later bags filled with
dirt were thrown on conservative Jews who came to prey at the “wail-
ing wall”(Ha’aretz June 12, 1997: 2A). Haim Miller, deputy mayor of
Jerusalem and an ultra-orthodox Jew, told journalists that “conserva-
tive Jews are a symbol for the destruction of the Jewish people….
Conservatives have no place in the country” (Ha’aretz October 21,
1997: 7A). Indeed, repeated attacks on conservative Jews prompted
their demand from Premier Netanyahu that they be given proper
defense against the Jews who continuously attack them. This demand
came following the painting of a swastika on a reform movement syna-
gogue in Jerusalem and vandalism in the conservative synagogue in
Kfar Saba.
Bus stops in Israel are designed in such a way that advertizing by
using large posters in them is possible. In May and June 1986 (with a
small repeat in May 1998), ultra-orthodox Jews began a systematic
campaign of burning these bus stops so as to force “Poster Media,” the
company that sells the advertizing spaces there, to censor its posters
and use only what they refer to as “modest” posters. Poster Media
yielded to this violence. Moreover, when international companies tar-
get Israel for advertizing campaigns for their products, they classify
Israel with such countries as Iran and other extreme Moslem states,
and design their campaigns accordingly (Ha’aretz July 6, 1997: 3B).
Ultra-orthodox Jews burnt a large number of Israeli flags in the 1997
Lag Ba’omer holiday in Jerusalem and possibly in Bnei Brak too (Ma’ariv
May 25, 1997: 1, May 30: 25, Ha’aretz May 27, 1997: 5A). One of the
suspects who was arrested after the event in Jerusalem, a 14 year old
boy, stated that “this is not my country, so I burnt its flag” (Yediot
Aharonot May 30 1997: 4) Violence against Israeli archaeologists is
prevalent among Haredi activists (e.g., resorting to violence against the
excavations of the City of David in 1978). Violent demonstrations have
also aimed to bring about the shutting down of main roads on Saturday:
the Ramot road in Jerusalem in 1978–81 and the Bar Illan road in 1997.
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?189
6
╇ On February 25, 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an orthodox Jewish physician from
the Jewish settlement in Hebron, entered the mosque of “The Cave of the Partiarchs”
in Hebron in the midst of Muslem prayer. He carried an automatic rifle and opened
fire indistinguishably on the praying Arabs. Twenty-nine Arabs were killed and up to
200 were wounded. Dr. Goldstein was killed by surviving Arabs.
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?191
1998: 6A; Kol Ha’ir April 25, 1998: 12). Different products in super-
market chains carry the notification that they were manufactured in a
factory which “observes the Shabbat.” Moreover, neighbors in building
complexes find themselves bickering about the use and operation of
elevators on Saturdays and similar issues.
Studies and surveys done in Jerusalem and Israel indicate that these
acts of religious violence and cultural coercion have consequences.
One study examined the satisfaction expressed by Haredi and secular
Jews in Jerusalem about the possibility of living together. While Haredi
Jews stated that they saw no problems and were satisfied, secular Jews
not only expressed extreme dissatisfaction but are leaving Jerusalem to
the secular periphery by the thousands (Hasson and Gonen 1997). In
fact, very few secular Jews are able to live among Haredi Jews. Another
study by Farber (1987) revealed that Haredi Jews display systematically
high levels of violence against non-Haredi Jews who dwell on the bor-
ders of their neighborhoods in Jerusalem. That violence is particularly
pronounced against women. Another survey by the Tami Steinmetz
center in Tel Aviv University asked subjects to respond to the possibil-
ity of separating state from religion in Israel. The overwhelming major-
ity of religious subjects expressed feelings of being comfortable and
satisfied that religion is not separated from state in Israel. Secular sub-
jects expressed their explicit wish that such a separation should take
place (Herman and Yaar-Yuchtman 1998). These results seem to be
typical for a situation of cultural hegemony. Members of the hege�
monic cultural group (in this case of hegemony in the religious sphere,
the orthodox and ultra-orthodox) feel comfortable and satisfied with
their hegemonic position. Those being exposed to the hegemony (typi-
cally secular Jews) express dissatisfaction, stress and discontent.
Violence, verbal and non-verbal, as well as using religious power in
the Knesset to prevent the separation of state from religion and enforce
a religious lifestyle as a reality in Israel in a number of areas, has a
direction and a purpose. It is not random, crazy, illogical or irrational.
On the contrary, what we are witnessing here is a group of theocratic
activists (some of whom, but not all, are Jewish fundamentalists), with
a more or less monochromatic world view which delegitimizes—in a
calculated, logical and systematic fashion—all interpretations of
Judaism except its own, using the power of the state to enforce this
trend. This line of activity gives legitimacy to continuous instigation,
verbal and physical abuse and violence, and to direct action (Ha’aretz
Nov. 10, 1996: 5A, Ma’ariv Nov. 10, 1996: 15). For example, a previous
192 nachman ben-yehuda
7
╇ An ultra-orthodox violent group which was responsible for a number of violent
attacks against what they saw as “anti-Haredi” targets. Most activities occurred between
August 1988 and February 1989. For example, members of this illegal organization
destroyed a kiosk that sold secular newspapers in Bnei Brak.
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?193
will not hesitate to use brute and sometimes even lethal force (as they
have done in the past) if and when they feel that they stand a fairly
good chance to win more popular support and move more swiftly
toward a Halakhic state. The prospect of initiating a fully developed
civil war in Israel at this stage, rather than a low level of continuous
conflict, simply does not appeal to them because it will probably fail
their goals.
