RELIGION, NATIONALISM & CONSUMERISM

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Conversation Outline:  


What do we mean by ‘religion’?     What is its relationship to nationality and culture?

THE PARADOX OF PLURALISM



Jack Miles
Miles offers two definitions of religion.

The first modern one where religion as we know it is “one human activity among many other kinds such as business, politics, warfare, art, law, sports, or science.“

Some contemporary people such as Jews, Hopi, and those from India do not experience religion in this way. “What you people call Hinduism is for me just part of being Indian.”  “Judaism is not a religion Judiasm is a way of life.”

The second ancient definition given by Miles: “Throughout most on world history in most parts of the world what we are accustomed to call religion, ethnicity and culture have been inextricable parts of a single whole.”

Miles argues Christianity at its origin produced the religion/secular divide which expanded to Western Europe, and resulted in modernity. “In accepting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (various ethnic groups) were not required by that act to become Jews or cease living in other regards as Egyptians, or Armenians or Macedonians.”

However Miles concedes that “an almost equally powerful tendency toward reintegration would repeatedly bring about the fusion of Christian identity with of the way of life of some nation or another, even one empire or another

Miles sees religion/secular distinction as a key element in this process: “between the religiously consequential or essential parts of the Jewish way of life itself and the rest of life, now taken to be not wrong but only religiously inconsequential or nonessential.”
Miles view the religion/secular distinction as key to understanding the Middle Ages with its “religious” vs “laity” distinction, Protestantism effort to justify lay pursuits as holy, and the Great Secularization of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century which make secular pursuits the center of life.

Western scholars tended to view non-Western religions as realities that could also be abstracted from their ethic and cultural environments. Non-Western people were also influenced by this view point.

Miles apparently sees Christianity as a set of ideas. He makes no mention of the possibility of books of revelation: the Torah, the Gospels, the Koran, or the Book of Mormon. All of these provide a basis of religion that is not dependent upon ethnicity or culture.

Miles also makes little mention of religious leaders (Moses, the prophets, Jesus, the apostles, Mohammad, or Buddha that have had profound influences upon religions that have spread far beyond their origins.

Finally, Miles makes little mention of religious practices such as circumcision, baptism, Friday, Sabbath, and Sunday worship as well as dietary practices that have served to identify religious traditions separate from ethnic, and cultures traditions.





NATIONALISM WITHOUT IDOLATRY



How Christians can purify their civic attachments.
Slavica Jakelic
Jakelic argues that “In distinguishing between obedience and love, state and country, (pope) Leo XIII (in encyclical Sapientiae christianae) points out that the Christian response to the modern world should not be a matter of rejecting it a priori, but of thoughtfully and responsibly engaging it.” 

Jakelic also maintains “the reasons for distrusting nationalism and for separating Catholicism from it are significant, both theologically historically.”

Obviously Pope Francis has been a frequent critic of nationalism, especially its unwillingness to admit immigrants, and its pursuit of self interest outside of international instiutions.

However Jakelic engages a fellow theologian far more than she does Francis

American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh argues that nation states are not natural creations but merely historical ones. He argues that Christians must resist the claim of the nation states to be the sole political model and source of identity. He advocates multi-organizational identities to blunt the tendency of the state to become a religion.

Jakelic acknowledges  that there is a lot of historical evidence on Cavanaugh’s side not only on in regard to other nations but all the United States.  National leaders have too easily mobilized Christianity for their purposes, and clergy have too easily cooperated with them.
Nevertheless, Jakelic thinks the distinction draw by Pope Leo between the obedience which the Christian owes to the laws of the state, and the love which Christians owesto his fellow citizens is very useful.

Pope Leo limits the obedience of Christians to just laws. If a law conflicts with God’s law or Christian duty then the Christian must not obey.

Pope Leo sees Christian love for fellow citizens as a part of God’s love and our love for our fellow humans. The Pope views this love as natural; however Cavanaugh seems to disagree that modern national states are natural.  

