religion and culture essay

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The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

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11 Culture and Religion

Matt Waggoner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Albertus Magnus College, New Haven, USA.

Published: 02 September 2009
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This article surveys trajectories of religious inquiry whose antecedents commonly stem from the classical sociological tradition, but whose outcomes vary with respect to the way they deal with reductive tendencies in the social sciences. To whatever extent contemporary studies of religion remain divided, as has been suggested by Russell T. McCutcheon, between essentialist theories and social-constructivist theories, the discussion argues that the key contribution of cultural analyses of religion consists in the way it has problematised this well-worn impasse by positing the possibility of a non-reductive yet thoroughly sociological study of religion. It examines the thinking of Durkheim, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida on culture and religion. The article also provides a historical and sociological critique of the notion of religion as a state of affairs, rather than a state of mind, a debate that in the social sciences goes back to Durkheim and Marx.

Introduction

Like other disciplines in the humanities, over the course of the last couple of decades, religious studies has fashioned itself in relation to the discourses of ‘culture’ and, indirectly, cultural studies. In practical terms this entailed the importation of new avenues of inquiry, with new vocabularies, enlisting headings like postcolonial theory, feminist theory, gender theory (women's studies as well as masculinity studies), gay and lesbian studies (or queer theory), critical race studies, diaspora studies, media studies, and more. This new face of the discipline shapes the conference programs of groups like the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the International Association of the History of Religions (IAHR), the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and related organizations. It also prompted the creation of new journals like Culture and Religion , the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory , the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture , and others. Peruse the table of contents of an anthology such as Critical Terms for Religious Studies and notice the virtual absence of entries with explicitly ‘religious’ connotations; they include, instead, standard categories in the lexicon of cultural studies: body, gender, modernity, conflict, culture, experience, image, liberation, transformation, transgression, performance, person, territory, writing (M. C. Taylor 1998 ).

In entries similar to the current one that appear in recent anthologies in religious studies, historians of religion Bruce Lincoln and Tomoko Masuzawa approached the subject of culture by surveying the history of the term and theories that emphasize conflict, power, negotiation, and fluidity (Lincoln 2000 ; Masuzawa 1998 ). Their essays model a study of religion as culture: that is, a human social production in which the rhetoric of gods and transcendence encodes social preoccupations with power, privilege, and identity formation. The reader is strongly encouraged to seek out these essays as indispensable resources for any attempt to consider the relationship between religion and culture. The present contribution differs slightly. It regards the association of religion and culture as a signifier for certain methodological and theoretical innovations. Here the question is not, What is culture and how might we study religion as culture? , but instead, How has ‘culture’ become emblematic of certain orientations toward agency and structure, ideology and system, subjective experience and subject formation? How have these intervening orientations informed the study of religion, challenging which rubrics of analysis? What fruitful lines of inquiry remain open to studies of religion situated at the intersection of ‘religion and culture’?

In what follows I survey trajectories of religious inquiry whose antecedents commonly stem from the classical sociological tradition, but whose outcomes vary with respect to the way they deal with reductive tendencies in the social sciences. To whatever extent contemporary studies of religion remain divided, as has been suggested by Russell T. McCutcheon, between essentialist theories (with roots in the phenomenological tradition) and social-constructivist theories (with roots in the social sciences), it will be argued here that the key contribution of cultural analyses of religion consists in the way it has problematized this well-worn impasse by positing the possibility of a non-reductive yet thoroughly sociological study of religion (McCutcheon 2003 ).

The Marxist Tradition: Culture, Cultural Studies, and Ideology Critique

Historically, ‘culture’ evoked the accoutrements of bourgeois life, intimating standards of taste, the greatest products that civilizations had to offer, the best books, musical compositions, and works of art. It implied a notion of canon as inclusion within what a given class in society privileged as uniquely emblematic of a culture. As such, ‘culture’ sanctioned a sphere of art and ideas which would preserve a dominant faction's definitions of the good, the true, and the beautiful (Williams 1977 ; 1983 ; 1985 ).

Marginal currents of twentieth-century Marxism later radicalized the concept and political significance of culture, the result of a specific history of reflection on the significance of culture dating back to the Enlightenment. Expanding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Romantic ideal of the ‘voice within’ as a guide for remaining true to oneself or authentic, Johann Gottfried Herder considered the way in which nations coalesced around essential value sets, structures of feeling, and ways of being, unifying members into coherent communities with shared, authentic life ways. For G. W. F. Hegel, culture expressed more than the pure particularity of national life ways; the specificity of historical communities and their cultural practices participated in the epic realization of the Absolute (Spirit, Reason, or Geist ) in history. Hegel invested culture with the significance of history's movement toward concrete forms of reason in history, its endpoint the achievement of societies attaining freedom no longer as an abstract concept (as he maintained Immanuel Kant's was) but as an embodied experience mediated by the cultures and polities of modern republican states (Taylor 2003 ).

In the shadow of Hegelian philosophy, German and, later, British Marxism resuscitated a new form of ambivalence towards culture, this time as either the domain of ruling-class ideology or the terrain in which the struggle for freedom occurs. In Britain especially, the New Left and cultural studies emerged in the 1960s as attempts to interrogate this ambiguity by working with and against traditional Marxian-Hegelian paradigms. A founding figure within that tradition, Raymond Williams's late twentieth-century work concentrated largely on the question of culture's place in histories of Marxist thought, wresting Marx's texts from the way in which orthodox, scientific Marxism interpreted them. Distancing himself from a mechanical style of Marxist theory and practice, Williams noted that Marx's early philosophical writings, which had suffered obscurity for many years after Marx's death, conveyed rather different attitudes toward the relation between structural and cultural formations. He argued that Marx rarely, and unsystematically, employed many of the concepts commonly associated with him, such as false consciousness and base/superstructure. And many of the early texts, as well as Engels's clarifications after Marx's death, flatly contradicted the spirit of those earlier readings. Instead of economic determinism, a view of ideology as an active and equally determining sphere in its own right (rather than the passive product of more substantive processes) emerged from close readings of the early Marx (Williams 1977 ).

E. P. Thompson

A lesser-known feature of the history of Marxist thought consists in its long-held preoccupation with religion, not just in the form of a critique of religious ideology, but through its attempts to comprehend religious movements that in some ways mirrored Marxism's own desire to mobilize the working classes to spontaneous outbursts. One example of Marxism's complex engagement with religion is the case of English Methodism. The combination of working-class support systems and collective eruptions led Marxists and other historians of Britain's failed revolution to want to understand in political terms the social significance of revivalism.

This debate became closely associated with Elie Halevy, Eric Hobsbawm, and Thompson. At mid-century, Hobsbawm and Thompson responded to Halevy's early twentieth-century thesis that Methodist revivalism frustrated revolution in England, thwarting the proletarianization of the working classes by distracting them with other-worldly concerns. Halevy ( 1961 [1911] ) maintained that revivalism compensated for its political quietism with ritual histrionics. In the 1950s, Hobsbawm ( 1957 ) challenged Halevy's thesis by pointing to evidence that the correspondence between church membership and radical society rosters seemed to indicate that revival-goers were no less politically engaged than others, and that, in fact, Methodism seemed to support working-class agitations. Six years later, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) Thompson introduced a complex account of the way in which Methodist revivalism ebbed and lowed in tandem with swings in radical political activity, concluding that religious spontaneity provided outlets for pent-up political frustrations. Thompson labeled this cathartic function of revival religions ‘psychic masturbation’; Methodism's revival tendencies were emotional surrogates for unexpressed political grievances.

Arguably, Thompson's conclusions advanced very little beyond orthodox Marxism's ideology critique of religion as a dead-end distraction, if not a smokescreen benefiting and perhaps even propagated by the ruling classes. In the end he viewed Methodism as an impotent and misdirected response to political conflict, a ‘reactive dialectic’. In any case, the seriousness with which Thompson contemplated Methodism's place in the making of English class consciousness improved upon the mechanistic model in other ways. In particular, Thompson rethought class, no longer in rigid economic terms, where one's class identity mirrors one's position in dominant modes of production, but instead in terms of ‘class consciousness’ (citing Georg Lukács's use of that term earlier in the century, cf. History and Class Consciousness ). Thompson argued in the introduction to The Making of the English Working Class for an experiential understanding of class consciousness, reliant upon modes of feeling and perception shaped not only by structural conditions but by cultural practices as well, including religious ones.

Whatever their limitations were, Thompson's arguments about English Methodism affirmed that the cultural and the political are linked inextricably. Even if Thompson toed the Marxist line by reducing cultural processes to underlying structural realities, he did at least unsettle the formulaic shape it usually assumed. The radicalization of what remained implicit in Thompson's argument eventually constituted the central claim of cultural studies in Britain, both in the works of Raymond Williams and under the intellectual leadership of Jamaican-born British sociologist Stuart Hall.

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall's writing demonstrates how influential the claims of Raymond Williams were that Marx was susceptible to plausible, alternative readings which militated against the reductionism normally attributed to him. In ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees’, Hall performed his own exegesis of Marx's texts, concluding, with Williams, that only a narrow reading of Marx sustains the view of culture as secondary and epiphenomenal. Hall argued that for Marx culture instead exists in a ‘co-determining’ relation to productive forces in society. Moreover, Marx appeared to regard culture as part of a process whereby societies (or factions within them) do not simply deceive themselves and others; rather, culture comprises the ‘processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into historical action against the prevailing system’ (Hall 1996c : 27).

Hall's work added to Williams's contribution the insights of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose early twentieth-century writings from prison had only recently been recovered after a period of obscurity, much like Marx's. Hall was largely responsible for bringing Gramsci to a wider audience and distilling from his texts implications for the study of class, culture, race, and ethnicity, as well as his critique of economic reductionism and his more optimistic view of the role that ideologies play in what Gramsci called the ‘hegemonic’ process (Hall 1996b ). In short, Gramsci imagined a position marginal to the orthodox Marxism of his day by considering how non-metropolitan, ‘subaltern’ classes do not follow the trajectory of normative proletarianization that both Marx and Marxists predicted on the basis of their analyses of productive processes in the centers of industrial Europe.

Gramsci's Prison Notebooks criticized and undermined analyses of economic determinism that relegate culture to the status of a derivative reflection of more determinate processes. He considered the role that popular religion (as well as street theater, music, and other things) played in facilitating among subaltern masses a sense of identity and opposition to dominant social forces (Gramsci 1971 ). Hall wielded Gramsci's notes as an affirmation of ideology in the process of subject formation in ways that could not simply be regarded along traditional lines as duping, but instead as critical engagements with hegemony, or what he and others began to call counter-hegemonic discourses. In the spirit of Gramsci, Hall's phrase ‘Marxism without guarantees’ continues to serve as a kind of slogan for the anti-reductive claims upon which cultural studies was founded (Hall et al. 2000 ).

These recollections of the emergence of cultural studies suggest that the intersection culture-religion carries with it an implicit theoretical rejection of reductive approaches, retaining, however, the claim that one can study religion methodologically as a social phenomenon. In other words, they suggest the compatibility of sociological with non-reductive studies of religion. To whatever extent this narrative of the relationship between a cultural turn in religious studies and the history of Marxist cultural studies is anything like correct, we should not overlook an important irony with respect to other traditions of cultural and religious study. That is to say, while the influence of Marxist cultural studies on religious studies consists primarily of a shift away from reductive theories, the general pattern elsewhere among scientific approaches to the study of religion has been less consistent.

Social-Scientific studies of Culture and Religion

The study of religion as just one among many cultural formations (with no more privileged status than any other) characterizes much of the social-science tradition since at least the nineteenth century. Yet these traditions yield no consensus with respect to the question of reduction. In this section I briefly survey how a few key contributions to the sociological study of religion outside the Marxist tradition imagined religion's relation to culture; secondly, I comment on how these classical approaches in the sociology of religion inform contemporary work in religious studies, where questions of culture and reductionism prevail.

The Classical Tradition

Whereas according to traditional readings Marx reduced religion to socioeconomic causes, according to an equally traditional reading Max Weber reversed the order by arguing that one religion—namely, Protestantism—significantly contributed to the formation and success of socio-economic patterns in Europe such as capitalism. In fact, however, Weber proceeded with indefatigable caution in order not to suggest that Protestantism acted as a determining cause; he claimed only to show that Protestantism enabled the ideological atmosphere in which capitalism could and did thrive in Europe. In any case, Weber's legacy in subsequent sociology and religious studies runs counter to explicitly reductive approaches by considering how ideologies are not simply by-products of underlying processes but also play determining roles in the construction of society.

Alongside Marx and Weber, Émile Durkheim introduced a third classical source of sociological inquiry in the study of religion. Durkheim's thesis in Elementary Forms of Religious Life that collective consciousnesses project the sacred—that societies construct religion, and that religious formations enact social formation through a kind of group transference—represents another version of the claim about religion's essential sociality. Like Marx, Durkheim treated religion as a product of the imagination—‘religious society is only human society stretched ideally to beyond the stars’ (1972: 220)—but, unlike Marx, he regarded the function of an imaginary locus of group identity as indispensable to the construction of societies; there can be no society without this collective identification with an external object which simultaneously transcends and congeals the group. To simplify, we might say: for Durkheim religion occasions the social; for Weber religion shapes the social; and for Marx religion symptomatizes the social.

The Contemporary Tradition

Secondly, W. C. Smith's view of ‘religion’ as a modern, Western concept resurfaced a few decades later in one of the most frequently cited remarks in Religious Studies: Jonathan Z. Smith's argument in the introduction to Imagining Religion that ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious— there is no data for religion . Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy’ (J. Z. Smith 1982 ). J. Z. Smith's thesis has been debated and commented on at length, in part because of its susceptibility to so many interpretations. Did he mean that religion ‘in itself’ eludes our grasp, and that we are left with no other recourse than to imagine it? Did he mean, alternatively (and most probably), that religion has no existence apart from our fabrications of it? In another register, did he mean to suggest that the history of the production of ‘religion’ as an object of study was the result merely of academic reification, and not of a certain cultural politics beyond the academy? Did the invention of religion and religions not also take place within the context of the colonial imagination and those other settings in which comparisons of peoples and their cultures informed the self-fashioning of Europe and its justification for dominating and conquering non-European others?

These questions highlight similarities between Smith's thesis and Edward Said's only three years before in a seminal text of post-colonial theory, Orientalism : that the ‘Orient’ as such does not exist, but is instead a reified product of the Western imperial imagination (Said 1979 ). One might also compare J. Z. Smith's claim, in ‘Map is Not Territory’ (1978), that within the framework of the history of religion, primitive peoples literally do not exist, because they fail to register within the discourses of ‘religion’ codified by the academy, to Gayatri Spivak's ( 1987 ) provocative suggestion (in another seminal work in postcolonial theory) that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ because her speech is incomprehensible to dominant discourses of meaning, speech, agency, and recognition.