Heilman (1990: 6) points out that the secular press is not without hos-
tilities of its own, and that the focus of interest of the secular press (for
example, report the unexpected, be profitable) is different from the
religious or Haredi press. The definition of “what constitutes news” is a
debatable issue and in its quest for readers, the secular press often “dis-
torts reality.” Focusing on the 1988 election coverage in the press,
Heilman concluded that the reports in the secular press presented both
Haredi and religious people as dangerous and splitting the nation,
extortionists and purveyors of alienation, transforming democracy,
encouraging violence, and aiming to “Haredize” the state. In short, that
the “news pages in the secular press present an implicitly unflattering
picture of the datiim [religious]” (Heilman, 1990: 55). Heilman attrib-
utes no malevolent motive to the secular press, but instead suggests
that this situation originates in the fact that the secular press is ori-
ented to the secular majority which “is not particularly interested or
prepared to read about why people choose to be dati. … Or what their
religion means to them” (Heilman 1990:65). However, Jews in Israel
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?195
are aware of the different types of Judaism, and the problem is that of a
kulturkamph between different factions of Judaism. In this cultural
conflict, the print media play a crucial role by reflecting, creating and
sustaining the conflict. In playing out this culture conflict, the media—
on both sides of the conflict—do not seem to be innocent or unbiased.
In this context, Hellman’s conclusions that the secular press is some-
times hostile to Haredim and religious Jews are probably valid, and are
corroborated by my study. Moreover, some secular journalism tenden-
cies to lean toward cynicism may add to this—for example, “On
Wednesday night, the Haredim forgot the bones of our ancient ances-
tors, and between setting garbage containers on fire they found the
time to attack the (female) photographer of Kol Hair” (Kol Hair
November 20, 1992: 60).
If we examine secular newspapers in the early 1980s, interesting dis-
coveries emerge (Taler and Shaked 1997, Rosner and Peninit 1999).
For example, Yediot Aharonot’s reports on Haredi deviance tend to use
terms taken from the military and war lexicon—for example, “the
Religious Commando strikes” (Yediot Arahonot Passover supplement,
March 29, 1983: 14–15), “dozens of Haredim stormed,” (Yediot
Arahonot January 17, 1984: 4), “Haredi reconnaissance units,” (Yediot
Arahonot April 24, 1984: 13), “Rabbis wanted to dictate a surrender
letter,”(Yediot Arahonot February 1, 1985: 4), “Hassidim conquered the
court,” (Yediot Arahonot March 13, 1985: 6) and “Combat over graves.”
(Yediot Arahonot, 7 Days supplement, January 31, 1992: 31). Haredi
behavior was described in terms that projected violence, vandalism,
and use of strong force: “Neturey Karta: ‘We Always Get Our Way with
Violence’” (Yediot Arahonot September 19, 1984: 24) and “A Haredi
man beat a female driver on Shabbat.” (Yediot Arahonot April 20,
1983: 13). Haredi deviance also tends to be described in terms of group
activity, implying “many,” such as “A large crowd surrounded the police
car” (Yediot Arahonot January 17, 1984: 4) and “Haredim against the
Hamam”(Yediot Arahonot April 18, 1984: 5).8 Provocative language
can be found too —for example, “A Haredi woman was accused of bit-
ing a police officer” (Yediot Arahonot, 24 Hours supplement, July 19,
1983: 12) “The yeshiva student was caught with the knife in his hand,”
(Ma’ariv July 21, 1985: 12, Yediot Aharonot July 21, 1985: 11), and
8
╇ Only one Haredi was suspected of setting fire to the car of the owner of the
Hamam.
196 nachman ben-yehuda
“The indecent act—an expression of the rabbi’s love for his male stu-
dents” (Yediot Aharonot November 4, 1984: 4). Yediot Aharonot used
biblical and/or religious language to describe deviancies, such as
“Sodom and Gomorrah in a Haredi Neighborhood” (Yediot Arahonot
January 7, 1985: 4, Ma’ariv January 7, 1985: 1, 11) and “Terror in the Name
of the Almighty” (Yediot Arahonot, 7 Days supplement, June 17, 1983:
10–11). Haredi suspects were described in terms that made them appear
guilty even before sentencing. Finally, there was a tendency to describe
Haredim as strange, bizarre, extraordinary and otherwise unusual.
be solved. The tension between these two blueprints for country and
culture is everpresent. The only solution for this contradiction seems
to be to turn thinking about “democracy” and “Judaism” from discrete,
black/white-type variables into continuous variables. In this manner,
it is not too difficult to realize that the orthodox and ultra-orthodox
versions of Judaism are, in essence, diametrically opposed to most
forms of democracy, while the conservative, reform and certainly
secular forms of Judaism are much more conducive to more forms
of democracy. At both ends, of course, we will find that ultra-
orthodoxy and democracy simply constitute a contradiction, while in
the secular-democracy combination this contradiction is attenuated
quite significantly.
‘Gentile’ law currently in effect.” The fact is that from the religious
underground in the 1950s which wanted a Halakhic state (‘Brit
Hakanaim’ [Sprinzak 1999: 61–66]), to present days protests, threats
and demonstrations against the Israeli secular legal system (especially
the Supreme Court), we have extensive empirical corroboration to tes-
tify to exactly the reverse of Soloveitchik’s statement. There is no rea-
son to suspect that as ultra-orthodoxy became more and more extreme
and fundamentalist, its demands for a state that is more “religious”
would not intensify. And, they did. The “blueprint” may not be pre-
sented in a fully matured utopian book, but it is expressed in each and
every pressure and law that is aimed to depict Israel in more religious
terms. As Soloveitchik points out, “Enforcement of religious norms in
a modern secular society means the use of violence, as large segments
of the population, possibly even its majority, must be cowed into obe-
dience” (1994: 221). Indeed, the violence documented in this chapter
testifies to this, as well as to the growing hatred and animosity between
ultra-orthodox Jews and such other interpretations of Judaism as secu-
lar, reformed or conservative.
