Are You Religious?
This is a follow-up to my last post on morality. The premise of the Volokh question posed there is that one can diide people into the categories "religious" and "irreligious." But I object!
If you tell me you're a football fan, I'll ask, "what's your team?" Because very, very few people are just "fans of the game." I mean, fans who go watch middle school games, watch West Coast games when they live in the Southeast . . . watch Phoenix Cardinals games. If you're a football fan, my guess is that you really follow a particular team, or maybe (if you're like me) a group of teams, which varies a little bit from year to year. But it varies largely based on players I like at any given time. So I used to follow the Colts, because I liked Jim Harbaugh (true story). Then I followed the Chargers, because of . . . Jim Harbaugh. Think of how many Packers fans Brett Favre has created.
The point is that it's really impossible to be religious in that general sense. I want to ask, "what's your team?"
Now, this is not to say that you can't be seriously observant in a particular religion. Don't get me wrong. You can be a Catholic, a Baptist, a Latter-day Saint, an Orthodox Jew, a Sunni Muslim, etc. But religions, er, disagree about some fundamental things, and that means that "religious" people actually disagree about lots and lots of things. So the category is not really that useful.
Now the one place the category has become increasingly used is in the Culture Wars, in which "people of [various and inconsistent] faith[s]" are supposedly at war with secularists. And I would agree that, on some particular issues, the category of "religious belief, almost any religious belief/observance" is useful, just as the category "secular" makes sense in some particular issue areas. The concepts do some work. Don't get me wrong.
But as a general category, covering everything?
Let's take an example. Bill O'Reilly and others are trying to save Christmas from, well, from whom? My sense is that retailers prefer "Happy Holidays" because it doesn't exclude certain consumers. (My sense, in other words, is not that this is because progressive secularists or any other group are pressuring the stores. This might occur in some cases, but I think the general phenomenon is probably driven by marketing departments.) But whom does "Merry Christmas" exclude?
Now, by almost any definition, I would be considered a secularist, one of the irreligious. But I celebrate Christmas, whole-heartedly and without reservation. Now I celebrate it as a secularist might, but I also like the message of love that the Christmas story embodies, in so many symbolic forms. I do so without compunction as a cultural Christian.
So "Merry Christmas" doesn't offend me. It wouldn't keep me away from the stores. I wouldn't mind shepherds and wise men and camels and a big, big star and angels and trumpets and the whole nine. I love "Silent Night." No problem here. I gladly wish people (who celebrate Christmas) a "Merry Christmas." (It may be PC, but I try to avoid wishing non-Christians a "Merry Christmas," because it doesn't make much sense to do so. Not because I don't want to offend. But wishing a non-Christian a Merry Christmas is like wishing someone a Happy Birthday in the wrong month.)
The line of cleavage here is not between the religious and the irreligious/secular but rather between cultural and observant Christians, on one side (and that group includes Bill O'Reilly and me, so it's a big group), on one side, and observant non-Christians (Jews and Muslims, primarily, but I guess there are a smattering of Hindus and Buddhists and . . . ?), non-observant non-Christians, and extreme secularists on the other side. The line is really not the one that is so often identified.
But the religious-irreligious dichotomy serves a need that many people feel, apparently, a strange kind of ecumenical belief that all religions are really one. They aren't.
Update: Make sure to read Rebecca's comment. Btw, part of the problem here is that I'm writing in response to someone else's post and working with, to some extent, their terms. Which are problematic. I almost wrote a post on the term "irreligious," too. It's an odd term, but the one Volokh was using.
Irreligious sounds a bit too much like irreverent, doesn't it?
posted by Number Three @ 7:06 AM
3 Comments:
yes. okay. good. Because I was going to respond to your previous post with some sort of malformed protest against the word irreligious, and I then realized that part of my problem was that I had no idea what it means. It's not a-religious, but it does indicate some sort of lack or absence that doesn't quite match up with my experience of a secularly lived life. so this is helpful.
And the whole religion category is extremely problematic once one ventures out, beyond the oceans, to places like China or Japan or India where belief systems/spiritualities/ritual practices are lumped into categories called "religions" but I mean Confucius isn't God, the Buddha isn't a deity, Hinduism is a lazy cheat of a term for a bunch of different faiths, and my Sufi-worshiping cab driver is still going to throw a coin at Durga's temple when he drives by. It's just what you do.
It strikes me that when we say "people of faith" in the US we mean (and by that, as I am no longer there, I mean "all y'all mean") "people of the faiths of the Book"--the Eastern Mediterranean, Arabian-region derived faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The "religious"/"irreligious" divide is predominantly a recent phenomenon, is it not? The side-effect of GOP culture wars and the effort to portray Dems as anti-God, hence immoral. But this raises a question: Is this divide purely the result of a rhetorical, political strategy, one designed to reclaim the moral highground for a party that had embraced southern hostility to racial progress, etc., OR is it a result of legitimate cultural shifts combined with deeply embeded structural features of American faith?
Prior to about 30 or 40 years ago, the divide between religious believers in the U.S. seemed the larger split-- Prots vs. Catholics, traditional Christians vs. Mormons, Jews (and everyone else), Baptists vs. Church of Christ, etc. All that stuff on the Bob Jones University web site about how the Pope is Satan's poodle would have seemed less fringy a generation ago. And this makes sense if believers routinely saw their primary competition as coming from other religious groups. So one explanation is that the secular worldview has become increasingly attractive over the last generation, probably because of expanding material prosperity and consumer culture in the U.S., making it a convenient time to mobilize previously conflicting religionists against a common enemy. But this just shows the absurdity of O'Reilly's screed. You don't honor religious Christianity by obsessing over how Wal-Mart speaks about faith because you're tacitly suggesting that Wal-Mart has become our national church. More confident Christians could complain about the commercialization of Christmas; now we pray for it. How GOP.
This enemy-shift wouldn't be possible in a counrty where religion was intensely creedal, but Tocqueville, Harold Bloom, and others have argued that American religion is partly defined by its creedal minimalism, again making it possible to pretend that religious believers all share something essential even if, thinking logically, we know they don't.
So, Em, are you giving us Protestants permission to hate Catholics again?
An additional thought: in defining proper Church attitudes toward those outside orthodox Catholicism, Thomas Aquinas argued that heretical believers deserved far worse treatment than non-believers, whether atheist or devotees of alternative faiths. After all, if you accepted Christ but believed the wrong things about Him, you were poisoning the faith from the inside. So you needed to be coerced, maybe even killed by the state. Non-believers should be approached with gentle persuasion as long as they don't actively hinder believers in their observance.
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