One of our PhD students, Sarah Thomas, has been all over the news media this week, following the New York Times story revealing the existence of secret Vatican rules regarding priests who break their celibacy and father children, this Monday.
Sarah is working on the children of Roman Catholic priests, focusing on their transition from isolated individuals to group members via the medium of social media, with semi-structured interviews providing the main data source. Initial data analysis suggests that the process of priests’ children forming a critical mass and challenging their ‘silencing’ through media outlets not only offers new knowledge about themselves and issues of secrecy, power and authority in the Roman Catholic Church, but taps into and advances research on other contemporary challenging of institutional authority from groups including the #MeToo campaign and victims of clerical sexual abuse. So to see her appearing in the media is apropos indeed!
First, the CBS News video and article that was published yesterday can be found here.
David G. Robertson has a new piece out over at the LSE’s blog on United States Policy and Politics blog, discussing his work on the intersections of religion and conspiracy theories. Read the whole thing here.
Conspiracy theories rarely lead to violence; with the main exception being 2016’s Pizzagate which culminated in a gunman threatening a pizza restaurant which he believed was a front for a satanic paedophile ring. David G. Robertson and Asbjorn Dyrendal unpack some of the reasons why conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate can gain ground so rapidly, citing links to the “satanic panic” of the 1990s. They also point to links with wider apocalyptic narratives of right-wing conspiracist groups, narratives which are often also reflected in religion.
An interesting story appeared in the Herald last week that illuminates some interesting features of the contemporary conversation about religion.
Chris McEleny was an electrician at the Ministry of Defense site in Beith, Inverclyde, and the SNP group leader on Inverclyde Council. In 2016, he announced he would be running as a candidate to become deputy leader of the SNP. He was then suspended by the MoD, and had his security clearance revoked. National security officials came to his home and asked him about his mental health, social media activity and pro-independence stance. McEleny resigned and pursued a discrimination case against the MoD, arguing that he had been fired because of his belief in independence.
But to do so, he had to argue that independence was a “philosophical belief”, and therefore a “protected characteristic” under the 2010 Equality Act. Legal precedent said that to fall under this category, his belief had to be “genuinely held”, involve “moral and ethical conviction” and relate to “weighty and substantial aspects of human life and behaviour”.
The judge ruled in his favour – impressive given that McEleny defended himself against the UK Government. In summing up, the judge said “The claimant has persuaded me that his belief in Scottish independence has a sufficiently similar cogency to a religious belief… to qualify as a philosophical belief.”
This preliminary ruling will now go forward to a full hearing, so expect to hear more about it in future. For now, I want to point out a few interesting points about how “religion” and “belief” are mobilised here.
Religion is about “genuinely held” beliefs.This could be problematic. Given that half the Jews in Israel are atheist, Scottish law would have to deny them any religious protection under this logic. Many forms of Buddhism would deny that belief was involved at all. What about sincerely held beliefs about female circumcision or witchcraft? What would we make about the many who identify as a religion but do not follow all of the rules and tenets of that religion? And if I have been raised in a religion and taken on its norms, how “genuinely held” are those beliefs? How do we test the “genuineness” of a belief? If it is not judged ‘genuine’, am I therefore lying?
Religion is about morality, and the “weighty” questions of life. Is it? Wouldn’t that make environmentalism or animal rights or the Geneva Convention religious? What counts as “weighty”? Who decides?
Religions are “cogent”. While the representatives of various traditions have a vested interest in presenting religions as internally consistent and sharing fundamental ideas, this is not true and never has been. [Try our Exploring Religionsmodule for lots of examples].
“Belief” is never defined. Seems pedantic, perhaps, but it matters a great deal – and the fact that we all assume we know what “belief” means should start alarm bells ringing. The idea that we have a series of belief ‘statements’ in our minds that we refer to when we act is clearly untrue; we act before thought, we hold contradictory beliefs, we hold multiple beliefs at the same time, we don’t do what we think, and so on. Is my love for my wife a belief? What about that the sun will rise in the morning, or that the switch will make a light go on?
No; what is going on here is an appeal to Protestant ideas about “faith”. Religious beliefs are understood as a special kind of belief that, because it comes from God, must be protected from criticism from merely “rational” beliefs.