Continuing this line, we need to note that there are a few strong
trends prevalent in Israeli Jewish culture now that are acting toward
pushing Israel into the direction of an extreme Halakhic State. The
theocratic violence on which this chapter has focused must be under-
stood within these trends:
First, the number of visible, and publicly identifiable, religious mem-
bers in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. In the Knesset in 1998, there
were 23 such parliament members. (In 2006 the number was 26.) This
number constitutes about 19.1% of the number of parliament mem-
bers in the Knesset which was elected in the May 1996 general elec-
tions. By comparison, the proportion in the 1984 general election was
only 9.8%. A large number of these politicians state explicitly and pub-
licly that, at a minimum, they will not object to, or stand in the way of,
turning Israel into a totalitarian Halakhic State. The presence of such a
large number of politicians in the parliament means that a strong affin-
ity exists in the Knesset toward laws that are favorable to religious
issues. The fact is that the political structure in Israel (split votes and
traditional coalitional governments) enables rather small parties to
exert disproportional power and influence. A large majority is not
required to turn a multi-party democracy into a totalitarian regime.
A determined minority of 30–40 percent in a parliament can indeed
religion and deviance: theocrats vs. democrats?199
Conclusion
9
╇ The research upon which this chapter is based was funded by grants from the
Silbert Foundation.
202 nachman ben-yehuda
References
Rosenthal, Celia Stopnicka. 1954. “Deviation and Social Change in the Jewish
Community of a Small Polish Town.” American Journal of Sociology 60: 177–81.
Rosner, Anat and Eyal Peninit. 1999. “Deviance in Haredi Society: Review of Israeli
Newspapers 1983–1985.” Paper submitted in Ben-Yehuda’s seminar “Deviance in
Israel,” Hebrew University (Hebrew).
Samet, Moshe. 1979. Religion and State in Israel. Jerusalem: Kaplan School of
Economics and Social Sciences, Hebrew University (Hebrew).
Shilhav Joseph and Menachem Friedman. 1985. Growth and Segregation—The Ultra-
orthodox Community of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for the Study of
Israel (Hebrew).
Soloveitchik, Hyam. 1994. “Migration, Acculturation, and the New Role of Texts in the
Haredi World.” Pp. 197–235 in Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic
Character of Movements, edited by M.E. Marty and R.S Appleby. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Sprinzak, Ehud. 1999. Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli
Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: Free Press.
Taler, Hadas and Neta Shaked. 1997. “Deviance in the Haredi Sector during 1992.”
Paper submitted in Ben-Yehuda’s seminar “Deviance in Israel,” Hebrew University
(Hebrew).
CHAPTER EIGHT
Robert Prus
A Greek educated author from the broader Roman era, Dio Chryso�
stom is often considered part of “the Second Sophistic” movement
(ca. 60–230 CE). Beyond his general roles as a Greek philosopher and
rhetorician who was also involved in the affairs of state, we know little
of Dio Chrysostom’s background. Given the various political, reli-
gious and intellectual disjunctures as well as the natural ravages of
time over the intervening centuries, our access to preserved texts from
this era is notably limited. Still, Dio was not alone in addressing reli-
gion in more pronounced pragmatist terms. Thus, somewhat related
considerations of religion may be found in the texts of Plutarch of
Chaeronia (ca. 46–125), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215), Lucian
of Samosata (ca. 120–200), and Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160–210).
Like Plato, Clement of Alexandria exempts Christian theology from
a more extensive constructionist analysis; however those who read
both Clement and Dio Chrysostom will recognize similarities when
discussing people’s conceptions of the gods. Whereas Lucian is best
known as a satirist, several of his texts address the pragmatist, con-
structionist, or relativist paradigms with respect to religion. Following
in the tradition of the Pyrrhonists who claimed that nothing is self-
evident, Sextus Empiricus advanced a totally skepticizing viewpoint,
refusing to make judgments on anything. Minimally, although this
chapter concentrates on one of Dio Chrysostom’s texts, it should not be
assumed that “the constructionist standpoint” developed herein is
especially unique to him.
In order to establish a contemporary pragmatist or constructionist
frame for the chapter, I will briefly outline the premises and methodo-
logical emphases of symbolic interaction.1 Representing a sociological
extension of the American pragmatist philosophic tradition, symbolic
interactionism developed through a synthesis of this tradition and eth-
nographic research at the University of Chicago with Herbert Blumer
(1969) as the principal architect. These eleven premises or assump-
tions may establish the conceptual parameters for the present consid-
eration of religion as a humanly engaged process.2
1
╇ The present statement on the eleven premises or assumptions of the symbolic
interaction, building most centrally on Mead (1934) and Blumer (1969), very much
resonate with and are informed by Schutz (1962, 1964) and Berger and Luckmann
(1966).
2
╇ These have been adapted from Prus 2007a: 8–9.
dio chrysostom (ca. 40–120) and the pragmatist motif207
Conceptualizing Divinity
Indeed, the race of men is more likely to run short of everything else
than of voice and speech; of this one thing it possesses a most astounding
3
╇ For some instances of ethnographic research on religion with more of an interac-
tionist emphasis, see Lofland (1966), Prus (1976), Jorgensen (1991), Van Zandt (1991),
and Shaffir (1993, 1995, 2004).
dio chrysostom (ca. 40–120) and the pragmatist motif209
wealth. At any rate it has left unuttered and undesignated no single thing
that reaches our sense perceptions, but straightway puts upon everything
the mind perceives the unmistakable seal of a name, and often even sev-
eral vocal signs for one thing, so that when man gives utterance to any
one of them, they convey an impression not much less distinct than does
the actual thing itself. Very great indeed is the ability and power of man
to express in words any idea that comes into his mind (Dio Chrysostom
1932: 69).
