Post-Materialist Religion: Pagan Identities and Value Change in Modern Europe 9781472509925, 9781472594594, 9781472514776

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedicaion
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Introduction
Entity models of the decline and change of religion
Critique of the entity model
Moral intuition and universals in human values
A new focus – vernacular religion and the non-entity model
Towards a post-materialist religion
The socio-cultural contexts of this study
Contemporary Paganism
2 Pragmatism and the study of religions
Pragmatic turns
The struggle for knowledge and good-enough objectivity
Pragmatism in the study of religions
Research objective and the methods used
Measuring post-materialist values
Fieldwork procedures
3 Religious identity and values
Data from the European Social Survey
Validating the theoretical value model
Covariates
Results
A religion that is relevant for the young generations
4 Modes of interpersonal relations
Testing the Individualism–Collectivism model
Exploring subgroups within the samples
Linking the modes of interpersonal relations to values
Heterogeneous and egalitarian context breeds tolerance
5 Pagans out of the woodwork
The character of the quasi-object
The changing narrative of the world
Finding a form for Paganism; an exercise in cat-herding
Paganism is work, with the goal of personal growth
6 Restyling religion: From templates to trellises
Complexity
Two habits of religion
A revised model of religious change
7 Conclusion
Security, tradition, conformity – and bigotry?
Self-expression: Selfish egoism or universalistic individualism?
Concluding remarks
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Post-Materialist Religion

Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies James Cox, Craig Martin and Steven Sutcliffe This ground-breaking series presents innovative research in theory and method in the study of religion, paying special attention to disciplinary formation in Religious Studies. Volumes published under its auspices demonstrate new approaches to the way religious traditions are presented and analysed. Each study will demonstrate its theoretical insights by applying them to particular empirical case studies in order to foster integration of data and theory in the historical and cultural study of ‘religion’. Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen Becoming Buddhist, Glenys Eddy Community and Worldview among Paraiyars of South India, Anderson H. M. Jeremiah Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations, Gregory Shushan Contemporary Western Ethnography and the Definition of Religion, Martin D. Stringer Cultural Blending in Korean Death Rites, Chang-Won Park Globalization of Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer, Christopher D. L. Johnson Innateness of Myth, Ritske Rensma Levinas, Messianism and Parody, Terence Holden New Paradigm of Spirituality and Religion, Mary Catherine Burgess Redefining Shamanisms, David Gordon Wilson Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging, Arkotong Longkumer Religion and the Discourse on Modernity, Paul-François Tremlett Religion as a Conversation Starter, Ina Merdjanova Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana, by Abamfo Ofori Atiemo Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology, Julian Droogan Spirit Possession and Trance, Patrice Brodeur Spiritual Tourism, Alex Norman Theology and Religious Studies in Higher Education, edited by D. L. Bird and Simon G. Smith

Post-Materialist Religion Pagan Identities and Value Change in Modern Europe Mika T. Lassander

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Mika T. Lassander 2014 Mika T. Lassander has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-47250-992-5 PB: 978-1-47427-622-1 ePDF: 978-1-47251-477-6 ePub: 978-1-47251-185-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lassander, Mika. Post-materialist religion : pagan identities and value change in modern Europe / Mika T. Lassander. pages cm ISBN 978-1-4725-0992-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-1185-0 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4725-1477-6 (epdf) 1. Europe–Religion–21st century. 2. Secularism–Europe. 3. Neopaganism–Europe. 4. Nature–Religious aspects. I. Title. BL695.L37 2014 200.94'09051–dc23 2014009005 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

For Amos

Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements Preface 1 Introduction Entity models of the decline and change of religion Critique of the entity model Moral intuition and universals in human values A new focus – vernacular religion and the non-entity model Towards a post-materialist religion The socio-cultural contexts of this study Contemporary Paganism

ix x xi xii 1 9 16 19 24 31 34 36

2 Pragmatism and the study of religions Pragmatic turns The struggle for knowledge and good-enough objectivity Pragmatism in the study of religions Research objective and the methods used Measuring post-materialist values Fieldwork procedures

41

3 Religious identity and values Data from the European Social Survey Validating the theoretical value model Covariates Results A religion that is relevant for the young generations

77

4 Modes of interpersonal relations Testing the Individualism–Collectivism model

45 47 52 57 58 74

77 83 87 89 97 101 103

viii Contents

Exploring subgroups within the samples Linking the modes of interpersonal relations to values Heterogeneous and egalitarian context breeds tolerance

108

5 Pagans out of the woodwork The character of the quasi-object The changing narrative of the world Finding a form for Paganism; an exercise in cat-herding Paganism is work, with the goal of personal growth

121

6 Restyling religion: From templates to trellises Complexity Two habits of religion A revised model of religious change

149

7 Conclusion Security, tradition, conformity – and bigotry? Self-expression: Selfish egoism or universalistic individualism? Concluding remarks

163

Notes References Index

171

115 119

122 128 137 144

150 153 156

163 166 168

177 197

List of Illustrations Figure 2.1. Post-materialist values per birth cohort in Finland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Figure 2.2. The relative positions of the ten value types in Schwartz’s value model. Figure 2.3. Security values for birth cohorts in pooled ESS round 1 to 6 data from Finland, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Figure 3.1. Value structure for the ESS sample with the twenty-one value items and the ten value types. Figure 3.2. Value structure for the Pagan sample with the twenty-one value items and the ten value types. Figure 3.3. Values per country. Figure 3.4. Values per cohort. Figure 3.5. Values per religious group. Figure 3.6. Benevolence and Universalism values for the groups. Figure 3.7. Self-direction and Stimulation values for the groups. Figure 3.8. Hedonism and Achievement values for the groups. Figure 3.9. Power and Security values for the groups. Figure 3.10. Tradition and Conformity values for the groups. Figure 3.11. Relative positions of group cohorts based on the twenty-one value items. Figure 4.1. Dimensionality of the scales for the Pagan and the Open University student samples. Figure 4.2. Post-materialism indicators for the clusters.

60 64 66 86 86 90 91 91 92 93 94 94 95 97 108 118

List of Tables Table 2.1. The ten value types of Schwartz’s value model Table 2.2. The horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism Table 2.3. The Pagan sample Table 2.4. The Pagan paths represented in the sample Table 2.5. Comparing the Pagan and the Open University student samples Table 3.1. The European Social Survey sample Table 3.2. Groups based on self-identification Table 3.3. Estimated mean scores for value types per group and birth cohort Table 4.1. Component inter-correlations Table 4.2. Statistics for the component-based scales Table 4.3. Mean scale scores for the Open University student and Pagan clusters Table 4.4. Rotated standardised discriminant function coefficients Table 4.5. Centroids of clusters on the discriminant functions Table 4.6. Correlation between modes of interpersonal relations and value types Table 4.7. Mean scores on the higher-order values of the Open University student and Pagan clusters

63 69 71 72 74 82 84 96 106 107 110 112 113 116 117

Acknowledgements Researching and writing this book was really fun, eventually. There have been many people pushing me forward and helping me to bridge the rough patches: Michael York convinced me that this topic is sane-enough to warrant investigation. Graham Harvey and Marion Bowman apparently took Michael’s word for it and trusted me even when I spoke in tabulated numbers rather than words. The Open University proved to be an institution that is fluent in interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box thinking and where pragmatism and rootedness in real life gives you a solid grounding. I needed that and am grateful to the powers that be for making and keeping it such. I thank David Voas, David Wulff, Paul-Francois Tremlett, Helen Waterhouse, John Richardson and all the others who gave me advice and critical comments for the various incarnations of this book. I received support from different institutions in various stages of this project. I thank The Finnish Cultural Foundation, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, The Emil Aaltonen Foundation, The Donner Institute and the Jack Shand Foundation of the Society for Scientific Study of Religions. Finally, and most of all, I want to thank Maarit, my love, my beautiful and brilliant wife, for unfaltering support when I was falling and for filling even the rainy days with joy. Amos, my son, born three weeks before I signed the publishing contract, you kept it real for me. This is for you.

Preface ‘If you believe,’ he shouted to them, ‘clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.’ Many clapped. Some didn’t. A few beasts hissed (Barrie [1911] 2004, p. 167). In J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911) Peter explained to Wendy that there are not enough fairies in the world these days. There should be one for each boy and a girl, but because children now know so much they no longer believe in them. He continues, ‘every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead’ (p. 43). In Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods (1992) the once-great god Om was worried: if a god has no believers, it dies. Barrie and Pratchett – two giants of British existential philosophy – invite us to worlds where people must be careful about what they believe in because by not believing in the proper thing that thing could die. But, in the world we live in – or the one we imagine being real – can we really choose what we believe in? At what point of the accumulation of knowledge do we stop believing in the proper things and start believing in the wrong things? Perhaps somewhere between fairies and quantum physics? Maybe the question of right and wrong beliefs is pointless, for the world we imagine to be real comes with all the things we really believe in. Yet, it seems, the study of religions, particularly that of theological persuasion, seems most concerned about the wax and wane of certain beliefs. I think that the study of religions is actually about the nature of our relationship with the things we believe in. Further, I think that people have, and always have had, different kinds of relations with the various things they believe in. With some we are subservient, some we feel – tacit and embodied – within ourselves, and some we want to know and master. I do not mean this as a hierarchy or as the stages of development with the new supplanting the

Preface

xiii

previous, but as the repertoire of transactional roles we all come to possess.1 Many things influence which role we tend to assume, but I do not think free will is one of the major ones among them. Rather, the distinction I am focusing on in this book is based on the influence of individuals’ needs on the image they have of the world they live in and on the roles they envisage upon themselves. My goal is not the definition or description of ‘religion’, ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, ‘secular’ or other such concept, other than as different attitudes to the world. Rather, I look for links between these different self-identifications and people’s values. The different labels are used as self-descriptions for various reasons and these choices and reasons are, I argue, linked to the individual’s basic values, in other words, the priorities that motivate people’s action (Schwartz 1992, 2006; Schwartz et al. 2012). People give practical meanings to these labels by associating with them and, I suggest, we can get some indication of these meanings through their emphasis on different types of values. This follows the pragmatic view that ‘[t]he essence of belief is the establishment of habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise’ (Peirce 1972, p. 144). From this it follows that these labels can have a range of different meanings and, also, that different labels can have, for all practical purposes, the same meaning. Religion is a particularly unfortunate term. Upon each use by scholars in the Study of Religions the term calls for a working definition, or at least scare-quotes. One way or another we squeeze it through a relativizing process whereby we indicate that we are aware that it is not a simple label on a solid and immutable object, admitting that, no matter what strategies we employ in order to fix the concept, each use of the term is bound by language, context and subjectivity. This begs to question the usefulness of such a concept. Yet the term moves in ordinary everyday use with the assured gravitas of a cosmopolitan actor, assuming roles that are salient within any particular script. This propensity of ‘religion’ to become object-like was commented on and critiqued by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in The Meaning and End of Religion, published in 1962. He argues that the concept ‘religion’ in the West has evolved through a reification process; it has become ‘a thing’ in people’s minds. Religion has gradually become conceived of as ‘an objective systematic entity’. Further, integral in this development is the rise into

