in general, we must conclude that ritual practices can encode very different ways of being in the world.

Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy

In approaching issues of ritual density, it has been customary to distinguish the degree to which religious traditions put an emphasis either on correct belief in theological doctrines or on correct performance of behavioral responsibilities. The first style of religion is known as “orthodoxic,” from the Greek words orthos (correct, right, straight) and doxa (belief, thought, opinion). The second style is called “orthopraxic,” from the Greek praxis, meaning “correct action.”46 As a result of the dominance of Christianity in much of the West, which has tended to stress matters of doctrinal and theological orthodoxy, people may take it for granted that religion is primarily a matter of what one believes.47 Yet in many religious traditions, concerns for what a person believes are often subsumed within more embracing concerns to live according to a code of behavior, a code that usually includes multiple ritual responsibilities. Whether a community is deemed orthodoxic or orthopraxic can only be a matter of emphasis, of course, since no religious tradition can promote belief or ritual at the total expense of the other, and many would never distinguish between them at all. Moreover, whatever the overall emphasis in a tradition as a whole, it is easy to find subcommunities stressing the opposite pole. As with the typologies discussed before, terms like “orthodoxy” or “orthopraxy” cannot be used effectively if accorded too much rigidity or exclusivity. Nor can they be used to suggest that one style is more truly religious than the other; the differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy appear to emerge primarily from social organization and history, not the degree or purity of religiosity. Nonetheless, these can be useful terms for understanding aspects of the density, style, and domains of ritual in the life of a religious community.

Orthopraxy may well be the more common situation for religious communities, seeming to dominate wherever religion, culture, and national or ethnic identity are closely intertwined. Orthodoxy, by contrast, tends to be the emphasis of religions that are concerned, for various reasons, to break down or transcend such links, and keep religious orientation from being subsumed into a particular political-social identity. So-called world religions, religions that have grown beyond the regions where they originated, crossing a variety of cultural boundaries while seeking to maintain the sense of a coherent tradition and an embracing community of the faithful, are apt to evolve an emphasis on orthodoxic belief over orthopraxic action. The logic of this is not hard to see. In tribal or local societies, which tend to be relatively closed and homogeneous, religion is not something separate from community identity, ethnic customs, political institutions, and social traditions. Beliefs are rarely formulated and spelled out in these circumstances, and they do not need to be. It is the formal and informal customs and obligations—namely, ritual responsibilities like attending to the ancestors, arranging the marriage of one’s children, and participating in communal festivities—that define one as a civilized member of this type of community. The historian of comparative religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith suggests that “what theology is to the Christian Church, a ritual dance may be to an African tribe,”

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namely, their way of formulating how the human is linked to the divine. The way in which people are religious cannot be separated from the nature of their society and type of expressive media on which that society relies.48

Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, is an example of orthopraxic tradition. A highly diffused religion up until the late 19th century, Shinto did not have a name for itself until Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 6th century to provide a challenging contrast. It is primarily a religion of ritual observances, formal and informal acts of purification, exorcism, appeasement, and celebration. Shinto’s understanding of the nature of the divine is closely intertwined with these observances, and there is little formulation of doctrine or theology as such. Despite some modern attempts at doctrinal codification, Shinto remains today primarily a means of ritual interaction with the cosmos.49 Hinduism is a rather different type of example. Over the centuries what is called Hinduism has embodied a tremendous diversity of practice, including a rich and multifaceted tradition of theological and even atheological speculation. While on one level it is usually understood that the more embracing theological formulations point to something in common to all forms of Hinduism, it has remained fundamentally a religion of ritual observances with relatively less emphasis on doctrine or belief. So, while atheism is included as an acceptable position in Hinduism, what is not acceptable and effectively casts one outside the bounds of this loose and inclusive tradition is disrespect for the Vedas, the ancient and authoritative ritual texts that are understood to be the root of Indian civilization.50