Although On Man’s First Conception of the Gods [hereafter MCG] is
only one of a wide array of topics discussed by Dio Chrysostom,4 this
statement deals not only with (a) the ways in which people may develop
constructions of divinity but also (b) the manners in which they might
represent divinity to others and (c) the implications of these represen-
tations for people’s subsequent notions of reality (including represen-
tations of these latter notions of reality).
After a lengthy introduction in which Dio (in Socratic fashion)
claims, “not to know things,” Dio (MCG 22) more directly begins to
consider the ways in which the poets Hesiod and Homer depict the
gods and then (MCG 26) suggests that this topic might be approached
in philosophic terms. Subsequently, Dio (MCG 27, 35) considers
(1) the argument that an awareness of divinity reflects an innate or
intrinsic human tendency on the part of Greeks and barbarians alike.
In the process, Dio references (a) the wonders of creation, (b) the
apparent regularity or order of the universe, and (c) the source that
provides benefits that people, as intelligent creatures, could appreciate.
Still, in pragmatist fashion, attending to people’s use of symbols in
developing knowledge about the world and divinity, Dio is also cogni-
zant of people’s tendencies to assign human-like intelligence to their
notions of divinity:
While they themselves uttered a most pleasing and clear sound, and tak-
ing delight in the proud and intelligent quality of the human voice,
attached symbols to the objects that reached their senses, so as to be able
to name and designate everything perceived, thus easily acquiring mem-
ories and concepts of innumerable things. How, then, could they have
remained ignorant and conceived no inkling of him who had sowed and
╇ The fuller title of this text is The Twelfth or Olympic Discourse: Or, On Man’s First
4
Conception of the Gods. The specific numeric citations to Dio’s text, MCG refer to
standardized notations in the Greek text that accompanies Cohoon’s translation in the
Greek-English Loeb edition. The present statement builds centrally on Cohoon’s
translation.
210 robert prus
planted and was now preserving and nourishing them, when on every
side they were filled with the divine nature through both sight and hear-
ing, and in fact through every sense? [MCG 28–29] …So experiencing
all these things and afterwards taking note of them, men could not help
admiring and loving the divinity, also because they observed the seasons
and saw that it is for our preservation that they come with perfect regu-
larity and avoidance of excess in either direction, and yet further, because
they enjoyed this god-given superiority over the other animals of being
able to reason and reflect about the gods [MCG 32–33].
Dio (MCG 36–37) then asks (2) if it might be appropriate, as some
(notably Epicurean philosophers) have suggested, to consider the idea
that the universe known to people is without purpose or a ruler. Instead
of a divinely enabled and ordered essence, they contend, the universe
is a random process in which things naturally assume patterns of sorts.
After reiterating the viewpoints just introduced, Dio (MCG 39–43)
explicitly considers (3) the possibility that people’s notions of the gods
are mythical, human creations:
As the second source we designate the idea which has been acquired and
indeed implanted in men’s souls through no other means than narrative
accounts, myths, and customs, in some cases ascribed to no author and
also unwritten, but in others written and having as their authors men of
very great fame…Of this acquired notion of the divine being let us say
that one part is voluntary and due to exhortations, another part compul-
sory and prescriptive (MCG 40).
Sociologists familiar with the objectification process (Schutz 1962,
1964, Berger and Luckmann, 1966) will recognize the consistency of
Dio’s position with sociology of knowledge, or a social constructionist
viewpoint. Further, Dio explains, (4) some of this may be voluntary
and reflect the encouragement that people (as poets and other spokes-
people) give to one another, but these notions also may (5) assume the
more proscriptive dimensions signified by legislation and penalties.
After noting that people generally do not appreciate highly detailed
explanations, Dio hopes that the better educated people will strive to
follow his statement. Dio next identifies three sources of people’s notions
of divinity (innate human tendencies to seek understanding for things,
poets, and lawmakers). Dio (MCG: 44) then adds a fourth source of
people’s conceptions of the gods—the craftspeople who construct stat-
ues or generate other physical representations of deities.5
5
╇In developing this text, Dio provides an early and explicit appreciation of
linguistic or verbal versus plastic or material artistic expressions. For some related
dio chrysostom (ca. 40–120) and the pragmatist motif211
long before he ever did. As well, the artist observes (MCG 58), all the
features of (physical) nature, which in themselves are easy for an artist
to represent, provide better images of divinity than any more direct
representations of divinity that human artists might generate. One
can compare human art with other human art but not with divinity in
any genuine sense. Nevertheless, Pheidias (MCG 59) explains, people
want representations of divinity beyond the things that they find in
nature. Although they have no idea of what God might be like, people
commonly assign god a human body to contain the intelligence and
rationale that they do not better know how to symbolize. This way,
Pheidias observes, people move from invisible to visible manifesta-
tions of divinity.
Again, while noting the heavens better attest to divinity than
any human (artistic) representations, Pheidias (MCG 60–61) says that
people want objects that they can more directly and readily access.
This enables people to honor divinity as well as facilitating the task
of persuasion (making requests of god). The artist likens this desire
to make contact with god to the intense anxiety that children feel
when they are separated from their parents. Pheidias adds that, lack-
ing artistic resources, barbarians are more likely to resort to symbol-
izing divinity through aspects of nature such as mountains, trees and
animals.
Then, in a shift of emphasis, Pheidias (MCG 62) states that instead
of criticizing him for his representations of god in human form, the
fault really lies with Homer (ca. 700 BCE). He states that it was Homer
(in Iliad and Odyssey) who portrayed the gods in human-like terms—
as beings that hold meetings, have disputes, sleep, drink, engage in
sexuality, wear clothing, and maintain other mortal affinities. Pheidias
asks if there can possibly be a greater imitator of the gods than Homer,
who widely is viewed as godlike in his literary accomplishments. After
observing that voice, speech and naming tendencies are the most
abundant and enduring of human qualities, Pheidias (MCG 65) not
only acknowledges the advantages that poets have in being able to
express verbally any ideas that come to mind but also states that poets
have the advantage of assuming exceptional freedom of speech as well
as access to all manners of frankness. Pheidias also observes that, as
the most accomplished of all poets (MCG 66–69), Homer built on a
wide range of Hellenic diction and traditions as well as notions from
foreign sources. Moreover, Pheidias adds, Homer was even more com-
pelling because he not only created new words and imitated the sounds
dio chrysostom (ca. 40–120) and the pragmatist motif213
In Perspective
References
Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interaction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall.