xiv Preface

Western consciousness in relatively recent times of several so conceived entities, constituting a series: the religions of the world (W. C. Smith 1991, p. 51). This inherited ‘world religions’ approach has led scholars to view religion as an objective category with certain essential qualities and boundaries, and upon which different external and internal forces then impose influence. The problems start with the questions about the definition of the concept, or, the essence and the boundaries. Tackling these problems has led to the proliferation of essentialist, functionalist, and family resemblance strategies (Harrison 2006). James Beckford (2003) doubts the usefulness of approaching religion as if it were an object that has some generic qualities that need to be discovered in order to define the concept.2 Rather, Beckford argues, focus should be on ‘the various situations in which religious meaning or significance is constructed, attributed, or challenged’ (p. 16). Timothy Fitzgerald (2000) goes further by arguing that there is no uncontested meaning for the concept ‘religion’ because there are no genuine phenomena that are identifiable as religious and clearly distinct from the non-religious. Rather, the particularisation of some phenomena as religious is the result of the Western ideological process that, for various reasons, imposed a categorical division between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’, even though such sharp distinction does not exist in the world (pp. 4–8). There may be ideological reasons for holding on to essentialist definitions of religion, but, as G. Scott Davis formulates it ‘[t]heologians may do battle over the essence of one religion or another, but there is no reason for students of religion to imitate them’ (Davis 2012, p. 119). Graham Harvey (2013) argues that focusing our attention on the lives of real people would ease the passing of the idea that religions are phenomena discrete from all the other things people do (pp. 23–41). But in order to do this we also need to demolish the boundaries we have created around the categories we employ as tools of trade (p. 116, passim). The trail laid out by these critics of the entity model of religion – who come from various schools of the study of religions – is the trail I follow, with the help of Bruno Latour’s autopsy of what he calls the modern constitution of societies (1993; 2005). In We have never been modern (1993) Latour argues that the narrative of modernity conveys two dichotomies that define our image of self in relation to rest of the world. The first dichotomy is the division

Preface

xv

of the world into two distinct realms: the domain of non-human nature and the domain of human culture and society. The second dichotomy is between this modern world of the clearly partitioned and purified domains and the premodern world that constantly confused the two domains, treating their culture and society as continuous with nature and indivisibly entangled with it. Modernity, therefore, according to Latour, means the effort of purification: constantly trying to escape the obscure mingling of social needs with facts of nature into a state where there is a clear distinction between what belongs to nature and what comes from humans (pp. 35–48). However, modernity is not and has never been pure, Latour argues, but instead proliferates mixtures of nature and culture – hybrid things that occupy the ‘Middle Kingdom’ (pp. 55–79). The work of purification has only made these hybrids invisible to us. The modern constitution with its propensity for purification therefore neglects the entanglements of human and nonhuman things3 and, also, the way humans and nonhuman things are equally involved as mediators in the production of these distinctions. This point is important for the methodology we use, particularly for the justifications we give for employing a particular methodology. When we insist that something can only be properly understood by studying either social constructs or natural causes we miss the point that this modern conceptual division is itself an artefact of the process of purification. Even though, if we agree with Latour’s autopsy report, the Great divide and the modern constitution in its purified form is just a figment rather than a reflection of reality, it has played a significant role in the history of the world, not least in the Study of Religions. The purification of the modern constitution and the modern–premodern dichotomy are well illustrated by the distinctions we make, such as indigenous or tribal religion versus the World Religions and superstition versus religious belief. While Animism, for example, represents the premodern that confuses, the domain of nature and the domain of humans the World Religions are fit for the domain of humans, society and culture in the modern constitution. They are important chapters in the particular heritage and tradition, but they also industrialise superstition and standardise beliefs. They deploy sophisticated systems of symbols and other devices that through centuries and millennia of use instil meaning to the tradition, but also try to contain it. And, further, they can become institutions

xvi Preface

with social and cultural functions that, in practice, are independent of the degree to which people subscribe to the beliefs the particular World Religion upholds. Signs of people starting to recognise that maybe we are not so modern after all are emerging in the field of Religious Studies. ‘Spiritual’ has emerged in the last couple of decades as a descriptor for another fuzzy category that is positioned in contrast with both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. More recently terms such as vernacular or lived religion – as a contrast to institutional religion and as an argument against simple secularisation models – has started to appear in the titles of books, articles, and conference panels (Primiano 1995; McGuire 2008; Bowman 2003; Lassander 2012; Bowman and Valk 2012). Graham Harvey goes further in Food, Sex, and Strangers (2013), suggesting that the entire enterprise of studying religion(s) as something separate and distinguishable from the everyday life of people is flawed to begin with. Rooted as it is in the ideas and ideals of a (Protestant) Christian worldview it throws around phrases such as ‘belief system’ or ‘meaning making’ as supposedly analytical categories and as things we should look for instead of other things, such as cooking, growing sweet potatoes or building a house (pp. 44–58). In order to see better these other possible places where we could find things of religious importance it helps to go somewhere that is completely different from here and start from scratch. Harvey goes to this ‘elsewhere’ to look for advice as to what on earth we talk about when we are talking about religion, or, rather, what we should be talking about instead of talking about religion as imagined by European Christian scholars who have been, and, arguably, still are, primarily theologians and other religionists (pp. 3–18). The complexity of this situation – a situation that is slowly dawning on us – is why I turn to Latour and Actor–Network Theory (e.g., Latour 2005; 2010), promoting the language used in Actor–Network Theory studies for the exploration of complex socially situated things (Lassander 2012; Lassander and Ingman 2012). I do not think the assemblies of heterogeneous things the categories ‘religion’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘secular’ are purported to refer to exist in real life as distinct entities. The boundaries, whether they are drawn by content, function, or family resemblance, are arbitrary snapshots of space and time from a specific perspective. Nevertheless, even if we, the scholars

Preface

xvii

who study such things, are (or should be) paralysed by the realisation that our central concepts may be too ambiguous for use – that our toolkit may be broken – for people themselves such self-classifications as Christian, Pagan, No-Religion, Spiritual or Atheist can provide meaningful and emotionally and cognitively important associations and handles for life. Instead of studying how being religious or secular influences one’s values, I look at it the other way round: how long-term changes in people’s priorities shape their outlook and worldview and how this shaping may influence people’s self-identification. What kinds of values appear to promote, for example, identifying oneself – today – as a highly religious Christian, as non-religious or as a Pagan? *** At the beginning of the 1970s Ronald Inglehart published his study on intergenerational value change in post-industrial societies (1971; 1977). He argued that improving socio-economic context appears to trigger a fundamental change in people’s values – or a ‘silent revolution’ – and that this change can be observed throughout the world. Inglehart (1971) called the emerging value pattern post-materialist, not because it is non-materialist or anti-materialist, but because it emerges only after the material needs are satisfied. Therefore the process of change came to be known as the Post-Materialist Value Change (Inglehart 1995, 1997). The argument is based on two observations: ‘(1) people value most highly those things that are relatively scarce; but (2) to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s pre-adult years’ (Inglehart and Appel 1989, p. 46). Therefore the value change is intergenerational. In other words, it occurs with a delay of about one generation after the socio-economic conditions have improved. Inglehart and David Appel (1989) argued that because the change is characterised by the decreasing emphasis on security and increasing emphasis on self-expression, this has implications for traditional religious orientation. An increasing sense of security brings a diminishing need for predictable and unifying norms and rules and increases the tolerance of diversity. Further, as the need for these norms diminish, the symbols and worldview of the traditional religions become less persuasive and compelling. This, according

xviii Preface

to Inglehart and Appel, brings to the foreground the ‘cognitive mismatch between the traditional normative system and the world which most people know from first hand experience’ (p. 48). They observe that ‘[t]he apparent decline of traditional religious and social norms tends to be linked with the shift from materialist to postmaterialist values’ (p. 68). They argue that these changes appear linked because they share a common cause: the improved level of personal security through economic growth and the rise of the welfare state (p. 68). Based on their study, Inglehart and Appel also note that despite their detachment from traditional religion, people with post-materialist values are significantly more likely than people with materialist values to spend time thinking about the meaning and purpose of life, further suggesting that ‘Postmaterialists may have more potential interest in religion than Materialists’ (p. 74). This suggests that the linkage between the rise of post-materialist values and the decline of religion in general is conditional, not inherent, and they conclude that [a] religious message based on economic and physical insecurity finds little resonance among Postmaterialists – but one that conveyed a sense of meaning and purpose in contemporary society might fill a need that is becoming increasingly widespread. […] If a decline of religion is taking place, it is not necessarily built into the conditions of advanced industrial society: the established religions may be losing a growing and potentially mobilizable constituency, by default. (p. 74)

Inglehart revisited the topic of post-materialist value change and religious orientation with Pippa Norris in Sacred and secular: religion and politics worldwide (2004, 2nd edn 2011). In their study Norris and Inglehart present their ‘thesis of secularization based on existential security’, citing more evidence in support of the thesis in the second edition of the book, published in 2011, seven years after the original. They observe that, ‘with rising levels of existential security, the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientation during at least the past fifty years’ (Norris and Inglehart 2011, p. 240). However, they continue, because of different rates of population growth between post-industrial and developing countries the overall religiosity of the world is growing. Immigration of people from developing countries to Europe and North America, and the democratisation processes that have brought representation and presence for

Preface

xix

many minorities have made the role of religion increasingly salient on the global agenda. Nevertheless, Norris and Inglehart argue, this does not signal the return of traditional religions in post-materialist societies. The apparent increase in the visibility of conservative religious groups in post-materialist societies is not an indication of the growth of these groups. Rather, the eversmaller fundamentalist groups within these societies have been scared into action because they feel that their basic values are being threatened, thus creating the illusion of increased popularity of conservative religiosity (pp. 240–1). What is troubling in Norris’s and Inglehart’s work is not the bleak future they paint for traditional kinds of religiosity – or, the inherited models of expression and practice – in post-materialist cultures; the evidence for that from their and other studies is strong. What is troubling is that in their argument secular is presented as an integral part of the modern constitution and religion in its assumed solid entirety is cast in the pre-modern past. The future they portray is one where secular is purely secular, clearly distinct from the similarly purely religious, which is something one needs to – and supposedly can – grow out of. I challenge this great divide by proceeding from Inglehart and Appel’s conclusion: exploring the Middle Kingdom in search of those kinds of hybrid creatures that find resonance among people in postmaterialist societies. This book is about one particular new religious movement that represents what I call post-materialist religion; one that works with self-expression values and cherishes all kinds of hybrids. From the early 1950s onwards, when – incidentally – the Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts were repealed in the UK,4 groups who practised reimagined traditional British Witchcraft started to emerge. I say incidentally because, even though the change in legislation was crucial in enabling these groups to operate publicly and advertise in the UK, the processes that led to these changes in legislation ran parallel with the emergence of movements such as Theosophy and several occult and esoteric movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In other words, the Paganism of the second half of the twentieth century had roots deep in the movements of the previous century (Hutton 1999, pp. 151–70) and changes in the legislative ethos were already at play in the late nineteenth century, themselves rooted in the Enlightenment and the ensuing ‘reformation of the

xx Preface

popular mind’ as Owen Davies calls it (Davies 1999, pp. 44–78). However, the timing of this legal reform was perfect, and maybe not coincidental after all – if the thesis of post-materialist value change holds. Paganism started to gain the attention of a wider audience slowly from the 1970s onwards during which time, according to Inglehart and Christian Welzel (2005), post-materialist values started to slowly gain the upper hand over materialist in post-industrial societies (pp. 100–7). Over the decades leading to the turn of the twenty-first century the Pagan movement(s) took off and landed in the USA, multiplied, and returned to Europe. What became known as contemporary Paganism, modern Paganism, or as just Paganism was the perfect thing for a growing number of people who were not motivated to try to conform with the norms of a traditional religious community, but felt something missing. They were open to new ideas that would allow them to express and explore their own mind. From the global perspective, having the UK as the point of origin helped in two ways in the distribution of this new religious movement around the world. Firstly, the close relationship between the UK and the US made crossing the Atlantic easy and the transition-culture activities that were already taking place in the US in the late 1950s provided an interested audience and channels to contact people across the continent from New England to California. Secondly, the sheer number of potential readers for English language publications, even on this fringe topic, eventually attracted the eye of the publishing houses, making the narratives of various Pagan worldviews accessible to the general audience. This snowballing effect brought Wicca and eventually other Pagan paths to popular culture. From the 1990s the number of published titles on Paganism started to grow rapidly and with the launching of the first Internet bookshops later that decade, these books also became available internationally. What is significant in this is that English language literature had a growing readership in many countries where English is not the native language. This enabled the idea of Paganism to jump cultural boundaries, even without local translations, and this has further led to the still ongoing emergence of Paganisms based on local pre-Christian traditions. Today Paganism is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of religious identities from around the world. With the example of contemporary Paganism I offer one possible

