The quiet religious conflict in France

Outside the terrorist attacks of radical Islamic ISIS supporters against secular France, there is an inconspicuous, time-worn, on-going religious conflict between Catholicism and unbelief.  The forces of division in France divide four ways: Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular.

While the conflict of the Reformation between the protestants and Catholics is long over, religious tensions in France are clearly high after the terrorist attacks. Tensions between Jews and Muslims in France are said to be similar to that of the  tensions between Palestinians and Jews in Israel (source RFI.fr).

What goes unsaid is that the traditional religion, Catholicism, has also been a target of palpable discontent.  Across France, Catholics have seen an increase of  vandalism against their holy sites.  At the same time, vandalism that targets Jewish religious symbols has also risen, but not as much as it has against the Catholics. See the pictures here.

Since 2014, it is a growing trend that the three faiths have seen vandalism rise against their respective places of worship and burial, according to the Minister of the Interior. Of the 807 attacks to religious sites, 673 targeted Catholic sites. The majority of targets are not against symbols of Muslims or Jews but Catholics.

For the Jewish sites, the minister said that 61 synagogues, a community center, 6 cemeteries, and 2 monuments have been damaged (against 26 for 2013). For Muslim sites, there is a light decrease of desecration in 2014: 60 mosques, several rooms of prayer, as well as 4 Muslim squares in a cemetery (against 75 in 2013).

Unless the three religions are targeting one another, which is possible, one can speculate that there is a backlash of not just one religion against another but a growing discontent against all religion.

What is religion? The opiate of the oppressed: Marx

In the next chapter of Eight Theories of Religion, Pals considers Karl Marx’s analysis of religion. Marx’s influence is, of course, enormous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is best known for his theory of history (historical materialism) and for providing a total system of thought (that curiously resembles a religion in its own way, with its sacred readings, heroes, need to convert others, etc).  However, his focus was on how society changed over time and Marx never wrote a thorough account of religion. Rather his analysis of religion was a token element in his larger analysis of economic and material life.

He had rejected religion early in his life.  As an atheist, he believed religion to be an invention of humanity. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,” he declared.[1]  Religion is treated in two different ways, as either the tool of the ruling class or the expression of the suffering masses. This is a functional theory of religion. Marx is not interested in religious content but the roles these beliefs play in social struggle, we discover the key to religion only when we discover what role religion plays socially or psychologically.

His ideas of religion were greatly influenced by the philosopher Hegel. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, part of the Prussian Rhineland of the time (modern Germany now).  Thus, he studied at the University of Berlin, which had been dominated by the ideas of Hegel and played a central role in Marx’s thought.  Hegel held that mind/consciousness was more fundamental than matter.  Material things and reality were the expression of an underlying universal consciousness that progressed through a dialectic.  As our consciousness changed  and progressed through the process of overcoming inherent problems, humanity shaped and changed material reality. Marx reverses this insight and says that matter comes before mind–the shape of ideas and culture are a product of material reality.

The most fundamental part of human life is our interaction with the material forces of reality. Economic reality shapes and informs culture and society, which is a struggle over scarce goods. As one group gained an advantage over another, history became a class struggle, a perpetual dialectic among the socials classes between those who own the means of production and those who must work.  The economic base produces the various forms of the division of labor, the struggle of the classes, and human alienation. Those aspects that are impacted by the base belong to the superstructure, such as laws, culture, and the arts.  Our cultural and intellectual life is a reflection of our economic organization.

The institutions of human life such as family, government, the arts, philosophy, ethics, and religion are developed to control and maintain the deep tensions that emerge from internal contradictions within the social structure and also between the social structure and the economic base.  The production of artists, politicians, and theologians creates “ideology”, i.e. a systematic defense of the present state of affairs. In reality, they are the expression of class interests that defend the system of privileges.