Cicero [c106–43 BCE]. 1923. De Divination [On Divination]. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
——. 1933. De Natura Deorum [On the Nature of the Gods]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
——. 1945. Tusculan Disputations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee.
Dio Chrysostom [c40–120]. 1932. The Twelfth or Olympic Discourse: Or, On Man’s First
Conception of the Gods. Pp.1–87 in Volume II of Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago:
Aldine.
Jorgensen, Danny L. 1992. The Esoteric Scene, Cultic Milieu, and Occult Tarot. New
York: Garland.
Klapp, Orrin. 1969. Collective Search for Identity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston.
Lofland, John. 1966. The Doomsday Cult: A Study in Conversion, Proselytization and
Maintenance of Faith. New York: Irvington Publishers.
Mead, George H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Prus, Robert. 1976. “Religious Recruitment and the Management of Dissonance:
A Sociological Perspective.” Sociological Inquiry 46: 127–34.
6
╇For a fuller consideration of memory as a socially engaged process, see Prus
(2007b). I would like to thank Beert Verstraete for his helpful comments on an earlier
draft of this chapter.
dio chrysostom (ca. 40–120) and the pragmatist motif221
Rick Moore
religious persecution (Grim and Finke 2005, 2006, 2007, Grim and
Wike 2010).
Upon examination, the reports draw upon a set of pre-existing gen-
res that often influence how international religious freedom is talked
about in the United States: universal human rights and idealized reli-
gious pluralism. Building on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981,
1986), I will show how these two interrelated genres work together to
structure the yearly reports. Through the use of these genres, the State
Department promotes particular versions of religion and religious
freedom, illuminating one way that the category of religion is created
in practice.
1
╇ The full text of IRFA and the IRF Reports can be found on the website of the State
Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom: www.state.gov/g/drl/irf.
the genres of religious freedom 225
Speech Genres
How can we best understand the way that the category of international
religious freedom, including value judgments of what constitutes
“good” versus “bad” religion, are produced in the State Department
reports? A useful place to start is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of speech
genres. According to Bakhtin (1986), all utterances, both spoken and
written, fall within one of an infinite number of speech genres.2 Speech
genres are the broad frameworks for communication that we learn as
we learn language. They help shape what is said by providing generally
accepted structures for how conversations proceed. Example speech
genres include, but are not limited to, greetings, commands, novels,
scientific papers, and letters. While they do not actually determine
what is said, speech genres have been described as the “form-shaping
ideology” that help guide a conversation (Morson and Emerson 1990).
Genres are not absolute constraints and cannot be reduced to a simple
set of rules. Instead, they influence speech by roughly directing it
toward its targets in a particular way. For example, when I am in a uni-
versity classroom I speak using academic language, or genres, and
expect that others do the same. The use of a particular genre does not
control what I say but it does mean that I will probably constuct my
speech consistent with the genre. It also makes me more likely to talk
about some subjects and less likely to discuss other topics. In this
example, the genre of an academic discussion guides the conversation
in the classroom.
Existing speech genres, although theoretically infinite, in practice
offer a limited repertoire of forms of discourse appropriate in a given
situation. Although a speaker may consciously decide to employ a par-
ticular genre, genres are often used automatically and constitute a part
of our habitus (Hanks 1987, Garrett 2005). Once a genre has been cho-
sen by an author, either consciously or otherwise, it then centers the
2
╇ In Bakhtin’s theory, an utterance is the basic unit of communication and is marked
by a change in speaking subjects. An utterance encompasses everything someone has
to say before pausing to give someone else a chance to respond. It can thus be a single
word or an entire novel.
the genres of religious freedom 227
material might recognize other genres, but I believe that the empirical
evidence presented below supports my claim for the existence and
influence of the genres I identify in this chapter.
The IRF Reports are written around the genre of universal human
rights discourse. Echoes of this genre can be found not only in the
reports but also in documents used by the activists who lobbied for the
passage of IRFA, statements from politicians who supported the law
and in the language of the law itself. The genre is defined by its clear
thematic use of human rights, as well as particular rhetorical strategies
(synecdoche, metonymy, naming, shaming), quasi-performative defi-
nitional work, and an emphasis on universalism. The genre is clearly
used and easily recognized in a variety of human rights documents
such as the annual reports of Amnesty International (AI) or Human
Rights Watch (HRW), as well as most other examples of human rights
discourse. The reader knows that the genre is being used when the
topic of an utterance is described in terms of human rights that are
universal, and when the utterance makes use of certain rhetorical
strategies and undertakes performative definitional work. However, it
is important to understand that not every document written in the
universal human rights genre displays all of the genre’s features, dis-
plays them to the same degree, or has the same content. Rather, the
genre works like a set of family resemblances (Wittgenstein 1953) that
signal to the reader not only the mere presence of the genre but also,
and more important, the expectations and assumptions that accom-
pany it, as will be seen below.3 In this section I will to point to the com-
mon structures, language, rhetorical strategies, and themes found in
both the IRF Reports and much of the human rights literature. I argue
that presuppositions of the genre affect how the IRF Reports are
received by their readers and that they speak to some of the particular
ways that the State Department conceives and develops the category of
religious freedom.
3
╇ This does not mean that statements made in the genre by different parties will
necessarily agree with one another. Human rights documents often sharply disagree
about the specifics of particular violations as well as on the gradients of human rights
more generally.