Preface

xxi

explanation for the variance and change we have observed in the landscape of worldviews and outlooks in post-industrial societies. This explanation is grounded on the thesis of post-materialist value change. It is a needs-based model that gives primacy to values rather than to worldviews or outlooks. By this I mean that people’s values bring content to different religious and secular worldviews, rather than the other way round, and that value change prompts religious change if and when the old religions are unable to accommodate and legitimise people’s changing value priorities.

1

Introduction

In the grand narratives of late nineteenth and early twentieth century sociology values were something that were to a large extent predetermined for the individual. Either broad political and economic forces were seen as the base that determines individuals’ social being, including their outlook and interests (Marx 1867; Calhoun 2002, p. 34) or people’s values were thought to emerge through cultural interpretations of social circumstances, such as religious explanations of good and ill fortune (Weber 1905). Regardless of what was seen as the principal determining factor, differences and variations in this factor were thought to cause predictable and consistent differences in people’s values. Émile Durkheim’s view of social values was a departure from the economical or cultural determinism of Karl Marx and Max Weber. According to Durkheim, common values develop in the interactions between individuals. These shared values hold society together, becoming what Durkheim called society’s collective conscience, defining the limitations and the building blocks of interactions between individuals who share the same collective reality ([1893] 1997, pp. 38–41). Through the interactions, the collective conscience is organised and reified into abstractions, such as religion and other normative institutions ([1912] 2001, pp. 310–11). Durkheim observed that ‘rituals are ways of acting that are generated only within assembled groups and are meant to stimulate and sustain or recreate certain mental states in these groups’ (ibid., p. 11). In his model, religion does not provide or determine social values; instead it represents and maintains them (ibid., pp. 154–9). While Durkheim’s thesis was mainly concerned with simple and

2

Post-Materialist Religion

homogeneous societies, his view was that all societies need some form of ritualised or symbolic reaffirming of collective sentiments and feeling of unity (ibid., pp. 160–2). Hence, in many of the sociological or social–psychological accounts where religion plays a role, the marriage of religion and values seems obvious and uncontroversial: a relationship of bidirectional influences. Religion is a diffusion of shared social values (e.g., Roberto Cipriani 2001) and religions influence values through influencing the choices people make in their criteria for moral judgements (e.g., Schwartz and Huismans 1995). These views portray religion as a conservative force in society, and that portrait is framed by the premise of a relative homogeneity of that society. The reality of that assumption, however, has crumbled a long time ago. In the last couple of centuries interactions between societies have increased, and the locus of power has shifted from religious and traditional authorities to authorities built on political or economical power. Particularly during the last half of the twentieth century, escalating globalisation and trivialisation of global communication has challenged the idea of culturally homogeneous nation states. Religions are no longer repositories of societies’ shared values (if they ever were in the first place), because societies are increasingly composed of individuals with disparate cultural backgrounds and religious views, and a growing number of people also have transcultural networks of connections. In increasingly multicultural and multi-religious societies a subconscious and shared reference point weakens. Differentiation of people’s conditions of existence leads to plurality of value positions, which no single religion can easily represent (Beyer 1994, Ch. 3; Bruce 2002, Ch. 8). On the other hand, in societies where there is one major institutional religion, changes in social values can lead to increasing differences between the values promoted by that religion and the values held by people. This contrast between values of the lived reality and those of an ideal reality can subsequently lead to diminishing relevance of the religion. Religious authorities, organisations and institutions can react to these situations by diluting or updating the dogma in order to accommodate this plurality or the changing values. For example, John Shelby Spong, a former American Episcopalian bishop, calls for the rethinking of Christian dogma to accommodate modern realities of life and opposes a literal interpretation of the Bible (Spong 2005). Or, these actors can turn to

Introduction

3

fundamentalism in order to protect the traditions and values they see as sacred (Beyer 1994, pp. 111–224). Either way, religions, or the principal actors in religious organisations, are reacting to changes in the social context. By doing this they acknowledge that religion has moved away from the Durkheimian ideal of being a taken-for-granted and instinctive part of collective being and communication. Religion has turned into something that needs to be defined, demarcated and recognised (J. Z. Smith 2004, Ch. 8); it is something that is separate from the collective consciousness, or the collective consciousness has moved away from it. Whether religion fades into the background or is romanticised as something traditional that our grandparents did, is re-invented as a multitude of religious movements, turned into a war banner, or is reacted against in the growing and more vocal atheist movement, the role of religion has changed. In a society in which pluralism and tolerance are seen as cultural values, religion as a means for legitimating norms and behaviour can be accepted in principle and to some extent in practice, but in reality it is highly problematic. For example, in the UK in February 2008 the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK ‘seems unavoidable’, saying that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system, and that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help to maintain social cohesion. This position was quickly opposed by lawyers and politicians from all sides, by other religious authorities, and by the general public in discussion forums. The main opposing argument was not targeted against Islam, but against the need for, and the appropriateness of, a separate religiously legitimised law for a particular part of the population. It was argued that British law already acknowledges the rights of religious minorities and the law should be the same for everybody. This was also generally the view of Islamic leaders. It appears that in post-industrial societies religion can be referred to as part of cultural history and in some cases as a description of society. For example, ‘Finland is a Lutheran country’ can be understood as referring to its cultural history as well as to the fact that about 70 per cent of its population are members of the Lutheran Church, but it is becoming difficult to interpret that as referring to widely accepted Lutheran dogma (Sundback 1988; Kääriäinen et al. 2005, pp. 161–5). To describe Britain as a Christian country, or to

4

Post-Materialist Religion

claim that British values are essentially Christian values, would be even more problematic, and as a way to enhance national identity and feelings of belonging it could be considered inappropriate and dangerous (Rogers and Muir 2007, pp. 22–3, 43). According to Zygmunt Bauman, late-modern societies are in the middle of a difficult process of having to come to terms with the thought of the ‘deregulation of human conduct’ (Bauman 1993, pp. 33–4). After centuries of believing that human passions and spontaneous inclinations can have no good end, the thought of not having the support of depersonalised rules, aided by coercive powers, can be frightening (Bauman 1994, pp. 3–4). Bauman, however, is optimistic about the future. He says that ‘[w]hat we are learning, and learning the hard way, is that it is the personal morality that makes ethical negotiation and consensus possible, not the other way round’ (Bauman 1993, p. 34). Far from being determined by culture, economic base or religion, in Bauman’s conceptualisation of postmodern ethics values emerge as a complex and fluid pattern, contingent on a number of economic, cultural, contextual and psychological variables. Individuals’ values are more flexible and dynamic than is appreciated by the classical models of society and religion. In this book I explore how the value priorities of people with different positions on religion – or, more broadly, different attitudes to the world – vary from generation to generation. I ask how and to what extent these positions are connected to individuals’ values and whether religious change and the emergence of new religions are associated with a broader change in people’s priorities. I suggest an explication of the relation of religion and values in which new religions are seen as indicators of an emergent value pattern and a consequent change in the nature of the relationship people have with the world. I follow Milton Rokeach’s understanding of values as ‘multifaceted standards that guide conduct in a variety of ways’ (1973, p. 13). He continues, [t]hey lead us to take particular positions on social issues, and predispose us to favour one particular political or religious ideology over another. They are standards employed to guide presentations of the self to others, and to evaluate and judge, to heap praise and fix blame on ourselves and others. (ibid.)

The broader rationale behind this book is the need to rethink the nature of ‘religion’ as a topic of academic investigation in societies where secular

Introduction

5

appears to be the norm and religious is the exception, but where, at the same time, there is no shortage of options for an individual to find meaning and engage with various traditions, philosophies, ideologies and practices. Bauman sees values as a means for justifying and orienting actions towards desirable goals. He argues that values change as individuals’ circumstances, goals and needs change, and through ageing and interactions with other people (Bauman and May 2001, p. 64). According to Bauman, differences in socio-economic situations translate into differences in individuals’ needs and therefore into differences in what they see as having highest value. He adopts Abraham Maslow’s (1954) idea of a hierarchy of needs – that there is a fundamental distinction between the need for physiological sustenance and safety and the non-physiological needs such as those for esteem, self-expression and aesthetic satisfaction. Both types of needs are equally real, but the basic physiological needs must be fulfilled before the non-physiological needs will be seen as important. When the basic needs are satisfied the subjective feeling of existential security increases and needs further up in the hierarchy emerge as desirable goals for the individual. In other words, this is a change in priorities. Bauman maintains, however, that this fluidity of values does not necessarily lead to egoism and the dissolution of morality. Individuals are competent in making moral judgements by themselves, without the aid of an external code or authority (Arendt 1958; Bauman 1993, pp. 21–36; 1994). I see the links between individuals’ needs and values – and the justifications people have for these – as fundamental in the process that leads to changes in people’s worldview. These links involve cognitive as well as social processes, and for this reason one needs to acknowledge psychological as well as sociological theory and research. The social–contextual model proposed by Inglehart (1971; 1977; 1997) is an important step in this direction. Inglehart’s studies have found a connection between countries’ economic growth, welfare and social stability and changes in the value priorities of the population. He found two kinds of value patterns, found in different ratios in different countries, depending on the socio-economic realities of the country. The first type prioritises the satisfaction of the basic material needs, and the second type –  the post-materialist – emerges only after these needs are satisfied, emphasizing the more abstract needs in the Maslow model. Inglehart agrees with Bauman in that values are not simply determined by culture or