In any case, J. Z. Smith's remark seems at least to acknowledge, as W. C. Smith's had, that the contemporary habit of imagining religion as a discrete object, embodied by a number of discrete entities (‘religions’), indicates less the way things are and more the way we imagine them to be —a social-constructivist thesis (Smith identified it with Kant, presumably with the idea that we do not grasp things themselves but must instead represent them to ourselves, a process involving imaginative acts of cognition and classification). But, unlike W. C. Smith, J. Z. Smith refused to subscribe to a notion of religion as ‘faith’ or anything like it. Religion, for J. Z. Smith, can be grasped only as a fiction, even if, as he was not at all reluctant to state, a necessary fiction. In other words, while we must study ‘religion’ and ‘religions’, we must do so cognizant of the fact that these reifications simply assist us in the taxonomic effort of studying the ways in which humans construct worlds and world views (J. Z. Smith 1996 ). The requirement of the scholar of world-construction processes is that she not naively imitate religious participants' mental errors by mistaking the discourse of ‘religion’ for a real object. Although Smith likened his approach to Kant's, I would argue that his ‘imagining religion’ thesis fits better with the empiricism of David Hume, who similarly maintained that while we cannot live without the inferences we routinely make (e.g., about causation), we must remain cognizant of the real limits, even impoverishment, of our knowledge.

Particularly in his very important Discourse , Lincoln aligned himself with Marxists like Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci as someone interested in relations of power as they permeate culture. He argued that culture, especially religion, serves as a site for ongoing negotiations for power and privilege in society, or the ‘hegemonic struggle’ (Lincoln 1992 ). In retrospect, Lincoln's nearly three decades of writing tend to emphasize only one side of culture's role in the hegemonic struggle: its ideological role, e.g., its effort to cloak its own historicity through transcendental claims meant to authorize one position and de-legitimize others. That is to say, he does not examine the way in which the hegemonic struggle for Gramsci and those he influenced (Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, cf. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1986 )) referred not simply to constructions of power and authority (by those in power), e.g., co-opting and appropriating dissent, fabricating authority and so forth; the hegemonic struggle also referred to efforts to challenge and de-legitimize those fictitious claims to authority, power, and privilege, precisely by rendering visible the arbitrariness of their claims.

Thus, Lincoln's combination of neo-Durkheimian and neo-Marxist orientations to the study of religion and culture consists of three main features. First, he proceeds from the supposition that societies construct religion, and that this construction lies near the heart of the process of social formation. Second, he stresses that religion comprises a rhetoric of power, and that, as in all cultural instances, one has to view religion within the context of operations of hegemonic struggles. Third, he makes a methodological suggestion: in the study of religion one must regard with suspicion religion's own claims, rather than treat them as first-hand evidence, since religious rhetoric functions by concealing its own culturally and historically specific origins, claiming instead the authorship and authority of transcendent, supra-historical origins.

These, then, illustrate some of the important recent interventions in the social-scientific study of religion which take seriously the role of culture, by (1) viewing religion as a subset of culture rather than something sui generis (see further McCutcheon 2005 ); by (2) stressing the ways that religion, too, participates in the hegemonic struggle; and by (3) marking the way in which the very category of religion already betrays the cultural specificity of the modern West. In the final portion of this essay I reflect on the problem of reductionism in religious studies by exploring some of the ways that the cultural turn has resulted in a shift from consciousness-based orientations to one that emphasizes the way in which something like religion may reside not within consciousness but instead within culture itself. I conclude by summarizing the argument put forward here that one of the most productive contributions of the ‘culture and religion’ intersection may be the shift towards an analysis of religion as it is inscribed within cultural formations, rather than within the hearts, minds, or bodies of participants. I take this to be one of sociology's promising contributions to the study of religion, even if sociology remains often enough just as susceptible to belief-centered approaches.

Religion as a State of Affairs (Not a State of Mind)

Notwithstanding the importance of Jonathan Z. Smith's contribution to the scholarly study of religion, would it be possible to acknowledge that religion is more than subjectively ‘imagined’ by conceding that religion's existence has its locus beyond brains and bodies, beyond myth and performance, i.e., in something like a culture or a social system, in technologies of representation and of the self, in discourses of truth and subjectivity? I conclude by proposing the need for the study of religion to consider what it would mean to disarticulate religion from individual and group consciousness as the primary unit of analysis, to imagine instead how ‘religion’ resides in another locus exterior to one or more subjects. If the general trend within Marxism and the social sciences was to reduce religion to a subjective construction, how might we rethink religion as an objective social phenomenon in order to grasp how it continues to structure late modern society?

This approach complies with what sometimes goes by the name of discourse theory, but can be traced to elements within the thinking of Marx. To begin with, Marx showed that insofar as social realities may be ideological, they arise from objective conditions. Even the subject with ‘consciousness’ and beliefs emerges out of determinate conditions in Marx's analysis. While the religiousness of believers is to be expected, given their estrangement from the mechanisms that actually govern their lives, the real site of mystical phenomena and theological sleight of hand, for Marx, occurs at the structural level of the political-economic organization of society.

To illustrate this, notice how Marx's well-known comments in Capital on the ‘fetishism of the commodity and its secret’ did two things (Marx 1977 : 163–77). First, it satirized ‘Enlightened’, demythologized society, which looked condescendingly at African and New World fetishism. Western society regarded these things as superstitious attributions of value to inanimate objects, while Europe, at the height of its highly advanced and civilized social development, constructed a socioeconomic system with attendant political formations on the basis of an equally mystical transformation of human processes and raw materials into special objects with inexplicable values, which is to say, commodities (see further Mulvey 1996 ; Taussig 1983 ). Secondly, Marx's critique of commodity fetishism broke with the common sense that regarded religion as a state of mind. If religiousness exists in the minds of individuals, it is because the conditions that give rise to those beliefs are already mystical in nature. The most ideological thing of all would be to look no further than cognition for an account of religion, for that would foreclose an analysis of the circumstances which engender religion as their cultural consciousness.

The problem, historically, is that sociology has tended to rely almost as much as psychology on the framework of consciousness; it merely provides a different account of its formation, as illustrated by a particular moment in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life . In the following excerpt, Durkheim specified what can qualify as sacred, and in doing so excluded, contra Marx, anything which could not be explained in terms of projections of individuals or group consciousness:

It is not enough that one thing be subordinated to another for the second to be sacred in regard to the first. Slaves are inferior to their masters, subjects to their king, soldiers to their leader, the miser to his gold, the man ambitious for power to the hands which keep it from him; but if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things whose eminent value and superiority to himself he thus recognizes, it is clear that in any case the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and that there is nothing in these relations which is really religious. (Durkheim 1976 : 37)

As if to challenge Marx's claims about the religiousness of social systems, Durkheim differentiated religion from relations of exchange, domination, and valuation in society stemming from structures of power and political economy. In doing so he avoided reference to anything identifiably modern, limiting himself to generic relations between slaves and masters, subjects and kings, soldiers and commandants, the power-seeking and the power-keeping. Interesting in this is the inclusion of gold fetishism, as if to say that while pre-capitalist fetishism may be religious, its capitalist counterpart surely is not.

Durkheim's effort to justify this distinction requires him to reduce all those examples of structurally derived relations of power and alienation to subjective phenomena: ‘if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things …’. The reduction from structural to subjective conceptualizations of value enables Durkheim to disqualify political economy as ‘religious’ for the same reason as he later disqualified magic; magic and commodity fetishism are, notwithstanding their secondary associations with collective supports (e.g., priesthoods or modes of production), fundamentally individual activities. The man who ‘makes a religion’ of gold apparently does so independently of historical circumstances in which gold is revered as an inexplicably valuable object; his fetishism is therefore cognitive in nature, a mental mistake, and is to be distinguished from ‘really religious’ instances in which societies collectively regard beings and objects as inherently valuable.

By assigning metaphorical status to the colloquial ascription of ‘religion’ to class structures and commodity fetishism, Durkheim clings to the code of regarding the products of Western culture, such as capitalism, as just what they claim to be: that is, rational and secular. Excluding the designation ‘religious’ from anything which cannot represent itself in the form of a consciousness, Durkheim effectively foreclosed the possibility of analyzing the religiousness of the cultures, discourses, apparatuses, technologies, rules, and systems that coordinate the conditions in which attributions and perceptions of value take place. Durkheim upholds the supposition rejected by Marx, who recognized religion in objective states of affairs and not just in states of mind.

Among recent theories of discourse and the subject, an alternative to the persistent subjectivism of both essentialism and anti-essentialist constructivism has taken the form of a turn to the exteriority of the subject, conceding that the locus of the self is in something like language or discourse. This axial turn emerged in the twentieth century primarily by way of Freud and Lacan, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other. It is thus curious that Freud and Foucault continue to be regarded as polarized figureheads for the essentialist-constructivist controversy.

She suggested that Foucault's concept of ‘relations of power’, which took shape in the late 1970s, depicted a notion of power working on and in the body, but independent of consciousness, and in that case must be read in the context of (Lacanian) constructions of the subject constituted ‘in the field of the Other’—that is, through a linguistically organized unconscious. My point is not to agree that Foucault achieved no more than what psychoanalysis had by then already asserted; it is to identify the emergence of models of subjectivation which locate the origin of subjectivity in modes of discourse and representation that exist outside and independent of the subject's ‘imagination’, consciousness, cognition, or whatever other metaphors for the locus of subjectivity one employs. By implication, neither the object ‘religion’ nor the processes of ‘imagining religion’ are adequately viewed as housed within the heads and hearts of folks. Heads and hearts, minds and bodies, fail to exhaust the operation of culture and discourse.

The linguistic turn challenged the model of a connection between individual and society which presupposed mechanical processes between discretely organic entities: on the one hand, individuals, bounded by their bodies, and on the other hand, societies, as mere complexes of individuals. With a theory of signification, what emerged was the possibility of saying, as Foucault did, that ‘something like a language, even if it is not in the form of explicit discourse, even if it has not been deployed for a consciousness, can in general be given to representation’ (Foucault 1970 : 361). To the extent that Foucault's history of the human sciences in The Order of Things stemmed from his critique of psychoanalysis, what remains evident is that the error of Freud was not to have posited a behind-the-back determination of the subject by the unconscious; it was his failure to follow through with a conception of the subject and of the unconscious as an effect of language, and therefore to conceive of them as entities whose locus is not in themselves but in something external to them. De Lauretis may be right that Freud did so in his theory of the drive; in another way, this was Lacan's achievement when he redescribed the unconscious as something structured like a language: the subject's locus is in the other, and the locus of the other is in language.

The future study of religion, I argue, will find it increasingly necessary to take seriously the exteriority of religion to the subject in ways that make the ‘imagining religion’ thesis less pertinent than it has been regarded in the past. Such a study may find models in the work of someone like Jacques Derrida, who contributed a number of books and essays on the topic of religion during the last decade and a half of his life. Derrida analyzed television, telecommunication, jet travel, and other components of globalization as instances of what he referred to as the ‘afterlife of religion’ following the so-called ‘death of religion’. His argument, seminal to what has come to be called philosophy's ‘religious turn’, was that religion is hardly dead in the midst of secularization. This is because there is a kind of rebirth, or perhaps intensification, of the religious within the structures of the global engineered by the process of expansionist capital, by the instantaneous proliferation of the word (through communication) and presence (through travel), and by juridical discourses of the global such as human rights (Derrida 1996 ; 2001 ). There is not space here fully to explicate Derrida's argument; suffice it to say that in Derrida's view we do not see religion today as much in the beliefs of individuals as in the cultural logics of the late modern world. I suggest that a sociology of religion relevant to the developments of late modernity will be one capable of attending to this model of religion as a state of affairs rather than a state of mind, and that to do so will require the field of study to relinquish long-held predispositions toward ‘reducing’ religion from a perceived objective reality to something merely imagined. The question may instead be: In what ways is the world we inhabit structured religiously even as it clings to the guise of secularization?

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Published: 19 June 2018

The future of the philosophy of religion is the philosophy of culture—and vice versa

Mike Grimshaw ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-061X 1

Palgrave Communications volume 4 , Article number: 72 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This paper reads the future of the Philosophy of Religion via a critical engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and diversions into other thinkers to support the main thrust of the argument. It takes as a starting point Tillich’s discussion of the relationship between religion and culture in On the Boundary (1967), in particular his statement “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (69–70). With (unlikely) diversions via TS Eliot and Karl Barth, the argument is developed through a re-reading of Tillich’s work on a theology of culture and in particular the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (264). Central to the rethinking of this paper is then the reworking of Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (52). While this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, this paper inserts culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a theology of culture also engages with a philosophy of culture; just as a philosophy of religion must engage with a philosophy of culture; for it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. The final part of this paper articulates a rethought Philosophy of Culture as the boundary space from which the future of the Philosophy of Religion can be thought, in creative tension with a Tillich-derived radical theology.

Folk religion as the “life-world”: revival of folk beliefs and renewal of religious categorization in contemporary China

Shuai Chi & Chao Liu

Vietnamese lived religion, Confucianism and women: goddess spirituality in Nguyễn Dữ’s the young woman from Nam Xuong

Ngan Nguyen Thi Kim

Using the ‘journey metaphor’ to restructure philosophy of religion

Timothy Knepper

Preface: setting the scene

This is an essay in conjecture—and deliberately so. It seeks to find a point from which to tackle the question of ‘‘what if’’ and ‘‘what for’’ regarding the future of the Philosophy of Religion. In doing so, the central figure from which to base this engagement is the great German-American theologian Paul Tillich; but because this is a deliberately discursive, conjectural essay, other figures arise, are named, perhaps engaged with and other times just briefly alluded to. This is a deliberate approach, for this article is a type of thinking piece that seeks to exist as a type of collected signposts: signposts from the past in that Tillich himself died over half a century ago and so to draw upon him for the future is to claim some form of continuity from his ‘‘then’’ to our ‘‘now’’ toward some possible future. A central aim of this essay is to draw theology back into a critical engagement with the Philosophy of Religion, positioning a radical secular theology as a way to think a future secular Philosophy of Religion.

