Keeping the Faith: Robert Bellah in conversation with Mark Juergensmeyer
- Islam/Muslims;
- Religion
Topics:
Renowned sociologist Robert Bellah talks to fellow sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer about why he is studying the Axial Age, his vision of global society, and why
we won't have a global religion any time soon. NOTE: This is an edited and condensed version of a longer interview that was first posted at The Immanent Frame, the SSRC's blog on secularism, religion and the public sphere.
MARK JUERGENSMEYER: You are currently working in ancient history, tracing the evolution of religious thought. I'm fascinated by your essay that is going to be a part of your new book, which I think will be out fairly soon, about the transition from myths and received habits and customs to theoretical cognition, or theoria (the word from which we get “theory”). ROBERT BELLAH: The point of my essay is that theory emerged a certain moment in human history, and before that, it didn't exist. Probably between 1 million and 2 million years ago humans communicated entirely with their bodies, what is called mimetic culture. We still do. It is never lost. It’s critical. For religion, it’s absolutely fundamental. Then language emerged—we don’t know for sure when, but between 50,000 and 120,000 years ago. After that, we get narratives. Narratives add an enormous amount of information to the kind of bodily communication that the mimetic has. Again, we’re still there. Most of our lives are controlled by narratives, not by logical reasoning, not by science. But rational, logical thought emerges at a certain moment, and that is the so-called Axial Age (800-200 BC), more or less around 2,500 years ago. In that little paper I give the examples of Plato and Buddha, two of the great rationalists. People who think Buddhism is some kind of crazy mysticism haven’t read very much. The Buddha could tell you very definite reasons for what he said—he could convince you rationally. He was, of course, coming out of a profound transforming experience we would call religious.
Before the Buddha, of course, everything in the Hindu tradition was ritual. Well, not everything, because the Upanishads already had the beginnings of something like theoria. But certainly before the Upanishads, it’s all ritual. Hinduism is ritual to this day. Of course, all religions are. Today many people, including the harshest critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, think that religion is a theory or a set of theories. Science has disproved those theories; therefore, we don’t need them. They're not getting at what religion is all about.
So the Greek philosophers take over theoria. Theoria, in its pre-philosophic meaning, meant to go and look at a religious spectacle and then come back and tell what you saw. In Plato, it becomes the philosophical quest to come out of the cave and see what’s really there, what the truth is, a vision of the truth. Once you have seen the truth, you look at the normal world in a different way; you see through all of its falsehoods. That gives you the beginning of the chance to use theory in a different way—namely, as a form of undercutting accepted beliefs. Plato was one of the great deconstructionists of all time. He wandered throughout the entire history of Greek culture—Homer, the tragedians, all of Greek poetry—and replaced it with what? Himself, because he saw the truth and he saw all these people as saying a whole bunch of lies. That notion of theoria gets into our notion of science. Science takes nothing for granted. It asks questions about everything. There’s nothing that is taboo. We can doubt everything. We can’t doubt everything at once, but at least we can doubt things one at a time. The term we use, “scientific theory”—that is a direct inheritance from the Greeks.
Many people think that secularism draws its intellectual roots from Greek philosophy. But weren't the Greeks just espousing a kind of new religiosity? Of course. Where does philosophy end and religion begin? Pierre Hadot, the great French classicist, speaks of philosophy as a total way of life—and certainly always tied into some sense of transcendence. It’s there in Plato centrally, and it’s also there in Aristotle, in Stoicism. It eventually gets absorbed into Christian theology. Thomas Aquinas, certainly one of the two or three greatest Christian theologians who ever lived, is saturated with Aristotle.
Can't we simply say—as Wilfred Cantwell Smith does in his famous essay “Philosophy as a Religious Tradition of Humankind”—that we are all with religion of one sort or the other, and the secularism we proudly espouse as nonreligious is in fact a religion with ancient roots? Yes. It’s also true if you look at China. Confucianism is supposed to not be a religion; it’s supposed to be a philosophy. You look at the history of Confucianism and tell me it’s not a religion.
The Department of Religion in Beijing does not include Confucianism, of course. Actually, they are beginning to. A former student, who is getting her Ph.D. at Princeton, writes that the Chinese are now debating whether to use the rubric of religion for Confucianism.
“Culture” is the other term we often hear when politicians and others want to invoke religion. In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) embraced “Hindutva,” a term it invented to mean “Hindu values.” Sounds a lot like American politics! This is one of those murky areas. Remember that many European countries have Christian democratic parties that are avowedly Catholic yet are “democratic.” I take a very pervasive view of religion. One of Paul Tillich's definitions of religion, probably his central one, is that it's one's ultimate concern. Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony, understood that. He spoke of people who worship “God-belly” or “God-purse.” Williams was one of our early Baptists in American colonial history. He didn’t approve of these people. He thought they were idolaters. But he knew that ultimate loyalties weren’t just about Jesus Christ and his papa. When you see the bumper sticker, as was around a few years ago in the United States, “The one who dies with the most toys at the end wins,” what is that telling you? It’s telling you that consumerism has become a religion. The person who has the most stuff is saved, so to speak. Some kind of religious dimension is inescapable, in my view. And this is true of even Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Dawkins, though they wouldn’t like to be told that.