Religions deserve protection, but political or other beliefs do not.Because it is comparable to a religion, this nationalism needs protected by the law. But why should religion be uniquely protected? Judging from the panel on Religion in the Law at our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference in February [soon to be a special issue of Implicit Religion], the issue at present seems to be mostly concerned with protecting minority groups, particularly immigrants, but problems arise as the model used is based on European Protestant Christianity. The law moves slowly, but in my experience, the legal system is willing, even keen, to listen.
Most comment on this case will revolve around the question of whether nationalism is or is not a religion, but this is really missing the point. Cases like these reveal the fault lines in how the category religion is understood in public discourse. Legal proceedings are an underused resource for analysing the public discourse on religion, and an especially important one, as it has real effects on people. My interest in religion has always been based in a fascination with the relationship between ideas and communities of people, and the law is the point where these ideas become inscribed in societies. If we as scholars are serious about wanting to be heard by the broader public, this might be a good place to focus our attention.
17th August 2018 at 9.00pm sees the first episode of Extraordinary Rituals, a new OU/BBC co-production on BBC 2. This series of three documentaries explores the spectacular and emotional world of rituals, and the Academic Consultant was our own Graham Harvey.
In Indonesia the Torajans put on the most elaborate funerals on Earth to secure their loved ones a place in the afterlife, while in Japan new hi-tech cemeteries store people’s ashes behind glowing neon plaques. In Italy, a passionate bareback horserace called the Palio is the ritual which keeps fierce rivalries between the districts of Siena in check. While in Malaysia, pilgrims carry massive burdens and their bodies are pierced to show their extreme devotion to the Hindu god of war.
Rituals can inspire us, but to stay relevant they must also adapt to our modern lives. In China, 21st century teenagers sing ancient love songs in a 7th century dating ritual, and follow it up by text. In Senegal, where wrestling has become the top sport, fighters still use amulets, potions and tribal dances to give them the edge in the arena.
Rituals are woven into the survival story of humanity. Among the Inuit in Greenland a boy’s rite of passage to become a hunter still demands he must hunt a seal on the sea ice. It’s a ritual of survival, but for those families that follow tradition, it’s also key to their identity. Aboriginal culture is the oldest surviving on Earth, using fire ceremonies to shape the landscape over 50,000 years. Passed down from the ancestors, the Dow fire ceremony teaches the next generation how fire brings fertility to the landscape. Today, science has caught up – ancestral knowledge and modern technology has combined, as Aboriginal rangers protect the land by creating vast firebreaks from helicopters.
We will continue to invent new rituals, from street crews practising parkour in Gaza, to the building of a Temple at Burning Man in USA, where people leave their painful mementos before it’s burnt down as a ritual of release. These rituals could become the traditions of the future, alongside ancient ceremonies for modern times, to help us to make sense of our human experience
There’s a bunch of material at Openlearn, the OU’s free learning website, including short videos from the origins festival and several pieces on ritual by Graham Harvey. A breakdown of the episodes follows.
Ep1: Rituals – Cycle of Life| The key rituals on our journey from birth, to marriage and death. These are universal, yet we perform them in extremely different ways around the world. Rituals give us meaning, and they bind us together for the most extreme moments in the circle of life.
Ep2: Rituals – Great Gatherings | Great Gatherings looks at rituals that bring us together in huge numbers, keep communities alive and reinforce our identity by joining the crowd. For billions of people, shared ritual experiences still help us to find where we belong and connect us to something greater than ourselves.
Ep3: Rituals – Changing World | This episode explores how rituals adapt in our changing world. How do ancient ceremonies stay relevant and when do we invent new rituals to answer our needs.
Did you know there are a variety of ways you can take Religious Studies modules as part of an Arts and Humanities qualification at the Open University? In this podcast, Stefanie Sinclair and John Maiden talk you through the different options, and the different Religious Studies modules on offer.
Religious Studies is a great addition to other Arts and Humanities subjects. As John Maiden puts it:
Religions are an important aspect of all human cultures past and present. And Religious Studies is not just about world views or internalised beliefs though we do look at belief very carefully. It’s also about great works of art, popular culture, national and international politics, public and private practices, the kind of everyday doing of religion. So, whether you’re studying music or literature or philosophy or history, you name it, you’ll find that Religious Studies links really well with any other Arts and Humanities discipline.