Religion is an ideology and a product of the tensions between the base and the superstructure. It is a belief system that provides reasons to maintain the status quo in favor of the ruling class. Thus, belief in God or gods is a by-product of the class struggle and an illusion that is detrimental to social health. Further, religion is the expression of an “inverted world” where the pain of humanity seeks solace in another source because it cannot find amelioration in its material conditions. Marx says in one of his many immortal phrases, “Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[2]

Consequently, the social effect of Religion is social pacification. It is a mystification that keeps people from seeing the truth of reality. Marx’s view of religion was significantly influenced by the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. In 1841, Feuerbach published his book The Essence of Christianity, a philosophical attack on Christianity that blamed it for alienating human consciousness.  Feuerbach argues that Christian theology proposes an alien being that possesses our most highly held personal qualities such as “goodness, beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love steadfastness, and strength of character and project them onto God” (Pals).  Rather than attribute these qualities to ourselves, they are attributed to a God. In reality, the subject of theology is humanity. In looking for heaven, humanity found a reflection of itself.

Marx accepted Feuerbach’s critique, seeing religion as a mystification that alienated humanity from the truth of its condition. Religion is just the expression of the greater distress of the economic and material alienation of  humanity. Marx did not blame the problems of society on religion. The problem is not state religion but the mystifications that hide the causes of inequality and suffering. Religion is the mere surface problem because the true problem is social injustice.

[1] Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

[2] Karl Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

 

What is religion? a way for society to worship itself: Durkheim

The next theory of religion from Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion comes from Emile Durkheim, a sociologist born in 1858 in Strasbourg, France. Durkheim provided a powerful and influential theory.

An advocate of the scientific method, he wanted the study of society to be as scientific as possible. He approached the question as a nonbeliever, although his father had been a rabbi, and he had been greatly influenced by a Roman Catholic school teacher in his youth.

The study of the human being had to be done scientifically, which Durkheim called sociology, whose purpose was to uncover the social facts of humanity. Social facts are the fundamental and collective elements that shape and influence our lives. A social fact, although intangible, is a real mass phenomenon manifested by the whole that affects individual consciousness. People always belong to something and this social identity precedes individual identity. A person cannot simply be reduced to biological instinct, individual psychology, or personal interests. We are far more the products of society than of our individual choices. The fact that this idea sounds so mundane  today is just an indicator of how influential and successful this point of view has become.

In looking at religion in terms of its social impacts, Durkheim asked why is religion so important and prevalent in human affairs? What function does it play in the life of the individual and in the workings of society?

In his work The Elementary form of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim concludes that religion is more than just the separation of the natural and the supernatural. Rather, religion is the institution that divides things between the sacred and the profane. Sacred things merit our respect because they are set aside as superior, powerful and forbidden to normal contact. The profane is the mundane, everyday, and practical. Sacred things always concern the group while profane things are less important, smaller, often individual matters. Religion resides within the sacred. Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” The purpose of the sacred is to “unite into one moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim).

Durkheim dismisses the idea that religion has its origins in magic. Magic is a private matter. Religious rituals and beliefs manifest when people invoke the group or collectivity. A magician might have clients, but he or she does not have a congregation. Durkheim suggests that theories about magic and animism misunderstood the function of religion. Further, he critiques the theory of religion by Tyler for being insufficiently scientific. Rather than giving a conjecture about how people invented the gods in the time before the historical record, as Tylor did, Durkheim stated we should look at the evidence available now for the “ever present causes” and find its “elementary forms.”

He did this by looking at studies of people living in hunting and gathering societies. His theory of religion is based on anthropological research of the communities in Australia, who practiced a totem religion.  The native Australian people divided themselves into clans that each had an individual animal, plant or object as their totem. The totem animal was sacred and forbidden to eat. The clan was also sacred as it was united with the totem. This was religion in its most elementary form and still in existence in his day.  We cannot know what caused the origin of religion in the past because there is no evidence; therefore, science must then take totemism, the simplest, most basic, original form of religion, as the basis for religion in general and from which all other religions arise.

In totemism, the clans do not actually worship the mundane animal itself, but rather an anonymous and impersonal force that stands beyond the totem and has enormous power. The totem has a physical and moral force over the clan that inspires respect and moral obligation to observe its ceremonies, and most importantly, through the totem, the clan feels a deeply connecting bond and abiding loyalty.