Was secularism ever really separate from religion? Originally, “secular” was a religious term. It simply meant a part of the total religious structure. It didn’t mean not religious. But coming out of, particularly, the wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation and the effort to enforce religious conformity, sometimes by very violent means, the European intellectuals—a very significant number of them—said, “Enough, already. Let’s get away from this. Let’s just leave religion out of it.”
Or what they thought of as religion. Well, religion was a very tangible thing when you had established churches that were persecuting people. So the first step was to say, “Yes, we all believe in God, but we don’t believe in these particular things where people are killing each other.” The next step says, “What do we even need God for, even without Jesus Christ? We have capital P, Progress.” In the 19th century, people thought progress was going to bring the millennium—a perfect society; we would all be nice to each other. Modern progress brought the atom bomb and all kinds of chaos and economic disaster and so on to much of the world. But there is a lineage here in which each of these so-called secular ideals clearly comes out of a religious tradition.
This brings us to Charles Taylor and his latest work, A Secular Age. Taylor’s whole point is that secularism as we know it would make no sense in a society that was not rooted in a Christian history. It’s a reaction to it and, in some ways, a fulfillment of it. As Taylor says, the Enlightenment, modernity, has fulfilled elements of the Gospel that were never fulfilled when the church had more power.
In your contributions to the discussion of A Secular Age on the SSRC blog The Immanent Frame, you voiced a slight disagreement with Taylor over whether this kind of secularism is beyond Durkheim in some way. The question is whether you can have a society without anything important in common. Unlike Taylor, I am arguing, again on sociological grounds, that such a society is impossible. Even now, when nation-states are certainly still important but by no means the only kind of society that counts, there is a widespread human rights consensus that any society in which the dignity of the individual is violated is a bad society and will be subject to all kinds of criticism. There are people in every society who strongly believe that. The notion that the earth is kind of sacred and that the violation of our atmosphere is something wrong, deeply wrong—almost like Calvinistic sin—is a view that transcends any nation and is shared by millions all over the earth. To the extent that there is something which you can call a global society, I would argue that you are going to find some global beliefs because those two things, sociologically speaking, always go together. Shared notions of the sacred—the sacredness of the dignity of the individual, the sacredness of the earth—are what Paul Tillich called “the dimension of depth.” It's there in every sphere of life.
Sociologically, from a Durkheimian point of view, this assumes that there is a collectivity. That’s the whole point, of course. If there were no collectivity, we would just be reduced to a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Let's move on to political Islam. I'd like to get your views on militant secularism and the Danish cartoon controversy. The motive behind that cartoon, it seems to me, was not particularly admirable. Taking on those things in Islam that are considered highly sacred and making fun of them is a way of taunting. José Casanova, professor of sociology at Georgetown, who has written extensively on political religion in the modern world, points out that the things that the Europeans are saying about Islam are very similar to the things that Americans said about Catholics in the late 19th, early 20th century—it’s undemocratic, its loyalty is to external forces, it undermines our values, it’s bad. It wasn’t long ago that many Christians, not only in Europe but even in this country, thought that the Jews were “undermining” Western civilization and were a real serious problem. So this anti-Muslim thing is an old story that we have been through before.
But on the other side you have radical jihadists who say exactly the same kind of thing about what they imagine is the threat of the secular West: that secularism is out to destroy what is good and valuable and decent about their culture. It’s charming, though, that the jihadists, particularly the al-Qaeda variety, have killed many more Muslims than they have non-Muslims. They particularly hate Shiites. They hate the regimes in power in the Middle East. They hate the Saudi regime. They hate the Egyptian regime. America is bad primarily because it supports these people they hate at home.
But then there are other jihadists who say that America has a covert Christian agenda. They aver that secularism doesn’t really exist, that civilizations are fundamentally religious, and that America’s secularism is really a Christian secularism—a point not that different from yours or Taylor’s. Actually, it’s historically true. Secularism as such emerged only in one place—namely, the West. Islam showed no indigenous movement that you could call secular. There have been secular Arabs and Iranians and so on, but they have been educated in Western schools and they have picked up their secularism from the West. And there are many pious Muslims, who have been called Muslim modernists, who, too, have accepted the idea of separation of church and state or mosque and state. But that was a Western idea. It didn’t come out of Islamic tradition. This is true in India and it’s true in East Asia. The whole idea of secularism is modern and Western. So it’s doubly alien when you move outside the West.
The religious right in the United States doesn't seem to be aware of this history either. They see secular politics and culture as the enemy of religion, in much the way that someone like Abouhalima, the Muslim jihadi, thinks of secularism being the enemy of religion. Fundamentalism is an America invention in the early decades of the 20th century. It was not really so much a war against secularism per se as it was a war between groups which considered themselves Christian. Some Protestants were upset about other Protestants besides them who had been too influenced by secular ideas, who were too liberal. Religious people want to be the ones who have it right and all the other religious people have it wrong.