Billy Graham died today. While he had been out of the public eye for some time, his passing will prompt many historians of religion to assess a remarkable – and remarkably long – religious career. These are brief, general reflections, written quickly, and which will no doubt require further thought. They only scratch the surface of his ministry and impact.
Graham experienced an evangelical conversion in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1934. In the 1940s he felt he was increasingly drawn towards evangelism, and over time developed a nation-wide reputation. His landmark Los Angeles ‘crusade’ in 1949 saw around 350,000 attend meetings over two months. From 1946, through his role with Youth for Christ, an international ministry also emerged. In 1954 he was invited to lead the Greater London Crusade. While the idea of a resurgence in British religiosity in the 1950s is contested amongst historians, his visits, followed the next year by evangelistic missions in London and Glasgow, were defining moments in post-war British Christianity. These visits also opened access to Britain’s Commonwealth networks: he toured India from 1956, Australia and New Zealand from 1959, and various African nations from 1960. As Britain’s global influence declined, and America’s political, economic and cultural power expanded further, Graham became the key figure in American Christian internationalism. In an age of Cold War anxiety, his evangelistic message was widely seen as a Western spiritual bulwark to communism. Later, in 1974, Graham had a leading role in the organisation of the Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. As various scholars have noted, this was to have an important impact, as majority world evangelicals began to exercise influence on the west, challenging narrower notions of Christian mission.
Graham’s evangelistic career brought together revivalism, ecumenism, technology and celebrity. The extensive local preparation for his missions encouraged a dynamic of ecumenical cooperation, and later his inclusion of Roman Catholics drew criticism from some evangelicals. He innovated in the use of media. From 1951 he pioneered the use of evangelistic movies (and I very clearly remember being taken to one in the late 1980s), and in 1954 his preaching in London was transmitted to churches and theatres around the country. Graham himself was a widely recognisable religious celebrity, and many secular celebrities were drawn to Graham.
Since the eighteenth century evangelicalism has been highly diverse, sharing, as David Bebbington has argued, four general characteristics of crucicentricism, conversionism, Biblicism and activism. However, in the United States, Graham made an important contribution to the emergence of something like a post-war American ‘new’ evangelical movement. The death of Graham – sometime after his retirement from public ministry – will invite further reflection amongst scholars of American evangelicalism about the present-day coherence of this movement. To what extent is it now a constellation of different constituencies, each with different priorities and agendas? Furthermore, with the death also of the Revd. John Stott, the English Anglican who also enjoyed an international leadership role, perhaps a similar kind of question about evangelicalism will be asked on a global scale. No single evangelical figure now has the same worldwide reputation. If such an individual is to emerge, perhaps they will come from the majority world?
Ticket price for the full 3 days: £255 (including B&B and evening meals). Day rates for Tuesday: £90 (not including an evening meal) / £110 (including meal).
What is a human body? This may seem a facetious question, but the answer will be very different according to which medical tradition you consult. Take Ayurveda, a traditional system of medical knowledge from India which has enjoyed a renaissance of popularity in the West since the 1980s – and is the subject of a new exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection.
Walking round the show, one is encouraged to explore different ways of understanding and visualising the human body. The Ayurvedic body differs significantly from that of European biomedicine, which is based on dissection. The Ayurvedic body is a body of systems. It is conceptualised as being composed of five constituent parts (mahābūta), seven body substances (dhātu) and three regulating qualities (doṣa). According to Ayurvedic theory, by attending to imbalances between these principles in a body, health might be promoted and illness avoided. The Ayurvedic concepts of the doṣas – vata, pitta and kapha can be seen in the West today promoting teas, soaps and massages.
But of course, there are many other different conceptions of the human body. There is the tantric understanding, often conflated with that of Ayurveda. Tantra focuses on the concept of energy channels (nāḍīs) which have particular centres of concentration along a line in the centre of the body (chakras). The traditional Chinese model, on the other hand, emphasises the dynamic principles of ying and yang as being paramount for ensuring health. Meanwhile, indigenous healing in many traditional cultures identifies problems between the individual and the greater social and metaphysical context as the cause of illness.
