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the radical Catholicism and Protestant evangelicalism of South America, the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland in the years before the dissolution of the Soviet empire, and the influence of the Christian Moral Majority in America, as well as the many civil wars (Ireland, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and so on) ostensibly being fought in the name of religion. For Douglas, theories of modernization had gotten it all wrong. Since the 1980s, most scholars have absorbed the lesson, and recent analyses of secularism have been less sweeping and more selfreflective. Yet there is still a prominent tendency to depict the replacement of good, communal religion by an introverted, narcissistic spiritualism of the sort that Bellah identified as “Sheilaism.”85 If, in some fundamental way, we continue to see “modernity” as antithetical to religion and ritual, it may be due in part to how we have been defining religion.86 For example, Gallup polls on declining church attendance have not asked about people’s attendance at weddings and funerals or the civic or occupational rituals—such as weekly participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, Labor

Day cookouts, ethnic festival activities, and Earth Day demonstrations—that have become important to the lives of many people and communities. Indeed, a greater percentage of Americans probably celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christ- mas—in some fashion—than ever before.87 While secular societies do experience a shift in traditional patterns of religious life, it is not at all obvious that religion or ritual declines.

Oral and Literate

Most theories of ritual have been rooted in ethnographic observations of oral societies. While such ethnography underscores the fact that there is nothing simple or primitive about such ritual systems, it can be convincingly argued that the ritual life of oral societies differs in significant ways from that of societies in which writing, literacy, the printing press, and, increasingly, computers have defined new forms of authority and community. Cultural change, for example, is thought to take different forms in these two types of societies. On one hand, the transmission of myth in stable oral societies tends to involve constant adaptation that keeps the myth in a “homeostatic” relationship with the concerns of the community. The presence of written texts, especially written records, on the other hand, introduces new dynamics: departures from the text as well as variation among texts are readily apparent, producing the sense of a breach between then and now, or here and there. Such ruptures can cause conflict, contradiction, a spirit of critical scrutiny of received knowledge, and the incentive to try to overcome historical time.88

In a study of the transmission of royal genealogies in premodern Tahiti, Van

Baaren demonstrates the homeostatic relationship in oral societies between the mythembodied value system and day-to-day life. Because the traditional Tahitian noble houses claimed direct descent from divine beings, genealogies were important to legitimate the reigning chief’s claim to the throne. These genealogies were embedded in myths ceremonially recited at important festivals; it was understood that the recitation could not contain any errors or the priest who made the mistake could be executed. This severe prohibition appeared to guarantee to most people’s satisfac-

tion that the oral genealogical record was protected from mistakes and manipulations. However, when political events caused the dynasty to change, the traditional myth had to be brought into accord with the new political situation. To do so, the priests made small, unobtrusive errors every time they recited it until it was fully adapted. Officially nothing changed; in actuality, the genealogy was changing almost all the time.89

As this story suggests, change may be construed as a constant and relatively unproblematic occurrence in oral societies because the closest thing to an Ur-myth,

Ur-genealogy, or Ur-ritual resides only in people’s memories, as competing variants, always embodied in a particular situation. Changes can be routinely made in ritual since, without records that cast one version as original or true, such changes are easily ignored or rationalized. Van Baaren also cites the case of the Dayak of Borneo, who had the custom of making a foundation sacrifice when erecting important buildings like the community’s longhouse. A slave was placed in the hole dug for the main pillar of the house and killed when the pillar was pounded into place. Dutch colonial administraters, however, prohibited this practice. Hence, the ritual had to be modified: a water buffalo was sacrificed in the pit instead of a slave, and the myth altered to explain that in the time of the ancestors a slave who was thrown into the pit had turned into a water buffalo.90 Of course, this story does not mean that no one noticed or cared about the difference in the rites. It was undoubtedly a major problem at first requiring a great deal of discussion and negotiation, although a consensus was eventually reached on how to amend things. However, the issue of “truthfulness” as a matter of conforming to what exactly happened at some point in the past was probably not the issue that was most important for this oral community. Rather, the coherent and effective maintenance of tradition would have taken priority.

The role of myth and ritual in oral societies is to enhance, enforce, and codify cultural attitudes—something they can do best if they are continually brought into some sort of fit with the current circumstances of the community. How effective the ritual modifications will be depends on many other circumstances beyond the ritual arena per se. There is evidence that not all components of a rite can change equally well or easily.91 Moreover, various units of the community can play an important role in maintaining adherence to remembered conventions or ratifying departures from custom. In this social context, the authority of the ritual expert and the authority of the ritual itself are rooted in tradition—yet tradition is something that exists nowhere but in its flexible embodiment in memory and in current cultural life. Ritual must have both a convincing continuity with remembered rites and a convincing coherence with community life. As one of the most visible and conservative embodiments of tradition in oral societies, ritual ratifies “the traditional” in general even as it recreates and revises it in the specifics of each performance.

