immanence

Language is an instrument for dealing with the details of reality. All of our words, along with the ways we string them together, contain or reflect concepts — signs or semiotic constructs – by which we refer to elements of a dynamic world. Because they are essentially pragmatic and context-specific, if we scrutinize any of them too closely or probe them too deeply, they become incoherent. (That’s what Jacques Derrida’s voluminous writings on deconstruction were intended to demonstrate.)

“Religion” is one of those words, and I’m going to argue here that its value has diminished significantly since it emerged into wide usage. (This isn’t my original argument; see, e.g., Benson, McCutcheon, or my earlier articles on this.) It came into broad usage for comparative reasons — to describe discrete things called “religions” — at a time when Europeans were colonizing and encountering other places and cultures around the world. But that world was changing rapidly, and in the intervening time the things called “religions” have also changed due to various processes (which we can loosely, but also problematically, label “modernization”). As a result, “religions” aren’t what they used to be, and a lot of other things have emerged which don’t fit the category of “religion.” These things all fit on a spectrum, but the concept of “religion” keeps us from being able to describe that spectrum appropriately.

It’s not that the elements of “religion” have gone away. They are all still with us.

If religion consists of beliefs about things taken to be important, people still believe a lot of such things. If it consists of deeply held values and moral codes, people still have those (the Golden Rule, anyone?). If it consists of views of the universe, how it arose and where it’s headed, people still hold such views (the Big Bang?). If it consists of community allegiances or the sense of solidarity around a collectively held identity or sense of “tradition,” we still have those (see “nationalism”). If it refers to either individual or shared extraordinary experiences — experiences of things that “transcend” our everyday concerns, that throw them into a much broader or deeper light, or that provide solace and comfort when difficulty hits us — many people still pursue and attain such experiences (through music, drugs, travel, meditation, and so on). If it consists of ritualized collective practices, people still engage in a lot of such practices. Just go to a football game or Taylor Swift or Beyoncé concert to see several of these things in operation at once.

Most scholars of religion find that they have to appeal to all of these things (and maybe others) in order to point to “religion,” and yet, that looking too closely at any single one of them, that none is sufficient to define what religion is. Religion has no core, no “essence.” It’s a catch-all term whose “all” has become much less graspable except in the sense that we can loosely distinguish between some things called “religion” and others called something else — science, nationalism, social and political ideologies, and so on.

But why don’t science, or humanism, or Marxism, or radical environmentalism, or white nationalism, or extreme pop fandom, qualify as “religion”? What are they missing? Is it that religion packs together all of those things — deeply held core values, community allegiances, sense of tradition, regular ritualized practices, accounts of the origin and end of things, etc. — while the other, “non-religions” lack one or more of those features? But then does every Christian’s Christianity include belief in seven-day creation? (Far from it.) Does every Buddhist practice meditation (nope) or believe in gods (hardly, and if they do they may be utterly unimportant)? Is Confucianism a religion or a philosophy, moral or educational system, or something else? What holds all Jews together besides the fact that they call themselves “Jews”?

In other words, has the label “religion” come to stand in for what it was intended to describe, and then taken on a life of its own? Has religion become a reification — something developed to describe a real feature of the world, but which has become little more than the description itself and its complicated and lingering effects in the world?

In his book You Must Change Your Life (Polity, 2013), German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argued that we should jettison the term “religion,” or at least the belief or “faith in the existence of ‘religion’,” in favor of an appreciation for “the formation of human beings in the practising life” (pp. 4-5) — that is, an understanding of how we humans make ourselves through our practices, the things we do with regularity and commitment over the course of our lives. He calls these things “anthropo-technics,” or the techniques that make us human, “the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death” (p. 10).

For Sloterdijk, it is “the practising life” that brings our nature and our culture together. “From the start,” he writes, “nature and culture are linked by a broad middle ground of embodied practices — containing languages, rituals and technical skills, in so far as these factors constitute the universal forms of automatized artificialities. This intermediate zone forms a morphologically rich, variable and stable region that can, for the time being, be referred to sufficiently clearly with such conventional categories as education, etiquette, custom, habit formation, training and exercise” (p. 11).

Sloterdijk’s point here is that we are not pre-made. We are made through our acts upon ourselves and through the actions taken upon us. Each of those things I’ve listed above as making up “religion” can contribute to what makes us, but describing those things as “religion” is no longer helpful. It divides us into our different “religions” and also into those who are “religious” and those who are not. But we all have self- and group-making practices that form us, and by refocusing our attention on those practices, we can actually make some headway into what sorts of beings we want to be and how to better approximate them.  

We express our beliefs, our values, our desires, our relations, our allegiances and solidarities through the ways we live out our lives. If we do not, then we ourselves are incoherent, and no use of words like religion (or any other) will help us be more coherent. For that reason, it might be better to use words like coherencing for practices that make us cohere. Not cohesion, which suggests solidarity but also stickiness, but coherencing as activity, behavior that makes us into coherent beings. This meaning is actually quite close to one of the etymological definitions of religion — as re-ligare, or re-linking, re-connecting, re-fastening, reattaching, re-binding (which I wrote about here).

Sloterdijk concludes his book with the provocative suggestion that “The only authority that is still in a position to say ‘You must change your life!’ is the global crisis, which, as everyone has been noticing for some time, has begun to send out its apostles. Its authority is real because it is based on something unimaginable of which it is the harbinger: the global catastrophe.” (444)

Of course, agreeing on the details of the “global catastrophe” is something that our religions, and our ideologies, will make difficult. But that there is a crisis is a good starting point. Once we agree on that, we can begin to share our feelings about it, and the things we do — and might do together — to cope and to make ourselves coherent with the scope of it.

It’s a crisis we’ll need to face together. And we will all need to change our lives if we are to do it well.