As the collection of papers to which this essay belongs addresses, there appears to be a widespread sense of crisis within the Philosophy of Religion. This seems to have arisen due to an overly focused attention and discussion on arguments as to the existence or non-existence of God. The issue is that having debated this, what can now be said? In short, it can be caricatured as: here is an argument for God’s existence or here is an argument against God’s existence. But for most people this is an increasingly irrelevant argument. Their response will be: yes, I agree or no, I don’t; but few will be convinced to change their mind from one view to the other. To be blunt, the crisis is one of relevance. Kevin Schilbrack has identified a similar set of issues, stating the traditional view of Philosophy of Religion is too narrow , intellectualist and insular (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10); from this critique he develops his own manifesto for a global philosophy of religion (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140) whereby “the future of philosophy of religion should be more inclusive, more focused on practice, and more self-reflexive, but I do not think that Philosophy of religion should give up the traditional normative task of evaluating religious claims about the nature of reality.”(Schilbrack, 2014 : p.140). And therein lies the nub of the issue—even for someone attempting to rethink the future of Philosophy of Religion—because, how is that reality performed and experienced, expressed and constructed? For most people, the question is twofold: firstly, what is done or not done in the name of religion and why; and secondly what can be done or not done in the name of religion and why? For religion is as much a way of doing as a way of thinking; or perhaps in a more nuanced way the question could be: how does the doing of religion affect our thinking and how does the thinking of religion affect our doing? Yet this is where theology can be of help, for theology has never just reduced itself or limited its main focus to the question of the existence or non-existence of God. Rather theology seeks to apply the critical thinking regarding questions of God and religion to all of existence. In particular, arising from the encounter with modernity, in the mid-twentieth century there emerged what can be termed ‘‘death of god’’ theologies and secular theologies that realized they could not just focus on arguments for or against God’s existence. Footnote 1 This is why the rethinking of Philosophy of Religion is undertaken via a critical engagement with Theologies that themselves had to rethink their future in modernity. It is also interesting to note that an important mid-twentieth century collection of essays on Philosophy of Religion that in many ways, from its own time, attempted to address a very similar question to that posed by this collection, labeled itself “New Essays in Philosophical Theology” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955). As the editors noted, their choice of title occurred because ‘‘Philosophy of Religion’’ “has become, and seems likely for some time to remain, associated with Idealist attempts to present philosophical prolegomena to theistic theology” (Flew and Macintyre, 1955, viii). Interestingly for this current essay and its call to engage with death of god and secular theologies, the editors of that collection observed: “We realize that many will be startled to find the word ‘‘theology’’ so used that: the expression ‘‘theistic theologian’’ is not tautological; and the expression ‘‘atheist theologian’’ is not self-contradictory. But unless this unusual usage of ours is adopted we have to accept the paradox that those who reach opposite conclusions about certain questions must be regarded as having shown themselves to have been engaged in different disciplines.” (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955, viii). So, we could say at the outset, that the future of Philosophy of Religion is to regain that name of philosophical theology and so be open to the expressions noted above in 1955. This also provides a background to what is expressed in this essay, for I also venture a future via the early theology of Karl Barth because many who found themselves as death of God or secular theologians (in particular Altizer, Hamilton, Vahanian) had arisen out of the theology of Barth and, taking seriously Barth’s criticism of modernity, sought a new relevance in light of modern, twentieth century secular culture. For just as theology had to come through its own crisis of meaning in modernity, perhaps Philosophy of Religion (or a reworked Philosophical theology?) can now gain from an encounter with those forms of theology that arose seeking a critical engagement with meaning in late modernity. Crucially, such theologies understood theology to be a constructive task of critical engagement and meaning, and it is here that the theological thought of Paul Tillich provides both a model and resource. For Tillich’s theology occupies a boundary between theology and secularity and between religion and culture, attempting always to express just what it might mean to be modern—and what we may need to draw upon to do so; and here TS Eliot provides a way to rethink what needs to be recognized.

This is also a time in which I find myself increasingly referencing Mary Ann Caw’s definition of what she terms ‘‘the manifesto moment’’ that is positioned “between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential, in a radical and energizing division” (Caws: xxi), a moment of crisis expressing “what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change” (Caws: xxiii) . These first decades of the twenty-first century seem to be decades of crisis—whether economically, politically, or socially. These are times where on the one hand we believe that via technology anything is possible—and yet the choices made seem increasingly to be those that privilege the self—and/or sectarian interests. At such times, the manifesto arises as the claim of the need to rethink so we can act in new ways. As such the manifesto moment is where the critical thinking is done, thinking that is necessarily both conjectural and radical, thinking that seeks to overturn existing orthodoxies and expectations in the hope of creating the possibility of something new, something better: a call for emancipation. What follows is an attempt to do via considering the future of Philosophy of Religion.

The time of crisis and the ‘‘necessary problem’’

We find ourselves in a time of crisis for the Philosophy of Religion—a crisis of meaning, a crisis of focus, a crisis of intent. Of course, it would be easy to state that such a crisis is inevitable given the two constituent elements of philosophy and religion; that is, what we have is the magnification, the concentration of existing crises in philosophy and religion. These are crises of meaning and crises of what future—if any—they hold that is positive. Yet is perhaps the sense of crisis is to be expected. If philosophy and religion do not think of themselves as existing in some form of crisis in modernity then we have, in effect collapsed out of modernity into that situation defined by Jean-Francios Lyotard whereby the post-modern is the return to pre-modern ways of thinking (Lyotard: p.79). For I would claim religion is ‘‘a necessary problem’’ for modernity that modernity seeks to continuously define itself against. Central to this is the challenge modernity throws down regarding religion as collective expression and claim of truth and religion as individual belief. We can trace this to the rise of the Enlightenment and the challenge to religion as political, cultural, and intellectual power. To be modern, I would argue, is to find some problem with religion as collective and individual claim; that is, to find a problem with how religion both seeks to interpret the world and human existence and meaning—and more so, how religion as collective entities and religious individuals may seek to challenge and undo modern understandings and values. For to be modern is to seek to live after religion—and yet religion continues, as both collective and individual claim, signaling that modernity is a project and not a realized state. This is why ‘‘religion is a necessary problem’’—for it reminds us that modernity is an unfinished project of emancipation within this world. Furthermore, if we trace religion back to relegare (to bind together) and to relegere (to re-read) then religion operates as the claim of an alternative to how things are organized and thought in modernity. To be modern is perhaps to attempt to live after religion—yet not be able to properly do so. To be modern is to recognize the existence of religion as a collective and individual sign that the hopes and dreams of modernity have yet to be realized. Therefore, when religion is not seen or experienced as a problem perhaps that is when we have slipped-over into the post-modern? For in the post-modern, religion becomes something we need not be emancipated from; rather it either becomes the source of an emancipation from the world and/or a means of accommodation to the world: in Marxist terms, the return of the opiate of the masses (Marx, 1844 ). As we shall see, the postmodern is also perhaps the end of the hopes and dreams of modernity, a type of collective and individual giving up of the modern aim of emancipation. We saw this shift into the post-modern with the rise of religion as just yet another lifestyle choice and part of identity-politics. That is, religion for many was not viewed as either an individual or collective problem, rather it did not matter whether people were religious nor what type of religious. We could say that such a turn to religion became an uncritical form of what Foucault termed the technologies of the self. (Foucault, 1988 ) Religion became a personal choice and expression and was not regarded nor experienced as a challenge nor critique of the collective status quo of contemporary society. Instead we saw a retreat into prosperity gospels, ecstatic Pentecostalism, and forms of evangelical emotionalism and pietism all focused upon personal salvation, often in a perverse combination of spiritual and economic divine favor. We also saw the rise of various forms of New Age beliefs as well as the turn to western Buddhism. In neo-Weberian terms, this is re-enchantment of the self, within capitalism.

Of course, such expressions are not pre-modern as per Lyotard’s description, but in their underlying endorsement of the status quo (often especially the economic status quo) and the retreat to personalist responses they signaled a shift whereby religion was, in the main, no longer experienced in the west as a problem or societal critique. Or perhaps, to be more accurate and in particular, Christianity was no longer experienced as such. At most, Christianity was regarded as a personal and collective oddity— and importantly, often regarded and dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary society. Even the rise of American evangelical Christian politics can be understood as part of this postmodern turn because this was a retreat into a form of Christianity that, in the main, turned its back on the challenges of and from modern theological and biblical scholarship. Also, its pursuit of various forms of Christian theocracy (if often never named as such) was in itself the pursuit of a pre-modern Christian governance.

Likewise, the rise of Islamic politics was and is in its own way a retreat into types of postmodern identities—whether in the rise of the revolutionary Islamic state in Iran or that of Isis, which combines postmodern identity-politics, social media religion, and nostalgic Islamist politics to tragic ends. For a theocracy can never be modern, but it certainly can be postmodern and the theocratic tendency is one form of the postmodern in the contemporary world. Similarly, the only form of religion that is really regarded and experienced as a problem in the West is that labeled radical Islam or Islamist and is so regarded because of terrorist actions and its challenge to both secular and Christian social and cultural norms. Yet here we need to be clear that whereas Christianity was regarded as a type of ‘‘necessary problem’’ for the modern West to define itself via and against, Islam is not seen or responded to in this way. Rather Islam is more often regarded as an alien problem, an external problem, a problem not central nor internal to Western self-definition. For Islam is often regarded as expressing a non-Western religion and culture (despite—or rather perhaps because of, the long history of Islam in the West). For Islam in the West is still a minority identity (despite the scaremongering of ‘‘Islamic demographics’’ evident in Europe) and so is also still responded to as part of both Western postmodern identity-politics and the identity-politics of multiculturalism.

A central theme of this essay is that while Christianity exists as and continues to be a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for Western modernity, this means it is also an intellectual and cultural resource to both draw upon—and react against. To understand how this may be so, it is useful to consider what TS Eliot expressed in the appendix to his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). First delivered as radio talks to the recently defeated Germany in 1946 and arising from Eliot’s pre-war The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he now expanded his central theme of the unity of European culture as expressed by the arts and ideas that arose out of a common Christian culture into a wider post-war discussion of culture. Eliot also saw the possible reconciliation of Modernism and Christianity as the way to restore an anti-romantic modernity against the newly defeated Volkgeist of Germany. He was, however, careful to state that the basis of European unity in a history of Christian culture did not necessitate or imply a unified contemporary Christian culture. Rather, in the modern world, the acknowledgment of a shared heritage to be drawn upon does not necessarily involve a shared belief in the present day. Developing the line of argument that would later become his famously all-inclusive definition of religion as culture and culture as “part of our lived religion” (Eliot, 1948 : p.31) Footnote 2 , Eliot commented: “It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of the Christian faith for its meaning.” (Eliot, 1948 : p.122).

This is why Christianity was expressed and experienced as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity, for modernity in the West was a modernity that arose from and in reaction to Christianity—and most importantly, from and against a Christian culture. Importantly for our discussion, Western philosophy arose primarily from a combination of, reaction to, and various rejections of classical thought and Christianity—especially, Christian theology. Therefore, any attempt to rethink philosophies in the West needs to take heed of Eliot’s insight; even if the philosophy is directly situated to reject Christianity or a Christian-derived culture, it does so because of the culture and context that sits behind it.

As has been argued, the shift to the postmodern was a shift that at a cultural level no longer saw any need to seriously engage with or even acknowledge this Christian cultural heritage. While there may have often been an uncritical turn to ‘‘the religious’’ and ‘‘the spiritual’’ in the postmodern shift, it tended to do so in a highly individualistic manner. The postmodern, especially in popular and mass forms, too often and too easily drew upon religion and that nebulous criteria deemed ‘‘the spiritual’’ as resources for identity-politics, becoming primarily used in an eclectic personal assemblage.

I have referred to Eliot because I believe he expresses a cultural truth that we seem in danger of either forgetting or misinterpreting today. For on the one hand, the emphasis on a shared or common heritage is either conveniently forgotten and/or summarily dismissed by those seeking to emphasize difference. While there was indeed the need of a corrective turn toward the acknowledgement of plurality away from a mono-cultural, mono-theological hegemony, this can and did, too often and too easily, result in a dismissal of any shared heritage or cultural lineage as merely hegemonic imposition. Yet conversely, from within such a postmodern turn, in the face of competing pluralities and identities, there is an increasingly conservative retreat into cultural, religious, and theological singularities that result in the promotion of a purist cultural and religious sectarianism against often ill-defined ‘‘others.’’ Therefore, in the case of both extremes, I wish to position Eliot’s statement as a necessary reminder of what is at stake at a time when many in our globalized societies are attempting to reconcile postmodernism and religion in forms that are types of Volkgeist . This in itself raises serious issues for Philosophy of Religion, for does it follow such moves down an essentialist, romanticist line and become in effect a de facto justification for such forms of postmodern religion? For as noted earlier, the Post-modern openness to a plurality of beliefs and cultures and viewpoints has also, unfortunately, resulted in the rise of conservative—and increasingly extremist—religio-cultural claims that increasingly circulate through both non-digital and digital outlets, expressions and networks: political parties, lobby and protest groups, print and digital media, social media, and the internet. This rise in what can be termed counter-modern positions has occurred because the theory of postmodernism as applied to beliefs, spirituality, and cultural difference (to challenge hegemony and allow difference) as has been replaced by the bureaucratic politics of postmodernity as applied to cultural identity (the creation of new hegemonic demands of classification, reordering, and rights). In particular, the shift from the Enlightenment’s suspicion and rejection of religion to the notion of the equality of all beliefs in a relativist fashion in a spirit of tolerance has had the unforseen result of the revival of intolerant expressions of faith as identity-politics. In short, we have seen the rise of the demanded tolerance of the intolerant.

What makes Eliot’s statement concerning a shared heritage different from postmodern essentialist claims is the recognition the heritage does not have to be believed in . In effect, Eliot’s statement is one of religious and cultural agnosticism, in that the agnostic (and also it could be argued, the atheist) assumes their position in reference to particular statements and expressions of belief. This issue of particularity sits at the center of Eliot’s cultural criticism. European culture has a particular legacy that each particular individual responds to by dint of being European. Yet this legacy of Christianity and Christian culture is not a collective demand as a belief upon any European individual as an individual . The individual, although they may find their thought, actions and creations occurring under the cultural influence of the legacy of Christian culture, are not, as individuals required, demanded or imposed upon to believe in Christianity. A cultural secularity has occurred that guarantees the freedom of the individual, even though the religious legacy continues, both implicitly and explicitly—to shape and define the culture they live, work, think, and create within. This is the background to the state of crisis we find ourselves in.

On how to rethink the crisis; or, hopes and dreams?

As for our present situation, the cultural critic Dick Hebdige described it thus: “Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable” (Hebdige: p.195). While Hebdige was writing 30 years ago, in many ways we still find ourselves in what could be called the postmodern interregnum: a modernity beset by postmodern banalities and exclusions without the possibility—it seems—of hopes and dreams to make the present bearable. What we have instead of hopes and dreams is a culture of distraction, the digital intensification via social media and the internet of that situation so telling dissected by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). So, to veer via Marx and his famous critique of religion as the opiate of the masses (1844), we find ourselves in a new form of digital capitalism where the opiate of the masses is a combination of postmodern identity-politics and data screen distraction.

A Barthian interlude?

I know this essay is really meant to be about what Tillich can offer us, but bear with me please for just one further deviation. If we are to think philosophically, religiously, and theologically about the crisis of modernity then we need to also look back a century to what Karl Barth did in Der Römerbrief of 1918/1919, for as Robert W. Jenson claims, Barth’s commentary “theologically divides the twentieth century from the nineteenth” (Jensen: p.2). With Barth’s Der Römerbrief a new type of theological modernity came into being: a rupture against the failures of the hopes and dreams of nineteenth century liberalism—whether theologically, religiously, or culturally. In many ways—and I acknowledge that it is perhaps heretical to say so—Barth’s Der Römerbrief was a type of proto-post-modern moment in and of itself, for it signaled a theology ‘‘without the hopes and dreams that made nineteenth century theology and culture bearable.’’