Competing medical systems
So what, then, has determined the dominance of one medical system of thought over another? The answer is far more complex than the “correct” or “most accurate” one.
This complexity is epitomised by the central piece of the exhibition, one of very few illustrations of the classical Ayurvedic systemic descriptions of the human body. This 16th-century drawing, as Dominik Wujastyk’s research has shown, was probably produced at the request of a rich, Nepalese patron by a scholar-physician, a scribe and a painter, none of whom were fluent with the original Sanskrit source. The Nepalese artist was clearly influenced by Tibetan medical illustrations.
We don’t know how this image was originally used or how influential it was, but its creation was dependent upon patronage and intercultural exchange. It was out of this mix of cultures, then, that came one of the most iconic visual presentations of the “Indian” Ayurvedic body.
The Ayurvedic Man. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection
Economic and political powers are strong influences on the shape and popularity of Indian concepts of the body today. Yoga is currently the most widespread Indian approach to promoting the health of the body. It is flourishing globally. Millions attest that yoga makes them feel better and Ayurvedic concepts are often presented as integral to yoga practices.
But it is not well known that the contemporary global interest in Ayurveda and yoga is partially a result of colonial mismanagement of India. This point is creatively illustrated in the Wellcome’s new show through an interactive commission by the artist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar. Millions of lives were lost throughout the colonial period due to forcible redistribution of food and other resources away from local Indian populations, to serve what were considered to be the greater needs of the British Empire.
As I have argued elsewhere, reactions to the tragic deaths of millions of Indians transformed yoga. Swami Vivekananda was inspired by the effects of famine and plague to redefine Karma Yoga as a social-service mission. Many leaders of the Indian independence movement, including Mahatmas Gandhi and Mohan Malaviya, promoted Indian approaches to medicine and health.
And so the establishment of the modern Indian nation was closely linked with the health of millions of individual Indian bodies through “Indian” systems of healing. This continues today as the prime minister Narendra Modi demonstrates through his association with Indian’s popular “yoga-televangelist” Swami Ramdev and the elevation of traditional medicine to that of an independent government department.
The promotion and preservation of Indian medicinal knowledge is laudable. But it is important not to oversimplify complex and sophisticated descriptions rooted in different worldviews. Economic imperatives often flatten traditions into marketable exports – and intercultural exchanges both enrich and confuse our models of understanding.
19th century painting depicting a yogic posture. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection
Many understandings
So should there be one answer, one dominant understanding of the body? I’m currently part of a team researching the overlaps between yoga, Ayurvedic medicine and Indian longevity practices (rasāyana) over the past 1000 years. Our research emphasises a plurality of understandings through time. Both yoga and Ayurveda are characterised by a diversity of practices, as well as by internal conceptual coherency. Millennia of intercultural exchange has created problems for asserting national ownership of traditional medical knowledge.
A Western conception of the body: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Wikimedia Commons
All medical systems have shared interests in promoting human health and longevity. But it is important to understand the differences as well as the similarities. As early as 1923, Indian commentators were expressing concern about the potential biomedical “mining” of traditional remedies for single active ingredients. One commentator in the Usman Report, a pan-Indian survey of over 200 indigenous medical practitioners, asks: “Does this amount to quackery” by biomedical physicians?
Today, our mental image of our bodies is largely picture built up from dissection and, more recently, x-rays and various other scans. Yet in practice, we understand our bodies as a changing system. We monitor our energy levels. We adjust how we feel with food, drink, sleep, exercise and drugs. The Ayurvedic, system-oriented body, then, is perhaps not that far from most people’s daily experience. So how might we better visualise our bodies based on our lived, somatic understandings?
Ayurveda is a rich and complex tradition that has always encompassed influences from a variety of cultures as well as retaining very specific, local applications. Ayurveda cannot be reduced to a simple definition, marketing slogan or quantifiable national export. The Wellcome’s new show explores these complicated relationships and raises important questions. If we are not to become “quacks” ourselves, we must continue to resist reductions of the human body into a single visual model.
David Robertson has published a piece over at the blog of CenSAMM, the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millennial Movements, on the function of conspiracy theories in Heaven’s Gate.
