The Role of Religion in Irish Society

Accessed from www.tcd.ie

The purpose of this post is to familiarise you with the role that religion plays in Irish society. What will be different from what you might expect is that we will not be thinking about religion from a religious or a faith perspective. We are going to take off our ‘clerical glasses’ and consider religion in Ireland from the standpoint of a sociologist. 

A sociological view of faith

The sociologist may not know anything about the religious life as a participant but he or she will work very hard at describing what they witness of religion’s role and impact in society.  Indeed, certain questions will demand attention when considering the phenomenon of religion.

What is the essence of religion?  How has religion been affected by what has been happening over the development of history?   Are we in the midst of a tidal wave of secularization and is this sweeping away the church?  What will de-institutionalization and globalization mean for religion? 

What is religion?

 

Joseph Runzo in a book entitled Global Philosophy of Religion defines religion as a world religious tradition with many common characteristics. According to Runzo,

A World Religious tradition is a set of symbols and rituals, myths and stories, concepts and truth-claims, which a historical community believes gives ultimate meaning to life, via its connection to a Transcendent beyond the natural order.

An even more comprehensive definition comes from the book Religion for Dummies written by Rabbi Marc Gellman and Monsignor Thomas Hartman. According to these authors,

‘A religion is a belief in divine (superhuman or spiritual) being(s) and the practices (rituals) and the moral code (ethics) that result from that belief. Beliefs give religion its mind, rituals give religion its shape, and ethics give religion its heart.’

Another important definition, and one to really bear in mind for this post, is the one put forward by those who write about the secularization of society.  The term religion, according to Bryan Wilson, must pertain ‘only to those activities that make some explicit reference to a supernatural source of values.’   The logic of that statement is that where those activities seem not to exist then religion is not present. The only comment one can make in response is that while explicit religious activities can act as some kind of gauge for the current state of a culture– it is probably too reductionist to suggest that they are the sole measurement of what a religion is.

Take, for example, these other two definitions of religion.  David Lyon in the book, The Steeple’s Shadow,  notes that ‘religion’ also includes the phenomenon of what some authors call Folk Religion.  This is where lives are lived with a sort of residual reference to whatever may have been the dominant religion in a culture. I had a French friend who never went to Mass but often visited her local church, lit candles, and generally orientated herself towards whatever was there.  One might also include wearing a crucifix for luck or feeling the need to christen a child as a religious insurance policy as further examples of folk religion. This kind of religion is actually fairly durable even though it would not show up much under Wilson’s definition. 

There is also what Robert Bellah identified as ‘civil religion’ which is a general Deistical approach to God which acknowledges his reality and pays lip service to certain religious values. An example of what Bellah is talking about might be a Presidential inauguration in the United States where God is evoked in the name of the country and the President.

Modernity, secularization and religion

As we move on to consider religion as an influence in society – we have to turn our attention to how it has been affected by two factors that have been quite significant for Western Europe and North America.  The first is the relationship between modernity and religion and the second (and of course they are not unrelated) is the impact of secularization on society.

What one can say fairly incontrovertibly is that modernity, especially where it has been deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, has turned away from religious authority and religious explanations of existence. Nature and evolution (at least as understood in the terms that Dawkins presents them) are perceived by some moderns as the real grid by which life can be understood.  Evolution as an all-encompassing, naturalistic account of how life came into being causes Dawkins to describe himself as an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The fact that he is such a protagonist for his case, and that there is such an evangelistic passion present in his writing, suggests that he does not think everyone has bought the Enlightenment paradigm quite as thoroughly as they ought to have done. But that is another matter.

What about secularization and its impact on society? This is an issue that is very complex and we need to try to disentangle the various threads so that we can understand what we are actually describing when we talk about secularization. First,  we need to be very careful in our use of terms.  I would suggest that the distinction between secularization and secularism is very important to grasp.  Secularization is a neutral term. It is simply the name given to a process that is visible within society. Secularism is an aggressive anti-religious outlook.  The British Humanist Association, for example, is made up of people who are secularists, who complain and campaign against the one time privileged position of Christianity in education and society. Dawkins, Hitchens and other aggressive atheists are following what one would call a secularist agenda. They want to undermine as far as possible the place of religion in society and the general consciousness.