It is well known that Barth’s commentary arose as reaction to the manifesto of support for the Kaiser in 1914 signed by 93 of the most eminent German intellectuals. This occasioned nothing less a crisis of faith in the liberalism that provided his theological and cultural world up to that time. As Barth writes in 1915, “It was like the twilight of the gods when I saw the reaction of Harnack, Herman, Rade, Euchen and company to the situation” (Busch: p.81); later reflecting in 1927, “they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war” (Busch: p.81). Barth regarded this failure to be an ethical one that in turn prompted him to proclaim “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order” (Busch: p.81). This is the context in which Barth turns to Romans , a turn to this text as part of a challenge to contemporary German culture Protestantism, liberal theology and a rejection of that which had developed in the wake of Schleiermacher. Romans was, therefore, positioned also against the romantic movement, idealism and pietism. (Busch: p.100) So a perceptive reader can see that while, on the one hand, I have stated that Barth’s Der Römerbrief could be a proto-postmodern rejection of nineteenth century theological and cultural modernity, on the other hand, Der Römerbrief is positioned against the forerunners of todays’ postmodern crisis. It is this that makes both Barth’s Der Römerbrief and the original Romans of Paul such fascinating—and troublesome—documents to engage with today.

One of the interesting moves of continental philosophy in the first decades of the twenty-first century is a turn to Romans , a turn back to Paul Footnote 3 —but not so much a turn to the possibilities offered by Barth. For Barth proclaims a problematic neo-orthodox theology in a critical confrontation with modernity. That is, Barth’s theology demands to be a necessary problem for modernity, holding modernity to account: modernity as theological event and modernity as cultural event. Barth’s turn to Romans is driven by the centrality of the term and idea of KRISIS Footnote 4 as biblical event that demands a theological response. For Barth, the crisis of the War and the support of the German theologians for war led to the KRISIS that asked as biblical and theological question ‘‘what decision is to be made?’’ For Barth the KRISIS was how could theology be done given the support of theologians for what had occurred? This act and the resultant KRISIS signaled the end of theology as was and the need for a new theology. Here Barth links the War to a central theological issue. The crisis of the war and more widely of modernity occurred because theology became religion. Theology gave up its role as what can be labeled corrective KRISIS and became that which celebrated human hubris in acts of divisive and destructive idolatry. For in Barth’s reading of Romans he finds the centrality of a theology opposed to all human attempts to reach God and express God’s will. These failures are identified as religion. Against religion stands Christianity and in Barth’s expression of Christianity, it rejects all human attempts to order and dominate. In his commentary Barth gives a list of all that Christianity does not support: Individualism, Collectivism, Nationalism, Internationalism, Humanitarianism, Ecclesiasticism, Nordic enthusiasm, and Devotion to western culture. Furthermore, Christianity “observes with a certain coldness the cult of both ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘civilization’’, of both Romanticism and Realism” (Barth: pp.462–463).

Barth’s turn to Romans is, therefore, a turn to a text of KRISIS in response to what he perceived as a contemporary KRISIS. In this re-turn to biblical theology and exegesis Romans became the text from which a critique of modernity and its hubris could occur and in doing so Barth repositions Romans as a text for the later critics. This turn occurs also as part of what Graham Ward identifies as the post-1914 crisis of confidence regarding language and representation, a “crisis of legitimization and confidence in Western European civilization” (Ward: p.7).

In Barth’s Der Römerbrief we have the situation of crisis (intellectual, cultural, political) as the problem of the age and the challenge of KRISIS (theological and biblical) expressed as time of decision, challenging that which is and demanding a decision in response. The war is, therefore, both crisis and KRISIS for Barth, and the crisis of the culture is symptomatic of the wider KRISIS of the age. The war, therefore, expresses clearly the KRISIS that the modern world finds itself confronted with. As the Jewish critic Will Herberg observed in 1949 , Barth’s Der Römerbrief “put to an end the smug self-satisfaction of western civilization and therewith to western man’s high illusions approaching omnipotence and perfectibility” (Herberg: p.50). Furthermore, as Herberg reminded his contemporary post-WW2 audience, crisis occurred as two types. There was the contemporary sense of crisis of seeking a truth but of which we cannot be sure we have reached and the Greek KRISIS, which is that of judgment. (Herberg: p.50).

Getting to Tillich via the ‘‘neo-”

Barth serves his purpose here with the twin signposting of crisis and KRISIS. I would suggest that as we proceed we need to also hold onto Herberg’s delineation, for the crisis of the future of Philosophy of Religion is perhaps because it has veered back from KRISIS. That is, does Philosophy of Religion involve judgment? Or is it, as Schilbrak critiqued, too narrow , intellectualist and insular? (Schilbrack, 2014 : p.10).

So, when does Tillich make his appearance—and how? To get to Tillich and what he can offer, I suggest we should also remember James Clifford’s aphorism that “ ‘‘Post’’ is always shadowed by ‘‘neo’’”(Clifford: p.227). The crisis of religion can, therefore, be understood via this as the rise of the neo-modern. And what of the crisis of philosophy? Again, I would also situate philosophy as the alternate ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity; for both religion and philosophy attempt to hold the modern—that is the modus (the just now )—to critique and challenge (or in Barthian terms, to the judgment of KRISIS). Likewise, modernity was often suspicious of the basis and authority of claims made by the religious and the philosophical, especially if they claim a non-material basis. What occurred was a type of unresolved dialectic whereby any synthesis occurred within modernity and with a greater compromise of either religion or philosophy than of modernity itself. The question became one of what degree of accommodation could modernity make? Or more truthfully, what degree of accommodation was modernity prepared to make? This saw the rise of secular religious thought as a rethinking of religion as ‘‘necessary problem’’ within modernity. For philosophy, the issue was a different one. Lacking the public impact and collective identities that religion its various forms could call upon, philosophy either retreated to the academy or became political philosophies that in mass movements such as fascism or state communism were tragically—and inevitably I would argue given their hegemonic ideological collectivism—expressed in totalitarian regimes of oppression and mass death.

Conversely, in the turn to the postmodern—which is as Lyotard observes also the turn to the pre-modern—religion and philosophy hold a less problematic place; why is this? Because religion and philosophy become in effect, lifestyle choices, reduced to the personal away from the public and so while we may be in a crisis we lack the corrective of KRISIS.

Why Tillich matters

It is now time, finally, to bring in Paul Tillich (1886–1965) as a resource for a rethought neo-modern possibility that restores religion and philosophy as the necessary problems of the neo-modern. I want to begin with his famous statement (almost now a Tillichian cliché) from On the Boundary (1967), that “As religion is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion” (Tillich, 1967 : pp.69–70). Yet what is often forgotten or perhaps even deliberately excluded, is the equally important statement that precedes this: “The relationship between religion and culture must be defined from both sides of the boundary” (Tillich, 1967 : p.69). This is why I included the earlier digression via Eliot for he attempted such definitions in his analysis.

Tillich’s starting point is that “religion is an aspect of the human spirit” that “presents itself to us as religious” when “we look at the human spirit from a special point of view” (Tillich, 1959 : p.5). Tillich clarifies this by stating “religion is not a special function of man’s spiritual life, but it is the dimension of depth in all of its functions” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.5–6), and then he provides his famous description: “Religion, in the largest and most basic sense if the word, is ultimate concern, and ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit” (Tillich, 1959 : pp.7–8).

This provides our entry point for reconsidering the future of Philosophy of Religion. For as Tillich articulates, to attempt to separate thinking about religion from thinking about culture—and vice versa—is to fail to properly engage with either religion or culture. Yet, to be clear, this does not mean that our thinking on either involves an uncritical engagement, for as has been outlined, the issues of postmodern culture are expressed in postmodern religion just as the turn to the uncritical self helped to drive the worst excesses of postmodern culture.

Of course, both religion and culture are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down and define, which is a central reason why they are often engaged with academically via the interdisciplinary lens of ‘‘studies.’’ So, let us attempt a clarification here: to think about religion and culture via Tillich is also to think about these concepts and experiences via the legacy of Western Christian thought and culture. Of course, the expressions of religion and culture can be expanded outwards from this legacy, but this legacy is, as argued via Eliot, central to Western modernity and what we are arguing for here is a neo-modern turn and engagement that restores religion and philosophy as ‘‘necessary problems.’’ Therefore, to think about religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ via Tillich is also to think about religion as ultimate concern present in all creative functions of the human spirit. That is, the ‘‘necessary problem’’ that takes form as ultimate concern in culture. Religion is, therefore, to be thought about as that which raises ultimate questions within cultural expressions. However, to remember the other side of Tillich’s insight, these cultural expressions also put forward that, which as ultimate concern, is to be thought of as religious. These may—and indeed probably will and I would argue should—challenge that which we wish too easily, from the side of existing religion, philosophy of religion, theology and their institutions, to prescribe and define as ‘‘religion.’’ Otherwise, in our thinking about religion, we are only thinking about that which we (from the side of religion) expect to be religious and accept as existing religion. We forget that cultural expressions arise out of the concerns, questions and experiences of culture. In our view culture includes that heritage Eliot emphasized and, importantly its current expressions that arise out of—and against—that heritage.

Ultimate concern is, therefore, an expression arising from hermeneutics: how do we interpret the times we find ourselves in and what do we give rise to that offers a critique? It is in this way both religion and philosophy occur as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity because they exist as problematic critiques of and from within modern culture. That is, religion and philosophy exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in three ways: as resources to draw upon; as ways of thinking to enable us to express those hopes and dreams that make modernity bearable; and as ways to critique that which makes modernity seem unbearable. However, we must be clear that to make modernity bearable is not the same as to make it enjoyable. Rather, in my understanding from Hebdige, ‘‘bearable’’ means making modernity meaningful—and meaningful in a way that is not just for me and my own pleasure. To draw upon Barth in the way a pure Tillichian never would, ‘‘bearable’’ means engaging with the crisis of modernity via expressions and thoughts of KRISIS. And what is the crisis of modernity? It is nothing more nor less than the secular turn of living ‘‘after God.’’ The crisis of modernity is realizing that ‘‘after God’’ we humans are responsible for the world and what happens in it. Ultimate concern is, therefore, our response today, to modernity after God. Here, we start to see the possibilities emerge for a secular Philosophy of Religion.

Towards a secular religious thought

Werner Schufler notes that when we understand via Tillich that theology is necessarily a theology of culture then everything becomes a theme for theology. (Schufler: p.15) I wish to expand this in two ways. Firstly, via Tillich we can understand that religion as ultimate concern is necessarily a religion of culture and, therefore, every cultural creation that deals with issues of ultimate concern becomes a theme for thinking about religion. It is here that the crisis and the KRISIS of religion and culture in modernity exist in creative tension. But then, I would argue further—via Gabriel Vahanian’s tracing of secular back to saeculum : the world of shared human experience (Vahanian: p.21)—that under-sitting all of this is what I would term secular theology; and culture is both wherein and whereby theology is created and also what theology is created in response to. Here, I acknowledge that cries of ‘‘crypto-theology’’ will be raised by those seeking a Philosophy of Religion (Continental or otherwise) after—and/or against theology. But I would argue that our thinking and understandings of religion are derived from theology and that there is no sui generis ‘‘religion’’ that exists in and by itself—even as a concept. Rather, religion is the forms our theological thinking takes: the forms in social organization, the forms in cultural and political expression. So, to think about religion is, at root, to think about theology and to think theologically. And what is the root, the radix of this theology? It is the noun ‘‘God’’, which I express and understand as the claim that holds within it both the excess and limit of possibility. Religion is the social and cultural response to this, expressed as ultimate concern. Theology is, therefore, a secular exercise and critique (arising out of and in response to the world of shared human experience) and is far more secular than the often sectarian and anti-secular expressions of religion. A Philosophy of Religion can, broadly speaking, proceed in two directions. It can be a Philosophy of Religion that, in its engagement with philosophy of culture, be a form of secular theology and, therefore, exist as continuing the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Or it can retreat into sui generis , essentialist, idealist and romanticist notions of religion that privilege the self and become unproblematic for modernity. In short, in the second option, it stops trying to make modernity bearable and rather attempts to make postmodernity enjoyable—for me. The question of the future of Philosophy of Religion is, therefore, also a political one and situated in response to how we may wish to engage with modernity—and for whom? I would argue that this political question—who are we thinking for and why —is what enables us to make sense, today of the statement from Systematic Theology III (1964b) that “…religion cannot express itself even in a meaningful silence without culture, from which it takes all forms of meaningful expression. And we must restate that culture loses its depth and inexhaustibility without the ultimacy of the ultimate” (Tillich, 1964b : p.264). In this way, a Philosophy of Religion that engages with ultimate concern is never static and it finds its expression in continuous new ways. If we are unable to think this, if we are unable to engage with this from both sides of religion and culture then we find ourselves unable to properly engage in either Philosophy of Religion or Philosophy of Culture. In understanding this we need to think through Tillich’s statement in On the Boundary that “My philosophy of religion …consciously remains on the boundary between theology and philosophy, taking care not to lose the one in the other. It attempts to express the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). While on the one hand this can be seen as expressing the basis of continental philosophy and its creative tension between theology and philosophy, I wish to insert culture as the meeting point that holds theology and philosophy in tension and not opposition. That is, a Theology of Culture also engages with a Philosophy of Culture, just as a Philosophy of Religion must engage with a Philosophy of Culture. For it is culture that gives rise to both theology and philosophy, being the place where they both meet and distinguish themselves. Even more than this, culture is the central expression of the human spirit and occurs as language, artistic and intellectual creations, popular and elite expressions and manifestations of human identity. We also need to remember critic Raymond Williams’ comment that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (Williams, 1976 : p.87). Culture, for Williams, can take three broad forms: that of individual enlightenment; that of the particular way of life of a group; and as cultural activity, often expressed and organized though cultural productions and institutions. What is important to note is that these can and do compete against each other and in such competition we can see ‘‘culture’’ used in a polemical fashion. We should also note that those cultural expressions of religion, theology and philosophy can also take polemical forms. But we must remember that Culture is also ‘‘ordinary’’, for it encompasses all the diverse means by which people are shaped and in turn give shape to their lived experience. This ‘‘shaping and giving shape’’ is where theology, religion and philosophy arise—as does politics. That is, they arise as the means in which lived experience is shaped, whereby what we can call the second-tier expressions of philosophy and religion (and of course politics and theology) arise out the primary tier of culture. Here, we slightly part company with Tillich, remembering that for him ‘‘ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human spirit.’’ I would wish to ensure that ultimate concern is not given an essence or an agency for it is but short step from there to idealism and even to sui generis notions of ultimate concern. Rather than ultimate concern being manifest, I would argue that ultimate concern can be interpreted as being manifest, that is, ultimate concern is a hermeneutical category and activity. That is, ultimate concern is not a thing in itself, existing separate to or separate within human construction, expression, and creation. Therefore, what ultimate concern is interpreted as being and expressing is also a question of politics. Here, we can draw again on Barth and use his twin categories of crisis and KRISIS for it is via these, in a hermeneutical activity, drawn from the positions of philosophy and religion as ‘‘necessary problems’’ in modernity that the politics of ultimate concern can be articulated. That is, why do I wish to identify this as ultimate concern in these creative functions and what are the implications of my doing so? What is the crisis that this ultimate concern speaks to and what is the KRISIS judgment it articulates? And just as importantly, via Elliot, what traditions do I draw upon in order to make such an interpretation? Therefore, only by thinking seriously about culture (Philosophy of Culture) can we think seriously about religion (Philosophy of Religion)—and vice versa. It is only through this, I would argue, that we can hold in creative tension that identified by Tillich as “the experience of the abyss in philosophical concepts and the idea of justification as the limitation of philosophy” (Tillich, 1967 : p.52). Confronted the void, the abyss of existence, we respond by creative functions of the human spirit. Yet it is only via theology that we can understand these as expressing a justification of the human spirit that does not become idolatry. For I would argue that theology is a response to the void that seeks to make life meaningful for others . It draws on a tradition in which the individual is called upon to act for others in the name of love: love expressed as the excess and limit of possibility; Love that is expressed also as crisis and KRISIS. Footnote 5 It is this that makes religion a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity. Conversely, a response to the void that only makes or only seeks to make life meaningful for me is theologically an act of idolatry and anti-human in intent.