6

Post-Materialist Religion

economic conditions, nor are they received from authorities, religious or otherwise. They emerge from individuals’ rationalisations of their needs, shaped by the realities of their existence. This suggests that changes in value priorities and social and economic changes go together in a coherent and predictable pattern, where people adopt those values that fit their existential conditions (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 37–8). Furthermore, as the needs of the majority of populations change, these changes influence the mainstream of values, and the cultural norms of the society are transformed. Inglehart and Christian Welzel’s study (2005) points to a generational lag in the effects of any socio-economic change on society’s prevailing values. The generational lag is where Inglehart’s findings depart from Bauman’s model. Whereas Bauman sees values as fluid, changing as a response to changes in one’s immediate situation, Inglehart and others argue that values are grounded in the pre-adult early socialisation, and that social norms, beliefs and attitudes change relatively little after they have been internalised during childhood and adolescence (Norris and Inglehart 2004, pp. 76–8; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 100–2). Their argument is grounded on a large international longitudinal dataset collected since the 1970s. Alasdair Crockett and David Voas (2006) found a similar cohort effect in people’s religiosity. Together these studies suggest that the norms we follow and the values that motivate us reflect the prevailing values of our childhood, mediated by our unique experiences. Concrete childhood experiences are linked to the current realities of life at a particular time, and as these realities change, through social and economic development, following generations grow up internalising different norms. If the changes are slow, differences in values from one generation to the other are small, but with rapid changes generational differences can be significant (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 94–9). The intergenerational value-change model is supported by a large volume of research by Inglehart and others, with empirical evidence from all cultural regions (e.g., Inglehart 1997; Norris and Inglehart 2004; Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Taniguchi 2006). These show that societies with high levels of economic development have high levels of post-materialist values, and that societies with high rates of economic growth have relatively large differences between the values of younger and older generations. Furthermore, since the early 1970s, when the first of Inglehart’s major value surveys was published,

Introduction

7

post-materialist values have increased at almost exactly the rate predicted by the intergenerational population replacement model (Inglehart 1997, p. 103). The post-war generation was the first where post-materialists outnumbered materialists, and as the younger generations replace the older ones, there is a period of transition where both value priorities are found in equal numbers (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 99–102). The theory of post-materialist value change is a needs-based model and it refers to psychological theories on the structure of human needs and values. These suggest a common human faculty that can cope with changes in individuals’ realities of existence and enable people to adapt their values and understanding of morality accordingly. Individuals’ own concrete experiences when they are growing up have a defining impact on their value priorities; values are not simply internalised as they are taught at home, in school or by religious authorities. In other words, while the three major socialising agencies – family, school and peer groups – contribute to the process whereby a child grows up to be a part of the society, it is not just a matter of these agents instilling their values in the child. The consistency of the child’s own first-hand experiences with what these socialising agents are projecting is a significant factor in what values he or she actually adopts (Rokeach 1973; Harris 1995; Pinker 2002, pp. 395–9; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 98–9). This view allows more autonomous agency for the child, but also draws attention to the significance of the environment in which he or she grows. To summarise: the theory of post-materialist value change links the gradual changes in people’s priorities to sustained and long-term changes in the socioeconomic context they live in. The change in priorities is characterised by a shift from values that emphasise security to values that emphasise individual self-expression. The immediate cause for this shift is an increasing feeling of existential security among the population of these countries. The factors that contribute to this are, for example, an improving standard of living, equality and human rights as well as the stability of the state and the proximate regions. The value change has been observed in all the countries that have experienced similar socio-economic progress with supporting empirical evidence from international value studies from the early 1970s onwards. In religious studies the proliferation of new religious movements has been observed coinciding with this value shift. My starting point is the assumption

8

Post-Materialist Religion

that security as a primary need may be associated with some types of worldview or outlook, while other needs call for other types of outlook. With increased emphasis on self-expression rather than security, these new types are dramatically different in character from the old ones; not necessarily in belief and narrative content, but in the operationalisation of this content. Because of these different priorities, the ‘religions’ of post-materialist cultures are fundamentally different creatures from those of materialist cultures; they live and evolve with contradicting instincts. If the instinct is to find security from collectivity, the religious content and organising structure are tuned to producing a homogenising framework. This appears as a stable, safe and reliable haven for people with ostensibly shared norms and codes of conduct. If, on the other hand, the need for security is no longer the primary motive this ‘normalising’ of religious content is no longer called for, and attempts to that end may face strong opposition. This instinct produces, in effect, a heterogenising framework. The premise of my argument is in two parts. First, I postulate that individuals’ basic values are evaluated – legitimised or disapproved – within the dominant legitimating framework. If the individual’s basic values are disapproved within this framework, these values that would otherwise be largely unconscious become overt. This disapproval, in effect, imposes a set of beliefs and opinions that do not fit with the beliefs and opinions that are more directly connected with the individual’s needs. This can lead to a state akin to cognitive dissonance; an emotional alienation from the inherited framework and a motive for these people to look for alternative frameworks that are more attitude-relevant and consonant with their own views (Holbrook et al. 2005; Fischer et al. 2008). The devices built over generations for nurturing the inherited framework find no purchase with the alienated people. Second, when the social interactions no longer transmit the importance of conformity, and the available conventions and resources become more heterogeneous, the process of changing the character of the common framework begins. This happens individual by individual and sooner or later, unless realised, the demands for change are mobilised in social movements. The ‘Silent Revolution’ – as Inglehart (1971; 1977) calls it – of the post-materialist value change works gradually. In the case of our field of study, facing unyielding opposition from institutionalised religions

Introduction

9

motivates the individual to seek alternatives that would be in consonance with their own motives and values. Consequently, the old framework either loses its relevance and withers or it is reinterpreted, if such reinterpretation is allowed. The options for traditional religious institutions appear to be: change or wither away. In other words, I posit that individuals’ needs are linked to their socioeconomic context and that their value priorities are a function of their needs. In a society, as an aggregate of individuals, a general value change from materialist to post-materialist values is an important process where the agility of the reified religious traditions is tested. If these are unable to adapt they become irrelevant for people and decline. However, I emphasise that this is a matter of relevance rather than that of plausibility as was suggested by Peter Berger in his secularisation model (Berger 1967, pp. 150–3). The loss of relevance is not based on cognitive rationalisation and therefore does not, in the case of religious frameworks of legitimation, necessarily imply secularisation. My argument goes against some of the established models of religious change and I will discuss these further in the next subsections.

Entity models of the decline and change of religion The convention in the study of religions and sociology to take religion as an entity may often be done for the sake of convenience, but sometimes also because people really think it is an entity in itself. This is reflected in the theories that have been offered as descriptions and explanations for the observed variance and change in the location or use of this entity in Western societies. In the following, before offering a non-entity model of religion, I briefly outline some of the most famous of these theories under the rubrics of secularisation, the marketplace model and metamorphosis.

Secularisation Classical secularisation theory posits that the rise of a rational worldview and the modernisation of societies are the main causal forces behind the decline of the social significance of religion and of religious beliefs and practices.

10

Post-Materialist Religion

Embedded in the Enlightenment vision of modern societies and in the scientific critique of religion the theory expects that modernity comes with a secular–rational worldview that undermines the foundations of belief in the supernatural. This erodes habitual religious practices and beliefs, leading to a decline in the role of religious institutions and of religion as the provider of an overarching regulatory code for the society. These processes are predicted to result in an overall linear decline in the demand for religion (Beckford 2003, pp. 43–50; Dobbelaere 2002). For Max Weber (1905), rationalisation did not mean the culmination of the Enlightenment ideal of liberating positivistic science. In Weber’s view of modernisation, societies become progressively ‘disenchanted’ and religion loses its role in public life. Webers ‘disenchantment’ was rephrased in the mid-1960s by Bryan R. Wilson as ‘secularization’, referring to diminution of the social significance of religion (Wilson 1966, p. 14). Secularisation of consciousness results when individuals are increasingly able to gain psychological independence from religion. He saw this as unavoidable even though some ‘non-religious constraints [still] operate to hold men to religious institutions or to persuade them to go through the motions of religious rituals’ (Wilson 1982, p. 150). According to Wilson, the driving force behind secularisation, in addition to rationalisation, was societalisation. Like Weber, Wilson also saw secularisation as a process where small close-knit communities are replaced by modern urban societies, states run by impersonal bureaucracies, and large industrial and commercial enterprises. This also entails ‘a shift in the location of decision making in human groups from elites claiming special access to supernatural ordinances to elites legitimating their authority by reference to other bases of power’ (Wilson 1985, p. 12). At the time Wilson published his Religion in Secular Society (1966), Peter L. Berger, an American sociologist, published The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion (1967), the second half of which examines secularisation. The core of his theory was that the emerging religious and cultural diversity of modern societies causes secularisation because it undermines the formerly strong plausibility structures of religious monopolies. According to Berger, social confirmation sustains plausibility. In a pluralistic world people are in constant contact with different forms of belief systems and ways of life, and no one way of living receives strong confirmation (Berger

Introduction

11

1967, pp. 150–3; 1979, pp. 17–19). The reason for this, according to Berger, is that the religious content of the plausibility structures in a pluralistic situation is deprived of its taken-for-granted, objective reality in consciousness, and their reality becomes a ‘private’ affair of individuals, that is, loses the quality of selfevident intersubjective plausibility – thus one ‘cannot really talk’ about religion any more. And their ‘reality’, insofar as it is still maintained by the individual, is apprehended as being rooted within the consciousness of the individual rather than in any facilities of the external world – religion no longer refers to the cosmos or to history, but to individual Existence or psychology. (Berger 1967, p. 152)

First, religion becomes a private affair of the individual, related to individual psychology rather than to a cosmic reality, and religion is seen as being located within the individual’s consciousness or personal experience, and next, because of this, one cannot talk about religion anymore – it has lost its self-evident intersubjective plausibility (see also Berger 1979, pp. 17–18). In Berger’s model this ‘talking about’ in everyday conversation is what reinforces shared beliefs, and when the shared plausibility of all religious communication is reduced, day-to-day interaction must become increasingly religiously neutral, and in losing the regular reinforcement of religious glossing-over of daily routines, the plausibility of religion is weakened (Bruce 2001, pp. 88–9). The plausibility explanation Berger offers may seem tempting at first sight, but it is based on the assumption that the twentieth-century West is somehow exceptional in its religious pluralism (Beckford 2003, pp. 97–102). Also, the rise of a rational worldview and the modernisation of societies did not lead to the complete disappearance of religion and the supernatural from people’s minds. Religion still persists and people seem capable in negotiating their beliefs with what to the naked eye looks like secular–rational ideology. Even though religion loses its role as provider of ultimate values and legitimacy for the entire society, it can find new roles or places as a supplier of meaning and identity for individuals and support for resolving problems emerging from, for example, rapid social changes or dislocation (Beckford 2003, pp. 45–6).

12

Post-Materialist Religion

The marketplace model An alternative explanatory model for secularisation also focuses on the diversity of religious landscapes. The marketplace or rational choice theory is based on the idea that a lack of competition makes religious organisations complacent and non-responsive to individuals’ various and changing needs, eventually resulting in a decline of membership and belief. The religious market model has been used to explain the contrast between secular Europe and religious USA. According to it, free competition, the realisation of consumer society, and the commodification of goods and ideas that is intrinsic in modernisation improve the performance of all actors operating in the same market. As long as religious organisations are free to compete without imposed monopolies or subsidies, vitality of religion follows the pattern of basic social exchanges. Within these social exchanges, people attempt to gain rewards and avoid costs. In this transaction, religion acts as a powerful compensator for human suffering with a promise of postponed rewards (Bainbridge 1997; Stark and Finke 2000). This model assumes that, because there is always human suffering that cannot be satisfactorily or more economically addressed by other means, there is a constant need for religious compensators, and ‘when these compensators are in short supply, new forms of religion emerge that can meet the demand by offering the rewards necessary’ (Fox 2005, p. 298). Variations in religious adherence and devotion on a national level are therefore attributed to differences in the supply of religious services rather than different levels of demand (Finke 1997). However, the empirical basis of the model has been challenged. Mark Chaves and Philip S. Gorski (2001) found no support for the proposition that religious pluralism increases religious participation and David Voas, Daniel Olson and Alasdair Crockett (2002) found little correlation between pluralism and religious participation. Voas, Olson and Crockett also concluded that the findings that indicate otherwise are based upon an expected, non-causal covariance arising from an error inherent in the formula used to calculate the correlation. Furthermore, there are theoretical problems with the model. Some of the cause–effect arguments rely on assumed shared schemas or cultural models.