Jakelic thinks that Pope Leo agrees with the contemporary German social thinker Hans Joas that religious traditions do nothing on their own, but become alive only when they are interpreted and enacted in particular times, in the individual and social lives of those who in habit them, Unfortunately Jakelic doesn’t give any examples of positive situations. 

Jakelic maintains that the responsibility for bringing together national attachments and Christian faith lies not in national councils of bishops nor in theologians.

 “The responsibility resides in the conscience of each individual Catholic believer, and within her multiple communities of attachment. As a consequence the results of thoughtful discernment about faith, civic duties, and attachments cannot be the same for everyone. For some, as Cavanaugh advocates, the answer will be the creation of religious and political communities as local and counter-communities.” 







The First Christians Were Not Like Us
David Bentley Hart
Hart had an illness when he was translating the New Testament; that caused him to think much more deeply about the text. How morally demanding it is.

“The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation- all of them-are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become perfect as God in his heaven, and to live as insouciantly as lilies in the field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent of adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent of murder; injunctions to sell all of one possessions and give the proceeds to the poor and demands that one hate one parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead.”

Then Hart says how different the early Christians must have been from us. “ they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society non only at its most degenerate but often at its most reasonable and decent.

They were rabble.

They lightly cast of all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family.”

Hart contrasts the Gospel and early Christians with our easy acceptance of our own culture and its values. He argues for the essential incompatibility of Christianity with capitalism and the consumer culture with their acquisitiveness, self-absorption and moral relativism.

Hart asserts that the New Testament says that great personal wealth is not a great moral danger but an intrinsic evil.

Beginning with Clement of Alexandria who first had to deal with moderately wealthy people, Christians have emphasize spiritual poverty, detachment from goods rather than actually being poor.

According to Hart, the reformation helped things alone by emphasizing grace over against works. Christ could be thought as having come to save us not only from our sins but also the burdens of all the extreme values that early Christianity had preached.

Rather, according to Hart, Christ condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches but also the getting and keeping of riches as such.

“It is truly amazing how rarely Christians seem to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly as commands.”

Hart says the early Christians were communists who held everything in common.

“Throughout the  history of the Church, Christians have been keenly desired to believe that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are, rather than, as is actually the case, the kind of people we are not, and would not like to be.”   




Sociology of Religion
Some sociologists make a distinction between religions that are cults and those which are sects based upon the origin of the religion. In both cases the words are not meant to be  pejorative.

A cult is a result of some revelation. Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism all were formed on the basis of a revelation.
A sect is the result of one religion breaking off from another religion, often claiming to have a better understanding of that religion. The Pharisees and Jesus followers could both be considered sects with Judaism.

After the destruction of the temple Judaism developed out the Pharisees attempt to basic it upon ritual purity. Christianity became a cult because Judaism refused to accept the revelation of Christ as part of its prophetic tradition.

Protestantism developed as a sect over against Catholicism which it regarded as a compromised Christianity. Numerous sects have occurred within Protestantism e,g, Methodism developed as a reform out of the Church of England

While the Mormons developed out of Christianity the Book of Mormon provides them with and additional source of revelation.

Some sociologists have expanded the notion of sectarian reform to the Catholic Church. How has it renewed itself?.

Mostly through reforms started by religious orders. First the desert solitaries provided a witness against the compromised made by Christians. Then communal organization of monks became centers of Christian life during the Middle Ages. Then the Franciscans and Dominicans provided renewal to the growing cities. Finally the Jesuits and other orders provided missionaries.

Sociologists see the first Christians as living in high tension with their cultural surroundings, first Jewish then Greek and Roman. 

The same high tension occurred in both the religious orders within Catholicism and in the sects which provide renewal in Catholicism.

Established members of churches have little motivation to reform. However sects provide other peripheral members with motivation. Often these are the poor or social outcasts. 
As sects grown they become members of the establishment and the process of reform and renewal begins again. This rise and fall of renewal movements is seen in both Protestant sects and Catholic religious