It’s interesting to me, the rise of the religious right in a country whose secular values are permeated with the values of the Christian tradition. As you know, as your writings have pointed out, much of this has to do with questions of identity. People feel that their sense of who they are is being undermined by the society in which they live, and they hold onto certain kinds of religious beliefs in order to affirm their own sense of self-respect and dignity.
They would be shocked to learn that their own motives for their extreme religiosity is not religious, but really more sociological. A former student of mine, in teaching the sociology of religion, handed out a little questionnaire just to get a sense of who was in the class. Among other things, it asked for religious identity: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and so on, and “Other.” A significant number of his students put down “Christian” under “Other.” They didn’t know about the history in which Christians were divided between Catholics and Protestants. They didn’t know what Protestantism was. Yet they embrace certain identities that they are ready to fight other people about.
That’s everybody’s problem in an era of globalization—when we can all live everywhere, and do. The sense of having a history, a tradition, a grounded community—it can be very fragile. So you hold onto certain fetishes. What is the headscarf thing—this need to focus the whole meaning of the Sharia on whether or not you wear a headscarf? It's like the Christian right in this country focusing so much of its attention on abortion, which was never an issue until quite recently—or gay marriage, which was certainly not a focus. Early in the 20th century, they were against not only drinking—they were behind Prohibition—but also against dancing and divorce. Those were the defining issues that told them who they were. What big evangelical preacher is going to get away with attacking divorce every week these days, when half his congregation is divorced? So these preoccupations change. They have no rooting whatsoever in the New Testament, but they become the hot-button issues that define who is good and who is bad, in a particular era.
In one of your articles, you thought a global religion was unlikely. But isn’t there a possibility of a kind of global civil society, in the sense of shared values, a sense of common citizens of this planet? Jürgen Habermas and other European intellectuals have argued that we need to build a global civil society. As I mentioned before, part of what would make it viable are some common beliefs or commitments to human rights, democracy, and ecology. All of these things are out there bubbling and burbling away. And we badly need a global civil society—for one thing, to keep the economy from destroying us. Our international bodies are weak compared to the extraordinary power of the global economy. Concentrated centers of economic and political power go their own way, pretty much disregarding all these things.
If there is going to be a global civil society, how would you envision it: as a collection of concerned citizens interacting in some way, or with some kind of religious character or depth? When you speak of “one religion,” “religion” tends to be interpreted in the traditional sense—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, or something. No, we are not going to have a global religion in that sense. I don’t think that what we call the world religions, the great traditions, are going to disappear into some global homogeneity. The great civilizations continue to be separate, to some degree—though not nearly as separate as Huntington imagined; they don’t necessarily have to clash. But they have values that will probably survive. There is going to be a balance between what unites us and what is pluralistic, and hopefully, mutually tolerant and mutually intelligible. As you know, there have been a lot of Muslim intellectuals who have been working on a Muslim version of human rights that will not simply copy Western liberalism, but will look for sources in the Sharia, in the Islamic tradition, that will also affirm these common beliefs. They are not going to stop being Muslims, although they can find some common ground with other groups.
Who would have thought that a tiny little Jewish sect that was by no means terribly popular when it began in the Roman world would take off and become a kind of global religion, embracing all kinds of perspectives and cultures and absorb even paganism within its culture and its rituals and beliefs? If it could happen to Christianity, could it also happen to Islam? Could you imagine a kind of offshoot of Islam that is broad enough, that could be a big tent and embrace people who had previously thought of themselves as Christians or secularists? No, I don’t think so. Both Christianity and Islam claim to be universal religions, but they were never universal religions. They always bumped up against people that said, “Get the hell out of here. We don’t want to become like you.” They were more successful with tribal peoples than they were with some of the high civilizations. If you look at the Sassanid Empire before it was destroyed by Islam in the 7th century, you find a great Persian culture that made Zoroastrianism into a state religion very much to say, “We are not Christians.” They were often at war with Byzantium. Unfortunately, Zoroastrianism and early Christianity undermined each other so that the Muslims could take over both. But in any case, I don’t think the kind of so-called world religions we have seen in the past will be replicated by some new world religion. That seems to me extremely unlikely. It will be a question of another level of common understanding that will not eclipse the previous traditions.
And probably a kind of extension of what we have thought of as secular culture in the West? Yes, no question. The Iranian dissidents today, though they are still very pious Muslims, know that this kind of fusion of church and state is deadly—that they will never have democracy until they have a separation.
But the old religions are not going gently. I don’t think they have to go at all. I think they have to adjust and change, as they always have. There is no religion that hasn’t changed constantly. I think they will continue to be part of the global conversation.
—Interview conducted by Mark Juergensmeyer, edited and condensed by Mary-Lea Cox
Print This Page
Subscribe to our Newsfeed
Get our monthly Council Update