Introduction

13

For example, the idea that religious involvement can be seen as a result of market functions assumes that there is willingness and a psychological capability to regard religion as a ‘consumable’, and as a matter of individual choice in the sense of comparing products and then selecting the one that best suits oneself. This may well be the unique product of historical and political events, and of the particular structure of the society in the USA where state intervention in religious affairs is minimal. The premise of universally shared schemas has been strongly criticised by studies in cognitive anthropology (Holland and Quinn 1987; D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Finally, the rational choice model operates within a narrow and exclusively instrumental concept of rationality. As Beckford points out, individuals do not necessarily have the desire or the opportunity to make use of their capacity to calculate an efficient relation between means and ends, and human beings do not always optimise their individual utility, but pursue, instead, collective goods or altruistic ends (Beckford 2003, pp. 169–70). Rationality or irrationality is not the issue; emotions play a more significant role than rationalist models grant it. While for some people religion may be the most efficient and emotionally fulfilling choice to deal with some issues, it is apparent that secular alternatives are increasingly gaining ground.

Metamorphosis The two theories outlined above illustrate the division between Europe and the US in the field of the Study of Religions. Even though the crux of the dispute appears to be about the current status of the same object of study, it may in fact be about the nature of the object of study itself (Beckford 2003, pp. 68–9): what position religion occupies in the minds and lives of people living on the different sides of the Atlantic. Rather than the status of religion in societies, religious change models focus on transformations of the nature of religion. Beckford talks of a ‘metamorphosis’ of religion. The claim is that religion is not disappearing, but instead it is changing form, and this change is making it invisible to traditional sociological tools and measurement instruments. For example, Thomas Luckmann (1967; 1990) argues that new religious movements and unchurched religiosity are ‘little transcendencies’ outside the confines or control of religious organisations.

14

Post-Materialist Religion

From Luckmann’s position secularisation is actually just an erosion of the traditional organisational forms of religion. Religion survives as invisible or implicit religion, and takes new forms, as the ‘little transcendencies’ become institutionalised (Luckmann 1990). David Martin (1969; 1978) also sees these non-traditional and non-institutionalised forms of religiosity as important evidence against the secularisation of societies. He criticised Wilson’s secularisation thesis because it was dependent on a particular definition of religion, it postulated a ‘Golden Age’ of religion that was actually idealised after eleventhto thirteenth-century Catholicism, but other than that has never really existed, and, further, because ‘contemporary society remains deeply imbued with every type of superstition and metaphysic’ (Martin 1969, p. 113). He sees secularisation as a contingent and possibly reversible product of particular historical forces, not as a universal and unilinear process tied irrevocably to modernisation (Martin 1978). Callum G. Brown (1992) also argues that the social significance of religion is relatively independent from modernisation. Although it can be sensitive to fundamental social and economic changes, it can also adapt to these new socio-economic contexts (Brown 1992, pp. 55–6). Steve Bruce and Voas (2007) argue that as a result of social and cultural changes people’s attitudes towards religion have changed. Ideologies of equality and pluralism have introduced the necessity for increased tolerance of deviance from the religious norm. Lack of commitment to dominant religions and suspicion towards overtly religious behaviour have undermined the social acceptability of traditional religious institutions. This has led to a situation where ‘sects and cults are no longer regarded as especially deviant, while churches and denominations are not necessarily respected’ (ibid., p. 14). Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1998; 2000) sees religion as a chain of memory that used to have a powerful influence over culture at a collective level, but that has fallen victim to the phenomenon of discontinuity of tradition that is typical in modern societies. Accordingly, the former virtually obligatory mode of believing, belonging and practising has lost its grip on the majority of the population. Individuals are then left exposed to the necessity to make their own sense of their lives and of the rapidly changing world in which they live. What is observed as secularisation is, then, a result of a crisis of collective ideals. According to Hervieu-Léger,

Introduction

15

[r]eligion is in decline because social change wears down the collective ability to set up ideals, the crises of ideals loosen social bonds. However, what emerges from this twofold movement is not the end but the metamorphosis of religion. (Hervieu-Léger 2000, p. 25) Religion is no longer transferred as a complete package to younger generations. Instead it changes into something different, goes through a metamorphosis in which various combinations of its different aspects – communal, ethical, cultural, and emotional – are established as individuals voluntarily adopt a new kind of religious identity. (Hervieu-Léger 1998; Hervieu-Léger 2000, pp. 149–62)

Another scenario for such metamorphosis is presented in the ‘Spiritual revolution’ model by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead (2005). They argue that a shift in modern culture identified by Charles Taylor (1991) as a subjective turn is causing a shift also in the mode of religious belonging: from people being adherents to people being clients. Normatively this means a change from living according to the values set by some external authority to living with one’s inner experience as the ultimate authority and with the quest of becoming the person one truly is (Heelas and Woodhead 2005, pp. 2–4). In this scenario, Spiritual revolution means the downfall of conventional religion. People are increasingly more often clients of one of the plethora of spiritualities, rather than adherents of a traditional congregational religion. The position of authority makes the critical distinction between ‘life-as’ religion and ‘subjective-life’ spirituality. In their terms, religion ‘involves subordinating subjective life to the “higher” authority of transcendent meaning, goodness and truth’ and spirituality ‘invokes the sacred in the cultivation of unique subjective-life’ (p. 5). Like Luckmann’s little transcendencies the spiritual revolution is a turn from public to private, or, rather, change in the location of authority from external source to internal. However, Matthew Wood (2007) argues, the position of authority is not simply transferred to the individuals themselves. Rather, external authorities are still recognised, but the authority is relativised to the extent that it is unable to shape spiritual or religious behaviour in a formative manner (pp. 155–63). Like the secularisation and the marketplace models, though, the metamorphosis model also starts with the assumption that there is a religionshaped slice in the cake of the society or the culture that people spoon in, concluding that people now prefer various kinds of cupcakes.

16

Post-Materialist Religion

Critique of the entity model The entity models are descriptions of spatial and temporal changes in a model religion, built and then studied with particular ideas about the nature of the thing the model represents and about the place it occupies in people’s minds. All of the above theories – secularisation, religious marketplace and metamorphosis – may well all be correct at the same time, but, I suggest, the causes they highlight – modernisation, rationalisation, plausibility and diversity, innate need for compensators and poor/healthy competition, and subjective turn and disconnect from tradition – are secondary and already translations of something else: a common factor or factors that is the basic postulate for these secondary causes. This unifying factor, or the basic postulate, is the individualisation of the modern West. The theories of change I summarised above are variations in the theme of individuals realising, and being allowed to realise, the philosophical, ethical and metaphysical issues that are relevant to them—topics that previously have been bundled in the narratives, routines and institutions of traditional religions. Scholars working in other fields have reached similar conclusions. Steven Lukes (1973) saw individualism as a particularly European ideological construct, aiming to promote freedom and equality. Anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred L. Strodtbeck (1961) posited three alternative ways in which societies can solve the ‘problem’ of how individuals should relate to others: hierarchically (which they called ‘Lineal’), as equals (‘Collateral’), or according to the individual’s merit. The cultural-differences principle of the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck model has also been influential in cross-cultural psychology, where, for example, Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991) related major cultural differences to whether the individual is generally viewed as independent or interdependent. Harry Triandis (1995) classified these two cultural types as individualistic and collectivistic. Social psychologist Richard Nisbett (2003) contrasts the ancient Greeks’ abstract logic, which has influenced European cultures with the holistic thinking of Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist traditions. He reworks the independence–interdependence dichotomy into more analytical terms, seeing the Western emphasis

Introduction

17

on individual identity and agency contrasted with the Asian emphasis on group orientation and harmony. From these studies it appears that there are two major types of cultures: those that cultivate an independent view of the self, emphasising separateness, ego, internal attributes, uniqueness and competition between individuals, and those that hold an interdependent image of self, stressing connectedness, social context, co-operation, responsibilities and relationships (Markus and Kitayama 1991). The independent or individualistic view of personhood is frequently seen as an exceptional case, attributed variously to abstract logic (Nisbett 2003), the rise of Protestantism (Weber 1905; Dumont 1986, pp. 23–59), Cartesian philosophy (Elias 1939), the ideological and political developments following the ideals of the Enlightenment (Hume 1740; Rousseau 1762; Paine 1791), division of labour (Durkheim 1893), or changes in economic systems (Smith 1776; Marx 1867). These differences have also been seen as stages in a linear and evolutionary process (towards individualism), with every new stage making the previous obsolete or primitive (Polanyi 1944; Mauss 1925). However, individualism and collectivism also appear to be persistent and relatively slowly changing cultural traits, preserved in spite of socio-economic changes (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Triandis 1995, pp. 1–15; Greenfield 2000; Hofstede and Hofstede 2005, pp. 74–5; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 144–5). This means that cultural variation survives relatively fast socio-economic changes, and that the overall value change is a path-dependent parallel change rather than a process of ‘Westernisation’, where all societies and cultures converge at one point (Brewer and Chen 2007; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, pp. 48–76, 133–4). Rather than viewing individualism as a uniquely Western and culturally bound phenomenon, or the destination of a one-way street, collectivism and individualism have also been linked with certain historical preconditions, such as the society’s primary means of livelihood, availability of resources and the presence of external threats. Differences in these preconditions, it is argued, dictate the options available for individuals and institutions, and influence the way the society is organised. Some conditions of existence and types of social organisation make collectivism more favourable, while others favour individualism (Cody and Diamond 1979; Triandis 1995, pp. 81–105; Diamond 1997, Ch. 14).

18

Post-Materialist Religion

Rather than giving way to convergent values – to homogeneous individualism – cultural differences influence how changes from pre-industrial to industrial and then to post-industrial society are realised (see the case studies in Oliver James 2007). As such, they offer different repertoires for individuals to turn rationalisations of their needs and realities of existence into motivational values. This compounds to plurality when with the increasing heterogeneity of cultural influences on individuals growing up in contemporary societies these different repertoires contribute to variation within these societies in how socio-economic change affects individuals’ value priorities. Further, as Matthew Wood’s study and my own fieldwork suggest, and Michel Maffesoli (1996) and Kevin Hetherington (1998) discuss at length, individualism is not necessarily the antithesis of collectivism; rather, new kinds of collectivity emerge along with individualisation (see also Allik and Realo 2004). This has also been evident in cross-cultural studies on individualism and collectivism – on an individual level these are not diametrically opposite constructs (Oyserman et al. 2002; Voronov and Singer 2002; Li and Aksoy 2007). The basic postulate of the entity models of religious change may be too simplistic. This is the first problem I find in the entity models of religious change. Even while individuals’ repertoires vary and produce heterogeneity the shared human condition maintains some level of similarity (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1989; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Inglehart’s cross-cultural study suggests a fundamental universal structure in the manner humans operate in secure and insecure conditions. Shalom Schwartz and others (Schwartz 1992; 2006; Schwartz and Bardi 2001; Schwartz et al. 2012) suggest a more nuanced structure of human values, and I will return to Schwartz’s model later as an empirical method to explore the post-materialist value change. Nevertheless, these models should not be seen as reducing humans to the role of drones, following predestined patterns of behaviour. Rather, as fractals, these models could be seen as curves and patterns produced by near-infinite complexity of the human desires and needs, and the contexts and constraints people have to cope with. One example of such complexity is judging what is right and what is wrong and further, I posit that the processes involved in moral judgement and reasoning are linked to the same mental processes that underlie the transformations in people’s values and worldviews. Exploration of these processes reveals the second problem of the entity models of religion.