230 rick moore
4
╇ This is not to suggest that the human rights genre never allows context to be pre-
sented, but simply that a lack of context in some circumstances is a common and
defining feature of the genre.
232 rick moore
and Political Rights, the nations of the world have affirmed the principle
that governments have a fundamental responsibility to protect freedom
of religion…. Ultimately, each nation’s policies and practices regarding
religious freedom must be measured against international norms (IRF
Report 2004: xix [emphasis mine]).
This quotation stresses the universalism of religious freedom not only
by expressly naming it a “universal value” but also by using such
phrases suggesting its universal nature such as “nearly global ratifica-
tion” and “international norms.” Further uses of the word “universal”
along with other cognate phrases pepper the reports.
So far we have seen how the reports signal the genre of universal
human rights to the reader by directly referencing the concepts of
human rights and universalism, as well as using metonymy and the
practice of naming and shaming. Yet beyond just situating religious
freedom firmly within human rights discourse, the use of the genre
also begins to tell us more about the particular shape of religious free-
dom through the quasi-performative acts that the State Department
deploys. For example, all of the Executive Summaries in the reports
have used the same five categories for violations of religious freedom:
1) Totalitarian or authoritarian attempts to control religious belief or
practice; 2) State hostility toward minority or nonapproved religions;
3) State neglect of discrimination against or persecution of minority or
nonapproved religions; 4) Discriminating legislation or policies disad-
vantaging certain religions; 5) Stigmatization of certain religions by
wrongfully associating them with dangerous cults or sects.5 By declar-
ing violations to fall within one of these five categories, the State
Department is also drawing boundaries around a particular definition
of religion and religious freedom. I call this a “quasi-performative” act
because saying, for example, that wrongfully associating a religion
with a cult is a category of persecution does not make it so in the same
way that a traditional performative utterance is an example of doing
something by saying something—e.g., “I now pronounce you husband
and wife.” (Austin 1962). When the State Department announces such
a category in a public document, however, it does have a performative
�quality about it. Falsely associating a religion with a cult becomes a
violation of religious freedom simply because the State Department
5
╇ The only exception is that the first report (1999) did not include a separate cate-
gory for the present category 5.
the genres of religious freedom 235
How�ever, Category 5 still leaves open the possibility that some groups
may actually be cults and therefore be properly labeled as such.
In summary, these categories tell us that religion is made up of both
belief and practice. While for the State Department religion and reli-
gions are relatively independent from other areas of life and cannot be
entirely controlled by the state, there is room left open for some “appro-
priate” state control. But control has its limits. The state may not over-
step its bounds by meddling unequally in the affairs of religion or by
banishing a religious group from the official category of religion alto-
gether by categorizing it as a cult. Not only must the state tolerate reli-
gion, it must actively protect religious practitioners from societal
discrimination and avoid creating state sanctioned discrimination. The
model for religion and its relationship to the state resonates with that
of free market liberalism where the state ensures that there is a level
playing field. This market view of religion also implies an understand-
ing of religion as a free choice that people make within this market.
The universal human rights genre also works within the reports rhe-
torically to support the claim made by the State Department that the
IRF Reports apply universal, non-American standards equally across
the various cultures of the world instead of relying on U.S. understand-
ings of religious freedom. State Department officials also use this genre
when asked about possible U.S. bias in the reports, and this language
echoes that used by supporters of IRFA in the fight to ensure its pas-
sage. Additionally it begins to lay out specific properties of proper reli-
gion and religious freedom through its perfomative work.
But, not surprisingly, interpretations of religious freedom that differ
from the American perspective are common. For example, Germany
actively promotes religious freedom and other human rights by relying
on many of the same international documents that the State Department
refers to in the IRF Reports. Despite this fact, the United States criti-
cizes Germany for its treatment of Scientologists because the United
States views Scientology as a religion deserving of protection under the
concept of religious freedom while Germany does not. According to
the German government Scientology is not a religion but rather a sub-
versive commercial enterprise.6 The dispute between the two nations
6
╇ For the U.S. position on Scientology in Germany see any of the IRF Reports on
Germany. For the official German position see the most recent Annual Report of
the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz
2008), http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/en_publications/annual_reports.
the genres of religious freedom 237
exists even though both countries claim to adhere equally to the UDHR
and other human rights instruments. If religious freedom were as
clearly defined or universal as the State Department claims, such fun-
damental disagreements between supposed human rights partners
would in theory be far less common than they are. But instead of being
rare, differing interpretations are the norm. As the example illustrates,
disputes happen not just between the widely acknowledged supporters
of human rights and the usual suspects of violators, but also among the
supporters themselves. Countries negotiate the proper space for reli-
gion based not only on international norms but also in light of their
own historical experiences and practice. Nations with different reli-
gious histories from the United States often understand religious free-
dom in different ways, especially with regard to controversial topics
like proselytism, conversion and the space of religion in public life
(Smolin 2001, Gunn 2006).
But the genre of universal human rights, as expressed in the State
Department reports, does not allow such differences. When interna-
tional religious freedom is presented as a universal human right, reli-
gion is fixed as a constant unchanging category and not viewed as a
reflection of a particular historical and cultural context. In essence,
this stance denies that its understanding of religion and religious free-
dom are anything but clear empirical facts. However, in practice, many
conflicting versions of this “universal” exist.
As will be seen in more detail, universal claims are effectively used
in the reports to hide the next speech genre introduced below. Speaking
of religious freedom in the language of universal human rights par-
tially masks that it is almost always spoken of in terms of the American
particular. This works to conceal the way in which the reports are
socially constructed and favor certain groups, drawing attention away
from how structures and discourses influence interpretations and
actions. Thus constructing the IRF Reports around a speech genre of
universal human rights helps defend them against accusations that
they reflect a particular, not universal, way of thinking about religion
and religious freedom.