The totem is a symbol of the god and of the clan. Thus, they are really one and the same. Durkheim’s insight was that devotion to the totem was really the way primitive peoples express and reinforce their devotion to the social organism. The function of religion is to provide and reinforce social belonging. Society is an abstraction that exists in the individual consciousness. Religion penetrates our consciousness and provides the social glue for the individual to the group, which is manifested and reinforced in important ceremonies. In the ecstasy of the ritual, they unite and feel connected to the group.

The totem remains the fixed and permanent symbol of the clan. From this the other phenomena of religion follow. For example, the belief in spirits or souls  comes from the totemic spiritual force that is spread out into each individual. As the totem is spread among the group, each individual portion becomes the “soul.” The soul is thus the voice and conscience of the clan, separate from our personal bodies. Likewise, the growth and importance of the clan and the totem make the guardian spirit more and more powerful until they acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.” Indeed, the aborigines also had a notion of a high god that united and stood above the totem gods– a kind of creator god.

Religion fills a primary role in uniting people to a community. When people worship, they are really worshiping the collectivity that reminds them of the importance of the group over the individual. Beliefs are only the speculative side of religion that allow for theological distinctions but make little functional difference. What is important is ritual practice and ceremony for social unity.

What is religion? an illusion: Freud

Sigmund Freud is the next theory that I will paraphrase from Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion. Freud was an atheist and he believed religions were no more than the projection of our unconscious desires and the collection of our ancient superstitions. The interesting question for him was not the truth of religion, for he did not believe it to be true, but why people continued to believe religious claims. In this, he thought psychoanalysis could provide answers.  In contrast, the theories of religion by Frazer and Tylor left this question unexplained.

Taking the western religious tradition as his example,  Freud saw a similarity between the actions of religious people and the behaviors of neurotic patients, which he examined in his essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). Seeing a striking resemblance, he noted how both religious people and neurotic patients placed significant importance on repeating certain activities in a patterned and ceremonial fashion. Plus, they both felt guilt when they failed to perfectly maintain the rules of their rituals. In both types of people, the rituals were associated with the repression of basic instincts. Freud saw that religion required the repression of selfishness, the restriction of the ego-instinct. Just as sexual repression results in neurosis, Freud therefore concluded religion appeared to be “a universal obsessional neurosis.”  In short, religious behavior resembled mental illness.

After taking a pause from the question of religion, Freud would later write three books on the subject of religion, of which we will look at two (omitting Moses and Monotheism due to its questionable historical claims). He wrote Totem and Taboo in 1913. This book provided a psychological interpretation of the life of primitive peoples using psychoanalysis. As the name of the book implies, he examined “totems” and “taboos.” People create totems when they associate themselves with a certain animal that serves as a sacred symbol. A taboo is a behavior that is marked off limits or is forbidden within the group. Freud said that two taboos appeared to be nearly universal: incest and the interdiction to eat the totem animal (except at ceremonially special occasions).

Taking the concepts of taboo and totem, Freud related the origins of religion to his theory of the Oedipal complex: the desire to have sex with one’s mother and to kill one’s father. The roots or the origins of religion go far back in our ancient past when primeval society was dominated by powerful alpha males who had large harems. These over-sized harems had the potential to make their sons and the other males jealous. Because he sexually desired his father’s females, the son banded together with other males and overthrew his father (this is essentially the sexual behavior of chimpanzees by the way). Without the leadership of the alpha, torn by anguish, guilt, and regret, they created in the totem animal a “father substitute.” This led to the commandment: “do not kill the totem animal” that later became “thou shall not kill.” Second, to avoid further conflict, they made it a law that they “shall not take thy father’s wives.” Instead, they would have to take wives outside of the clan.  The totem animal was then projected as the dead father who received divinity. The clan next created rituals to worship him by eating the totem animals flesh that reinforced the commandment to repress their sexual desires.

According to Freud, the murder of the father in the prehistoric clan had tremendous importance for human social life. The emotions produced from this heinous act led to the origin of religion. Freud saw the incest taboo as both the origin of morality and the origin of the social contract because it sought to protect the group. The totem and the taboo were the foundations of civilization. We have only changed the totems (king, republic, constitution, etc.) and adjusted our taboos.

