Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

populate the same moral order space as people attracted to the therapeutic utopias of the 1970s and, more recently, “new age” religion. We can empirically observe these relationships developing. Paul Numrich (1996) has identified the phenomenon of “parallel congregations” in Buddhist temples where Euro-American converts often share space with immigrant Buddhists. ISKCON (aka Hare Krishna) is a Hindu-related movement formerly dominated by Euro-Americans, but it now finds itself largely serving an immigrant Indian population and depending on them for institutional survival. At the opposite southeast corner of the map we find Muslims and African-American Protestants sharing space in the moral order. Given this, it is not particularly surprising that African-American converts are such a rapidly growing sector of Islam in the United States. In American cities, this religious affinity also has important effects on the relationship of Arab immigrants to African-American communities, both within the mosques and on “the street.”

These juxtapositions raise some interesting questions regarding immigrant identity in a pluralistic U.S. culture. For example, will the dominant culture be more likely to view Muslim immigrants as “black” and Hindu or Buddhist immigrants as “white?” Or, will Muslims’ location in a more familiar sector of the moral order lead to an easier legitimation of their religious identity while Hindus and Buddhists remain “exotic?”

Second, we can use the moral order map to make some observations or raise questions about religious change experienced by new immigrant groups. Some observers have suggested that the typical pattern is for immigrant religions to “Americanize,” often in the direction of what Warner (1994) has called “de facto congregationalism.” For Warner, this refers primarily to structural changes in the organization of immigrant religions. Ironically, perhaps, this form of Americanization may help immigrant groups to resist cultural or religious assimilation. This points to the complexity of concepts like “assimilation” or “Americanization.” They are not unidimensional nor are they all-or-nothing propositions. Portes and Rumbaut’s (1996) concept of “segmented assimilation” has captured this notion and enriched the study of immigrant change. The moral order map provides a way to speak more concretely about the cultural or religious changes that may or may not follow from structural changes like de facto congregationalism. It also suggests that this process may occur differently for different groups.

For Hindus and Buddhists, movement toward the mainstream could occur in one of two ways. A group could move toward the religious left by adopting communalism, that is, coming to view the moral project as collective. The phenomenon of “engaged Buddhism” in the United States, where Buddhists become actively involved in social concerns would be an example of such a trend. A group might also move toward the religious right by collectivizing moral authority. Kurien (1998) describes this process for two Hindu temples in Los Angeles. In our Chicago-area research, we have observed a similar process in a Hindu temple located in a Republican stronghold in suburban Cook County. By contrast, the inner-city temples in our study are the only ones that have become involved in community political action (even though this is still a relatively rare occurrence). Thus, the direction in which a group moves may be influenced by its context.

But accommodation and Americanization are not inevitable, nor are they unidimensional. Some groups may use religious identity (even “Americanized” congregational forms of it) to resist cultural assimilation. Religion may thus become more

important for some immigrants than it was in their country of origin. Again, location within the moral order may have an important influence on whether religion is accommodative or sectarian. On the basis of the moral order map, we might hypothesize that Korean Presbyterians, because of their location on the mainstream diagonal, would be more likely than Korean Buddhists to use religion as an Americanizing cultural resource. Since Buddhism and Hinduism are so closely linked to ethnicity for immigrants, these religions may serve to resist assimilation.

For Muslim immigrants, the question is still more complex. For them, cultural or religious Americanization would involve a move toward modernism (individual as moral authority) in one direction, or libertarianism (individual as moral project) in the other. The observer can find examples of both these alternatives in Muslim immigrant communities. It may be, however, that the pressure toward religious assimilation is not as great for Muslims as it is for Hindus and Buddhists. Note that there are many more American neighbors in the southeast corner of the moral order map where Muslims are located than in the northwest corner where we find Hindus and Buddhists. Muslims can look to numerous other U.S. sectarian religious groups as role models if they wish to use their religion to resist cultural accommodation.