Srrody’s exit statement claims that those who are fighting “this or that conspiracy or global plot” are “only seeing the most obvious deceptions”, whereas Heaven’s Gate has given him knowledge of the true “negative forces” in control of the world – Luciferian extraterrestrials. As odd as this narrative might seem, it’s in fact identical to William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse(1991), a foundational text for New World Order conspiracy theorists.
If you are in the UK, you almost certainly saw the fuss around a story carried by The Times on Aug 28th under the banner “Christian Child forced into Muslim foster care”. The scandal ostensibly revolved around the fact that the foster mother wears a burka, which the Times suggests “generally indicates adherence to a conservative, Salafi-influenced interpretation of Islam that is often contemptuous of liberal Western values”. The use of the term “contemptuous” is clearly loaded, implying an irrational hatred of Western morality rather than simply a disagreement, and there is nothing in that that will be surprising or less than obvious to anyone following the discourse on religion in the popular media.
There are a few interesting points when we dig into the story, however, which I think are illuminating in how such hysterical stories come to appear in the press (and I am drawing here from Richard Bartholomew’s excellent blog post on the stories). Firstly, the Times report seems to have been intended primarily as a follow-up to the recent Tower Hamlets fire and the ongoing concern over the callous treatment of the residents by the local council both before and after. It mentions “the scandal-ridden borough of Tower Hamlets” several times, but had no concern about the girl’s previous Muslim foster parents prior to the fire. The article was also written by the journalist who broke the story of “grooming gangs” in Rotherham, so perhaps that further encouraged the sensationalistic tone.
However, the story began to receive wider attention when the Mail Online picked it up and added a stock photograph of a child not in obviously “Muslim” dress holding hands with a Muslim woman in a headdress onto which they had clumsily photoshopped a veil, as reported by the Guardian. It further emerged that the appointment of the foster carers had nothing to do with Tower Hamlets council, that the court-appointed guardian had absolutely no concerns about the child’s welfare, and that the child had always been intended to eventually reside with their grandmother once a risk assessment had been carried out. Things then took a bizarre twist when it emerged that the grandmother in question was, in fact… Muslim.
So we have a perfect storm of more-or-less explicit xenophobia, editorial ineptitude and conspiratorial implications about both corrupt local politicians and organised anti-liberal Islamic invaders. This guaranteed click-bait then gets further traction when the left-wing press picks it up in order to criticise the right-wing press, not without justification in this instance. Thus a viral story is born.
But I think this story also reveals a couple of interesting implications about how religion is dealt with in the media, beyond the obvious Islamophobia. First, notice that the child’s Christian status is uncontested and unproblematic. It is as though the child’s Christianity is an essential and permanent essence, whereas Islam is being imposed (“forced”, even) from without. While the implication is that the child is vulnerable and therefore should be protected from having ideologies forced upon them, this doesn’t seem to be a concern with Christianity. Can one be brainwashed into Christianity? If the child is too young to choose to become a Muslim or not, does that not suggest that it is also too young to choose to become a Christian or not?
No; and the reason why is a good example, I suggest, of the difference between ideology and hegemony: when an ideology is invisible, it is a hegemony. We are happy to describe Muslim dress codes as being for cultural or religious reasons, but we do not often describe our own dress codes in the same way – including many codes determined by gender and status like skirt-wearing, cosmetics, business attire, and so on. These are just what people do. Like fish, we do not see the water in which we are swimming.
For scholars of New Religions, the language used in these reports will be strikingly similar to the way that “cults” were talked about from the end of World War 2 until the 1990s. As I wrote about in a previous blog, children were often at the centre of the Cult Wars, and the rhetoric (often from the very same individuals) of the anti-cult movement continues straight into the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 1990s and into the present with Pizzagate. The desire to protect children from harm is laudable, and indeed seems to have been the aim of all the officials involved here, but these reports seem more concerned with protecting children from difference. If we wish a more progressive society, it is as important to protect from dangerous hegemonies as from dangerous ideologies. So long as they remain invisible, however, the former is far harder to do.
Ayurveda is a rich and complex tradition that has always encompassed influences from a variety of cultures as well as retaining very specific, local applications. Ayurveda cannot be reduced to a simple definition, marketing slogan or quantifiable national export. The Wellcome’s