Research on the effects of writing and literacy suggest that the emergence of literate social classes has important ramifications for ritual practice, the sense of tradition, and the locus of ritual authority. First of all, written records lead to what can be called a historical consciousness, the realization that today is different from yesterday, that practices, attitudes, and circumstances of today differ significantly from what they were in the past that is visible in unchanging records. Writing opens up a practical and metaphysical gap between then and now.92 Second, writing down what

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people are doing or should be doing creates an account that is easily taken as normative and prescriptive. Ritual practice is deemed most correct and effective if it conforms to these normative guidelines. In this way, ritual can become a matter of enacting a canon of written guidelines. Indeed, with the emergence of authoritative texts and the sense of an historical gap, tradition itself comes to be understood differently: no longer directly embodied in custom and actual practice, tradition is now that which is described in and represented by texts; it is something to be reproduced as stipulated, to preserve, and protect from change. As the historical gap widens, the need to link immutable historical sources with very mutable living communities gives rise to complex institutions of interpretion and experts to mediate past and present. Authority tends to reside in written rules and, by extension, in those who know, elucidate, and apply them. Written religion, suggests anthropologist Jack Goody, heightens social stratification by differentiating the priest to whom the written word belongs from the rest of the people, who receive instruction.93 As writing redefines a tradition’s locus of socioreligious authority, ritual is no longer a matter of doing what it seems people have always done; it becomes the correct performance or enactment of the textual script. The audience has little right or opportunity to approve or disapprove, since only those who have access to the texts know whether it is being done correctly.

In this framework, prayers are “recited” or “repeated,” the liturgy is “followed” or

“read,” and aging linguistic forms can create a separate and professional liturgical language.

In an oral society, the embodiment of tradition can flexibly change to keep pace with the community and win people’s assent as remaining true to tradition and appropriate to the current climate. Ritual can change without necessarily being very concerned with change as such. In literate societies with written models, however, change itself easily becomes a problem that is viewed as a threaten to tradition and authority. On the one hand, textually based ritual traditions can more readily forestall and control change because of the power of the authoritative text to act as a measure of deviance. On the other hand, the textual medium affords greater access to liturgical knowledge and more explicit challenges to its meaning, legitimacy, or originality; ultimately it helps to promote the rise of contending forms of expertise. In comparison to oral societies, therefore, change in literate societies is much more apt to be deliberate, debated, ridden with factions, explosive, and concerned with fundamentals. In other words, in literate societies change can be very untidy.

The textualization of ritual, that is, the emergence of authoritative textual guidelines, can be linked to a number of other developments as well, such as the ascendancy of increasingly universal formulations of values over more local and particularistic formulations; the organization of larger, more centralized, and bureaucratic institutions; and the formation of notions of orthodoxy versus heterodoxy in tandem with the codification of dogma. Hence, textually based ritual can lead to tensions between a centralized liturgical tradition that abides by written norms and local ritual life that maintains continuity with oral customs. Indeed, orality is never completely displaced by literacy, and many aspects of social life remain predominantly oral. This can create contending levels and types of ritual experts, such as literate experts with official positions and local folk experts with closer ties to localized subcommunities.94

Despite the abundance of ethnographic studies of ritual in predominantly oral societies, it is important to note that we do not know nearly as much as we should about ritual in literate, stratified, industrial, and postindustrial societies.95 While some aspects of ritual in modern America and Europe appear similar to aspects of Ndembu ritual life as chronicled by Victor Turner, many other dimensions are clearly quite different—including the whole general place and style of ritual. While the far-ranging effects of literacy can explain some differences, the effects of very different economic and political structures are equally important and dramatic. Ethnographic models in which ritual is a central form of cultural production are probably poorly equipped to deal with the divisions of labor, class, knowledge, and ethnicity found in complex political economies.96 Despite the fact that distinctions between oral and literate societies are necessarily provisional, and the fact that many literate societies are complex tapestries of both types of cultural transmission, the oral-literate contrast has helped to illuminate important dimensions of the data for the study of ritual and will continue to influence how such studies are constructed in the future.

Church, Sect, and Cult

After Max Weber raised the distinction between church and sect to the level of formal terminology, his colleague Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) developed it into a complete classification system that identifies the distinctive religious features for each.