Secularization,  put at its most basic and uncontroversial,  is the process by which religion or faith is uncoupled from its connection to institutions in societies. For example, in France it was the case that the Catholic church had been a substantial provider of education until the twentieth century.  This is now no longer the case. That is secularization.  It could be argued that with the dearth of vocations to religious orders that the Catholic schools of Ireland are undergoing their own process of secularization.  Interestingly, if one wanted to bring Pope Emeritus Bendict XVI into this conversation,  one might note that it was his view as a cardinal that even in church institutions like hospitals and universities – where there was no longer a faith commitment on the part of those staffing the institutions – these bodies should undergo voluntary secularization.

The Secularization Debate

Thus far we have seen secularization as the process whereby religion’s public role is diminished and it loses its connections with the institutions in which it previously had a pivotal place. One might also, uncontroversially, describe secularization as the process by which the public’s engagement with the rites and practices of religion has increasingly diminished.  No-one will dispute, for example,  that in western Europe there has been rapid secularization and that religious practice is alien to a huge section of the population. However, we have only scratched the surface of the issue of secularization. There is much more to it – and indeed, the judgment one makes of what secularization is telling us about the true nature of things – will have some impact on how confidently one will pursue one’s own future ministry.

To set the scene for what I would term ‘the secularization debate’, let me share with you a stanza from one of the most poignant poems ever written. The poem in question is Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, and the third stanza about ‘the sea of Faith’ has inspired and given its name to a radical movement within the Church of England that questions the presumption of theism.  (By that, I mean the presumption that an objective God, such as is identified by the Creeds, actually exists).  Don Cupitt, the theologian most identified with the Sea of Faith (evangelicals in the C of E have rather unkindly given him the nickname ‘Stupid Cupitt) openly identifies as a non-realist theologian. Realist in this context means ‘belief in the objective existence of God.’ Cupitt would describe God much more in terms of the highest ideals of human beings and those things which are of ultimate meaning to them.

Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold accessed at loveaquote.com

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

 

That opening, positive description of the sea of faith is a metaphor of the time (and Arnold probably had the Middle Ages in mind) when religion could be experienced without the doubt that the modern (then Victorian) age had evoked through Darwinism and the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Arnold seems to believe that the prevalence of religion was a good thing and that it beautified the world with its simple assurance of meaning and purpose.  When religion was intact, as Arnold saw it, the world was dressed ‘like the folds of a bright girdle furled.’  Now that this faith has gone, the world lies there stripped naked and bleak.  He writes of ‘the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world.’

The crucial question

Is that where we are going and was Matthew Arnold one of the first to witness a steady, uni-directional, inexorable movement towards the extinction of faith? Are we, indeed, dinosaurs, anomalous creatures still living in a world to which we truly no longer belong? I ask that question partly because the poem demands it, but also because it lies at the heart of a particular view of secularization.

Durkheim et
 

Max Weber accessed at doktorpaisal.wordpress.com



Emile Durkheim accessed at abordandosociologia.blogspot.ie

It is at this point that I want to introduce you to two of the classical sociologists of religion, the Frenchman Emile Durkheim and the German, Max Weber. Durkheim promoted the view that religion was part of the primitive stage of human development and that it had no on-going relevance for modern human beings.  In other words, it was something that individuals and society as a whole would grow out of. Along a similar trajectory, Webber emphasized the fact that mankind was becoming ever more rational and that this very process (which included modernization and the rise of technology) would marginalize religion.   Bryan Wilson sums up the general sense of what secular sociologists see taking place.