Orthodoxic and orthopraxic traditions do not have an easy time understanding each other. Christians have traditionally criticized Judaism for what looked like an excessive concern with ritual with a perspective that sees the orthodoxic style as normative.51 The terms “creed” or “faith” have long been very acceptable substitutes for the term “religion” in Europe and America, as in “people of all creeds and faiths,” yet they clearly assume the priority of doctrine and belief. As a highly orthopraxic tradition, Judaism is said to lack any term for theology. In Hebrew, the word for religion is dath, originally meaning “law” and denoting adherence to prescribed and proscribed activities, which is essentially what religion has meant in Judaism until the modern period.52 Although ancient Judaism distinguished itself from its neighbors by its avowal of monotheism, one God over and instead of many gods, this idea was not understood as a theological principle so much as a rule about who and what one could worship. Exclusive ritual practices came to define what it meant to be a

Jew. Particularly after the destruction of the second Temple of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile of the Jews from the city that had been a locus of their ritual life, Jewish identity increasingly came to depend on a growing body of formulated laws known as Halakah. The laws were the means by which sacred scripture, Torah, could be applied to every aspect of daily life: marriage and sexuality, children, food, social relations, legal concerns, and so on. As a corpus of laws prescribing what and how things should be done, Halakah made no effort to theologize. According to the historian of Judaism Jacob Neusner, what Christians spelled out in theological writings, rabbinic scholars “wholly encapsulated in descriptions of ritual.”53

Comparable in various ways to Christian monastic orders, rabbinic Judaism attempted to ritually prescribe or circumscribe almost every act. Nowadays, such intense ritualization of daily life is maintained only among those groups called the

haredim, some of whom have actually increased their stringency in recent generations.54 Haredim is usually translated as “ultra-orthodox,” but this is certainly something of a misnomer, according to Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman:

“strictly speaking, the term Orthodox is inappropriate because what distinguishes those Jews who have come to be called ‘Orthodox’ is not doxa, belief, but rather practices and a way of life punctiliously attached to ritual. It denotes a population that is generally identifiable as championing tradition and ritual orthopraxis in the situation of modernity.”55 From the order in which to put on one’s shoes in the morning to the days on which one can speak to one’s spouse, ultra-orthodox obedience to the laws of Halakah, which often actually exceed the letter of these laws, is understood to be the way in which one worships God and proclaims a true embodiment of religious values. Such a life is known as “Torah-true,” a model to those in the community and an accusation to those who have left for greater laxity.56

Such stringent ritualization has the powerful effect of tightly binding one to a small community of like-minded people. Indeed, one of the salient features of extreme ritualization appears to be a high-profile identity as a tight-knit group of true followers, a position that heightens the contrast and ill fit with other groups. On the one hand, this can result in a sharply differentiated sense of groupism that may lead to factional fighting among tiny sects competing in stringency; on the other hand, many of the more extreme forms of orthopraxy are, in fact, the very means by which a group heightens and maintains its internal group identity, often in the face of more diffused and complacent communities. When Jews were finally allowed to claim citizenship in late-19th-century Europe and could began to assimilate, tensions developed between those staying faithful to the old food and dress codes that set them off and those who sought interpretations of traditional law that would legitimate more relaxed and pragmatic forms of adherence. Some scholars suggest that this historical situation generated a polarization in which both tendencies became more extreme in reaction to each other—one group going in the direction of increasing stringency in obeying the law, the other in the direction of increasingly flexible interpretation.57

A number of studies have attempted to chart degrees of adherence to traditional law in various ultraconservative Jewish communities. Solomon Poll’s classic study of the Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, argued that the stratification of the Hasidic community is unlike any other American community, since it is based not on wealth, lineage, occupation, or education but on the frequency and intensity of ritual observance: “The greater the number of rituals and the more intensely they are observed, the greater the esteem accorded a person.” These rites can be public or private. If private, they can start with one’s first waking minutes: “A religious Jew upon awakening must rise immediately and be ready to serve his Creator before evil inclinations can prevail. He must wash his hands in a ritual manner, taking the vessel first in the right hand and then in the left; then he must spill the water with the left hand upon the right and then, in reverse, from his right hand upon the left, repeating this performance three times.”58 Other ritual observances involve circumcision; stipulated forms of dress, including shorn hair and a head covering for married women, and covered heads in public for men, who also wear fringes (tzitzit) under their outer clothes; the degree or length of fasting on special days; the degree of obedience to the laws of kashrut concerning kosher food and its preparation; the degree

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of compliance with Sabbath laws that forbid all work, entertainment, and travel except by foot, but require attendance at services and the study of religious texts; and the regularity of observance of the ritual bath (mikveh) for married women after each menstrual period.59

