{"id":685,"date":"2018-03-27T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T09:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=685"},"modified":"2018-03-20T14:42:31","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T14:42:31","slug":"anti-authoritarian-unbelief-or-not-being-told-what-not-to-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/?p=685","title":{"rendered":"Anti-authoritarian unbelief: or, not being told what (not) to believe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Irvine and Theo Kyriakides<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 directly facing the north fa\u00e7ade of the church \u2013 leaves little room for interpretation. Surely this is an act of resistance and opposition to the yellow limestone and hagiographies of the aging building?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, part of what we need to grasp here are the grounds on which people reject mainstream religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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, \u201cyou\u2019ll find folk are no very religious here\u201d. People who wanted to \u2018sing Kumbaya\u2019 were welcome to do so if they wanted, but they shouldn\u2019t for a moment think about leaning on others to join in.<\/p>\n

When people explain their unbelief, the starting point is very often the rejection of authority and particularly of religion as a \u2018means of control\u2019. A key theme in people\u2019s accounts of why they consider themselves atheists is precisely the idea that religion exists (in the words of one) to \u201ckeep people in their place\u201d or (in the words of another) \u201cto tell us what to do as though we don\u2019t ken ourselves\u201d. 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\u2019 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 \u2013 so this kind of dissent actually has a key role in the history of religion in Scotland.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s political landscape. The fact that Cyprus\u2019 first president, after becoming a republic in 1960, was a clergyman \u2013 Makarios III \u2013 who went on to serve three consecutive terms in office, succinctly conveys the close relationship between religion and politics in Cyprus. Makarios\u2019 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\u2019 spiritual standing is waning as a result of stories such as its involvement in the 2013 Cypriot IMF bailout<\/a>, or its recent ambition to invest in the tourist industry<\/a>. \u201cI don\u2019t believe in the Church or what it stands for\u201d, is a reactionary statement which permeates my conversations with Cypriots, and which denotes their distaste against the authority and relevance of religious structures.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, if we take the rejection of authority as the starting point for unbelief, it doesn\u2019t necessarily follow that unbelievers automatically favour modes of thinking that rationalists might deem \u2018magical\u2019. 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 \u201cGod doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d Below the stencil, a reply to the previous provocation, or perhaps a question to the person witnessing the image, in Greek: \u0395\u03c3\u03cd<\/em>; – \u201cDo you [exist]?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Image 2: Stencil of Christ in back alley in Nicosia. Photograph by Theodoros Kyriakides.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Dowsing provides an interesting case in point here<\/a>. 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 how dare British water companies waste money on such superstitious methods in the 21st<\/sup> century: in the words of Sally Le Page<\/a>, \u201cI 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet when Richard discussed this with people in Orkney \u2013 even with those who defined themselves as non-believers and who vehemently rejected religious belief as \u2018nonsense\u2019 (or far, far worse) \u2013 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: \u201cBut it works.\u201d One important thing to note here is that \u2018magic\u2019 is an externally applied term for what is simply considered practical knowledge. \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t say anything about it being magic. I just said it works\u201d \u2013 though crucially, it only works for those with the ability to do it. Some have it, some don\u2019t. Here, the sense of what is \u2018magic\u2019 can be turned on its head, as in the following conversation with a contractor: \u201cYou turn on your tap, oh look, there\u2019s water! That\u2019s magic. You don\u2019t even think about where it comes from,\u00a0do you? But where do you think we get the water from? We have to drill for it. And you think we\u2019re going to stop finding the water the way that does the job just because someone says so who\u2019s probably not got the first clue about where the water comes from and how you get it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, we see clearly how anti-authoritarianism can also be deployed to reject those authorities who would deem particular practices \u201cmagic\u201d 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\u2019s about not being told what<\/em> to believe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,6],"tags":[142,196,198,141,197,194,195,140],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-contemporary-religion-in-historical-perspective-2","category-ideas","tag-belief","tag-cyprus","tag-opposition","tag-orkney","tag-resistance","tag-richard-irvine","tag-theodoros-kyriakides","tag-unbelief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":693,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/religious-studies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}