Monday, June 4, 2012

Building Religions 22: Defining Religion


When you're creating a world in which you want religion to play a significant part, it's good to take a moment to ask yourself what you mean by 'religion' to begin with. The definition of religion that you use as your starting point can help you shape the questions you want to ask about its role in your world, so what I'd like to do in this post is lay out some classic ways of defining it and consider what they could offer.


The first idea to keep in mind is that scholars of religion tend, these days, to treat these definitions as descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, they're more concerned with what sort of phenomena people include under the heading of 'religious' than with setting up boundaries between what is always religious and what never is. Under the broadest of descriptive definitions, anything—any phenomenon, action, or worldview—can be religious if a community declares that it is. This gives you a great deal of latitude as a worldbuilder if you don't want to focus too much on the details of your setting's religious attitudes: you can just note that people believe X or do Y for religious reasons, and that's that. There are, however, narrower definitions, and it's those that interest me here.

The second thing to consider is that you can break down many definitions into one of two types: functional or experiential. Functional definitions describe how a religion works in the communities that follow it. Experiential definitions describe the kinds of individual or collective experiences that have historically been treated as religious. Not all definitions fit neatly into one category or another, but depending on the kind of world you're creating, you might look for ones that lean more toward your intentions.

Functional definitions, for example, are useful if you want to focus on religion in society: communities, hierarchies, relationships, laws, and so on. If you've got a setting in which the emphasis is on the human aspects of religion, a setting in which gods don't intervene or manifest directly and humanity is left to its own devices, then these are probably more suited to your needs. (If you've been reading this blog, you'll likely have noticed that I've tended to focus on this side of religion over the experiential side; it's a matter of personal preference, based on the kinds of worlds that I tend to create. I like to keep my gods fairly quiet.) Some sample definitions:
Émile Durkheim: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all who adhere to them.”
James G. Frazer: "Religion is a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life."
Clifford Geertz: Religion is "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."
None of these definitions say anything about religious experience itself. Durkheim's work focuses heavily on the role of religion as a social phenomenon. For Frazer, it's about a worldview that describes a relationship between human and supernatural powers. For Geertz, it's a symbolic system—a kind of language—whose effects permeate a society. In all three, you can imagine how it's possible to be religious without ever having any immediate experience of the divine.

If, on the other hand, you're imagining a setting in which religious experiences are going to play a major role, then one of the experiential definitions could be better. They help describe the sort of internal, often emotional, responses to religious phenomena, which makes them good starting places if you've got a religious character whose feelings you want to convey. Some examples:
Friedrich Schleiermacher: Religion is "the feeling of dependence ..., the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us."
Paul Tillich: "Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life."
Karl Marx: "Religion is the sigh of the afflicted creature, the soul of a heartless world, as it is also the spirit of spiritless conditions."
William James: "Religion, therefore, as I now ask you to arbitrarily take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."
Rudolf Otto: Religious experience is an encounter with a "mysterium tremendum et fascinans." (Roughly, "a frightening and fascinating mystery," with the sense that the sacred is something "wholly other" than ourselves and our experiences.)
What do these all have in common? They all focus on the individual, and the individual response either to an external power or the simple problem of existence. Notice that none of them are especially positive or negative, though they do lean toward a sense of restlessness and a need to struggle with the questions of life's realities. The kind of religious character that you create from one of these definitions would incorporate that feeling of unease and the constant quest to examine his or her place in the world.

There are a few other definitions that don't quite fall under either heading, insofar as they include both the individual's drive to find a place in the world and the larger social institutions that might be constructed around that drive. J.Z. Smith, for example, offers this:
"What we study when we study religion is one mode of constructing worlds of meaning, worlds within which men find themselves and in which they choose to dwell. What we study is the passion and drama of man discovering the truth of what it is to be human... Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate ones 'situation' so as to have 'space' in which to meaningfully dwell. It is the power to relate ones domain to the plurality of environmental and social spheres in such a way as to guarantee the conviction that one’s existence 'matters.'"
Here, religion is an attempt to reconcile the individual, the material, and the social; it's a way to create, organize, and understand one's world in a meaningful way. I find this definition particularly useful when considering religion in alien environments: if you change the nature of any of the three elements to be reconciled, what kind of religion might spring up in order to help people give meaning to their lives?

To summarize, then: the way that you define religion can give you tools for building your worlds, and there are enough scholarly definitions out there that you can find the one that best suits the kind of stories you want to tell. Don't feel that you're constrained by one or another, either. You can consider one of the functional definitions for dealing with large-scale issues, and an experiential one for writing about the inner life of a specific character. It's very difficult to go wrong, so long as you take the time to think about the questions and problems that each definition brings to mind.

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