Ritual in an orthopraxic tradition is an integral part of a holistic religiocultural way of life. Such orthopraxic traditions are experienced as cultural communities— often defined in ethnic or racial terms—to which one automatically belongs by birth. Hence, to be a Jew, one need only be born of a Jewish mother. But to be a good Jew, for some, one must observe local Jewish customs that signal one’s alliance with this community and tradition. As an orthopraxic community, Judaism does not see itself as a world religion seeking to convert others but as a people maintaining a rich heritage in the face of pressures to assimilate and accommodate. In this context, ritual activities are a medium for sustaining that heritage. Although more conservative subgroups tend to stress preservation of the tradition as it is, while more liberal subgroups stress adaptation of the tradition to new concerns, both use ritual to perpetuate Jewishness as culture, spirituality, and peoplehood.60

The style of ritual found in orthodoxic traditions can differ dramatically from orthopraxic traditions. Since orthodoxic rituals are frequently concerned with avowing theological ideas and creedal statements, they often explicitly connect particular doctrines to what is being done in ritual. This can involve a formal restatement of key beliefs, as in the Christian creed (“I believe in God the Father Almighty” of the

Apostles’ Creed) or the Islamic duty to “witness” (the shahada, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet”). Ritual in orthodoxic communities may provoke theological speculation that can influence the future formulation of beliefs and even lead to changes in the ritual. Yet despite the importance, and perhaps even the historical priority, of central rituals, orthodoxic traditions tend to cast them as somewhat secondary, as expressions of things that should already be in the heart. While this secondary status does not automatically make all orthodox rites more flexible, the ritual corpus is not tied to a single, monolithic cultural tradition concerned to maintain its identity. As the expression of theological ideas, change may be rationalized more easily.

An understanding of ritual as a somewhat secondary complement to beliefs can be both a strength and a weakness: it is a strength in that the relative flexibility of the ritual tradition allows it to travel, adapt, and speak to other cultural groups, but it can be a weakness due to the vulnerability of such rites to challenges addressed to the central belief system. Hence, being a Christian has meant, for a good part of

Christian history, that one believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Although there is a humorous acknowledgment of “cultural Christianity” and “cultural Catholicism,” it is not sufficient simply to be born of Christian parents or raised in a Christian home.

All Christian churches would hold that a personal commitment is required. Therefore, a person born and raised in a Christian environment who does not believe in the central ideas of Christianity is likely to feel that he or she has little reason to continue involvement in its ritual and communal life. It is interesting to speculate whether an orthodoxic emphasis is also not more likely to lead to criticism of ritual as empty and meaningless, a view that makes it particularly difficult to understand more orthopraxic communities.

As religious communities expand, sometimes coming to include cultural groups quite different from the one in which the religion originated, there is often a deemphasizing of orthopraxic ritual customs in favor of more cross-culturally manageable orthodoxic beliefs. Christianity experienced something of this in its early development, as did Islam. However, Islam maintained a central and important tension between an Arabic revelation for an Arabic-speaking people, which is a tendency toward orthopraxy further evidenced in the development of Islamic law, and a universal mission to convert all people, which is a tendency toward orthodoxy further evidenced in the importance of personal submission to a radical monotheism. Indeed, the histories of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are full of times when the tendency to be a highly prescriptive religion for the few and thereby maintain tradition and a clear identity has come into conflict with a tendency toward flexibility that could allow the religion to be embraced and appropriated by increasingly different communities.

In Judaism, the emergence of sectarian differences in how to be Jewish—Re- form, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox—has given rise to the heated religiojudicial issue of “who is a Jew.” The issue of conversion has always been a particularly contentious one in Judaism, going back as far as the Roman occupation of Judea and the subsequent diaspora, even though conversions were rather frequent and sometimes plentiful. According to Shaye Cohen, the incorporation of converts into the Jewish community is still a “challenge,” and the “major obstacle to their integration is the fact that we Jews see ourselves as members of an ethnos or nation or tribe, a people linked by descent from a common set of ancestors.” At least, he continues, “we like to pretend that we are a single people.”61 If Cohen is right, this vision is a matter of constantly trying to create singleness in the face of the multiple forms of Judaism that emerged in the diaspora and even more dramatically in the last two hundred years. It is a vision that has raised difficult questions for the state of