Introduction

19

Moral intuition and universals in human values The theories of moral development by Jean Piaget ([1932] 1965), Lawrence Kohlberg (1981; 1984) and others suggests that moral reasoning emerges from our own thinking about the moral problems we come across in social interactions. Observing this in the moral reasoning of children, Piaget argued that morality is not a matter of culturally specific rules learned from parents or other authorities – rather than parental or teacher influence, social experiences are the main force in moral development. This has been found in empirical studies since Piaget’s work (see Moshman 2005). Les B. Whitbeck and Viktor Geckas (1988), for example, found that attributions of values between parents and children were more strongly correlated than were actual values. In other words, children understand what kind of values their parents try to socialise them with, but the values that actually motivate their actions are different. Morality develops through an internally directed cognitive process, where an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the inherent logic of social relations is constructed. According to Piaget, the norms for morality come from the norms of co-operation that are learned through interaction with one’s peers (Moshman 2005, pp. 52–4; Nunner-Winkler 2007). The conditions that motivate these interactions also influence how these norms are realised in life. In an experimental study by Marco Cipriani, Paola Giuliano and Olivier Jeanne (2007) a public goods game was used to determine how the values of parents and their children correlate. The game was about how many of their personal tokens individuals were willing to contribute as public goods for the group to which they belonged. They were randomly divided into groups and they did not know to which groups they belonged. The study found no correlation between parents’ and children’s behaviour, and concluded that family does not appear to be the primary locus of value formation. However, they found that children from larger families tended to contribute less. These studies indicate that value formation is primarily the result of environmental factors, such as experience of scarcity because of competition for resources with a large number of siblings. These experiences promote moral development by stimulating our mental processes and motivating us to figure out more comprehensive positions for moral judgement.

20

Post-Materialist Religion

Kohlberg formulated a rationalist theory of three distinct modes for making moral judgement: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Pre-conventional morality is simple compliance with rules to avoid punishment and gain rewards. Conventional morality involves the integration of social values, norms and the conventions of the social relations with which the child is growing up. Therefore it has a strong emphasis on tradition and conformity to rules that are defined by others’ approval or by society’s norms. The development of post-conventional morality represents another broadening of horizons, when the conventions of one’s own society or religion are seen in relation to other alternative norms, value systems and conventions. At this stage moral reasoning is based upon the individual’s own principles and conscience. Social systems are viewed as results of contracts that aim to benefit all. Rather than viewing moral issues from the perspective of a social system, the system is evaluated with regard to this aim to benefit all (Eckensberger 1994; Miller and Bersoff 1995). The need to be able to make and maintain connections with other individuals has been suggested as the principal adaptive value of morality. Richard Joyce suggests that ‘the human mind bears the traces of a past in which reciprocity played a big role’ (Joyce 2006, p. 141). These traces can be seen as structures that have evolved to uphold different systems of co-operation. The systems develop in stages that follow the development of social perspective-taking, through an increasing ability to grasp complex situational relations (Gibbs et al. 2007). Games theory research on adaptive strategies of co-operation supports this idea. Humans appear to have certain innate dispositions that uphold the systems implicit in the first two stages of Kohlberg’s sequence (Krebs 2000). These strategies evolve to serve real-life functions and solve real-life problems, such as survival, resource accumulation, reproduction and the care of offspring (Krebs 1998, 2000). For example, in human and other primate groups the maintenance of a ‘good reputation’ is essential for individuals. It increases their ‘fit’ in the group, and therefore their chances for survival and procreation. Social practices such as gossip and grooming have been shown to be important in discouraging anti-social behaviour, promoting indirect reciprocity and improving group cohesion (Alexander 1987; Goodman and Ben-Ze’ev 1994; Krebs and Hesteren 1994; Dunbar 1996).

Introduction

21

However, it appears that in real life people do not derive all their moral judgements from the norms and schemas of the stage the individual has reached. Instead, moral reasoning is structurally flexible. Dennis Krebs and others (Krebs et al. 1991; Krebs 2000; Krebs and Denton 2005) argue that different types of moral rationalisation are used in different situations, suggesting that rather than a linear path of development, morality is more an open-ended learning process, fuelled by individuals’ experiences and social interactions. Previous levels are not transformed and displaced by new structures; instead people acquire an increasingly broad range of strategies – or richer vocabulary – to make moral judgements. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others (Haidt 2001; Haidt and Joseph 2004; Haidt and Björklund 2008) have criticised Kohlberg’s model – and rationalist models of morality in general – for paying too little attention to human emotions. Their moral intuition approach is a shift in emphasis. Whereas in the rationalist approach moral judgement is seen as a process of reasoning based on innate or socially constructed moral knowledge, intuitionists say it is a matter of ‘quick intuitions, gut feelings, and moral emotions’ (Haidt and Björklund 2008, p. 186). They argue for a model that separates moral intuition from what they see as post-hoc moral rationalisation. Therefore they make a clear distinction between moral judgement and moral justification. The premise of the social intuition model is that the basis of moral norms and motives is in a small set of intuitions, or instincts, that have evolved in the human mind, which then enable and structure the development of motivational values and ideals. Moral judgement is this quick and unconscious intuition that triggers a slow and conscious process of moral reasoning.1 Haidt and others have identified five topics that appear to be universal as concerns for moral intuition (Haidt and Joseph 2004; Haidt and Björklund 2008). Three of these are strongly evident across cultures: (1) harm/care – a sensitivity to or dislike of signs of pain and suffering in others, particularly in the young and vulnerable; (2) fairness/reciprocity – a set of emotional responses related to playing tit-for-tat, such as negative responses to those who fail to repay favours; and (3) authority/respect – a set of concerns about navigating status hierarchies, for example, anger towards those who fail to display proper signs of deference and respect. They suggest that these three

22

Post-Materialist Religion

issues are good candidates for being what Haidt and Fredrik Björklund call the ‘“taste buds” of the moral domain’ (Haidt and Björklund 2008, p. 203). The two slightly weaker candidates are: (4) concerns about purity/sanctity, which are related to the emotion of disgust – giving rise to the many norms and taboos concerning food, sex, menstruation and the handling of corpses; and (5) concerns about boundaries between in-group and out-group, in other words, the norms concerning the handling of strangers (ibid.). These five topics are where, according to Haidt and Craig Joseph (2004), human moral intuition usually triggers an emotional reaction, such as compassion, anger, respect, resentment or disgust. The post-hoc moral reasoning is about finding justifications for such an emotional reaction and about finding support for one’s unconscious attractions or repulsions (Haidt and Björklund 2008, p. 181). Therefore, moral discussion, traditionally a mandate of religious authorities and institutions, is a kind of distributed reasoning that has a direct link to the individual’s unconscious valuations as something it justifies – it is the prevailing discursive framework that legitimates some kinds of rationalisations while suppressing others. The legitimating framework is the important part to focus on in the case of social value change, and particularly when it comes to the relevance or irrelevance of such frameworks. The nature of the framework, or how binding it is for the individual and how agile it is to adapt is, I suggest, intimately connected to the types of social interaction that characterise this moral discussion in that particular community. Developmental psychologist David Moshman and others argue that the degree to which children and adolescents have experienced symmetric and asymmetric social interaction translates into differences in how their morality develops (Moshman 1995; Moshman and Geil 1998; Walker et al. 2000; Moshman 2005, pp. 70–5). Asymmetric social interactions involve individuals who differ in knowledge and power; in other words, authorities who transmit cultural and personal norms and values to others. The one with lower status may learn what the one with higher status teaches, but without much impact on the rationalisations of either. These can be seen as conductive to conventional morality, but they discourage the activation of private reflection process, and therefore impede the development of the post-conventional morality. On the other hand, symmetric social interactions involve people who are, and see themselves as,

Introduction

23

comparable in knowledge, authority and power. No individual can impose his or her perspective on the other, and none is inclined simply to accept the other’s perspective as intrinsically superior to his or her own. With more asymmetric interactions, more culture-specific or traditional values are transmitted. Symmetric social interactions are more likely to encourage individuals to reflect on their own perspectives and to co-ordinate multiple viewpoints, enabling the development of post-conventional morality (Moshman 2005, pp. 45–6). Even if people share the same moral intuition, we all have our own vernacular for moral justification and rationalisation – and the grammar of the vernacular comes from the style of moral justification and rationalisation that is conveyed and developed through social interactions. This two-layered composition of intuition/rationalisation is also found in our instinct to locate ourselves in the world and in the justification we give for believing we are there – or, to use Heidegger’s concept, our rationalisation of Dasein (Heidegger 1927). The struggle to locate ourselves in the world is the universal human condition and the solutions we find betray the nature of the grammar of justification we have learned growing up. It would, in my opinion, be wrong to call this intuition religious intuition or spiritual intuition because these are concepts that can describe the style of justifying Dasein, but not the underlying intuition or instinct, which may be better called, for example, the self-orientation instinct – there is no Homo Religiosus, only Homo Sapiens. Similarly to Kohlberg’s structural model of morality – which takes the moral justification as morality itself – the entity model of religion mistakes institutions and organisational flow-charts for the thing itself, with the core beliefs, texts, deities, founders and places depicted in the idealised constellation. The institutions in the entity model are thought to control the flux and flow of the matter – such as ideas, narratives, symbols, totems and fetishes – that circulates and is available to people for the creation and maintenance of the assembly of things that, when people are questioned, pertain to what they associate with religion or being religious. These assemblies are called into being through social custom; they are not reflections of an individual’s interiority. They reflect the rationalisations people have for their self-orientation instinct, but are not the rationalisations. To turn this back into the linguistic metaphor, they provide a vocabulary for these rationalisations, but they are not irreplaceable, static or necessarily the most significant features of the

24

Post-Materialist Religion

individual’s vernacular for justifying Dasein. Forgetting or ignoring this is the second problem of the entity models of religious change. If study of religions means the study of this vernacular then we have to include more than just the vocabulary. We have to follow all the interactions through which the grammar for this vernacular is conveyed and developed. ‘Religion’, then, is not distinct from everyday life, but, as Harvey argues, ‘[r] eligion is etiquette in the real world’ (2013, p. 2, passim). It evolved in a relational and material world and, Harvey continues, as a heuristic concept it should be seen as diffuse, like gender, age and ethnicity, ‘either as something that informs everything people do, or is available as a resource for when difference or similarity, intimacy or strangeness, seem to require emphasis’ (pp. 208–9). The treatment of religion as an entity is an artefact of the process of (and obsession for) inferring universal meanings from particular instances of meaning attribution. Scholars like Harvey, who recognise this, are just a small minority among those who, for methodological or ideological reasons, employ ‘Religion’ or some example thereof ‘to nail down a true representation of static complexes’ (Harvey 2013, p. 208). I would like to replace this methodological hammer with pragmatic methodology and the fieldwork strategy suggested by the Actor–Network Theory. My intention is to demonstrate the prospects these approaches can reveal for the study of religions. In the following chapter I suggest that even if we are denied the possibility of finding unmediated truth or means for objectivity and universal validity we can reach good-enough objectivity that is still much better than absolute relativism. But before that I introduce the central themes I will be entertaining throughout the remainder of this book.