What I arguing for, via Tillich, is therefore a re-thought Philosophy of Religion that exists in a creative, hermeneutical tension with a Philosophy of Culture that views religion as a ‘‘necessary problem’’ for modernity; it is from this position that a future for Philosophy of Religion can begin to be articulated. A re-thought Philosophy of Religion exists as the critical engagement with culture whereby what is created and presented as ultimate concern is held up to hermeneutical engagement in light of the tradition from which the culture and religion arise. In this, religion and theology exist as ‘‘necessary problems’’—unable to be dismissed or excised but neither able to singularly determine what occurs nor what is to possibly be. Culture likewise is rethought as that which gives rise—in various creative expressions—to that determined through hermeneutical engagement and KRISIS to be ultimate concern. In all of this therefore, the future of the Philosophy of Religion occurs as the politics of what I term a radical secular theology: seeking to ask questions of and critique ultimate concern in and for this world of shared human experience in the name of the excess and limit of possibility arising from an emancipatory hermeneutics of tradition and culture. How we might approach this via Tillich proceeds from some insights from his Systematic Theology 1 . Firstly: “…in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern can actualize itself” (Tillich, 1964a : p.16). Or, as I would secularize this: in and through every preliminary concern the ultimate concern is able to be possibly interpreted and responded to . Secondly, we must also hear Tillich’s caution of culture in that “idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy”. (Tillich, 1964a : p.126). Thirdly, the basis for a secular theology (a theology from and of the word of shared human experience) is made clear: “…on every page of every religious or theological text these concepts appear: time, space, cause, thing, subject, nature, movement, freedom, necessity, life, value, knowledge, experience, being and non-being”.(Tillich, 1964a : p.24).

A secular theology is how these concepts are interpreted and expressed, critiqued and engaged within ways via theology and religion that express them as part of the ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity and also, most crucially, in ways that can make modernity bearable for others . What makes such a secular theology radical is that such a theology occurs as hermeneutical event out of the tradition yet also after the abyss of the void of the death of God that institutes modernity. That is, what can the name God mean as hermeneutical critique, event and thought in the world of shared human experience to act as crisis and KRISIS to make modernity bearable for others ? Tillich becomes our guide because as he remarks: “Since the split between a faith unacceptable to culture and culture unacceptable to faith was not possible for me, the only alternative was the attempt to interpret the symbols of faith through expressions of our own culture”. (Tillich, 1964b : p.5). It is this that provides the first half of a re-thought Philosophy of Religion, acknowledging religion’s unacceptability as the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of modernity. Similarly, we remember—via Eliot—that culture arises from the traditions formed by faith and now secularized. Drawing on Tillich, both are ways to express those responses to the ‘‘necessary problem’’, which can be labeled ultimate concern. Yet neither religion or culture nor the thinking about them can be properly engaged with from a Tillichian-derived perspective unless we engage with the other; otherwise neither faith/religion nor culture are secular, becoming instead sectarian idolatry and concerned with the self and not for others.

In considering how to proceed, it is useful to draw upon contemporary radical theology. Here I consider one of central statements to be that made by Robbins and Crockett regarding the role of theology in the work of Charles Winquist: “Theology was a discourse formulation that functioned to fissure other discourses by pushing them to their limits and interrogating them as to their sense and practicality” (in Winquist: p.10). We can also note similarities with Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School that Tillich found much in common with. The Frankfurt School, even though a neo-Marxist movement, recognized the value of theology because, as expressed by Eduardo Mendieta: “…critical theory…is reason criticizing itself” (Mendeita: p.7). In contemporary Modernity, theology, once vanquished, and religion, once segregated by the Enlightenment, are both being reemployed by critical theory because of their value as self-reflexive, critical tools. In particular theology, in its critique of existence itself, as “reason in search of itself” (Mendeita: p.10) acts as the self-critical reflexion on both society and religion. It is here that Tillich’s position as theologian of the boundary readily enables such a critique. The future for such a Philosophy of Religion as I am outlining also occurs because, as critical theorist Helmet Peukert declares, both Enlightenment and theology are unfinished projects in that both are continually to having to self-reflexively prove themselves anew as critical endeavors. (Peukert: p.353) As such, modernity occurs as a series of on-going ‘‘necessary problems’’ that seeks to make life bearable— for others . Therefore, how we think critically in modernity is the basis of how we choose to act for others . This is the future for the Philosophy of Religion and, as discussed, it occurs in a critical hermeneutics with Philosophy of Culture; that is, philosophy undertaken for others to make modernity bearable.

It is important to clarify that theology, as expressed by the Frankfurt School, is “inverse, or negative theology [that] must reject and refute God, for the sake of God, and it must also reject and refute religion for the sake of what the religion prefigures and recalls” (Mendeita: pp.10–11). Therefore the radical secular theology I am arguing for is not theology as commonly understood, but rather a self-reflexive, critical, secular theology that stands as “argumentative discourse” (Peukert: p.368) in critique of both institutional, orthodox theology and those forms of Philosophy of Religion that seek to shy away from its role as argumentative discourse within modernity.

Carl Raschke, like Robbins and Crockett engaging with the legacy of Winquist, in tracing a lineage back to Kant argues, “To think intensely what remains concealed in the depths of thought is to think theologically”, and yet, because of the Enlightenment, such theological thinking has become “a very difficult, if not impossible, peculiar labor” (in Winquist: xiii). Here, we also hear a challenge from situating theology in dialectic with deconstruction, whereby in Modernity, theology is now “a thought that has learned to think what is unthought within the thought of itself” (in Winquist: xv). The challenge from this for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Culture is clear. If religion and culture wish to be meaningful within an ongoing Modernity and so engage with that which is—as of yet—unthought within religion and culture they too must engage with the ‘‘necessary problem’’ of theology. For theology in modernity had to become a problem unto itself and for everything else: a crisis and KRISIS of its own thinking and articulation to ensure it retained its necessity and could not be consigned to irrelevance. Or, as I would state, in Modernity, theology, if not sectarian, is the self-reflexivity of modern thought that thinks the unthought of both secularity and ‘‘religion.’’ I realize that this may be a difficult concept and even more difficult expression to comprehend. So, let me try and put it this way. Theology, if it seeks a meaningful engagement with the world of shared human experience (the saeculum ), is where and whereby we become aware of and critique what secularity and religion prefer not to think. As such, it is theology from which we stand—with Tillich—on the boundary between secularity and religion, between religion and culture. The crisis and KRISIS for both Philosophy of Culture and Philosophy of Religion is actually their desire not to engage with theologizing, that is ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’; for the challenge of theology is that of a self-reflexivity regarding that which we designate ‘‘religion’’, ‘‘the sacred and the profane’’ and ‘‘the secular’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ The centrality of theology occurs because theology is self-reflexivity about being human and what, in Tillichian terms we designate ‘‘ultimate concern.’’ Here, we can also draw upon what Charles Winquist notes regarding the self-reflexivity of theology—that is thinking about thinking—in that theology demands that then “we have to decide why we are calling any particular datum ‘‘religious’’” (Winquist: p.182). To this I would add that theology demands further decisions regarding the designations ‘‘sacred’’, ‘‘profane’’, ‘‘secular’’, and ‘‘culture’’—and of course ‘‘ultimate concern.’’

Radical secular theology is, therefore, done in modernity ‘‘after God’’, as a self-reflexive human activity of ‘‘thinking studying thinking’’ as to what is to be done for others , undertaken on the boundary between religion and culture. It is secular because we remember Vahanian’s maxim that, “in a pluralistic world, it is not religion we have in common. What we have in common is the secular” (Winquist: p.96). As to what this might mean and entail, a way to ‘‘think the future’’ is to consider another option from the past. In 1970, the theologian Van A Harvey reflecting on his own “zig-zag career—from department of religion (4 years) to seminary (10 years) back to department of religion” (Harvey: p.17) raised the issue of “the possibility and even the relevance of traditional systematic theology in our pluralistic and secular culture.” At that time, Harvey saw a new home and possibility for theology in Religious Studies, that included the possibility of “a new and probably non-Christian theology of some sort” being developed that is “ more strictly philosophical and does not at all understand itself as a servant of a church or a tradition.”[emphasis added] (Harvey: p.21). Referencing Victor Preller of Princeton, Harvey termed this a “meta-theology” (Harvey: p.28) or “a genuinely secular theology” (Harvey: p.28).

The future for Philosophy of Religion as I envisage it via Tillich is also in line with this option arising from Harvey. Yet both secular theology and a radically secular Philosophy of Religion are yet to find homes in either religious studies or philosophy. Rather, in a very Tillichian fashion, they exist ‘‘on the boundary’’ between such disciplines: too theological for philosophy and too secular for many in religious studies. Instead, such thinking tends to arise from those who find themselves ‘‘on the boundary’’ between disciplines which means there a critical tension between such thinking being written and such thinking being taught. This is not to say that there are not religious studies departments and philosophy programmes where such thinking is both taught and written. But they are few in number. What is interesting is how much of such thinking occurs from individuals located in various disciplines and departments neither labeled religious studies nor philosophy and who yet manage to write—and surprisingly often (if somewhat subversively) teach such thinking. Usually such departments are engaged in the critical study of culture in some way and these thinkers—often without even knowing they are doing so—are engaging in the critical hermeneutic of religion and culture argued for in this paper. Therefore, in many ways the future of Philosophy of Religion is already being undertaken, but we have to increasingly look outside of the expected places and voices to find it. Drawing on such places and voices, in finding a way beyond the split of religion and culture unacceptable to each other, we seek a rethinking of religion and culture each as ‘‘necessary problems’’ for modernity, necessary problems that articulate ultimate concern for others . Tillich’s thought can, therefore, be a basis of emancipatory potential for a secular radical theology of religion and culture as hermeneutics, in the name of that noun and its tradition used to express the limit and excess of possibility in the name of love for others.

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Perhaps still the best introduction to these debates regarding the challenges of theology in modernity is that set out in AN Prior’s “Can Religion Be Discussed?”. Written in 1942, Prior was a theologian, who at this time was in transition to becoming a philosopher and in particular, a noted logician. See AN Prior, “Can Religion Be Discussed?”, in A Flew and A MacIntyre New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1963) [orig. 1955].

Eliot’s inclusive definition of culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby day, Henley regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.” TS Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1948), 31. As Eliot goes on to note “bishops are part of English culture and horses and dogs are part of English religion.” Op.cit.32.

This ‘‘turn to Paul/Romans’’ includes: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism , trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses. Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul. On Justice . (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul , ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann with Horst Folkers, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich and Christoph Schulte (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute—or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London/ New York: Verso, 2000), Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The perverse core of Christianity , (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003). It is noted that the re-turn to Paul extends beyond Romans and that this re-turn has become an ever-expanding sub-field in both Continental thought and political theology. For an interesting overview, see Matthew Bullamore, ‘‘The Political Resurrection of Saint Paul’’ TELOS 134, Spring, 2006: pp.173–182.

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I expand on what I view as the meeting place and challenge of love in Philosophy and Theology in my essay “Weak Love? 17 Propositions” (Grimshaw, 2017 ).

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Faith, Reason, and Culture

An Essay in Fundamental Theology

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George Karuvelil 0

Faculty of Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India

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Explores the rationality of faith in the contemporary world

Addresses multiple issues of contemporary culture, including: secularism and atheism, science-religion relations, religious diversity and inter-religious dialogue

Conceives fundamental theology as a discipline which seeks religious truth in the midst of diverse perspectives

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

Front matter, reason: the multi-coloured chameleon.

George Karuvelil

Religious Diversity and Theology

Science and religion: some parables and models, science and religion: autonomy and conflict, communication, culture, and fundamental theology, justification: beyond uniformitarianism, perception: its nature and justification, nature mysticism and god, religious diversity, christian faith, and truth, pulling together, back matter.

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“The effort developed by Karuvelil is impressive, without a doubt, and – from my point of view – this is clearly a theological essay that brings more fresh air and a much needed renovation to FT. … Scientific reason is not everything, but neither can we ignore the objections of such people when it comes to practicing the healthy dialogue to which Karuvelil’s impressive work invites us.” (Lluis Oviedo, ESSSAT News & Reviews, March, 2021)

“George Karuvelil’s mastery of epistemology has enabled him to make a truly major contribution: he has justified brilliantly the essential rationality of religion and theology. This book has re-established a philosophical base for fundamental or foundational theology. Only a scholar with such epistemological expertise could have achieved this remarkable break through and elucidated a true and convincing starting-point for theology.” — Gerald O’Collins, SJ, former dean of theology, Gregorian University, Italy

“Faith, Reason, and Culture is an impressive and comprehensive engagement with some of the most difficult questions facing us today on religion and its role in society and the academy. Karuvelil robustly engages a wide range of classical and contemporary Western scholars who debate religion’s place and role in society, while remaining ever attentive to his home context in India. He is conscientious in considering a wide range of views, yet steadfast in his defense of religion’s enduring importance and relevance in every contemporary debate. This book will open doors on the philosophy of religions and fundamental theology for beginners, while yet too catching the attention of established scholars in the field.” — Francis X. Clooney, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA

“There have been many books on faith and reason but none comes close to the erudition and comprehensiveness that characterize this book. Karuvelil’s resourcefulness in philosophy and his long experience in interreligious dialogue enable him to explore important theological themes in original and highly informative ways. Thoroughly researched and rigorously argued, this book will prove indispensable for both theologians and philosophers who want to explore new frontiers in in the area of faith, reason and culture.” — Louis Caruana SJ , Dean, Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical Gregorian University, Italy

“George Karuvelil’s Faith, Reason, and Culture: An Essay in Fundamental Theology is a real tour de force, which will delight those interested to explore the complex issue of the rationality of religious belief. Integrating Kierkegaard’s insistence on religious belief as existential concern and adroitly pressing into service Wittgenstein’s concepts of ‘language game’ and ‘grammar,’ Dr. Karuvelil has developed a convincing case to justify religious belief. In this process, he has built on the work of contemporary philosophers whose analyses he has found fertile while not mincing words in his critique of authors whose thinking he judges has gone astray, being particularly severe on those who are wedded to scientism as the last word in human rationality. Lucid writing, helpful introductions and summaries and numerous examples make this book intelligible to non-professionals while professionals will find the acute analysis and meticulous argumentation worth careful attention.” — Lisbert D'Souza , Emeritus Reader in Philosophy, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth (Pontifical Athenaeum), Pune, India; former Assistant to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus.