Finally, what impact might the influx and growth of new immigrant religions have on the larger moral order? Here again, a map of the moral order is instructive. If the number of groups located off the mainstream diagonal is increasing, and the groups themselves are growing relative to established groups, then the mainstream diagonal may eventually no longer be the mainstream. The dotted line separating the religious right from the left in Figure 23.2 may become an important realm of discourse in its own right. Phenomena such as the emergent Catholic-Buddhist dialogue may be indicators that this is already happening.5

Post–1965 immigration may well be creating a significant shift in the moral order, such that no discourse can claim dominance. Under those conditions, the center’s realm of ambiguity may expand. Religious politics may increasingly make strange bedfellows with widespread religious change and innovation the result. By contrast, if interreligious encounters are conflictual rather than dialogical, religious differences may be heightened, and groups may withdraw into their “corners.” In this case, religious identity is more likely to become sectarian, sharpening the distinctions between groups. The path that religious change ultimately takes will be shaped by contextual factors that exist outside the moral order as I have mapped it. But the map gives us some basis for understanding change as it occurs, and predicting where the important tensions are likely to appear.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have argued that the U.S. religious and cultural terrain, that is, the “moral order,” is best depicted in multidimensional terms, rather than the unidimensionality of earlier bipolar conceptions. The map I propose includes most of the bipolar oppositions that others have identified. Creating a two-dimensional space, however, enables a more precise mapping and thus a more nuanced analysis of specific conflicts and

5One of the most prominent and longest-running of these is the Los Angeles Buddhist-Catholic Dialogue, begun in 1987 (see http://www.kusala.org/bccontent.html).

changes. It permits interesting distinctions to be drawn between different issues and groups, distinctions that are often blurred or ignored by unidimensional schemes. A two-dimensional mapping of the cultural terrain has the further benefit of highlighting the role of peripheral groups and ideologies in the larger moral order. This facilitates a more complete understanding of intragroup conflict and change for groups that occupy different locations on the map; it provides insight on the impact of new, emergent, and peripheral groups on the mainstream; and it suggests questions and hypotheses about the future of religious conflict and change in the United States.

I have been careful in this chapter to limit my applications of the map to the U.S. situation, but it is worthwhile thinking about whether and how it may be applicable more broadly. Certainly, concerns about moral authority and moral project are common to any ideological system. Thus, the map may very well be useful in other settings. However, the sharp distinction between individual and collectivity that forms the poles of the two dimensions may only be applicable in cultures that are rooted in Western Enlightenment traditions. There are important parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, where this distinction may not be very meaningful or important. In these settings it may be necessary to develop other ways of representing the poles of the two dimensions.

By contrast, it is also true that the diffusion of Western cultural assumptions throughout the world is one important consequence of contemporary globalization processes. The individual-collective distinction may be gaining significance even in places where a more holistic Eastern world view is still dominant. Clearly, immigrant Eastern religions in the United States have to deal with the individual-collective distinction, and, at least in some cases, significant religious innovation is the consequence. Likely, similar innovation is occurring in the countries of origin for these religions as global capitalism brings a liberal economic gospel of individualism and the pursuit of self-interest.

These, as they say, are “questions for further research.” There is plenty of work still to be done in coming to a clearer understanding of how particular cases of religious change and conflict are related to their larger moral order, how the moral order itself is constituted, and how such cultural systems have an impact on human behavior and social life. We will no doubt continue to debate the specific answers to these more general questions. Our debate will be more productive, however, if we can be as specific and concrete as possible in mapping the terrain we are attempting to traverse.

First, the notion of “civil society” introduced earlier goes beyond religion to describe a broad segment or layer of any society’s social structure. It refers to that assortment of nonkin, nonwork, mediating institutions, voluntary associations, and social movements separate from the state and government. While it excludes the private world of the family and the working world of the wage earning economy, it includes neighborhood associations, community organizations, trade unions, and religious groups. While it excludes governmental agencies and assemblies, it includes political and social movements that grapple with matters such as the environment, health, sexuality, gender, poverty, or faith itself – unless and until President George W. Bush’s “faith-based initiatives” simultaneously make and break the law. Insofar as these initiatives involve government support for faith, they would pose a clear violation of at least the most common reading of the First Amendment that the one thing the government cannot legitimately support is faith itself.

