Jonathan Tuckett of the Religious Studies Project attended our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspectives conference in February, armed with an iPhone. Drawing from the themes of the conference, he came up with some (difficult) questions to ask the attendees – including our students Theo Wildcroft and Alison Robertson, and Lecturers Marion Bowman, David Robertson, Paul-Francois Tremlett and Suzanne Newcombe.
Steven Sutcliffe | Explaining the Economy of New Religions
The second keynote from our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference is Steven Sutcliffe (University of Edinburgh). Recorded on Feb 20th 2018, it is entitled “Explaining the Economy of New Spiritualities, with the Help of Bourdieu”. Enjoy!
Magic and Modernity at the Religious Studies Project
Just published over at the Religious Studies Project is a conversation between the Open University’s Richard Irvine, Theodoros Kyriakides and David G. Robertson concerning magical thinking in the modern world. We may think that such ideas are confined to the fringes in the secular, post-Enlightenment society, but this is not necessarily the case. We talk about Weber’s rationalisation and James Frazer’s evolutionary model of modernity, and how they relate to ideas of belief, and magic. We then look at examples from Orkney and Cyprus to show these ideas in play. This is an interview that will be of interest to all students of secularity, modernity and belief.
This interview was recorded at our Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective conference in Feb 2018, and is based on the “Magical thinking in contexts and situations of unbelief” project, part of the Understanding Unbelief programme.
Anti-authoritarian unbelief: or, not being told what (not) to believe
Richard Irvine and Theo Kyriakides
Walking through the old town of Nicosia, perched between two olive trees, Theo encountered graffiti of a snarling creature with red eyes in the grounds of a church. Besides the illegible signature of the artist there is no text accompanying the image, but the demonic imagery and its strategic placement – directly facing the north façade of the church – leaves little room for interpretation. Surely this is an act of resistance and opposition to the yellow limestone and hagiographies of the aging building?
Such imagery serves as a background to the everyday discourse of unbelief, especially among the youth of the city. But why would non-believers revel in such apparently occult imagery? This might seem contradictory, given that unbelievers, by their very nature, are thought to tend towards rationalism as a set of logical ideas and assumptions about the world. Yet, as we write in our previous blog post, part of what we need to grasp here are the grounds on which people reject mainstream religious beliefs.
As we progress with our fieldwork, we often find that the association between explicit declarations of unbelief does not necessarily go hand in hand with an emphasis on rational scientific explanation as the only basis for knowledge. On the island of Rousay in Orkney, where Richard is based, abandoned kirks punctuate the landscape, and only a tiny handful of the island’s population of 200 attend the regular service in the church centre set up in the old manse (a manse is where the Kirk Minister lives, or in this case, would once have lived). As Richard was told early on when attempting to find the church, “you’ll find folk are no very religious here”. People who wanted to ‘sing Kumbaya’ were welcome to do so if they wanted, but they shouldn’t for a moment think about leaning on others to join in.
When people explain their unbelief, the starting point is very often the rejection of authority and particularly of religion as a ‘means of control’. A key theme in people’s accounts of why they consider themselves atheists is precisely the idea that religion exists (in the words of one) to “keep people in their place” or (in the words of another) “to tell us what to do as though we don’t ken ourselves”. Indeed, some would go further in locating religion as historically being in the pocket of government interests and rich landowners. (Interestingly, this was precisely the motivation which led to the Disruption of 1843, a schism in the Church of Scotland where those who opposed the interference of landowners’ right to install a minister of his choice in the Kirk seceded from the Established (i.e. the state) Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland – so this kind of dissent actually has a key role in the history of religion in Scotland.)
Likewise, in Cyprus, the formation of the state and the stratification of Cypriot society closely dovetail with the becoming of the Cypriot Christian Orthodox Church as an important and powerful force in the island’s political landscape. The fact that Cyprus’ first president, after becoming a republic in 1960, was a clergyman – Makarios III – who went on to serve three consecutive terms in office, succinctly conveys the close relationship between religion and politics in Cyprus. Makarios’ time as president was tumultuous, and his involvement in the Cypriot problem and the 1974 Turkish invasion is fiercely contested and debated amongst Cypriots even today. 40 or so years later, public opinion surrounding the Church of Cyprus’ spiritual standing is waning as a result of stories such as its involvement in the 2013 Cypriot IMF bailout, or its recent ambition to invest in the tourist industry. “I don’t believe in the Church or what it stands for”, is a reactionary statement which permeates my conversations with Cypriots, and which denotes their distaste against the authority and relevance of religious structures.