“With skillful and patient archeology of the divide between reason and faith, especially in modernity and Western thinkers, resulting in severe harm for both, George Karuvelil convincingly shows that to successfully meet the challenges of contemporary religious pluralism we must, as Pope John Paul II says, breathe with both lungs and fly with both wings, namely, reason and faith. With this work, Karuvelil establishes himself as a first-class authority on fundamental theology. At a time when truth is dismissed as ‘alternative facts,’ Karuvelil's robust confidence in both reason and faith is all the more needed and urgent.” — Peter C. Phan , The Ignacio Ellacuria , S.J. Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University, USA

“In its grand sweep of the history of philosophy, theology, and modernity, the book provides a remarkably open access to a theological project that is rationally based, and addressing the intellectual debates of our contemporary times. The author opens up a splendid panorama of reason and critically challenges its Procrustean curtailment by scientism and positivism. The book is deep, and at the same time, highly engaging and accessible to a wider readership, thanks to its clarity of thought, expression and cogency.” — Felix Wilfred , Emeritus Professor, University of Madras, India

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George Karuvelil received his PhD from the University of Delhi and has a background in philosophy and theology. He is the editor of Romancing the Sacred (2007) and was the editor of Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies .

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Faith, Reason, and Culture

Book Subtitle : An Essay in Fundamental Theology

Authors : George Karuvelil

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45815-7

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

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Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45814-0 Published: 25 July 2020

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-45817-1 Published: 26 July 2021

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-45815-7 Published: 24 July 2020

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Number of Pages : XVII, 402

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Topics : Christian Theology , Philosophy of Religion

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Culture and Religion

Remarks on an indeterminate relationship.

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Religion is often viewed as a subset of ‘culture’, that is, the two terms are often used interchangeably. At the same time, it is possible to view religion and culture as clearly distinct, perhaps even opposed to each other. This article ponders the ways in which what counts as religion in the present day is intertwined with a concept of culture. Each has an essentialist and postmodern variant, and how they are related, whether conflated or separated, carries normative claims about each. Bringing together theoretical insights on these two highly debated concepts, this piece offers an analysis of the nested indeterminacies between both and urges analytical attention toward them in the interplay of essentializing and de-essentializing practices.

About eight years ago, I took a group of students on a guided tour of a large, ornate mosque in a city center in southwestern Germany. Our guide, a knowledgeable young German woman of Turkish origin, was clearly well practiced in interreligious dialogue and its style of speaking. As she led us through the various rooms, she pointed out the many similarities between Islamic and Christian spaces and beliefs. In so doing, she often addressed our (by all appearances homogeneously white, middle-class) group sweepingly as ‘Christians’. In our follow-up discussion in class, some students expressed irritation at being referred to as Christian (“How could she just assume …?”), either because they identified as non-believers or felt that their religious orientation was a private matter. A classic teachable moment. Categorizing the group as ‘German and therefore Christian’, the young woman turned the tables on us by applying the same logic with which her community is confronted every day (‘Turkish and therefore Muslim’), in schools, supermarkets, government offices, the media. Religion and nationality (or ethnicity), she seemed to be saying, are so closely linked as to be practically interchangeable. By addressing us as members of a ‘Christian culture’, she likely did not mean to suggest that we are particularly devout. My students, however, felt that being called ‘Christian’ was tantamount to being called ‘religious’. This led to a lively discussion about why it is easier for us to think of Muslims as a cultural group than to think of Christians as such. How are religion and culture related to one another? Is ‘religion’ another way of saying ‘culture’? Is religion a subset of culture? Or is religion, in fact, clearly distinct from a more general culture that it may in fact reject or, conversely, strive to influence?

Since multicultural societies are also multi-religious societies, the question of how religion and culture are related to one another is not trivial, and the answer is not immediately obvious. Since that ‘aha’ moment years ago, the necessity to think clearly about what we mean when we say ‘religion’ seems ever more urgent, as this category gets drawn into identity politics—and the increasingly tense debates around them—and is taken up in the public discourse that emanates from powerful institutions (the law, bureaucratic apparatus, the media). In the following, I would like to offer a comparative analysis of these notoriously fraught concepts by pointing to two paradigms that both terms share, moving between everyday speech, public discourse, and scholarship with a focus in Europe. Each of these paradigms is problematic in various ways: contradictory, often essentialist, and deployed for specific projects and agendas. 1 Considering then, that these concepts are not firm, but rather the result of strategic categorizing practices constantly in flux, the relationship of culture and religion to one another remains indeterminate. I will argue that what deserves closer attention are the practices of defining and relating, which can engender open discussions such as the one I had with my students. Who is deciding in a given situation what religion and culture are, how they are set in relation to one another, and to what end?

Two Ways of Speaking about Culture and Religion

As a starting point, German migration scholars Paul Mecheril and Oscar Thomas-Olalde (2011: 38–45) provided me with a useful distinction between two ways of speaking about religion in the social sciences, which also enter into public discourse: a ‘paradigm of appropriation’ and ‘religious identity as destiny’. The first paradigm builds, I would argue, on what Charles Taylor (2007: 297–419 ) calls the ‘nova effect’: the explosive diversification of the religions on offer in the modern era, including the possibility not to believe in God at all. In this discursive mode, religion is viewed as something that, in principle, every individual does as they please. This freedom is tied to an extensive deinstitutionalization of religion. It is not just that modernity accepts a wide array of alternatives to the major churches in the West (Eastern religions, New Age, esotericism, etc.), but also that traditional forms of belief are being combined in personalized ways with other bits and pieces, regardless of how the churches feel about it. Religion is viewed as a freely chosen stance and practice that can be switched out, modified, or completely abandoned at will. This ‘paradigm of (individual) appropriation’ treats religion as a question of personal style, aesthetic preference, and individual opinion, and it is found often in discourses dealing with ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ religiosity. People decide for themselves what they believe, which practices they attach to their convictions, and with what level of intensity and discipline they live them out. Religious pluralism is represented as a free market of options for believers ( Stark 2006 ), and thus is hardly viewed as a problem or source of conflict. Research in this vein focuses on practitioners’ creativity and agency and the fluidity and hybridity of their practices. In public discourse, it is treated as how religion is ‘supposed’ to be: a private, personal matter of belief , something you freely choose and design to your own needs. This ideal type I will refer to as ‘Religion 1’.

The other discursive mode, which I will call ‘Religion 2’, understands religion as a group or institution that offers and/or assigns fellowship, community, and identity. Whereas Religion 1 can offer no clear answer to the question “What religion are you?”, Religion 2 allows for unequivocal categorization. It is the paradigm behind the survey that produces a pie chart of the relative distribution of religions in society. Here, diversity is represented not as a market, but territorially. The size of the slices becomes important: the churches worry about their slices shrinking, while right-wing populists are preoccupied with the relative size of the Muslim slice. In this paradigm, where religions are thought of as definable units, diversity can be seen as a threat to society, a source of conflict and social disintegration. But Religion 2 is not merely an artifact of the governmental gaze; it is also very much a feeling that people can actively cultivate. Built on the assumption that we are born into a religion and remain fundamentally shaped by it for our entire lives, ‘religious identity as destiny’ is not just a personal preference. In this discursive mode, religion is the practice that a family and community shares; it is seen as heritage and a tradition that must be passed down. Unlike Religion 1, it cannot be a purely individual and private matter, as the community needs organizations and spaces for common worship and religious education for the children, creating situations of unequal treatment among religious communities by the state. Thus, Religion 2 is central to the politics of multiculture. It is useful when demanding political power, rights, and equal privileges. Talk of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue belongs to this paradigm, producing difference even as it pursues the peaceful co-existence of clearly defined groups that mutually recognize each other as religions ( Bender and Klassen 2010 ). The paradigm of Religion 2, then, places emphasis on community and identity , which, as will be discussed below, makes the question of belief somewhat secondary.

There is a clear tendency in both public discourse and many sectors of the social sciences to assume that Religion 1 is the ‘proper’ religion in Europe today, while Religion 2 is what is being brought in by migrants (cf. Mecheril and Thomas-Olalde 2011). 2 In other words, discussions on religion rely on an implicit modern/pre-modern divide in which Religion 2 is used to construct the Other and their “failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity” ( Asad 2003: 10 ). In Germany, this discourse has a long tradition. It is the mode in which Catholicism was construed as backward and repressive during the Kulturkampf era in the late nineteenth century (e.g., Gross 2004 ); it is how Islam is often spoken about in Germany today. 3

When looking at these two modes of talking about religion, I am struck by similarities to the two understandings of culture often debated in anthropology. The holistic concept of culture, which is usually traced via Franz Boas back to Johann Gottfried Herder, has similar characteristics as Religion 2, so here I will call it ‘Culture 2’. In this way of speaking about culture, it can be thought of in the plural; one can speak of more or less clearly definable units of language and custom, ‘cultures’ that could theoretically fill a pie chart of the world. Culture 2 is behind the idea of multiculturalism, in which ‘culture’ is a synonym for ‘ethnic group’, ‘ethnicity’, sometimes ‘race’. This culture is destiny; it is no more a matter of personal choice than one's native language(s). 4 It belongs to you, and you belong to it. Culture is a source of identity by virtue of being one's ‘origin’ or ‘home’, two very politically laden concepts closely tied to this way of speaking about culture. Essentialism seems built into Culture 2—the notion that there is a core, even changeless truth that defines a culture. Deeply determining how its members think and feel, it is expressed in their art, crafts, and lifeways. The Boasian school turned this notion of a cultural essence that deserves to be preserved for its own sake into an instrument of anti-colonialism and anti-racism that is still mobilized to articulate both the idea of rightful cultural property (and accordingly, the notion that it can be stolen) and a right to cultural survival. But it is also the basis for neo-racist assumptions and sentiments. A statement like “that's their culture, it's just how they are” could just as easily be read as an expression of respect and recognition as it could be one of othering and exclusion.

This is one of the reasons that sharp criticism of this concept of culture emerged, pointedly formulated by Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) in “Writing Against Culture.” She proposed replacing “culture” with “practice” and “discourse,” as “they were intended to enable us to analyze social life without presuming the degree of coherence that the culture concept has come to carry” (ibid.: 147). An anti-essentialist understanding of culture, which I will call ‘Culture 1’, recognizes that people simultaneously take part in various cultures, those of classes, genders, and generations as well as ethnic groups. The socio- or ethno-cultural practices that individual actors take up depend on the concrete situation; thus, these practices, which can be switched or combined, are constantly in flux—something that happens rather than something pre-existing and static that must be passed down and cared for. Arjun Appadurai (1996: 12) proposed using the concept of culture primarily in the “adjectival form of the word, that is, cultural ” precisely with the aim of recognizing and expressing that it is a dimension, not a thing. German philosophers Byung-Chul Han (2005) and Wolfgang Welsch (1999) have proposed speaking, respectively, of ‘hyperculturality’ or ‘transculturality’ as a way of loosening the moorings that tie cultural elements to a culture, making them more mobile, less the property and inheritance of a single society or ethnicity, and capable of combinations and hybrid forms. Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2019: 36) has drawn on this concept to emphasize how culture works for a specific “cosmopolitan middle class, which mostly gathers in urban centers of Western societies”: for them, culture is “the plurality of cultural goods that circulate in global markets and provide the individual resources for their self-realization ” (my translation; emphasis in the original). 5

As a dimension or recombinant practice, Culture 1 is not countable; the mere use of the plural form ‘cultures’ makes proponents of this paradigm cringe. Here, identity is not destiny but something you do (cf. Brubaker and Cooper 2000 ), based on the assumption that the subject is the agent of this doing. Belonging is demonstrated and lived out through the taking up of particular cultural elements: home is not objectively ‘there’; rather, we create it ourselves through practices that frame a place as home and create a sense of belonging ( Binder 2008 ). By recognizing such processes, Culture 1 places the emphasis on the actors themselves, on how they deal with their different cultural belongings and live them out in different variations and intensities.

In her piece on how Muslim practitioners in migrant communities in France, Germany, and Great Britain implement the discourse of culture, Jeanette Jouili (2019: 231) notes that they must also negotiate between two competing concepts:

My European Muslim interlocutors tried to distance themselves from an association with the all-encompassing and oppressive culture (as past and obsolete custom) concept and to lay claim instead to a more ‘humanist-inclined’ (universal, timeless, and/or future-oriented) concept in order to overcome the stigmatization and exclusion stemming from their assumed incapacity to endorse and enact the ideal of individual freedom.

Her observations grew out of fieldwork conversations about the relation of the religion of Islam to culture in Europe, specifically, and she contrasts the ‘high’ and ‘low’ definitions of culture (the arts vs. everyday life; creativity vs. custom), whereas I have chosen to highlight the overlaps of static/identitarian vs. processual/individualized understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘religion’. But we come to the same conclusion in one respect: the dichotomizing operation reproduces the structure-agency duality. In the case of Culture and Religion 2, structure is emphasized and can lead to a cultural-determinist kind of argument that tends to be applied mostly to ethnic and religious minorities. In Culture and Religion 1, the focus is on actors and their boundless agency and creativity, attributes that align with ‘European values’. It is based on this paradigm that the culturally competent, responsible subjects who optimize themselves for the market and/or integration into majority society are interpellated.

Like the actor-structure divide itself, neither paradigm is completely right or completely wrong. In fact, upon closer inspection, the binary disintegrates: Culture and Religion 1, apparently based on individualism, can be seen as a collective phenomenon and the result of a liberal dogma that itself brings an identity into being (‘moderns’), whose ‘creativity dispositif’ ( Reckwitz 2017 ) is their destiny. And conversely, groups of people assigned to cultures and religions are, on the ground, far less homogeneous and static than the discourses of Culture and Religion 2 suggest. Ultimately, it is important to produce ethnographic descriptions of how and where these distinct yet labile discursive constructs can interact and even transform into each other. There is a lot to be learned from how these seemingly dichotomous discourses are handled in everyday life, at once upheld and parodied, deployed and undermined, as shown by Gerd Baumann's (1996: 34) concept of “dual discursive competence” and the wealth of ethnographic work it has inspired.

Essentializing Strategies: Affective and Political Advantages

Banning the concept of culture altogether has not proved to be a very feasible proposal ( Fox and King 2002 ), but many scholars in the social sciences have been able to get behind a whole-hearted rejection of Culture 2. They urge that Culture 1 be the model with which we analyze data, thus maintaining ‘culture’ as an anti-essentialist analytical concept, understood as practice and discourse, a perpetual process rather than a ‘thing’ that can serve racist agendas. Culture 2 would then only be found in non-scientific ways of speaking, in everyday practices, public discourse, the media, legal decisions, and so on, as a misnomer and wrong understanding of what culture ‘actually’ is. Culture 1 is used to deconstruct Culture 2, just as Religion 1 can be used to deconstruct Religion 2. But the recourse to essentialist conceptions of culture and religion in public discourse is so ubiquitous and undying that rather than simply critique it as wrongheaded and dangerous, it is worth asking why it retains its appeal, even and especially for those without the intention or means to enforce it. So before I discuss the relationship of religion and culture in the final section of this article, I will suggest why some issues may actually call for a careful defense of Culture and Religion 2 against its ‘cultured despisers’.

