In our day of increased secularism, the extent to which religion
permeates people's lives, whether faithful, indifferent
(neutral), or actively antireligious, is probably difficult to
assess. The separation of church and state is powerfully anchored
in constitutions and declarations of independence, while new
presidents, kings, emperors, state officials, and members of the
judiciary still swear on the books of their religious faith,
invoke their respective gods as the ultimate judge (or help), and
openly, or covertly, participate in the rituals inherited from
theological practical experiences. The dominant symbolism of our
day has a religious aura. It seems that both the faithful and
the secularists of all nuances entered a mutual agreement in
sanctioning what came to be known as civil religion. People
pledge allegiance to the flag, get emotionally carried away when
the national anthem is played, and partake in the celebration of
holidays, never questioning their justification. These elements
of civil religion come to us in perverted forms, divorced from
the pragmatic context within which they were constituted. To
swear on the Bible was specifically prohibited ("You are not to
swear at all, not by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by
earth, for it is his footstool..." Matthew 5:33-36). Swearing-in
ceremonies take place in the open in order to make them
manifest to the gods. In some countries a window is still opened
when an oath of office is recited. Holidays, meant as occasions
of religious recollection, or to instill a sense of solidarity,
remain only what each person makes of them. Even more, in
countries making a point of avoiding the domination of one
religion over another, the holidays of the dominant religion
become the holidays of the entire nation, enjoyed foremostly as
market celebrations.
To notice the contradictory nature of the presence of religion in
contexts of secular practical experiences, some directly
contrary to religious beliefs, means to notice how some of the
motivations of religion expatiate in a context contradicting the
legitimacy of the theological experience in our day and age. This
became clear even within the particular circumstances of
revolutions whose stated goal was to eradicate religion through
state oppression or by education. The French Revolution
discovered, soon after the king and other members of the power
elite were decapitated, that the authority of its ideals,
embodied in the call for liberty, equality, fraternity, was not
enough, despite being housed in the same body of literacy as
religion was, to substitute for the higher authority of
Divinity.
The Soviet Revolution hoped that theater or cinematography would
substitute for religion, or at least for church. Some of its
ideologues experimented with a secular god- building strategy,
inventing a sui generis higher force to which people could
relate, and on which hope could be placed. They tried, very much
in the spirit of the utopian Marx, to deify the collective force
of the working class in order to inspire a religious sense of
community. Enormous energy was invested in designing new rituals.
Many of the atheist artists of the Russian avant-garde served
the cause they thought opened the gates of artistic freedom and
universal love. Their own escape from the realm of literacy into
the realm of imagery-intended to replace the confining texts of
religion and ideology-should have warned them about the
impossibility of the task at hand. Disappointed by their own
naiveté, but incapable of acknowledging failure, some of them
wound up embracing the new civic religion of gods and holidays,
as shallow as the theology around which they were built.
What we identify in all these elements is the continuation of
structural characteristics pertinent to religion and to the
medium of its expression, i.e., literacy in a fundamentally
different context. The encompassing principles of tolerance,
equality, and freedom contradict the spirit on which religion
and literacy were based. They weaken our convictions of what is
right and efficient in view of the desired end, and of
endurance as a group. The decline of morals in a context in which
moral behavior does not affect efficiency is not due to the
decline in religiosity, but to the general perception,
justified or not, that morality and religion do not count; or
that they play no role in making people happy. The sanctity of
life gone, there is little sanctity left in forms of
celebrating it: birthdays, communions, marriage, funerals.
Between birth and death, the audience at our rites of passage
diminishes painfully. We know that death is very personal, but
communities, for pragmatic reasons, used to confront death and
its consequences, many related to inheritance, not relegate it
to specialists in the various aspects of dying. Death is reduced
to a biological event leading only to biochemical
decomposition: No fun, no direct practical significance for
others, except in the inheritance process, a market event for
funeral parlors and pushy clergy.
Appropriation of life events in the civilization of illiteracy
equals the structuring of small languages of post-literate
celebrations, taken over by baptism, communion, and marriage
consultants, all alienated from the religious meaning they had,
moreover from the initial pragmatic motivation. Literacy stood
as the rulebook for all these direct, integrated,
sequentialized, deterministic occurrences. The illiterate
celebrates the randomness and the relative and makes everything
a festival of randomness-crime, deadly disease, a riot, a
bargain, a love affair.
Religion and church tried to instill permanency. Baptism was the
initiation rite that opened the cycle. Confirmation entailed
acceptance in the community. Marriage, once and forever,
introduced a sense of unity and continuity. The last rites freed
one from life for an afterlife in which the deceased still
watched over the living faithful. Today, each of these moments
is associated with a civil ritual: birth is recorded in the town
or city hall. The child must have a social security number by the
age of two. At age five, children must enter school. Children no
longer join the community as responsible members at the age of
12 or 14 years, but they are given rights that they sometimes
cannot handle. Marriage and the establishment of family come much
later than in earlier pragmatic contexts. Extracted from the
religious context, family life is a strange mixture of
biological convenience and contractual obligations. Death, always
the focus of religion, is defined in terms of its effects on
efficiency. The fine distinction between clinical death and
total death only shows how priests, the final witnesses to the
end of a life, are replaced by the technologists who keep the
heart beating under the alibi of "sanctity of life." Life ends
as it begins, as an entry in the record books, for tax purposes.
Japanese parents-to-be might still consult an ekisha (a sort of
fortune teller) in order to choose the proper name for a newborn
infant, already thinking about the marriage (names should fit in
order to ensure harmony); others will have difficulty in
understanding the similarity between choosing a name and the
observance of agricultural cycles, as both were religiously
encoded in minute rules centuries ago. These people will even
cringe at the discourse in a monastery where the priest might
indulge in the discussion of the unity between inner order (of
the individual) and outer order. The fact that mandala, traded
all over the world, once represented that order escapes their
personal experience.
Religions distinguished between nature and cosmos. Whether
explicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, the
source of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach,
should not be interfered with. The experience of
extraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. In
today's integrated world, resources and environmental concerns
also contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent to
our activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth,
oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. Neither is the
distinction between what is feasible and what is desirable. The
Ten Commandments tell us what we should not do, while the devil
called desire whispers into our ears that nothing is forbidden
unless we really do not care for it. The relation between the
wholeness of the being and its parts is subject to maintenance,
just as the automobile is. Once gods were described as jealous
and intolerant. Now they are presented as accommodating a world
of diversified experiences and heterogeneous forms of worship,
including Satanism. Our pragmatic context is one of generalized
pluralism, embodied in the many choices we pursue in the
practical experience of self-constitution. When the pragmatics of
self-constitution can be based on rationality, the churches of
the civilization of illiteracy are houses of secular religion.