Nevertheless, if we take the rejection of authority as the starting point for unbelief, it doesn’t necessarily follow that unbelievers automatically favour modes of thinking that rationalists might deem ‘magical’. In an alley behind the service exit of a bar, much less visible that the creature staring down the church, one finds a stencil of Christ wearing a gasmask. Over the stencil, the artist or someone else wrote “God doesn’t exist.” Below the stencil, a reply to the previous provocation, or perhaps a question to the person witnessing the image, in Greek: Εσύ; – “Do you [exist]?”
Image 2: Stencil of Christ in back alley in Nicosia. Photograph by Theodoros Kyriakides.
Can one exist without belief in something? As the above image suggests, opposition, resistance and unbelief to dominant religious discourse often does not lead to certainty about what one knows about the world. Rather, unbelief opens up an ambiguous grey zone of self-doubt, and a quest as to what one should or shouldn’t believe in. This grey zone is not one of rigid distinction between belief and unbelief, but rather a cognitive and social space where relations between the magical and the rational potentially proliferate.
Dowsing provides an interesting case in point here. In late November a minor controversy bubbled up in the British media after an evolutionary biologist, Sally Le Page, enquired via twitter whether major UK water companies routinely used divination to detect water leaks – only for 10 out of 12 companies to reply, often in a very matter-of-fact way that yes, some of their technicians did use dowsing rods. For some rationalists, this was a cause for uproar – how dare British water companies waste money on such superstitious methods in the 21st century: in the words of Sally Le Page, “I can’t state this enough: there is no scientifically rigorous, doubly blind evidence that divining rods work. Isn’t it a bit silly that big companies are still using magic to do their jobs?”
Yet when Richard discussed this with people in Orkney – even with those who defined themselves as non-believers and who vehemently rejected religious belief as ‘nonsense’ (or far, far worse) – it was generally met with a shrug. Especially in rural areas and outlying islands where farms and households need to drill wells for groundwater supplies, divination is routinely employed to find the find the best place to bore for water. Hence the frequent reply: “But it works.” One important thing to note here is that ‘magic’ is an externally applied term for what is simply considered practical knowledge. “No, I didn’t say anything about it being magic. I just said it works” – though crucially, it only works for those with the ability to do it. Some have it, some don’t. Here, the sense of what is ‘magic’ can be turned on its head, as in the following conversation with a contractor: “You turn on your tap, oh look, there’s water! That’s magic. You don’t even think about where it comes from, do you? But where do you think we get the water from? We have to drill for it. And you think we’re going to stop finding the water the way that does the job just because someone says so who’s probably not got the first clue about where the water comes from and how you get it?”
Here, we see clearly how anti-authoritarianism can also be deployed to reject those authorities who would deem particular practices “magic” and seek to apply abstract rules to everyday life. In this form, unbelief is not about subscribing to a new (rationalist) framework for belief: it’s about not being told what to believe.
Bettina Schmidt | The Contentious Field of Religious Experience
Professor Bettina Schmidt (University of Wales, Trinity St. David) gives her opening keynote presentation from our Contemporary Religion in Historial Perspective conference on the 19th Feb, 2018 – “The Contentious Field of the Study of Religious Experience: The Challenging Influence of Rudolf Otto, Andrew Lang and other Founding Fathers.”