Religion is now privatized. In a consumer society it becomes another consumer good, a leisure time activity no longer affecting the centres of power or the operation of the system – even at the level of social control,  and the organization of the emotions and motivations. Religion has become a matter of choice, but whatever religion is chosen is of no consequence to the operation of the social system.

WHAT DO WE THINK OF THAT STATEMENT?  My sense is that much of Wilson’s description is accurate since a large swathe of western Europe does function from a secular starting point and religion has been sidelined in terms of decision-making and ethical guidelines. However, has he presumed too much for the Enlightenment worldview?  It is his assumption that rationality and the dominance of that mindset has made religious faith an impossibility for the masses. He writes,

Modern man [and I would stress ‘modern’ and not ‘postmodern’) may suffer acutely from his lack of emotional reassurance, but it also appears that religion is no longer capable of providing this reassurance for the mass of men.’

However, with the proliferation of New Age ideas alone, it would seem that the rationalistic mindset has not quite determined the future in the way Wilson and others assumed. But that is perhaps to jump ahead.  What must be stated is that the sociologists of secularization really did believe it was a uni-directional, inexorable process. In fact, one of the reasons for why this was the case was that the Darwinian idea of evolution was lifted out of its biological context and applied to society’s development.  Thus religion itself was thought of as an evolutionary hangover, rather than an integral part of life.

Here is a quotation that illustrates this point. It is written by a man called Caplow and he is referring to the work of sociologist Robert Lynd, a former Presbyterian minister who saw secularization as an almost evolutionary certainty.

Like many other sociologists of his time, he viewed social evolution as an inevitable progression from social forms based on custom to social forms based on rational planning. According to this view, drawn from 19^th century extensions of Darwin’s discussion of the origin of species to social institutions, modern religion was supposed to be a vestige of a more primitive stage of society and was expected to disappear. This gradual but inevitable disappearance was called secularization.’

Reaching some conclusions

If that evolutionary view is correct, if this movement away from religion is an inexorable tide sweeping through history, then Christianity’s days are numbered.  We are simply caught up in an inevitability and religion is nothing more than a primitive prop. The over-riding question at this point is whether or not such a bleak perspective is justified.

Referring back to the poem, Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold refers to a period in history (probably the Middle Ages) where people lived happily under what has been termed ‘a sacred canopy’ . In other words, it was a time of widespread belief with religion at the very centre of life.  This assumption, at least as it’s expressed in the poem, fits well with the idea that there has been a sort of evolutionary development within society so that the need to ‘believe’ has become redundant over time and that we are now in that age of natural scepticism.

You probably will be pleased to know that such a ‘take’ on European religious history has been questioned within the field of sociology itself. The first open dissent from the received wisdom came in 1965 in a ground-breaking article by David Martin entitled ‘Towards eliminating the concept of secularization’ in the book The Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences. Martin’s essential point was that those who were promoting the concept of secularization – and remember, we are not talking about simply the view that Europe is becoming more secularised, but the conviction that secularization is an irreversible process in humanity’s social development – those who were promoting that concept, Martin says,  were ideologically biased and were actively promoting an anti-religious ideology.  In other words, they allowed their atheistic presuppositions to colour their understanding of cultural history.

One example of where that misunderstanding was present, claims Martin, was the presumption that religion was at the very heart of Medieval society (and therefore something that was utterly central to peoples’ lives.)  This was not necessarily the case, suggests Martin,  who thinks that only an educated elite ever embraced a Christian worldview and that for the rest it was more a straightforward mixture of superstition with some elements of Christian piety. Even Benedict XVI, when he was a Professor at Tubingen, also made the point that the assumption that the Medieval period was an age of belief was over-stated to say the least. 

[We hear it said] claims Ratzinger … that in the Middle Ages everyone without exception in our lands was a believer, it is a good thing to cast a glance behind the scenes, as we can today, thanks to historical research.  This will tell us that even in those days there was the great mass of fellow-travellers and a relatively small number of people who had really entered into the inner movement of belief.’ (Introduction to Christianity)

The average secular punter of today who subscribes to New Age thinking or some other tangential spirituality may not be a million miles from a Medieval person only loosely connected to orthodox belief.