Israel, which wants to see itself as a national state among other states and as the primary representative of the larger world community of Jews.62

Yet Israeli national identity does not always fit easily with the tradition of Jews as a single, if scattered, people. In 1983 the Reform branch of American Judaism rescinded the ancient halakic rule that to be a Jew meant one had to be born of a Jewish mother. They decided that children of mixed marriages in which either parent was Jewish would be considered Jews “if they participated in appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.”63 So, while the ruling overturned a hallowed piece of tradition, it maintained an emphasis on an orthopraxic definition of the peoplehood of the Jews. Yet Jews recognized as such under this Reform ruling are not necessarily recognized by other Jewish sects. The issue became controversial for Israel when it adopted the Law of Return in 1950, which gave the right to immigrate to Israel to any halakic Jew (i.e., born of a Jewish mother) or any convert who does not profess another faith. In ruling on who is Jewish and eligible to immigrate to Israel, both the secular Israeli Supreme Court and the Israeli rabbinic courts have refused citizenship to halakic Jews (i.e., born of a Jewish mother) who converted to Catholicism or accepted aspects of Christianity. Some critics argue that this ruling not only weakens halakic identity and the orthopraxic bond of “public and formal acts of identification” but also threatens to adopt the type

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of orthodoxic criteria (i.e., belief) indicative of Christianity itself. For such critics, the traditional bonds of orthopraxy were also undermined when both courts ruled to recognize Ethiopian Jews, despite great differences in religious practice. This ruling led to Operation Solomon, a 1984 airlift of more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in order to escape war and famine. Yet after their warm reception, the assimilation of these culturally very different Jews has led to hard questions concerning longstanding Ethiopian customs that do not accord with Halakah, such as religious leaders whose roles and expertise do not fit traditional rabbinic requirements.

Islam, as noted previously, also presents an interesting tension between orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Basic to Islam is the practice of the five pillars: shahada, the witness that “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet”; salat, prayers said five times daily facing Mecca; zakat, almsgiving as an act of worship and thanksgiving; sawm, fasting, which is particularly observed during the month of Ramadan; and hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca by all those who are physically and economically able to make the trip. Obligatory for all Muslims, the pillars establish the fundamental common denominator underlying a far-flung Islamic community. While all five are considered “acts of worship” and suggest an emphasis on orthopraxy, the first can also be seen as an act of faith, a declaration of right and true belief that certainly has been central to Islam.64 In keeping with this dual emphasis, various Muslim scholars and writers through history, often described as philosopher-theologians, have decried the dangers of theology. According to Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), “The Qur’an is like food, profitable for everyone, but theology (kalam) is like medicine, profitable for some but deleterious for most people.”65 Theological speculation should remain an activity of the scholarly elite, while teachings on correct practice should guide the masses. Of course, this view was shared by many leaders of the

Roman church at that time.

The orthopraxic equivalent of heresy in Islam is the failure to adhere to religious and political norms of behavior prevailing within the community, making one a subversive dissident.66 By this definition, the “blasphemy” for which the writer Salman

Rushdie was accused by the mullahs of Iran in 1989 was rather atypical and something of a challenge to the traditional system. Some Iranian mullahs in exile did not hesitate to criticize as both illegitimate and specious the Ayatollah Khomeini’s formal decree calling for the assassination of Rushdie. They argued that only a court of

Islamic law can issue such a fatwa, and it would be issued after due process only to make “a general statement of opinion on a particular matter,” not to “condemn a specific person.”67

Although Christianity is generally considered a prime example of an orthodox tradition, it is by no means without orthopraxic subcultures. For groups like the Amish and Mennonites, a way of life that is largely at odds with the surrounding culture and even the rest of Christendom is a primary symbolic act of religiosity and identity. Mary Douglas fondly describes an Irish community in London as a similar type of orthopraxic community. As an island of Irish Catholics living in the midst of British Protestantism, the so-called Bog Irish are a highly ritualized community. Their prime defining act has been the Catholic taboo against eating meat on Friday, which establishes allegiance to what in London has been something of a despised culture.

In this social context, the act of eating fish instead of meat on Fridays has come to be