Meanwhile a second meaning of “civil society” is a cultural preference for a “civilized” society characterized by civility and the civic virtues, variously defined but generally including such liberal staples as mutual trust, respect, and tolerance as part of a package of good democratic citizenship.

Not surprisingly, these two meanings are often intertwined with each other and with virtually tautological results. Thus, the presence of one seems to guarantee the presence of another almost by definition. It is largely a semantic fluke that persuades us that a civil society of the first sort is a necessary and sufficient condition for a civil society of the second. But that is precisely what the new theory of civil society holds. In both the United States and around the world, this has moved beyond a matter of conjecture to become an article of faith in its own right (cf. Hall 1995).

It is here that I want to introduce some skepticism based on my recent comparative study of religion and politics in some fourteen countries around the globe – including almost all of those mentioned earlier. Without trying to explode the theory altogether, I shall argue that the relationship between the two meanings of civil society is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Civility as a Western Chestnut and Conceit

Few ideas combine longer pedigrees with fonder hopes than that of the civilized society. It is hardly surprising that it should have great appeal among Americans at a time when the United States is described as increasingly divided against itself and the battlefield for a most uncivil “culture war” (e.g., Hunter 1991, 1994; Goggin 1993; Guinness 1993; Gitlin 1995). Putative battles range from inner cities to wilderness fortresses over such fundamental matters as racial discrimination and economic justice, abortion and family values, and the scope of government overall.

This diagnosis has become both a source and a symptom of the illness, and in the confusion it is little wonder that citizens are drawn to simpler nostrums from simpler times. That often unholy alliance of scholarly pundits and media publicists has persuaded many that the country is in desperate need of regaining its moral bearings and recapturing that precious sense of individual trust and institutional integrity on which every successful society depends.

In a variant of the old bad cop/good cop routine, social science has provided both the scare and the solution. In fact, there are problems with each. As for the scare,

research has indicated that the so-called American culture war is a hyperbolic misrepresentation of the inevitable cultural skirmishes entailed in what is mostly democracy in action. A true culture war would involve a massive and violent polarization of the public at large with the state itself hanging in the balance. But study after study shows a citizenry huddled in the middle of virtually every contentious issue ranging from race and inequality to abortion and homosexuality (e.g., DiMaggio et al. 1996; Williams 1997a; Mouw and Sobel 2001). There have certainly been inflamed episodes fanned by movement entrepreneurs on the flanks of public opinion; there have even been protracted agonies such as the Civil War of the 1860s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. But to characterize the current American scene in warlike terms is to make a mockery of those countries around the world where culture wars have become a tragic way of everyday life. These include not only the countries mentioned previously but other violent battlegrounds such as Afghanistan, the Balkans, Egypt, Guatemala, Israel, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and Sudan.

Of course, one reason why the “scare” of an American culture war is overdone is that the solution of a “civil society” is already in place in the United States and a number of recent scholars have probed its various dimensions. But many have lamented some missing virtues (e.g., Cohen and Arato 1992; Glendon 1995), while others such as Adam Seligman (1992), Robert Putnam (2000), Francis Fukuyama (1995), and S. M. Lipset (1996) have explored problems emanating from America’s distinctive value placed on individualism, the special role of American voluntary associations, the unusual American line drawn between the community and the state, and the unique importance attached to American religion. None of these analysts can be accused of playing a starry-eyed Pangloss to a nail-biting Cassandra. All would likely acknowledge problems with both the theory and the reality of American civil society.

References to any civilized society combine the same sense of nostalgia and hope that once characterized earlier accounts of the nature of social order. Indeed, from one vantage point, civil society is simply social order with a handshake and a smile. As one who was involved in the earlier debate over functionalism (e.g., Demerath and Peterson 1967; Demerath 1996), I have an uncomfortable feeling of deja-vu. Many of the same specific issues lurk beneath the current theoretical surface, including questions of consensus versus conflict, stability versus change, culture versus structure, and macro versus micro.