First, it is not as if Culture and Religion 1 are completely unproblematic. The tendency to essentialism of Culture and Religion 2 has been roundly criticized, less so the problem with concepts such as ‘hyperculture’ and the religious ‘market’, that is, their built-in modernization-as-secularization theory. When culture and religion are characterized as constructed, hybrid, changeable, and freely selectable, people who show themselves to be aware of or even bound to tradition appear strangely intransigent. Not only do anti-essentialist concepts tend to over-individualize and overemphasize agency, they can also have a normative effect, producing an expectation of religious hybridity by scholars in the field and, ultimately, the state. The policy conclusion might well be: “If religion everywhere is hybrid anyway, what is the problem with asking Muslims in Denmark to make theirs a little bit more Protestant?” It is just for this reason that the strong counter-discourse offered by Religion 2 is useful; it should not be met with blanket critique without a careful examination of how the anti-essentialist option works out for different groups. Instead of dismissing it as a backward, pre-scientific way of speaking based on false understanding—since it proves useful for social scientists of religion, too, when we need to construct more or less clearly definable units for the purpose of a research question (cf. Woodhead 2011 ), or as heuristic concepts in conversation with other disciplines that still use them—we should examine strategies of essentialization and what they can accomplish, without neglecting to note where they are in danger of falling into familiar traps.

Second, hybridity and fluidity rely on the very plurality provided by clearly defined phenomena. Culture 1 works by manipulating and recombining Culture and Religion 2. A hyphenated identity such as German-Turkish is made up of two imagined cultural units that are bound together in one person or family. Developments in one's biography construed as cultural (“I've become more and more British since moving to Durham”) or religious conversion narratives only make sense when two distinct cultures or religions are postulated. Clearly defined communities can also be the basis of conviviality in a pluralist society. In daily interactions, cultural and religious difference is named and acknowledged in order to accommodate and recognize it, as an offering of sensitivity and friendliness: colleagues offer to switch shifts with those of another religion in the spirit of helpfulness; at parties, dishes are planned in order not to compromise various religious and cultural preferences as a sign of hospitality. At the same time, such recognitions of identity can be quickly modified or abandoned. Differences are asserted and then almost immediately downplayed, perhaps to counter stereotypes, perhaps from a fear of being (or being viewed as) a bigot. Very often, people find similarities and postulate equivalencies across difference, like our tour guide in the mosque. The borders between the two ways of speaking flicker between fixedness and fluidity according to the strategy and the situation. As Baumann (1999: 93–94 ) elegantly puts it: “In some situations, they can speak of, or treat, their own culture or somebody else's as if it were the tied and tagged baggage of a national, ethnic, or religious group … In other situations, however, they can speak of, and treat, their own culture or somebody else's as if it were plastic and pliable …, something you make rather than have.” The use of Culture and Religion 2 is not always already exclusionary.

Third, essentializing practices can be emotional practices and thus provide affective satisfactions. Far more effectively than the free-floating, radically individualized Culture and Religion 1, notions of belonging can serve as vehicles of emotional effects, both serious and ironic. Serious—and to be seriously challenged—are those practices that use Culture and Religion 2 as vehicles of hate in order to exclude and even perpetrate racist, culturalist, fundamentalist violence. But people are also seriously in need of essentialist concepts for inclusionary purposes or when they want to maintain and pass down a tradition, especially when that tradition seems threatened. The feelings that are mobilized in this process—the sense of ‘we’, the pride and satisfaction at passing on something personally significant in as intact a form as possible—reward the use of a concept of community or culture as homogeneous and insular. The balancing act between strengthening one's own identity and remaining inclusive is not easy, while judgments of identity practices as per se exclusionary are quickly made. Looking closely at how actors manage to enjoy cultural or religious pride without postulating their own superiority can help us understand the integrative work of some essentializing practices.

Not least, we are attached to essentialisms because they can be fun. Laughing together at our community's quirks is a practice of cementing bonds. Clearly, ironic practices and humor that play with culturally or religiously coded elements are risky; enjoying that humor with someone from outside the group invokes trust (“a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar”), and when this is done misguidedly or even coercively, it must be called out. But humor is important because it can also do subversive work, undoing essentialist concepts. Ironized cultural and perhaps even religious performances demonstrate the instability of Culture and Religion 2. That these performances give pleasure does not make them harmless; they can quickly slip into flat and thoughtless reproductions of stereotypes and racist representations. The post hoc framing as “just for fun” is no excuse; attention must be paid to the intention behind the balancing act.

One could argue that most essentializing practices—not just the intentionally humorous ones—are balancing acts, oscillating between emotional seriousness and a distancing irony. Tourists seek to experience the ‘authentic culture’ of another country while knowing that their activity is vaguely exoticizing. People participate in religious rituals or traditional customs for the pleasure of it (see the undying enthusiasm for the ‘white wedding’), knowing at the same time that they are antiquated and likely misogynist and racist. Finding a way to open up the space within that wavering into a deeper conversation about the effects of essentializing practices might change people's tastes and pleasures. But I would suggest that it is unlikely that Culture and Religion 2 will ever disappear because affective ties to essences—ranging from the playful and pleasurable to the serious and respectful—grant them significance. The playful, ironic mode promotes self-conscious uses of essences and awareness of their inventedness, and the serious, respectful mode can take place within a framework of inwardly directed identity constitution without making claims to rightful hegemonic status in society. Identifying where the line is crossed and difference is enforced, discrimination promoted—that is the daily challenge of living with essentializing practices.

Finally, essences also offer a source of power and thus political advantages. For emancipatory movements and the politics of anti-discrimination, the highly individualized way of speaking used in Culture and Religion 1 is counterproductive because it weakens any claims to recognition of a group as a group, robbing them of their clout. Religion and Culture 1 are the paradigms of the privileged, ‘modern’ ways of engaging with belief and lifestyles framed as self-determined and private matters, so that labeling specific groups (as Religion and Culture 2 do) is viewed as a discriminatory practice, akin to racialization. But as we know, color blindness does not guarantee equity, and self-ascription of religion-as-destiny can provide advantages. In daily life, essentializations grant bargaining power, not least because Culture 2 emerged from an agenda of respect for all cultures, and Religion 2 can draw on notions of religious freedom. Identity politics builds on “I was born this way” precisely because this essentializing discourse latches onto the veracity of the ‘natural’, precluding any possibility of free choice or negotiation. Paradoxically, this claim is an empowering strategy; it is also risky. “The strategic use of an essence as a mobilizing slogan or masterword like woman or worker or the name of a nation is, ideally, self-conscious for all mobilized,” Spivak (1993: 3) notes, but she worries: “Can there be such a thing?” (ibid.: 4). In order that essentializations not become traps, in order that we not to succumb to their “fetish-character,” their constructedness, historicity, and social embeddedness must be kept uppermost in the minds of strategists, “even when it seems that to remind oneself of it is counterproductive” (ibid.). Spivak sees this kind of self-consciously strategic use of essentialism at work in the mobilization of developing nations post-1989, in which “ethnicity and religion are negotiable signifiers in these fast-moving articulations” (ibid.: 15), but do important work.

To sum up, there is quite a lot at stake when one considers discrediting Culture and Religion 2 as paradigms, and Culture and Religion 1 are not completely blameless when it comes to politics. The interesting research question, then, is not which discourse is correct, but instead how actors implement either or both paradigms and to what end.

Culture and Religion in Relation

Having recapitulated that what counts as religion and how we conceive of culture comes into being through strategic discursive practices of both de-essentialization and essentialization, we can now think about how their relationship to each other is constituted. Distinctions between culture and religion and the nature of their relationship are neither ‘simply there’, nor have they arisen on their own from supposedly autonomous processes of differentiation and modernization; they are also made in strategic discursive practices and serve various purposes, institutional and personal. Who divides culture from religion? Who joins them together, and why? What rhetorical or political advantage, what emotional-aesthetic attachment stands to be gained in doing so?

The sphere of legal discourse shows very clearly how dividing religion from culture can have strategic advantages. In the debates in Europe over the headscarf or male circumcision, those who wish to forbid such practices find it advantageous to connote them as cultural, for if they are religious, they could be protected under the premise of religious freedom. This happened in 2012, when a court in Cologne ruled against allowing male children to be circumcised (a ruling later overturned). In the public debate that ensued, the ‘true meaning’ of circumcision was aired from a variety of perspectives, with different outcomes for Muslims and Jews. Some participants in this debate used the strategy of division to assign religious significance to one practice, brit milah, and cultural origins and purposes to the other, sünnet or khitan, meaning that only the first should be protected by law and the latter could be forbidden. 6

In the realm of scholarship, a marked distinction between a theological and a social science approach to the relationship between religion and culture emerged over the course of the twentieth century. In the founding era of the social sciences, they were close: religion was treated as a foundational element of culture and society. While Emile Durkheim's theory tended to conflate religion and society, Max Weber's lifework of studying the economic conduct supported by various religions was based on a notion of religion as a factor distinct from economy and society, to allow it the status of a more or less independent variable. He agreed with the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, with whom he shared an intense intellectual conversation, that a sound knowledge of religious history was indispensable to the understanding of a society's broader historical trajectory. This was not only in line with Christian conceptions of religion being a moral foundation for the culture at large, but also with Weber's methodological individualism, which viewed ideas (including religious ideas) as the driving force in history, since they motivated human action and shaped ethical conduct.

However, following Weber's concept of increasing rationalization, modernization theory in the social sciences prophesied the retreat of religion. Since then, religion has been treated as a quantité négligeable in many social science research designs—or else, in a functionalist sense, it is merged with the notion of a ‘value system’. Working closely with sociologists, Clifford Geertz (1973) participated in this sort of merging when he formulated his influential definition of religion as a cultural system. Like culture, religion provides meaning, orientation, and above all the power to bind people together, all of these functions being regularly actualized in rituals (ibid.). 7 Thus, the concepts become interchangeable: whatever entity ‘primordial loyalties’ ( Geertz 1994 ) are able to attach themselves to—ethnicity, nation, or religion—they all serve the same purpose. Samuel Huntington's (1996) sketch of a global cultural conflict quite illustratively reproduces this assumption, with spatial, ethnic, and religious designations for ‘culture areas’ standing beside each other as more or less functionally equivalent: the West, the Islamic world, Orthodoxy, Japan, India, Latin America, Africa.

If sociology and anthropology have tended to conflate religion and culture, theologies still tend to divide religion from culture. With its echoes of the Lutheran two kingdoms doctrine, the definition of religion as independent from culture may seem to have been particularly important in Protestant theology, 8 but it is also useful for other theology departments and seminaries, or any scholarly endeavors centered on religion, particularly when conceived of as a sui generis phenomenon. 9 By removing religion from the cultural sphere, refusing to see it as ‘just another form of cultural expression’, scholars of religion push back against the tendency to subsume and secularize their research object, similar to how the study of literature, art history, and musicology also became sciences of ‘culture’ once these texts, images, and sounds were removed from the religious sphere. This would appear to echo the strategies of distinction between religion and culture performed by pious believers. In an illuminating comparison of young evangelical Christians and reformist Sunni Muslims in the Netherlands, Daan Beekers (2020: 120) has shown, for example, that both groups distinguish their faith not only from the surrounding secular ‘culture’, but also from the “unreflective religious cultures they had been raised in.” They view a religion distinct from culture as a truer faith, “personal, self-reflective, and committed” (ibid.) and oriented toward “feeling close to God” (ibid.: 121). The demarcation against ‘culture’ allows them to determine what should actually count as religion.

The strategy of division between culture and religion would appear to support Religion 2 and its essentialist tendencies. Indeed, a rejection of the ‘world’ and its impious, even sinful ‘culture’ has been a central argument of religious groups from all traditions seeking to offer their communities as alternatives. Olivier Roy (2004) views such ‘deculturation’ of religion as highly problematic, leading inevitably to radicalization. 10 But the division of religion from culture can also been a feature of liberal reform movements whose aim is to find the essence of a given religion outside of culture so that it can adapt to the modern world, or become more easily transportable. Division can have emancipatory effects, as Jouili (2019: 208) reports about the revivalist Muslim women in France and Germany:

Among these women, I found a consistent emphasis on the necessity of separating religion from culture. The women critically conceived ‘culture’ as the locus for those passively inherited customs with which Muslim societies are often associated in public discourses. This particular distinction between culture and religion enabled them to criticize certain patriarchal practices they discerned within their communities.

Clearly, ‘deculturalization’ is not always per se reactionary. It is necessary to look closely at the actors and their goals.

By the same token, strategies of conflating religion and culture are not necessarily progressive but can also be quite the opposite. It can manifest, for example, as a religionization of culture . A typical example in European public discourse would be the subsuming of many different ethnic designations (particularly of immigrant groups such as Turkish, Bosnian, Pakistani, Syrian, etc.) into a single religious one: Muslim. People who have never set foot in a mosque are labeled Muslim because of a presumed cultural membership, often deduced from nothing more than a name and/or skin color. This strategy must be critiqued as a homogenizing practice of othering and exclusion when performed from the outside (such as when populists decry the “Islamization of European culture”), as opposed to when actors decide for themselves that it is advantageous to subsume their cultural origins under a religion, for instance, to avoid a perceived conflict between two national affiliations. The label Muslim French, British, or German can better depict an unambiguously felt national affiliation without totally effacing one's family history, or can be used to create a distinctive artistic culture. Jouili (2019: 208) recounts how British Muslim art practitioners spoke of culture “especially in the sense of self-expression, creativity, and arts. They emphasized the intrinsic link between Islam and cultural expression,” seeking to create “an ‘authentic’ British Muslim culture.”

The converse operation, the culturalization of religion , is very often seen as a practice of identification, one that takes the ‘religious identity as destiny’ notion of Religion 2 seriously, but without necessarily engaging in the practice or avowing the beliefs. To take a complicated but obvious example, identifying as Jewish is often not ‘just religious’—despite a few examples, such as the Protestant concept of religion-as-belief, which shines through German administrative categorizations of Judaism as a ‘confession’, or American habits of referring to ‘being Jewish’ as a person's religion. Jewishness is arguably most frequently referred to in the sense of belonging to a specific community with a specific history and culture, to the point that active religious practice can be secondary: non-religious people who come from Jewish families still call themselves (atheistic or secular) Jews. As Stacey Gutkowski (2019) explains, the question of what makes one a ‘Jew’ is complicated: adherence to Jewish law ( halakhah ) is more important than any given set of beliefs. Yet even a self-declared atheist can be considered Jewish if her mother is Jewish: “One need not behave in accordance with Jewish law, nor believe in its divine mandate, nor indeed believe in God in order to be considered a Jew by the Orthodox rabbinate” (ibid.: 126). This slippage between religious and cultural identity affords obvious advantages for the Israeli state, which builds on the religious-secular hybrid that is Zionism (ibid.: 127). There are other examples of the ways that culturized religion supports an understanding of nationhood. Jason Ānanda Josephson (2012) has shown how Shinto was transformed in late-nineteenth-century Japan to make it appear more modern and at the same time embedded in what it means to be Japanese.