Humour, Concealment and Death Mindfulness in Romanian Funerals
By Maria Nita (University of Wales, Trinity St David)
Death in the West vs. Romanian funeral practices
The modern funeral in the West is increasingly a celebration of life, marked by a depletion of ritual. The French historian Philippe Ariès (1974) claimed that in the West a reduction in the ritual associated with death and dying reflected an inability to accept death caused by the progressive growth in the importance of individuality. Thus ‘the death of the other’ – which was expected and accepted in the Middle Ages as a sort of reintegration in the ancestral community – becomes in modern times, according to Ariès, an unbearable occurrence which can no longer be mediated by ritual. In contrast, the Romanian funeral is still heavily dominated by folk customs, despite some studies suggesting a recent decrease in ritual due to various social factors, such as men taking up a more active role in organising funerals, an area largely considered the domain of older women, who act as expert maintainers of these traditions. (Popescu-Simion, 2014) Also in opposition to the Western emphasis on remembering the past by celebrating the life of the deceased, Romanian funerals are defined by a focused attention on the present, on the moment by moment developments of these rites and also, by an intense relational exchange with the dead body itself. I would like to explore here this engagement with the dead body as a sort of ‘death mindfulness’, leading to an identity transition of the deceased.
Mortu’ as a transitional state in Romanian funeral customs
In Romanian funeral customs, ‘the deceased’ is cautiously talked about as mortu’, a Latin-derived word also meaning ‘the dead body’. ‘Mort’ is, of course, the root word of many English words in this connotative field, such as mortuary, mortality or mortify. Family and friends, all dressed in black, sitting around a traditionally open casket coffin for a three day wake will adopt various attitudes towards mortu’ – from wailing at the head of the coffin, when overcome by grief, to quiet and even jolly conversations, whilst reminding each other to observe all the relevant customs. The customs range from smoky ‘ablutions’ of the body, circling the coffin with frankincense three times a day, to protecting oneself from mortu’ and its potentially dangerous, contaminative and unstipulated rapport with the living: ‘you mustn’t turn your back on mortu’ and if you do, find a small speckle on your clothes and put it on the coffin’, ‘we mustn’t let the candles burn out’, ‘you must put a black scarf on top of the main entrance’, and so on. This could be interpreted as a kind of funeral mindfulness – a practice that focusses one’s attention on the present moment. Towards the end of this process, as the body is taken out of the home or chapel and ‘sent on its last journey’, women rush to cover it with flowers and sometimes jewellery, or even makeup, giving it a puppet-like appearance. The transition is now complete and the frequent relational exchanges of the last few days come to an end.
Humour, death and hidden identities
The ambivalent nature of these interactions seems to have, to some extent, a historical basis. Marina Cap-Bun (2012) shows that in Romanian culture we can identify two concomitant attitudes towards mortality: a pious reverence and abstract idealisation of ‘the departed’ – which Cap-Bun claims to be a later Roman influence, and an older indigenous attitude marked by an irreverent and humorous attitude towards death. This latter is embodied by the Merry Săpânța Cemetery in Romania, which, as the name suggests, abounds in funny and rude portrayals of the deceased. This attitude is also present in old funeral games in which mortu’ was the subject of concealment and trickery; in one extreme example the body was tied up with ropes and used as a puppet to startle unassuming visitors. Like with some shamanic practices dealing with disease, illness and death – laughter and mockery seem to become a gate for plural meanings through which a change or transition of identity is mediated. These polysemic funeral customs are also a constant reminder that one is engaging with mortu’, a transitory and ambivalent ‘being’, in a cocoon-like state. By focussing the attention on the dead body and the present time Romanian funeral rites and customs appear to provide a death mindfulness practice that seems largely forgotten or absent in the West.
Billy Graham (1918-2018)
By John Maiden.
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?
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Video | The Legacy of Edward Tylor
Over at the Religious Studies Project last week, Graham Harvey and Paul-Francois Tremlett of the OU took part in a roundtable discussion to mark the centenary of the death of Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the seminal figures in the early academic study of religion. This is also the theme for a new volume edited by Tremlett, Harvey and Liam T. Sutherland, ‘Edward Tylor, Religion and Culture’ (Bloomsbury, 2017) which features contributions from all of the roundtable participants (and several other scholars), which was launched at the BASR annual conference in Chester last September.