Many scholars have tinkered with the distinction since then, variously elaborating, modifying, criticizing, and simplifying it. In general, churches are understood to be open, inclusive, and often bureaucratic institutions into which one is usually born; they basically abide by and help promote the values of the larger society in which they exist. In contrast, sects are smaller, less stable, and more exclusive movements that either break away from churches or develop autonomously; in both cases they tend to reject or greatly qualify the values of the church and the society at large. One usually joins a sect voluntarily instead of being born into it, and its demand for a strong and exclusive commitment fosters both its rejection of the status quo and its sense of religious revitalization.97

Some scholars have argued that there is a dynamism to these types of religious organizations by which small unstable sects gradually become more churchlike until new discontent within spins off a fresh sectarian rebellion that will also in time take on the features of a church. Others have pointed to a possible continuum of tension between a religious organization and its social environment, ranging from the lack of tension with society seen in most churches to sects that operate in total critical disdain for social conventions and laws.98 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge find it useful to distinguish between those groups that arise spontaneously using new or imported ideas, which they call cults, and those that develop through schism from a larger institution, which they call sects.99

Within the framework of these general distinctions, ritual life can differ markedly in churches, sects, and cults. Typically, a church has a fairly fixed and codified liturgical life claiming a long lineage rooted in tradition, divine models, canonical

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texts, or all of these things. Those churches that were originally schismatic sects often define themselves by critical differences in liturgy as well as theology. Hence, their founding liturgical formulations are central to what the group stands for and, as a result, may never be seriously questioned again. In a church, ritual experts are formally trained by means of accredited training that distinguishes various levels of competency and service. In tandem with the bureaucratic and worldly structure of the institution, therefore, the ethos of church-based ritual life tends to be hierarchical, with fixed roles for specially designated professionals, and some distance between these experts and the rest of the community. There are also fixed ritual events in the calendrical year with specially designated services and celebrations. Indeed, as an institution solidly identified with the social status quo, there is a tendency to emphasize calendrical and periodic ritual over rites that respond to unique or occasional situations. The content of the rituals is apt to address a somewhat hierarchical universe of religious power within which the ritual expert intercedes for the whole church, conceived as a nearly universal community, with somewhat less attention to the concerns of the local community or the immediate experiences of the individuals at the service. In this way, the local community sees itself as part of a much larger whole—a whole that is the church, the society, the rhythms of nature, and the order of the universe itself. Concomitantly, ritual life also affirms or ignores, rather than challenges, the values of the larger society, such as national loyalty, separation of church and state, and basic economic arrangements from valuing labor to tolerating the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Churches may sponsor missionary activities, giving a sense of dynamism and growth to the settled communities who raise money for such efforts, but in foreign locales the liturgical life of the church has more trouble being consonant with social values.

Sectarian movements often break with a church institution over the latter’s worldliness and the concomitant corruption of its original ideals. Hence, the sect sees itself as inaugurating a “return” to a more original purity and simplicity of vision that by its nature constitutes a challenge to current society. In ritual terms, this often means a modification of liturgy in ways that favor less hierarchy and expertise.

There may be a greater emphasis on individual experience and participation, instead of the passivity of an “audience.” There is likely to be a valuation of spirit over the formality of rules and procedures. The rites may be emotional and spontaneous, or they may be reflective and meditative, but in either case their efficacy is seen as dependent on the active participation of the believers, even if they must simply open themselves to divine grace. In other words, sectarian ritual is not an autonomous apparatus, in contrast to church-based ritual, which can act to mediate human and divine by delivering sacraments, grace, or the Word of God to those who come to attend it. Sectarian rites also work to bind the immediate local community together by virtue of a heightened intimacy and a sense of being a distinct and spirit-filled community in opposition to so much around them. The ritual life of the group emphasizes the importance of personal decision and a commitment to break with the outer world for the sake of the community and movement. Hence, sectarian ritual activities are more likely to revolve around initiations and responses to immediate needs rather than predictable calendrical events.