Perhaps this tendency explains why a growing body of literature is grappling with the ways in which religion becomes culturalized (for an overview, see Astor and Maryl 2020 ), particularly for majoritarian religions. In European countries, the strategy of identifying oneself with Christianity as culture rather than belief is common (in spite of what my students felt). Not long after Grace Davie (1994) described the phenomenon of ‘believing without belonging’ (an example of Religion 1), scholars noted that the reverse phenomenon, ‘belonging without believing’ (reinstalling Religion 2 in a variant without belief), was alive and well. 11 Like the subsuming of religion under culture in the social sciences, culturalizing religion in everyday discourse ‘disenchants’ it, strips it of its mysterious or supernatural qualities and downplays its function of communicating with deities or ancestors. As N. J. Demerath (2000: 136) notes, the assumption that one is merely ‘culturally’ a member of a religious group is “a way of being religiously connected without being religiously active.” He takes this very seriously as a secularizing impulse, claiming that cultural religion is “a tribute to the religious past that offers little confidence for the religious future” and is thus the “penultimate stage of religious secularization” (ibid.). The placement of cultural religion on a secularization trajectory might be empirically difficult to substantiate, as it is quite possible for a group's serene understanding of itself as ‘culturally religious’ to become the fertile ground for their suddenly emotionalized identification with a religion and even religious revival.

It would appear to be one of the foremost operations of secularism to claim that religion is a thing of the past and significantly so, thus transforming it into (national) cultural heritage. Christianity is frequently spoken of as ‘cultural heritage’, 12 valued as an ethic and/or narrative, while sidestepping its cultic dimension ( Hervieu-Léger 2000 ). One can do without the Trinity and distance oneself from an antiquated morality, yet still identify with the historical community of a church and its culture (especially in the sense of high culture: art, music, architecture), whether out of conservationist conviction or mere habit ( Engelke 2014 ). Religion-as-culture (or heritage) has been mobilized in legal arguments against the removal of crucifixes and prayers from public spaces. Lori Beaman (2020) shows in several detailed examples how this strategy reinstates privilege to majoritarian religions, even in a society committed to secularism. But following Talal Asad (2003) , secularism is not the end point of a social trajectory away from the influence of religious institutions in society anyway. Secularity is the concept taken up by the state to enshrine the post-religious stance of the dominant culture and frame it as the religiously neutral ground of citizenship, thus producing ‘religious minorities’ who cannot be religious and citizens at one and the same time (ibid.: esp. 159–180).

Thus, although culturalizing religion may seem to be a fitting strategy for religion to find a place in a secular nation—and many churches in Europe do embrace this strategy, emphasizing their cultural importance in order to hold on to their privileges—it, too, is risky. It can “depoliticize[e] religion and tam[e] its divisive potential,” as Astor et al. (2017: 139) have argued for the Spanish case. But with the rise of right-wing populism, the culturalization of religion has been twisted into just the opposite: a weapon against what is viewed as an encroaching Islam, consciously using the word ‘Christian’ to denote a ‘way of life’, or as a member of the German AfD party has put it, a national “feeling of life.” 13

Whereas the liberal argument for majoritarian hegemony mediates between religion and culture by using the language of ‘values’, that is, culturalizing religion by turning it into an ‘ethics’, the AfD phrasing goes a step further, activating emotional attachments to a religious past. For societies that trace their heritage to Christianity, the celebration of Christmas ranges high among the affective ties to religion, even without belief in its tenets ( Klassen and Scheer 2019 ), presenting annually recurring challenges to states who view themselves as secular. 14

The Consequences of Indeterminacy

Just as there is no ‘correct’ definition of culture or religion, neither can there be a correct determination of their relationship to one another, but only situated understandings, which have as much to do with the current social and political context as with common academic usages in varying disciplines and countries. Rather than trying to nail down the ‘actual’ or even ‘proper’ relationship between the two, anthropologists of religion can more fruitfully attend to the ways that these concepts are deployed—by whom and for what purpose—and how these strategies change over time and why. As we have seen, this is currently being applied in the research on the rise of ‘religion as heritage’, which also shows how important it is to take the positionality of the practitioners into consideration. When culturalizing religion works to the advantage of the majoritarian religion again and again, it helps us understand why some groups choose a different strategy. Acknowledging that both essentialist and anti-essentialist ways of speaking have their strengths and weaknesses can facilitate this work. Instead of pitting one way of talking about religion and/or culture against the other, we should look at the ways they are combined and why. When essentialism is used for exclusionary aims and to justify violence, it should be called out for that reason and denaturalized. When it is used to include and empower, particularly for the benefit of marginalized groups, it can do important political work—although this may also entail exclusionary tendencies and will therefore always remain potentially dangerous (see Kurzwelly et al. 2020 ).

In the course of analyzing this complex relationship between religion and culture, it seems clear that being attuned to the built-in biases of the discursive modes described here, as well as how they are set in relation to one another, can generate new questions, offer new perspectives. With Religion 1 in mind, even the most conservative religious groups could not be reduced to an identity, community, or institution: the creative, hybrid, and heterogeneous religious practices of their members would also come into view. And even the most hybrid, individualized exemplars of Culture 1 build their practices on understandings of bounded units (Culture 2), which could be acknowledged as providing affective rewards, or critiqued as insufficiently reflected upon, as in the case of the white privilege that many such ‘modern’ actors enjoy. At a historical moment in which public debates over these two very issues in particular—religion and culture—are being conducted from increasingly entrenched positions, the anthropology of religion might have a role to play in nuancing the categories being deployed and the associations being drawn.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on my inaugural lecture for the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Historical and Cultural Anthropology, which was presented at the University of Tübingen on 25 April 2015 and published in German in the Zeitschrift für Volkskunde in 2017. Many thanks to Diana Madden for her translation of that manuscript into English and to Pamela Klassen for her critical reading and suggestions as this English version evolved. Heartfelt thanks also to the participants and organizers of the Copenhagen workshop in June 2020 who offered important insights, to the editors of this Symposium, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Discussions of the concepts of religion and culture abound in many areas of the study of religion and society, but this article is not intended to deliver a review of all the relevant literature. Given its nature as a ‘think piece’ I have limited my bibliographic references to the most essential.

Linda Woodhead (2011) presents an excellent assessment of concepts of religion in the social sciences that is slightly different from, although not entirely incompatible with, what I have sketched out here. What is missing from her analysis, in my view, is an acknowledgment of the value judgments embedded in the various concepts of religion she describes and, ultimately, their politics. Furthermore, we should keep in mind, as Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 4) point out, that “such concepts as ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or ‘nation’ are marked by close reciprocal connection and mutual influence among their practical [i.e., ‘folk’ or ‘lay'] and analytical uses.” Religion and culture are among these concepts that flow freely between everyday and scholarly usage, so it is particularly important to be aware of how each discursive context affects the other.

In other parts of the world, these histories and trajectories will play out differently. As one anonymous reviewer of this article pointed out, in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, both Christianity and Islam are viewed as ‘freely chosen’ religions, as opposed to traditional practices given by ‘culture’. The focus here is on Europe, with the hope that, mutatis mutandis , the insights offered will inspire work outside Europe as well.

See Brubaker's (2013) comparison of language and religion and their meaning for the construction of ethnicity and nationality.

In this book, Reckwitz makes a distinction, which first appeared online in 2016 ( https://www.soziopolis.de/zwischen-hyperkultur-und-kulturessenzialismus.html ), between Hyperkultur (hyperculture) and Kulturessenzialismus (cultural essentialism) as two modes of the ‘valorization’ of the social through its ‘culturalization’ and marks them the same way I did in my 2015 lecture as ‘Culture 1’ and ‘Culture 2’. I was not yet aware of this coincidence when I prepared that lecture for publication in 2017. Reckwitz (2019) does not discuss religion but analyzes how these two modes of valorization and culturalization interact, postulating a ‘third path’ that would be less conflictual.

Cf., for example, a report published in Süddeutsche Zeitung at the height of the debate ( Schulte von Drach 2012 ).

Talal Asad's (1983: 238–239 ) equally influential critique of Geertz's definition of religion begins with remarks on how a (problematic) definition of culture forms the basis of Geertz's proposal for an anthropological definition of religion. Inspired by a Foucauldian approach, Asad also criticizes the melding of religion to culture in an attempt to provide a universal definition of both as systems of meaning. Instead, Asad proposes, anthropologists should investigate “social disciplines and social forces which come together at particular historical moments, to make particular religious discourses, practices and spaces possible” (ibid.: 252). He criticizes the fact that Geertz is working with a conception of Culture and Religion 2: “Universal definitions of religion hinder such investigations because and to the extent that they aim at identifying essences when we should be trying to explore concrete sets of historical relations and processes” (ibid.).

A classic discussion of the problem can be found in H. Richard Niebuhr (1951) .

Of course, this is a concept heavily critiqued from within religious studies (see, e.g., McCutcheon 2003 ; Proudfoot 1985 ).

An implicit strategy of dividing religion from culture has also been criticized in the work on ‘everyday Islam’ ( Fadil and Fernando 2015 ).

See also the concept of ‘nominalism’ in Abby Day's (2011) Believing in Belonging , which was discussed in the Author Meets Critics section of this journal in 2016.

The Horizon 2020 HERA Project “HERILIGION—The Heritagization of Religion and the Sacralization of Heritage in Contemporary Europe” conducted research on this topic from 2016 to 2020. See https://www.cria.org.pt/en/projects/heriligion-the-heritagization-of-religion-and-the-sacralization-of-heritage-in-contemporary-europe .

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) politician and self-declared Kulturchrist (cultural Christian), Alexander Gauland explained in an interview why the party program contains a reference to “Western and Christian culture” in spite of the party's lack of support in the churches: “We are not defending Christianity, but rather the traditional feeling of life in Germany, the traditional feeling of home” ( Löbbert and Machowecz 2016 ).

With regard to France's position as a secular state, see Beaman's (2020) analysis of a 2016 ruling by the French Administrative Supreme Court on the presentation of a crèche in a town hall in the Vendée department.

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Contributor Notes

MONIQUE SCHEER is Professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, where she also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Religion, Culture, and Society (CRCS) and as Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Diversity. Her research interests include aesthetics, images, practices, and emotions in Catholic, Protestant, and secular contexts in Europe. Recent publications include Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (2020). E-mail: [email protected]

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Value and Meaning of Culture and Religion Essay

Culture and religion have always been closely interlinked subjects since the very beginning of human history. It can be often observed by analyzing different religious and cultural values that they are deeply integrated with each other. Many communities around the world build their lifestyles according to the dominant religion in their region. These people tend to form their views based on complicated topics such as the meaning of life, death, birth, and marriage.

Moreover, many also build their views on representatives of other cultures and religions using their own ones. Therefore, there is indisputable evidence that religion forms one’s culture and, as a result, their habits, traditions, and even views on followers of other religious teachings and cultures. This can be seen by looking at the three main religions present on Earth today – Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

Christianity originated around two thousand years ago in modern-day Israel, with Jerusalem considered to be its cradle. It remains the world’s largest religion, with around 2.3 billion followers worldwide (Hacket & McClendon, 2017). By looking at the history of the countries practicing this religion, their cultures are developed under the heavy influence of the church. European art is the key evidence of how religion can influence an entire culture.

Many renaissance artists based their works on biblical plots, such as da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495-98), depicting the last meeting of Jesus Christ and his apostles. This shows that Christian people of the past formed their culture, views, and traditions based on their religion (Pasipoularides, 2019). Furthermore, even modern-day Christians tend to mix the religion and culture of their life. For instance, whenever a new president gets elected in the U.S.A., they swear on the Bible during the inauguration process. In addition, many Christians follow biblical rules by attending services and controlling their diets during the periods of Lent. Therefore, even today, Christianity influences the cultural behavior of its followers, forming their traditions and habits.

The Muslim faith is even further integrated into the lives of its followers. This religion is one the youngest among the three. Islam is the youngest of the three religions, originating at the beginning of the 7th century CE. It is based on the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran, which is seen as the only true version of the revelation of God by its followers. Even though followers of the Muslim faith tend to separate Islam from the Islamic culture, it is almost certain that one cannot exist without the other. Islamic culture, just like its European counterpart, consists of its own literature and art (Islam, 2019).

Moreover, many Muslims form their perception of other religions based on the principles of their own. This is particularly true in the Muslim-majority countries where people believe that disciples of other religions will not be allowed into heaven and that covering others is their religious duty (Sardar et al., 2019). Overall, it can be seen that the Muslim faith also has an enormous impact on its followers, forming their lifestyles, tradition, and deception of other religions.

Buddhism, unlike the other two religions, is not an Abrahamic religion. Its teachings and concepts are completely different from the other two. There are around half a billion Buddhists around the globe who practice different variations of this religion. It is based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha, who is believed to be the first man who broke out of the Samsara. Despite its enormous difference from the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism’s influence on the life of its followers is also gigantic.

The end goal of the religion is to end the cycle of rebirth and reach nirvana. Buddhism has a unique phenomenon called karma, which categorizes anything a person does during their lifetime into good and bad deeds. A Buddhist who dies with good karma is believed to achieve nirvana. The karmic system, therefore, is deeply integrated into the minds of those who follow it. It is believed by many Buddhists that any wrongdoing in their life may come later and have certain consequences in their life or after the next rebirth. Such a perception of karma formed the Buddhist culture their traditions and behavior.

In conclusion, it can be observed that religion and culture are two closely integrated topics. Religion always forms people’s perception of the world around them and, thus, creates a unique culture for every religious society. Most of the todays’ European traditions, festivals, and art would not exist without Christianity. The same way as most of the Muslim people would not be trying to live according to the Five Pillars of Islam if Islam was never created or had a different interpretation.

Buddhists would not try to keep their karma clean in order to break out of the Samsara. Therefore, it can be easily said that religion formed many cultures around the world. Throughout the history of humanity, religion was integrated into cultures of entire societies, and most of the things for religious people remain unchanged even today. The one cannot simply exist without the other.

Hackett, C., & McClendon, D. (2017). Christians remain world’s largest religious group, but they are declining in Europe . Pew Research Center.

Islam, M. H. (2019). Islam and civilization (Analysis study on the history of civilization in Islam). Al-Insyiroh: Jurnal Studi Keislaman , 5(1), pp. 22-39.

Pasipoularides, A. (2019). Emulating Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Convergence of science and art in biomedical research and practice . Cardiovascular Research ., 115(14), e181-183. Web.

Sardar, Z., Serra, J., & Jordan, S. (2019)., Religion and culture. In Muslim societies in postnormal times: Foresights for trends, emerging issues and scenarios. (pp. 73-79). International Institute of Islamic Thought.

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IvyPanda . "Value and Meaning of Culture and Religion." October 29, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/value-and-meaning-of-culture-and-religion/.

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