And yet there are also differences. For example, Seligman (1992) quite rightly notes that architects of civility have tended to work from the individual up, assuming an ideal citizen who embodies all the scouting virtues, with trustworthiness above all. But when this model of civil society is identified with the great Emile Durkheim of the turn of the twentieth century, we can almost hear the protests from his Paris grave: “Mon Dieu; this is Herbert Spencer revisited! Individuals take their moral cores from society rather than imparting morality to it.” Again, Seligman is aware of the tension; in fact, his central paradox is that, in stressing the individual rather than the collectivity, civil society deemphasizes the very source of the individual’s virtues; namely, the moral force of the collectivity itself. But then one might also point out that no collectivity has more legitimacy than one that trumpets the centrality of the individual; the two levels operate in tandem.

Of course, many have lionized America’s individualism, including some who have seen it as a mixed blessing gone sour (Bellah et al. 1985; Putnam 2000). But again the

discourse leaves a gnawing sense of discomfort. After all, isn’t this the same society that is so often chided for its conformity? Isn’t there a difference between individualism as a cultural value and individuation as a structural circumstance? Isn’t it at least possible that some of our societal uneasiness here is due to the presence of one without the other, that is, individuation without the kind of individualism that makes us comfortable with the result?

Meanwhile, Durkheim (1893/1997) and his French predecessor, Alexis de Tocqueville (1831/1969), would recognize the emphasis on voluntary associations and group affiliations that mediate between the individual and the nation. Both gave special attention to religion, and de Tocqueville to American churches in particular. But this has not been as true of recent civil society theorists. Many have neglected religion altogether even though it is the single largest source of organizations and associations constituting American civil society (Skocpol and Fiorina 1999; Putnam 2000). That is not true of Robert Putnam’s compelling moan over “Bowling Alone.” Putnam (2000) argues that American democracy, civic virtues and social capital are all rooted in a wide variety of shared activities that are now tragically waning – including organized bowling leagues but also churches, trade unions, and other voluntary associations. The thesis has launched a flotilla of critical responses, many of which argue that there has been a shift more in the kind of social participation than in the overall amount (e.g., Skocpol and Fiorina 1999; Edwards and Foley 2001; Wilson 2001). A very recent study of religion in Indianapolis, IN, suggests that the social capital engendered by churches has much less significance for participation in the wider community and its politics than Putnam and others have supposed (Farnsley et al. forthcoming)

As Paxton (1999) suggests, it is worth pausing to wonder whether declining associations with their plummeting “social capital” are the cause or the consequence of a loss of civility? As with the related issue of individualism versus individuation, one might also ask if the structural ebbing precedes or follows the cultural shift? Meanwhile, Putnam’s concerns cue yet another aspect of Western civil society that is related, namely, its source in ascetic Protestantism.

Virtually every civil historian acknowledges that the “Protestant Ethic” so emphasized by Durkheim’s German contemporary, Max Weber (1904–5/1958), was as important to the spirit of political civility as to the spirit of capitalism. The liberal stress on individuals seeking salvation through their own actions accounts for at least some of the “individualisms” among our “habits of the heart” (Bellah et al. 1985).

However, a less-celebrated legacy of Protestantism may be equally important; namely, its emphasis on congregational solidarity. A major secret of Protestantism’s early success was that it too provided a cure for its own disease; on the one hand, it promoted the curse of individualism and, on the other hand, it provided the remedy in a new kind of congregational involvement. Loneliness before God can be countered by the support available from one’s fellow congregants.

Today the link between Protestant “civil society” and American civility is more complex. It is even arguable that religion’s impact has changed from positive to negative as it has taken on a newly uncivil tone. Even though the decline in liberal mainline religion has been partially balanced by an increase in conservative evangelical religion, some see only the former as an authentic staple of civil society and source of social capital (Putnam 2000). But surely it is too simple to plot the rise of incivility and social withdrawal as a function of the decline of liberal and the surge of conservative religion.