A new focus – vernacular religion and the non-entity model The new focus I am trying to achieve follows the footsteps of scholars like Graham Harvey (2006; 2013), Leonard Primiano (1995), Marion Bowman (2003), Ülo Valk (Bowman and Valk 2012) and Meredith McGuire (2008) who, among others, observe ‘religion’ in the wild, in its natural habitat. In studying vernacular religion or religion as everyday life they climb down to the grassroots

Introduction

25

and keep their gaze horizontal, seeing a ‘Flatland’2 rather than a hierarchy of levels, or Venn diagrams of spheres. We are still stuck with ‘religion’, ‘secular’ and other such concepts for the lack of alternatives, but artificially creating a new language seems like the ultimate modernist fallacy, evidenced by the fact that I am not writing this in Esperanto. That said, recognising that these concepts float around, but that they are analytically rather useless, I would like to push those concepts off the centre of our inquiry and rather see them as tags some people use to conveniently access a heterogeneous and fluidly variable collection of things they see as somehow related. Further, people tag things differently: the principle of tagging that is the epitome of logic for someone can be alien garble to another. For this reason Beckford’s use of the phrase ‘dialogue of the deaf ’ (2003, p. 68) seems appropriate. What to focus on, then and how? What Harvey, for example, tags as ‘religion’ is not necessarily or primarily, and most certainly not only, about beliefs (2013, p. 120). Rather, he argues, it is about the intercourse people have with their surroundings, including, as life entails, consuming some of those who are integral parts of your surroundings and the really hard but vital procedures of trying to figure out and deal with strangers. ‘Religion’ is the everyday practices that sort these things out for us. These practices and the beliefs that may emerge to justify them, are, then, collaborative efforts of an assembly of human and non-human participants, and ‘religion’ is a product of the personal creativity taking place in the contexts of individuals’ daily lives. The concept of vernacular religion (Primiano 1995) refers to these continuous processes of acquisition and formation of beliefs and other habits through conscious and unconscious negotiations of and between human and non-human actants – those who play any active role in the negotiations. To study this vernacular one has to pay attention to variance and change in that process, or in the observable manifestations it has, and offer tentative theories as to the factors that may be linked to the variation and change. This refocus privileges doing and acting over beliefs (McGuire 2008, pp. 12–16; Harvey 2013, pp. 205–8). In other words, religion is not something interior to a person, it is relational activity and ‘[b]elief, respect, and purity are […] not interior attitudes, but expressive acts. They are not expressions of soul, mind, spirit or some other postulated interiority. They are actions or performances. They are deeds that contribute to living life. Religion is something people do’ (Harvey 2013, p. 206).

26

Post-Materialist Religion

Religion according to Actor–Network Theory In his argument for reassembling the object of social scientific study, Bruno Latour (2005) suggests that there is no sui generis community that can be seen as the essential provider of structure or context for action. There are only interactions and associations between human and non-human actants (Latour 2005, pp. 173–90). Latour insists that it is not enough to just zoom to a different level of analysis. It is necessary to consciously abandon the assumption of pre-existing constructs or hierarchies of levels, such as culture, community, society or ‘social context’, that often come with sociological accounts. Latour and other proponents of the Actor–Network Theory criticise the habit they see in much of sociology where ‘the social’ is taken as a domain, separate from other domains such as psychology, economics, biology and politics. ‘The social’ is then used to illuminate that which cannot or, by some accounts, should not be understood, interpreted, explained or accounted for by the other domains (Latour 2005, pp. 3–4). In the study of religions, ‘the religious’ is seen as such a special domain requiring a specialist language and ‘religion’ as an entity that is immersed in a ‘social context’, bound by ‘social limitations’, influenced by ‘social factors’ or possessing ‘a social dimension’ that accounts for some residual phenomena, but that is wholly inexplicable but by the language of the special domain. In Latour’s view, sociology of the social can provide useful shorthand to designate the things that have already been established as ingredients of the collective realm – such as, culture, social capital, socialisation and peer pressure – but it cannot provide explanations or accurate descriptions (Latour 2005, p. 11). I extend this to the case of religion. The religious study of religions has provided us with shorthand for what has been established, but the shorthand fails when the established prove to be less than stable. Rather than thinking of domains or fields, or containers, Latour suggests studying the principles of connection between the assortment of human and non-human things that go into the making and maintaining of whatever we are studying. We should look into the motives and means these things hold in order to make these connections durable (Latour 2005, pp. 231–41). What we are looking at, then, is not a domain or a context at all; rather, it is an

Introduction

27

interacting collection of stabilised bundles that are made of interconnected but discrete things. The things are not put into a social frame or seen as subject to social forces: there is nothing behind or above the bundles. The social, therefore, is a product of the constituent things enmeshed in the bundle and the means by which they are connected. In other words, the ‘social’ is not an explanation, rather, it is the thing that needs to be explained (Latour 2005, pp. 8–9). The ‘actor’ in an actor-network is not seen as the source of action. Rather, it is a feature which is ‘made to act’ by many others; a heterogeneous array of things connected to it and engaging it in some way. The ‘actor’ therefore is a relational effect of these connected things (Latour 2005, pp. 47–50). Nor is subjectivity an inherent trait of humans. The world is not made of passive object entities, perceived by subjective observers that are separate from the entities. Sidestepping the subject–object distinction, Actor–Network Theory sees subjectivity as a property of the gathering of things, and it grants objects the potential of being active agents by affecting and stabilising interactions in these gatherings (Latour 2005, pp. 217–18). The actor is not a free agent, nor is it a singular point at the mercy of numberless influences from numberless things. Instead, the actor could be imagined as a star-shaped whole – an actornetwork – that is entwined with other such actor-networks and the complexity of this interviewing grants the actor subjectivity and relative freedom (Latour 2005, pp. 175–83). To summarise: the ‘network’ in the actor-network is not a stand-in for the sociological concept of structure. It is not an abstract entity, or existing on a different level, as in macro versus micro. It is the exploration of a thing and its relationships rather than an explanation of or for the thing. The term network refers to something very concrete and very local: the various constituent people and objects, the connections between them and the locations where choices and translations are being made. The Actor–Network Theory is a way to conceptualise complex processes in a way that avoids the nature–culture or objective–subjective division. In that way it avoids suggesting objective reality for some things while not for others, and agency for some things while not others. To view something as an actor-network is therefore a processoriented view, focusing on translation as the process in which actors construct common meanings and definitions, and co-opt each other in the pursuit of individual and collective goals. In this process the identities of the actors are

28

Post-Materialist Religion

defined and redefined according to prevailing strategies of interaction (Wolf and Fukari 2007, pp. 23–4). Latour underlines that while this position rejects the idea of unattached individual freedom it does not mean that people are marionettes at the mercy of the puppeteer (or a series of puppeteers). Rather, and here Latour nods toward Gabriel Tarde, we should treat these external attachments as translators, or mediators, between the agent and yet other mediators in a chain of mediators. Taken together, the various mediators offer an opportunity for the agent to act as a mediator itself (Latour 2005, pp. 213–18). The more mediators it is attached to, the more opportunities and options it has. In other words, ‘[the] puppeteer still holds many strings in her hands, but each of her fingers is itching to move in a way the marionette indicates. The more strings the marionettes are allowed to have, the more articulated they become’ (Latour 2005, p. 216, emphasis in original). With this actor-network (the actor and a large network of attachments) as the focus of attention we can explore, for example, how ‘religion’ is created in a particular case, and how it is maintained and transformed by the combined effort of all the mediators involved. Further, the grammar of justification we have learned growing up is directly connected to the status of the individual; in Latour’s words ‘[t]he strings transport autonomy or enslavement depending on how they are held’. Emancipation, then, is not a matter of ‘“freed from bonds” but well-attached’ (Latour 2005, pp. 217–18, emphasis in original). The language of Actor–Network Theory offers tools for looking at what goes into the creation and maintenance of a ‘religion’ – the interactions that are involved in the routinisation of practices, verbalisation of spirituality, conceptualisation of the world according to the ‘religion’ and believing that some things have more meaning than others. An Actor–Network Theory approach sees these interactions as varied processes of translation through which bits and pieces of the socio-material world gather together, form relationally configured networks of persons and things and stick together long enough to be taken as an entity (Law 1992; 1994, pp. 102–5). This does not mean enumerating the particular symbols, narratives, people, places or items that are highlighted in these interactions, but the examination of the conduits through which the interactions are accomplished and figuring out how that material in the network gets highlighted. This way of looking keeps

Introduction

29

the boundaries of the object of study fuzzy and gives the constituent network the opportunity for being fluid (Latour 2005, p. 178; Lassander 2012).

Quasi-object religion An actor-network does not have to be internally coherent; what matters is that each connection between two actors is successfully and continually negotiated. When all the heterogeneous bits interact successfully and continue to do so, the actor-network becomes stable. A function of this kind of a stable actor-network is an artefact, such as religion in this case, which is by nature a quasi-object. The quasi should be read as indicating a lack of solidity, or essence, and the object as an indication of object-like internal integrity: a quasi-object resists deconstruction into pristine parts (Harman 2009, pp. 63–4). The quasi-object appears to be immutable and stabilised; it has the appearance of being a self-contained and self-evident object. The messy processes of invention, negotiation and calculation at play in its creation and continuance are rendered invisible. The important point here is that – even though it looks solid and resists dismantling – in order for the quasi-object, vernacular religion, to exist in any practical sense, the actor-network must function. First, the actants must translate (alter in a meaningful way) the flow of information in the actor-network. If an actant fails to do that and it no longer makes a difference it becomes just an intermediary; the actornetwork would function just as well without it. When an actant fails that way, the topography of the actor-network changes, and because the quasiobject religion is a function of the actor-network, it also changes. Secondly, the connections must continue to be relevant and meaningful for the actors so that they can be constantly renegotiated. Failing this, the actor-network stops functioning and no longer produces a functional quasi-object religion. In either case, a new actor-network may emerge, which might become stable and produce a different quasi-object artefact. Or, the things that made up the actor-network may become just an arbitrary collection of loose items. In other words, even though they appear to be stable, religions are not fixed. Their dynamic nature comes from the negotiations between actants, the dropping out of some actants and the inclusion of new ones. Therefore, despite

30

Post-Materialist Religion

appearances, the quasi-object religion does not have an essence that could be seen as its objective and immutable meaning, or defining feature. Instead, the meaning is generated in the negotiations between the actants; it is never fixed, and it is stable only insofar as the negotiations between the actants are successful. As long as the set of materials available to people is homogeneous or controlled by a homogenising framework, and values that emphasise security prevail, people have neither motive nor means to change the status quo. With post-materialist values people are motivated to change things and – regardless of the efforts of the former network of mediators to control the flow of new material, apart from violent oppression – people will renegotiate the language for making sense of the world. *** What I am trying to achieve with the introduction of Actor–Network Theory for the study of religions is avoiding prejudice by prior commitment to social theories, particular structure, content or extent of the aggregate, layered explanations, such as micro and macro, or pre-set coordinates for study, such as power and hierarchy or sacred and secular. To put this in other words, religion, like society, is not a specific kind of stuff – distinguishable from other stuff. Instead, what is referred to as religion is made up like everything else we set our hands and minds to. As a concept, religion, and its cognates, is a sometimes emic, sometimes etic and sometimes mutual interpretation of and label for the nature of a heterogeneous assemblage of actants – people and things. Furthermore, these assemblages are not innate, static or necessarily in a coherently justifiable constellation. They vary from individual to individual and from one localised instance to another, through a process of differential and varyingly successful negotiation and renegotiation of the connections between the actants (Oppenheim 2007; Latour 2005, p. 107). A consequence of this kind of proposition of distributed agency is that the individuals are not seen as completely unfettered agents, rather – as Leonard Primiano expressed in his treatment of religion as always vernacular – they are involved in processes of bidirectional influences of environments upon individuals and of individuals upon environments (Primiano 1995).