Moreover, what about the powerful growth of Protestant non-conformism among the middle class in England during the Industrial Revolution of all times. It appeared at the time that widespread growth was just around the corner and the failure of that dream was not due to the impact of rationality and technology – but to the devastation caused by the impact of World War I. That is what destroyed missionary optimism - not some irreversible process going on in society.

So it is possible to read history very differently from the secularization theorists.  What I suggest is the fundamental problem with their understanding of secularization is that it is too mechanistic. It denigrates the role of human beings in history reducing them to the status of being pawns to massive social forces.  I suggest, on the contrary – human beings are capable of responding or even reacting to cultural trends and not simply be their victims. Anywhere that religion has hugely affected the cultural mindset has been, in some degree, in reaction to prevailing trends.  Some historians believe that the impact of the Wesleyan revival in England was that the nation was spared a French style, secular revolution.  Culture is also affected by events, by unexpected turns, and not everything that is confidently predicted actually comes about or stays the course. There is no assured progress of secularization, no matter what.

Before we end this post by looking at globalization and its effect on religion, let me say a couple of positive things about what secularization may have done for the church. 1. It probably has finished off the Constantinian state church.  Cardinal Franz Koenig, the late Archbishop of Vienna, is one of those senior churchmen who see this as a most likely outcome of current trends. This is not necessarily a bad thing.  There is a case for suggesting that such an arrangement has an inherently diluting effect on the witness of the church.  Remember Nussbaum’s analogy of the child picking up the viper. Secondly, the kind of church that may emerge out of the secularization of the West will recognise itself in the New Testament as ‘the little flock.’ The NT does not view the church as a majority institution nor does it presume that wider society will be Christian. GOD CAN COPE WITH THAT REALITY. SO CAN WE!

Globalisation and its impact on religion. 

It may be helpful to offer some definitions of globalisation although we all have a sense of what it is.  One definition of the phenomena is, ‘The growing frequency, volume and interconnectedness of movement of ideas, materials, goods, money, information, and people across national boundaries.’  McLuhan’s term ‘Global village’ sums up that aspect of globalisation. We might also refer to it as the growing capacity of information technologies to dramatically shorten the distance in time and space between events and places in the world. We would certainly describe it as the diffusion of increasingly standardised economic, political and cultural practices. Finding a Marks & Spencers in Seville or eating a Big Mac in Freiburg may be tiny examples of that process.

Underlying the standard sociological reading of globalisation is the view that the modernization which characterised the secular development of Europe will have a knock-on effect on world culture. In other words, as countries undergo ‘modernization’ through the impact of globalization, they will become more secularised. Again the inevitability theme rears its head.

However,  it is by no means certain that globalisation will go the way many sociologists expect.  Firstly, this increased movement across frontiers has also meant the rapid numerical growth of religious Islam in Europe.  Globalisation can mean not only the export of western values to the rest of the world but also the introduction of religious influences from outside the secular west.

There is also a reaction to the ‘unwholesome’ values that are being peddled via globalisation. You might interpret Islamic fundamentalism as a reaction to what has been deemed a culture of dissoluteness - their response to what they term pejoratively, the great Satan. Indeed,  even among second and third generation Muslims in Europe whose parents are secularised are we finding substantial numbers re-embracing Islam?  Also worldwide there is a resurgence of conservative religion among others faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Shintoism.

Let us not also forget the worldwide proliferation of Pentecostalism, particularly in Latin America where there is a palpable sense of religion in the air. It does not seem to be the same narrative in every part of the world and there may be unique cultural factors that make Europe’s secularization a uniquely European reality RATHER THAN Europe being the definitive model for everyone else’s future.

Those are just a few optimistic thoughts on globalisation, but if you want a substantial academic foundation for seeing globalisation as not sounding the death knell for faith, read Peter Beyer’s Religion in the Process of Globalization.