At the same time, today’s religious right has departed considerably from the agenda of mutual tolerance that has characterized the liberal values at the core of both mainline religion and American democracy.

The term “fundamentalism” was coined in the United States, even though its original biblical meaning has been eclipsed by a broader sense of ideological extremism here and abroad (e.g., Riesebrodt 1993; Marty and Appleby 1995). In some ways, the fundamentalist is now seen as a euphemism for any “fanatic” – or one “who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject,” according to the variously attributed British witicism. But even in its less extreme form, conservatives have traded an emphasis on individualism for a stress on family values and an enforced traditional morality. Although conservative, evangelical, even fundamentalist religious organizations are undeniably a part of American “civil society,” many observers would see them as more responsible for cultural friction than harmony. As some of religion’s most prominent forms of civil society have become liabilities rather than assets in the pursuit of older patterns of civility, it is important to remember that civility itself is a matter of cultural taste and is a variable rather than an absolute.

Meanwhile, there is another aspect of America’s political tradition whose relation to civil society and civility is more complex than is often supposed. One hears a good deal about democracy as a central tenet of civility. And yet one must define such valueladen terms very carefully. Insofar as democracy entails a spirit of equal rights and responsibilities that goes beyond the voting booth, it involves a sense that what is truly worthwhile in a society is truly accessible. Here conceptions of civil society are sometimes sadly deficient.

Civility often puts a good face on social convention by dictating a hegemonic code that is in the interests of society’s winners rather than its losers or indeed those who simply cope. From this standpoint, civility becomes a conceit, and under some circumstances, it can engender sufficient resentment to undermine itself and become a source of actual incivility in response. As civility becomes infected with power, what is seen as appropriate within a dominant class, ethnic, gender, or generational group can become – by virtue of that very perception – alienating to the subdominant.

In fact, both “civility” and “civil society” have different meanings in different countries. In an increasingly globalized (i.e., “Westernized”) world, American notions of civility and a civilized society are not without influence, but they are also not without suspicion. If civility can be a high-status conceit within the West, it can also be seen as an exported conceit of the West.

Meanwhile, the structured layer of “civil society” has also been a common export. But in many countries it has taken on a different emphasis. From Latin America through Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the reference is not so much to an Americanized cultural outcome but to a structural segment of society that is a hopeful means to a variety of ends. The important thing is that “civil society” is distinct from the state and offers an independent voice influencing it.

But here, too, there is a need to make problematic what is often taken for granted. The common assumption is that civil society is the best defense against state oppression and corruption and the best pathway to democratization and all of its manifold blessings. Certainly there are cases feeding such confidence, most notably the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including the inspirational saga of Solidarity in Poland where the phrase “civil society” took on special significance.

And yet there are two major difficulties with the scenario. First, civil society itself is not always what many might hope. Its myriad associations and organizations often reflect the interests and control of high status elites; alternatively, they may take on the properties of extremist movements with demagogic appeals to short-run emotions at the expense of long-range advantagement – pro-life as well as pro-choice, pro-labor as well as pro-NAFTA. Second, the state itself can be a far more positive source of civil outcomes than sometimes modish state-bashing would allow (Gupta 2000). Especially from the standpoint of nonelites and the disadvantaged, government can sometimes be the only realistic source of positive change; it can also serve as a crucial arbiter among conflicting organizations within a civil society that can be far more turbulent than its image would suggest.

So much then for a brief critique of two different versions of “civil society,” and the liberal thesis of a causal relationship between civil society in the organizational sense and a civil-ized society overall. Somehow something seems to be missing as an intervening factor. Let us turn to that now in the concept of a “civil religion.”

ASSESSING “CIVIL RELIGION”

To those in search of a stable and peaceful social order, “civil society” offers structural hope at the institutional level. However, another source of encouragement is more cultural and more society-wide. It is “civil religion,” or any society’s most common religious denominator which consecrates its sense of nationhood and pivots around a set of tenets and rituals forged in the fires of a shared history. In the United States, it is a Judeo-Christian heritage invoked by nondenominational public prayers on July 4th, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, and presidential inaugurations.