Needless to say, Christians were insulted and outraged by these claims. Ignoring the response, Freud only returned to the subject fourteen years later with The Future of an Illusion in 1927.  Here he argued that religion continued because of the psychological need we had in confronting our helplessness with death and suffering. Instead, we looked for a way to face the hardships of life as we did when we were children–to our parents, and more specifically, our fathers. God became the universal father who saved us from our fears and who rewarded us for obeying the repressive laws of society. Freud said that this was an “illusion,” a belief that we wish to be true. Religion holds its power because it aligns with our deepest wishes, thus religions are the “fulfillment of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”

Freud thought religion was a neurotic relic of our past that humanity had to outgrow so it could be replaced by a suitable and mature rationality. Lastly, this is a functional theory of religion because religion filled an important need in humanity’s early social organization.

What is religion? Animism and Magic: Frazer

Here is the second half of the first theory of religion paraphrased from D.L. Pals work Eight Theories of Religion. James George Frazer (1854-1941) provides the compliment to Tylor. Frazer was the kind of scholar who theorized about the truth of the world from the comfort of his chair and a warm cup of tea. A comfortable way to live, but perhaps one that leads to all kind of endless logomachy (a dispute over words). His most important work was The Golden Bough. The book seeks to resolves a pagan ritual of human sacrifice from an old roman myth.

In order to resolve the puzzle, Frazer examines the origins of religion and magic. To understand the old stories, one has to understand magic. Using a comparative study, Frazer argues that magic works by sympathy. The primitive mind believed that nature functioned by “sympathetic magic,” i.e. the primitive mind would mentally associate two things, which were thought to correlate with physical reality. “Mental connections mirror physical ones” (36). Magic was thought to affect things because of an imitative principle or a contagious principle. It is imitative if two entities are connected due to a similarity or contagious if the two entities are connected by contact.

Pals cites several examples here and it is worth noting several for clarification. For example, when someone plunges a pin into a voodoo doll adorned with the hair of his enemy, he imagines that by contagious transmission he can inflict suffering upon his foe. Or when Pawnee Indians sacrificed a maiden to their field tools, they believed that merely by contact with her blood, the life-giving properties of the maiden would be transmitted to their tools. In certain villages in India, during periods of drought, the people would perform a rain ritual. They chose a boy who wore nothing but leaves and nominated him Rain King.  He would then visit each house so the residents could sprinkle water on him and the rains would return.

Frazer like Tylor sees these rituals as both magic and proto-science. The practice of magic offered a kind of certainty about the natural world. The people who had this knowledge, the magician, the medicine man, the witch doctor, etc.,  usually held a great deal of social power. They  would ally with the King or the chief who would use their services. Sometimes the possessor of magic knowledge became king, wielding magical powers for the whole community.

Being a secular man, Frazer states that magic is a false science that people eventually see through, and in its place arises religion. He adopts a definition similar to Tylor: religion is a belief in spiritual beings. Religious people do not use spells to change the course of nature but use pleadings and prayers to supernatural beings to their preferred spirits or gods.They ask for help and favors and in return they promise to give loyalty, love, and obedience. Like Tylor, Frazer believes in the evolution of human thought and culture; thus he holds that magic and religion are stages of human consciousness.

Where magic sought to manipulate nature, religion is in the hands of the gods. And who knows the will of the gods? Indeed, we are at their mercy. In the political realm, the magician-king becomes the priest-king. Of course, there are endless variations. In ancient sedentary societies, people began to worship seasonal cults and vegetation gods. Out of this came the fertility cults based on the cycle of birth and death, often linked to sexuality. For example, in ancient Cyprus, the god Adonis was paired with Aphrodite around rituals of prostitution and a law that required virgins to sleep with a stranger at the temple before their marriage. The ritual was supposed to encourage the gods to mate so that nature would be reborn. This was a combination of magic and religion, an appeal to the gods through the principle of imitation.

Magic provided the first attempt to explain and control the power of nature. As magic declined religion took its place, but it too was found wanting. With the decline of religion, science has come to the fore. Welcome to the new age…