7
╇ Following Polletta (2006), I am using the words “narrative” and “story” inter-
changeably.
the genres of religious freedom 239
More than 350 years ago the Puritans journeyed to these shores in search
of religious freedom. Sixty years later the Quakers settled Philadelphia as
a haven for persecuted sects…. The right to worship God according to
one’s conscience is recognized in our founding documents as a basic,
inalienable human right. So if Christians in America stand by and do
nothing as their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world suffer,
they are abandoning the proudest heritage they have as Americans
(1997: xi).
Later, the first paragraph of the “Findings” section of IRFA begins with
a strikingly similar statement:
The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence
of the United States. Many of our Nation’s founders fled religious perse-
cution abroad, cherishing in their hearts and minds the ideal of religious
freedom. They established in law, as a fundamental right and as a pillar
of our Nation, the right to freedom of religion. From its birth to this day,
the United States has prized this legacy of religious freedom and honored
this heritage by standing for religious freedom and offering refuge to
those suffering religious persecution (IRFA 1998: 2788).
While these examples illustrate the basic plot structure of the narra-
tive, there are many different variations to be seen in any particular
telling of the story. The most common ones connect the United States
and its history to the invention of religious freedom and human rights
in general, as well as directly linking religious freedom to democracy.
This again serves to tie the universality of human rights to the American
240 rick moore
virtually any space for religion in the public sphere. This illustrates
how deviance from an engagement of religious pluralism as under-
stood in the United States often becomes defined as a violation of reli-
gious freedom, even when multilateral bodies do not view it as such.
Other examples explicitly tie violations or support of religious free-
dom to pluralistic notions of engagement among religious groups.
A common sentence found in many country reports is: “The generally
amicable relationship among religions in society contributed to reli-
gious freedom.” This stock phrase is revealing in the way that it links
positive relationships across different religions to freedom of religion
more generally. We again find a rhetorical connection between how
people of different religions engage one another and the status of reli-
gious freedom.
Proposed solutions in the reports to religious freedom problems
begin to point overtly toward a direct connection between American
religious pluralism and religious freedom. The following passage from
Section IV of the 2007 report on Jordan describes some of the activities
of the U.S. Embassy in that country:
The U.S. Embassy sponsored many individuals on exchange programs
related to religious freedom and tolerance…. [T]he Embassy also spon-
sored the second annual International Visitor Program designed to
expose Shari’a judges to the diversity, religious tolerance, and freedom of
U.S. society, including by meeting religious leaders from several religious
groups and U.S officials who raised religious freedom concerns.
In the summer of 2006 a Fulbright scholar studied for six weeks at
the University of California at Santa Barbara on a U.S.-funded project
entitled “Religious Pluralism in the United States.” This scholar, a dean
at a major Jordanian university, returned to his faculty and students
with an appreciation of how American society, culture, and institutions
allow varied religious beliefs to coexist (IRF Report 2007: 562 [emphasis
mine]).
groups, while one quarter use the word “dialogue” directly. The State
Department praises examples of interfaith dialogue, seminars on cul-
tural diversity and meetings among diverse religious groups. Overall,
these passages suggest that the State Department, in the reports on
religious freedom, is encouraging a kind of engaged pluralism and
deep discussion. Religious diversity is celebrated, and religious groups
are encouraged to engage one another through dialogue. While the
separation between religion and the state is still considered the correct
model, religion is not banished from the public sphere, and the only
stance not tolerated is intolerance.
The rough boundaries of the role of religion in public life can also be
observed. On the one hand, the IRF Reports criticize countries like
Saudi Arabia for their distinct lack of a pluralistic concept of religious
freedom and for taking the mixture of religion and politics too far. On
the opposite end of the spectrum, countries considered highly secular,
such as France, are also criticized for their implementation of religious
freedom. As can be seen in the headscarf debate mentioned above, the
IRF Reports took France to task for not allowing enough religion in the
public sphere. Religious freedom in the reports has therefore become
synonymous with an American understanding of the appropriate pub-
lic space for religion and religious freedom, as opposed to a universal
pluralism simply found in the United States. The genre of idealized
religious pluralism defines a specific space for religion in public life
where the mixing of religion and politics is accepted, but where this
interaction is also limited. As is common in the United States, the
genre of the reports expects that religious actors can be political up to
a certain point. Many passages in the executive summaries draw con-
nections between religious freedom, American style democracy and
functioning nations. America does not attempt to remove religion
from politics but rather strives to create a religious subject compatible
with its specific vision of a democratic society (Mahmood 2006). Like
all nations, the United States has its own history of negotiating a space
for religion in public life, and this history is reflected in the reports.
Similar to the genre of universal human rights, the genre of ideal-
ized religious pluralism favors certain conceptions of religion over
others. Religion still has some of the same characteristics found in the
universal human rights genre, namely that it is based on a free market
model where religion is understood to be a freely chosen entity sepa-
rate from the state, which in turn regulates religion only to ensure a
level playing field through the separation of church and state. But the
the genres of religious freedom 245
Conclusions
“it makes little sense to say that either political context or discursive
history was decisive. Instead, it is the inextricable interplay of past and
present, discursive history and contemporary context,” that has here
led the State Department to talk about religion in the way it does.
In particular, religion in the reports is seen to consist of both belief
and practice. The concept of religion presented resonates with free-
market liberalism in that religion is seen to be a personal choice with
the state serving to keep a level playing field among religions. In doing
so the state must not only treat religions equally but is also charged
with protecting individual religions from societal discrimination. On
one hand, this version of religion is portrayed as a universal ideal based
on the idea of human rights, but at the same time it is described as
something uniquely American. The linkage between the United States
and religious freedom in the reports suggests that correct religion,
according to the State Department, embraces an engaged pluralism as
found in mythologized versions of the story of religion in America.