Civil religion is another concept with origins in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, especially within France, and particularly in the person of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762). In fact, the very phrase “civil religion” had an ironic ring in such circles. After all, Rousseau and his peers were basically nondeists who looked forward to an age without the religion identified with Christianity and its higher churchly variants. And yet many of these people saw the need for a different sort of “religion” that would compel allegiance to the state through a different sort of faith. In Rousseau’s (1762/1960: 305–6) terms:

But there is a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which it behooves the Sovereign to fix, not with the precision of religious dogmas, but treating them as a body of social sentiments without which no man can be either a good citizen or a faithful subject.

Almost exactly 150 years later, another Frenchman developed the idea further. Toward the end of his great work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912/1976), that seminal sociologist, Emile Durkheim, took readers by the hand and guided them back to turn-of-century “modern France” following the book’s extended excursion among the tribal Arunta in Australia. As part of the concluding chapter – one of the great thirty pages in Western social thought – Durkheim (1912/1976: 427) writes:

Thus there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself. There can be

no society that does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and its distinct individuality. This moral remaking can be achieved only by meetings, assemblies, and congregations in which the individuals, pressing close to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments. Such is the origin of ceremonies that . . . are not different in kind from ceremonies that are specifically religious. . . . If today we have some difficulty imagining what the feasts and ceremonies of the future will be, it is because we are going through a phase of moral mediocrity. . . . In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born. It is life itself, and not a dead past, that can produce a living cult. But that state of uncertainty and confused anxiety cannot last forever. A day will come when our society once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideas will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time.

Durkheim’s concluding prophecy was correct, but chillingly so. World War I was just around the corner – the war to end all wars and the war that took his only son.

Despite the eloquence of both Rousseau and Durkheim, they left us with more of an idea than a concept. The latter finally crystallized in Robert Bellah’s classic article (1967). Insofar as there was a basic difference between Rousseau and Durkheim, Bellah sided with the latter. For Bellah, civil religion – at least in the United States – is essentially a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in the Durkheimian tradition rather than the topdown, imposed doctrine commended earlier by Rousseau (cf. Demerath and Williams 1987). Thus, our civil religion is a kind of religious common denominator that bubbles forth from our long-standing “Judeo-Christian tradition” and underscores the religious significance of the nation as a whole and its government. It is more of a passive cultural legacy than the result of an activist political decision.

But there is another sense in which Bellah departed from both Rousseau and Durkheim. Perhaps reflecting his own churchgoing heritage, Bellah focused on churchgoing religion as the core of America’s “civil religion.” Both Rousseau and Durkheim had been at pains to introduce a broader concept of the sacred and to note that conventional religion per se need not constitute the soul of a nation. But Bellah’s version was more literal, perhaps even more fundamentalist. And not without reason, given America’s strong Judeo-Christian sensibilities – “Judeo” not so much because of the role of the tiny minority of Jews in American life itself but, rather, because Christianity emerged out of Judaism historically, theologically, and ethically.

One of the clearest identifiers of America as a religious society is the way its Christianity is publicly invoked and symbolically brandished. Our most important national holidays such as July 4th and Memorial Day are religiously sanctified. Virtually every session of the nation’s daily legislative business is prefaced by prayer. Both our coins and our politicians proclaim religious mottos. Our national rites of passage – whether weddings, funerals, or presidential inaugurations – are marked with religious observance. And religious solace and supplication accompany every national crisis. In Bellah’s (1967) view, all of this forms a rich residue of historical experience that has become a binding cultural force. The country is irretrievably religious, both at its roots and in its most luxuriant foliage. Indeed, this is another part of American exceptionalism, since few other societies can boast such a natural melding of religion and nationhood.

But again there are reasons to pause before swallowing an analysis whole hog. It is not clear whether this is an analysis of America’s mythology or a contribution to it.