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) in many respects has a fixed place in the academic memory of religious studies and cultural anthropology yet acknowledgement of his role is often purely historical, as a key ancestor of little direct relevance to contemporary discussions. This has left us with a limited narrative about the man and his work; a particular received or canonical Tylor defined by his introduction of the concept of animism, his intellectualist approach to religion, his armchair research and staunch social evolutionism. The year of his centenary is an opportunity to begin the task of critically examining the legacy left by Tylor’s work on religion and culture, how much the received Tylor matches his body of work, whether other Tylors can be extracted from these texts which undermine such a limited perspective on a long and eventful career and whether contemporary scholars can find anything of ongoing relevance in the work of such a historically distant figure.
Topics discussed included his impact on indigenous societies, the debates over animism, monotheism and the definition of religion as well as his relevance to the cognitive sciences of religion and the degree to which Tylor can be classed as an ethnographer and more. This roundtable includes contributions from Dr Miguel Astor-Aguilera of Arizona State University, Dr Jonathan Jong of Coventry University’s Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab, James L. Cox Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, Liam T. Sutherland – PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Graham Harvey and Dr Paul Tremlett at the Open University.
A very ‘Christmassy’ research project!
By Lucinda Murphy, PhD researcher at Durham University
Well, here we find ourselves again in the depths of January; a new year well under way, and the realities of ‘the everyday’ forced back upon us. It feels somehow hard to imagine that, just a month ago, we were all immersed in an utterly different world. It is, as Shakespeare’s Caliban would have it, a world “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs”; a world in which realities are suspended, if not strangely magnified. It’s a world in which time stands still, dreams are indulged and escapist utopias entertained. It’s a world in which no expense is spared; a world of intensity in which expectations press, and emotions run high; a world in which everything seems to have that extra little bit of sparkle; a world which feels just a little bit ‘Christmassy’.
This annual shift into the world of ‘Christmas’ is of course second nature to most of us. Some dread it, some have fun laughing or even complaining about it, whilst others just seem to naively or feignedly ‘wish it could be Christmas every day’. Whichever angle of the spectrum you personally fit into; it seems clear that Christmas is a cultural event, and we might even say, phenomenon which can’t simply be ignored. Quite the contrary; the whole world seems to close down for it. In the UK, as in many other parts of the world during December, it’s pretty much inescapable. It is plastered across billboards, shop fronts and TV adverts; reinforced and cultivated by institutions of industry, public service and leisure; and physically adorned over and around both public and private spaces.
The very hint of even the word ‘Christmas’ conjures up a rich thought-world of symbol and meaning. Father Christmas; mince pies; snowy scenes; peace and goodwill; Christmas crackers; nativity plays; robins; carols; Quality Street; Christmas trees; candlelit churches. Quite clearly, the cultural symbolic resources for the weaving of such ‘webs of significance’ abound (Geertz, 1973). However, as Chris Deacy has recently shown in his 2016 book Christmas as Religion, these various weaves are neither distinctively personal or cultural, nor distinctively religious or secular. At Christmas, perhaps more than at any other time of year, many seem able, or at least willing, to balance multiple identity commitments, multiple emotions, and also multiple parts of their lives into one syncretic community spirited sparkly mixing bowl. And all the while, the perennial search for ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ hovers somewhere in the midst, casting hints of seeming authenticity into a festival which many fear often appears to be losing its ‘magic’ to empty commercialism and the outrageously ‘naff’.
What could be a more fertile window for the exploration of meaning making in Britain today; and more specifically into the complexities of ever-blurring religious and cultural identities? And yet, when I tell people I’m studying for a PhD on ‘Christmas’, I am met more often than not with astonished looks of incredulity. It’s often seen as too frivolous, too ‘fun’ to study (God help academia!). It seems as if this particular cultural world is perhaps a little too close, too special, for many of us to step outside. But it is of course exactly this intimacy that I believe is so worthy of study, and which I have been striving to capture in my ‘Christmassy’ fieldwork over the past few months. What is it exactly about this utopian dream-like world of stockings, magic dust, innocence, truth and fun that seems so personal; and perhaps more pertinently, how does it any of it relate to our ‘everyday’ January lives?
If you think you might be interested in pursuing some of these questions, do join my research assistant @MyElfGelf and I in our Christmassy musings by logging your own Christmas story as part of our online questionnaire, or by following our Festive Log Research adventures at lucindaslog.com or on Twitter or Facebook using #TheFestiveLog.