Idealized religious pluralism, as theoretically found in the United
States, serves as the example to the rest of the world of how religions
are supposed to relate to one another. This version of religion is repre-
sented as inevitable and in itself quasi-divine in origin. It tends to reso-
nate most closely with Christian traditions, which may explain some
alleged discrepancies in the reports when reporting on religions pat-
terned after different models. This process of creating and recreating
the category of religion at the State Department draws attention to the
authorizing discourses (Asad 1993) used by the U.S. government to
promote its version of religion and religious freedom. It demonstrates
how a form of governmentality (Foucault 2007) is used by the U.S. to
exercise the power of the state over an international population
through the IRF Reports and thus in essence creating a particular ver-
sion of religion.
Additionally, the questions discussed in this chapter highlight the
importance of thorough qualitative analyses. Many of the key issues
dealing with how the State Department talks about religious freedom
could be easily missed in a purely quantitative study that simply
counted types of events reported. This serves as a note of caution to
those who would use the IRF Reports and similar documents as unbi-
ased data. The use of the report as objective data is problematic, not
only in light of the issues raised by critics, but also because it does not
take into account the way the reports’ production leads to its conclu-
sions in regard to the fundamental questions of what constitutes
250 rick moore
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the genres of religious freedom 253
John H. Simpson
[S]he was the compleat intellectual—i.e. she went always and as rapidly
as possible for the great synthesis and her human understanding, pain-
fully limited, could not support the might of historical analysis…
— Saul Bellow (2010:391) on Hannah Arendt
In the first chapter of this volume, Kevin Christiano makes a case for
embedding the sociology of religion in a strong sense of history, a
sense that recognizes the significance of events, precedence, sequence,
and stages in the human passage through time. By forgetting or never
considering such matters, he contends, we throw up knowledge that is
limited by the narrow gauge of “presentism.” It is unable to account for
itself because it lacks a realization of whence it came.
Memory and meaning are the materials of history. Enmeshed with
who we are and can be, they operate at individual, group, societal,
national, cultural, and civilizational levels. They underwrite the insti-
tutions of human life—the various ways that human life is accom-
plished and cared for. Levels (or structures) and institutions are
precipitates of meaning and memory in the flow of time. In that sense
everything is history—history omnia. History proper—the subject of
Christiano’s intervention—is an observation within the flow of time
using selected procedures to tell a story about how some particular got
from there to here. It provides an answer to the question: “What hap-
pened next in the case of…?” The answer is an abstraction from the
stream of memory and meaning—an island in the sea of history omnia.
This afterword justifies the claim that everything is history.1 If every-
thing is history (including the claim that everything is history), history
1
╇ The difference between “everything” and “all” is critical where the claim that “eve-
rything is history” is made. Everything connotes many different things each with a
history. The claim that all is history lacks distinctions. If all is history, is it impossible
to distinguish between the histories of different things. The claim that everything is
history is then the claim that every (particular) thing has a history. Furthermore, the
claim that every particular thing has a history as argued herein includes the claim that
“manyness” is not illusory, that manyness is not something that can done away with, as
256 john h. simpson
in the Buddhist claim and ritual practice consistent with the claim that “all is one”
which is “a direct rejection of the [idea of] distinction” (Luhmann 1998: 42 [emphasis
added]).
2
╇ Marion Blute is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology, University of
Toronto. I thank her for her comments, critical suggestions and corrections to this
piece, all provided in the spirit of generosity. I bear full responsibility for the content of
the chapter and any problems that may remain in it.
afterword: what is history? 257
3
╇ The nature/nurture distinction rests on a false division of things. There can be no
nurture without something to nurture—that is the brain-body substrate. Sociologists
who think and write as if socialization were something that is independent of the
brain-body substrate and its variation at the individual level have their heads in the
clouds. Descartes’s dictum, “I think therefore I am,” should read: “I am and can think
because I have a brain-body that is what it is on account of evolution.”
afterword: what is history? 259
4
╇ The theory of Darwinian evolutionary biology today is a highly specialized, com-
plex branch of knowledge with many technical niches that are sources of information
and development for what may be viewed as a general theory. This paragraph repre-
sents my reading, abstraction and summary of Blute’s (2010) detailed, critical report of
her own work and the work of others in order to present what I call “the elements” of
Darwinian biological evolution. Zimmer’s (2011) lavishly illustrated discussion of the
evolution of bird feathers (“one of evolution’s most durable mysteries.”) provides a cur-
rent example in a popular magazine of contemporary Darwinian analysis.
5
╇ Were biology—including evolutionary biology—as settled as classic physics and
chemistry are, cures would exist for all forms of cancer and dementia, among other
things. The probability that this will happen depends on understanding genetic/epige-
netic interaction and protein expression, and applying that knowledge to the unique
genome/cell structure/immune system (etc.) of an afflicted individual. The science of
that possibility involves theoretical statistics, genetics and genomics—“the study of
how genes interact, in all their mindboggling complexity” (Picard 2011).
260 john h. simpson
Conclusion
6
╇ See for example any recent issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
(JSSR), where a substantial majority of the articles are based on an analysis of quantita-
tive data (and more specifically, Cornwall [2010] and Smith [2010]). Submissions to
any journal compete for publication. Cornwall and Smith lay out the selection criteria
used to judge whether or not a submission is fit for publication in JSSR. Competitive
selection processes produce winners and losers. It is not difficult to find latencies in
Cornwall and Smith that favor quantitative analysis.
7
╇ See Diamond (1997, 2005).
afterword: what is history? 263
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CONTRIBUTORS
ISSN 1610–5210
The series Religion and the Social Order was initiated by the Association for the
Sociology of Religion in 1991, under the General Editorship of David G. Bromley. In
2004 an agreement between Brill and the ASR renewed the series.