Why Study Religion, Part Deux
Why study religion? This is a question I often field from co-workers or family members trying to understand why a thirty-three year old is back in college studying something different than he did the first go-around. My usual retort is, why not? I go on to explain that religious thoughts, ideas, and practices continue to influence history, philosophy, pop culture, and politics. For me, religion is more than merely poring over a sacred text. It is a critical study into why people choose to believe certain things, rather than what they choose to hold sacred. Not that I think what they hold sacred is without merit, but as Emile Durkheim argues, the sacred object is usually merely a symbol representing something more profound.
Recently, I have been debating religion with my boyfriend who is a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive psychology at Rutgers. We have many thought-provoking, often heated, debates about not only what religion is, but also what is its function in society. Was Marx correct in labeling religion as opium for the masses? Is it an archaic way of searching for answers to humankinds’ existence and how we fit into the scheme of things? Is it a hypnotic tune that the politician pipes away to lead a country into battle? Or is it all of these, or none of these?
Durkheim takes a rather interesting and sociological approach to the topic by arguing that rather than religion holding court over humankind, humankind (functioning as a society) commands a sort of power over religion. This sense of force is achieved by humans imposing a structure upon religion that is analogous to the structure that humans experience from their social interactions within the community at large. One such example would be a power of subordination. Another example is that because humankind learned how to collectively group themselves, they now have the model for grouping other things as well. This community at large, ultimately, becomes the model and the teacher its members’ cosmological view. The cosmology is then represented by society. Therefore, the community is eminently important as it contains within it the beliefs and practices that perpetuate this cosmological view. This can be seen in Durkheim’s definition of religion: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
Religion, therefore, is formed and shaped by the collective. One learns what is sacred and profane from the community. This learning is then passed along from generation to generation, which evokes an idea of a living spirit moving from society to society. This living spirit can be perceived also as some form of moral obligation, which serves to unite the individual to the community. Each community, then, serves as a teacher to new members and subsequent generations.
In this sense, community can be seen almost as a divinity – something that is eternal, connected to both past and future. Therefore, one could argue that religion is society. A definition like this keeps one from being mired in the particulars of a certain faith or denomination. It allows for the complexities of varied individuals and their multitude of beliefs and practices. It allows for each religion to be based in truth, for as the sociologist Durkheim argues, nothing built on a falsehood could endure.
A different way of looking at this is creatio ex nihilo. In this context, every religion is borne out of something (for Durkheim, this is the community) and also contains within it some kernel of truth about the human existence. What this ultimately means for Durkheim is that there can be no a priori concepts. We cannot get something from nothing. There has to be a teacher of sorts. This is not to imply that the educator is “divine.” As he demonstrated with his definition of religion, Buddhism functions without a divinity. In Durkheim’s argument, community functions as this educator.
Yet, how does this argument hold up today? Last year, an article ran in TIME magazine stating that some scientists believe that we have something akin to a “god gene” encoded within us…something that makes us seek something outside ourselves. For these scientists, it would seem that there are a priori concepts mapped into us, or something innate that waits to be made manifest. Perhaps Durkheim would concede to this idea. He does state after all in his introduction that science has oftentimes led us to re-examine things previously held absolute, especially in biological terms of unicellular development. With regards to the “god gene,” Durkheim would argue that it is society that makes manifest the latent. Just as society brings about the fervor and creates the notion of the sacred for its members, it also generates the fervor necessary to awaken the individual.
In conclusion, I return to my introduction: why study religion? If, as Durkheim argues, no religion can be false, then every study of religion offers one the chance to see how communities of people gather together and endure, and how this process of enduring as a society shapes their practices and beliefs.