The ritual life of cults can be quite idiosyncratic, the product of more individual syntheses, which might range from maintaining an audience for the teacher-leader to complex disciplinary regimens. In Stark and Bainbridge’s usage, cults emerge independently of other religious groups; they are not schismatic like sects are. Hence, cults tend to see themselves not in opposition to a particular established group but more generally to society as a whole. This tension is often understood as a correlate of beliefs in an approaching Armageddon, a definitive point in time when the forces of good and evil will have their final confrontation. The cult may develop this millennial vision in various ways, both benign and ominous, assigning themselves the role of waiting it out, instigating it, or alerting humankind that the hour of truth is coming. Due to this vision and the underlying sense of an imminent end to the status quo, the ritual life of cults is not particularly developed or systematic. They are not interested in building structures but in discerning important revelations and making preparations for what is to come. Some initiatory activities, usually more ad hoc than traditional, emphasize loyalty to the leader, rejection of the world, and membership among the chosen. Corporate activities may heighten identification with the group, but often less so than in many sectarian settings. Here the group itself is temporary, a vehicle for “crossing over,” although the leader as the source of revelation and instructions is indispensable.

Cults often involve communal living arrangements for some components of the core group. There are likely to be evening gatherings for teaching, revelation, and prophesy, for sharing, confessing, disciplining, or meditation and communal chanting. The idiom of being a “family” makes sense in this context and also legitimates the role played by a dominant leader, analogously understood to be the father or the mother of the group. Aspects of these features can be identified in the extremely antisocial activities of Charles Manson’s “Family”; in the People’s Temple founded by Jim Jones, who orchestrated the mass suicide of more than nine hundred followers in Guyana in 1978; and in the Branch Davidian movement led by David Koresh, who was killed with many of his followers when government agents attacked their compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. However, rather peaceful groups also display this cult structure, including some subgroups of the Hare Krishnas, members of the

Rajneesh International Foundation, and even the Unification Church under Sun Myung Moon.100 In addition, the category of cult can legitimately include third-world

“cargo cults” and UFO clubs in America. In most cases, such groups do not deserve the derogatory connotations the term can have in the popular press. Although some cults clearly become dangerous when their leaders have too much authority and power, Jonathan Z. Smith points out that the religious fanatic so vividly vilified in the newspapers is not always so different from the visionary hero we are apt to revere when safely lost in history.101 Ultimately, according to Stark and Bainbridge, cults are important for their creative influence on more conventional forms of religion, even though few of them grow into “full-blown religious movements.”102 Usually occurring on the margins of society—although cults in successful middle-class communities have been documented—various analyses indebted to Victor Turner’s terminology find they provide the liminal antistructural experiences of communitas, inversion, and experimentation that are needed to renew the structures of mainstream culture.103

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The historical evidence suggests that cults may have always performed this function and as such have been indispensable to the richness of religious cultures.

No matter how flexibly it is used, the church-sect-cult typology does not seem to account for many features of the more significant changes of the last two decades in religious organizations and their rituals. For example, while American liberal mainline churches—namely, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Baptist Churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist

Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)—have lost membership since the mid-1960s, there has been great growth in interdenominational evangelical churches that do not readily fit any of these three categories, although one could try to press them into the sect category more easily than the other two. While these groups are often started by a religious entrepreneur and usually attract some of the disaffected from the mainline churches, there is no schismatic movement as such, and they have little concern with theological issues. The type of tension found between these new evangelical churches and the social status quo is not that generated by a systematic rejection of current social values—only a few flash points appear important. In general, these new church groups embody many of the features of traditional revivalism, a type of religiosity that has never been too far below the surface of American life. Their large services offer a fast-paced orchestration of singing, preaching, dramatic enactments, and personal witnessing that generate significant emotional responses from the audience. Indeed, these services see themselves as reaching out to “touch” each person and communicate spiritual sustenance and vision.104

American revivalism can be traced back to early New England, when a steep decline in the popularity of Puritanism in the early 1700s was soon followed by a series of religious revival movements, now known as the Great Awakening. The figure of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is thought to embody the passion and style of this period, when the pulpit and sermon were used to move the audience both emotionally and intellectually to facilitate the experience of an abrupt “conversion,” by which one passed into a new life and new commitment. A Second Awakening in the late 1700s and early 1800s took place predominantly on the expanding frontier, where the preaching style was more emotional and less intellectual. Traveling preachers pressed the audience for immediate conversions before moving on, while camp meetings that lasted a week would gather crowds and dozens of preachers. In the words of one observer of the time,

Ten, twenty, and sometimes thirty ministers, of different denominations, would come together and preach night and day, four or five days together; and, indeed, I have known these camp meetings to last three or four weeks. . . . I have seen more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon, and I have seen and heard more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once.105

The revival manner of emotional sermonizing—opening one’s heart and then testifying to the power of the Lord in one’s life—is clearly a style of public, communal ritual with deep roots in American culture. Christian evangelicalism draws on this tradition to assert the importance of being “born again” into a very personal re-