Introduction

31

In these processes the individual is neither independent, nor at the mercy of some abstract social forces (Vuuren and Cooren 2010). The interdependent processes of innovation and negotiation are aiming for the construction of a stable and self-sustaining actor-network, a quasi-object. The ‘mechanics’ that are used to effect closure, or how boundaries are created and how stability and order of the actor-network are effected, is a central point of interest in Actor–Network Theory research (Kaghan and Bowker 2001). Following the actors and trying to keep pace with the innovations actors have made in order to make everything fit together is the sacred quest for Actor–Network Theory research, as it is in all ethnographic endeavour. For Actor–Network Theory the ‘making everything fit’ part is important. Individuals are faced with actants that compel them to act in ways that are not necessarily congruent with each other. To make things fit together requires creativity on the part of the individual: creativity in the way people relate to complexity and conflicts that occur due to the instability in the various related networks. Further, because ‘the social’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘socialisation’ are also seen as products of other actor-networks they cannot be employed as aids to explain, describe or understand religion as is often done in our field. Instead, the researcher has to put effort into finding the best locally situated account that describes the associations that have been established (Latour 2005, pp. 7–12). With this approach religion needs not to be accounted for by some kind of force external or internal to the individual; it is merely seen as a peculiar kind of linking together of various things that are not themselves inherently parts of some kind of social or religious order or structure. Social forces, cognitive aptitude and cultural tradition certainly play important roles in these linkages, but, in order to study religion in practice, it is necessary to explore how these linkages play the important roles they have; what things are gathered together, how they are linked, what they do, and why and to what extent these stay together (Latour 2005, pp. 13–14).

Towards a post-materialist religion I argue that two major factors in the backdrop of individuals’ lives feed into the processes of change that are taking place in in regards to individuals’

32

Post-Materialist Religion

worldview in contemporary post-industrial societies. Firstly, traditional religions that have evolved to offer legitimation for social values that aim to enhance a feeling of community and existential security perform poorly in societies where the general feeling of existential security is already high and freedom of self-expression is the norm. As a conservative force an instituted traditional religion may impede the normal societal value change processes by supporting and legitimising certain kinds of value patterns, even though in reality they may contrast with the actual values and motives people have and which influence their behaviour. Depending on the severity of this contrast, and on how strongly individuals feel about their own priorities, people may be alienated from the institution that purports to embody shared values, or they may be distressed by a lack of legitimating support for their values or by overt vilification of their needs. For this reason pressure for new frameworks grows, and this pressure can vent in destructive ways, as observed in the world today. Secondly, world-spanning networks of instantaneous communication, increased freedom of travel, and a growing number workplaces or professions where the scope of operation is global generate dense networks of ties and associations between individuals. The free flow of information, ideas, labels and identities has become natural, and geographical proximity is no longer automatically the primary method for in-group classification. The typical mode of interpersonal relations is changing from a community to a network, and this challenges the traditional methods for defining what is common and shared and supplants, at least to some extent, the former sources for individuals’ identity, such as the traditional religious institutions. Unlike Norris and Inglehart and other proponents of the linear secularisation models claim, I argue that this realignment of individuals’ values and modes of interaction does not equate to a switch from religiousness to a secular worldview. Rather, it entails a change of motives and thereby motivates the founding of new frameworks to legitimise the new values with new habits of everyday life. This may result in the decline in traditional religious associations as these lose the connection to people that sustain them. In other words, their relevance as legitimating frameworks. In Europe, the large national religious institutions struggle to change their course, and

Introduction

33

spin-off sects have started to emerge at a growing rate. These spin-offs along with an increasing number of new religious and spiritual movements, as well as secular humanism, new Atheism and other ideological movements, such as the environmental movement, are taking up the role of providers of legitimation and support for one’s values. When looking from this angle the transformations that have been identified as secularisation, religious change or spiritual revolution are manifestations of slow processes of adaptation to changed realities of existence. In these processes the individual strives to maintain emotional and practical functionality and relevance of their worldview. A shift in human priorities from security to self-expression is linked to increased feelings of security; after this shift a pluralistic context can further facilitate the development of morality and values that transcend local conventions and traditions. New kinds of worldviews emerge to support and legitimise these new values and modes of interaction. To summarise: my hypothesis is that people’s priorities change as a consequence of socio-economic transformations and that, in turn, this change has implications for the functionality of the frameworks people have traditionally had available to them as sources of legitimation and support for their values, and, ultimately, for their needs as people going about their daily lives. Increasing differences between values supported by the traditional religions and individuals’ motivational values is the key factor in the changing religious landscape. Secularisation may be part of this process, but as an incidental outcome, not essentially as the defining feature. All the factors proposed by the classical secularisation theories are still at play – such as rationalisation, modernisation, functional differentiation and pluralisation of societies – not directly, but instead by contributing to the value change. Similarly, individualism and privatisation have been seen as defining features of religious change, but they are also incidental outcomes. While the emerging value pattern appears to emphasise self-expression, this does not necessarily always translate to individualism. Self-expression can manifest in the formation of various alternative forms of association between individuals, and instead of resulting in isolated individuals, it may produce complex networks and new types of community and collectivity (Maffesoli 1996; Hetherington 1998).

34

Post-Materialist Religion

The socio-cultural contexts of this study In Europe Christianity has traditionally been seen as the framework that provides explanations, norms, hope and the essence of values for people. Because many generations have lived in a religiously homogeneous society, that particular religion has become reified as part of the natural order of things for people; its beliefs the true doctrine that cannot conceivably be challenged. The salience of Christianity as a source of values can therefore be seen as a result of induction during childhood and the further experience individuals have had growing up in a social context where monopoly of the traditional religion went largely unchallenged. This tradition, however, is now in decline. Particularly since the Second World War, it has been increasingly challenged, not only by other traditional religions such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, brought to Europe by immigrant populations, but also by the proliferation of new religious movements, new interpretations of traditional religions and a secular worldview. It appears that in contemporary Europe some kinds of worldview are growing while traditional Christianity is in decline. In order to identify cultural variance, three countries were selected for the study: Ireland, the United Kingdom and Finland. These have distinct religious, cultural and economic histories, but they are now on a similar socio-economic level. The Republic of Ireland is a traditionally Catholic country with a high level of religiosity on any indicator, but it also has a strong pre-Christian Celtic cultural identity that survived the early introduction of Christianity to Ireland, sometimes, and to some extent, intermixed with Christian themes (Bowman 2002). In recent years Ireland has experienced rapid economic growth and pluralisation through immigration, and equality legislation has improved the opportunity for other religions to operate. The percentage of the population belonging to the Roman Catholic Church has fallen from 95 per cent in 1961 to 89.8 per cent in 2011, and the number of people who state that they identify with no religion has increased from 0.04 per cent to 4.41 per cent in the same period (Central Statistics Office 2011). Ireland’s religious pluralism is to a large extent influenced by an immigrant labour force. Muslim and Hindu minorities are growing, but other minority religions are also emerging, and belonging to the Catholic Church appears to be in slight decline among the Irish.

Introduction

35

The UK has a long history of dealing with different cultures, and this has brought it into contact with a broader range of religions and worldviews. In addition, movements such as the Freemasons, other Western esoteric traditions, Theosophy, and alternative spirituality have had an exceptionally long history in the UK, while the recent growth of atheism and secular humanism is particularly noticeable. Even though 71.8 per cent in Great Britain identified themselves as Christians in the 2001 census, the number had fallen to 59.3 per cent in the 2011 census (Office for National Statistics 2012). Much lower figures are consistently found in social surveys. According to the British Social Attitudes survey data 50.1 per cent of people in England and Wales identify themselves as Christians. Further, the level of affiliation has fallen for each successive generation for the past century (Voas and Crockett 2005). The European Social Survey obtained similar figures for the UK in 2006 with 48.5 per cent identifying as Christians (Jowell and Central Co-ordinating Team 2008). However, Britain is arguably a country with an unusually long history of contact with other cultures and religious traditions; it also experienced early industrialisation and subsequent economic and social changes, and was at the centre of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. These factors may have contributed to the decline of traditional religion in Britain, although a similar decline is also evident elsewhere. Finland, in contrast, is culturally homogeneous and remained isolated for long. Still, Finland stands between the Slavic influence from the east and the Anglo-Saxon influence from the south and west, which adds some element of religious and cultural variance. Nevertheless, it is a Lutheran country to the same extent that Ireland is a Catholic one. Like Catholicism in Ireland, the Lutheran religion in Finland has formed part of the national identity. Lutheranism is seen as a part of Finnishness, and the comparatively liberal Finnish Lutheran Church is viewed as a provider of important social services and moral guidance. In Finland, belonging to the Finnish Lutheran Church has declined from 92.4 per cent in 1960 to 77.1 per cent in 2011 (Palmu et al. 2012). Finland also experienced relatively late industrialisation, from the late 1940s onwards, after the war against the Soviet Union. General living standards began to improve significantly in the 1950s, and the economy started to grow rapidly in the 1980s.

36

Post-Materialist Religion

Contemporary Paganism Pagan as a self-identification in contemporary societies covers a broad range of bespoke practices and worldviews, where, it appears, beliefs are of secondary importance after practices. The nature of the beings and the levels of realities an individual holds salient and the extent to which these are taken as real or as metaphorical does not necessarily make a difference in the practices of the individual. There is no method for measuring the validity of a collection of beliefs and practices other than that it works for the individual in his or her private and shared life. Inspiration and imagery for these is often drawn from pre-Christian cultures (e.g., Celtic, Norse, Greek, Roman, Persian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian), types of worldview (e.g., polytheism, animism and pantheism), identities (e.g., shaman, wise-woman, witch and magus) and practices (e.g., astrology, herbalism and magic), but also from contemporary fields such as psychology, anthropology and quantum physics. It is a hybrid that does not recognise boundaries between spheres of life in the traditional way. Paganism can, generally, be described as a polytheistic nature religion that recreates old ways of relating to the Earth and all its inhabitants and does not divorce nature from the supernatural, rather seeing the sacred as entwined with the mundane (Harvey 1997, p. 1). Ronald Hutton identifies four different ways in which Pagans and Paganism were talked about in Britain between the early nineteenth century and about 1940 (Hutton 1999, pp. 3–31). The first discourse is a colonialist one that sees Paganism as the religion of primitive people in Africa and among other indigenous people. The second links Pagans with pre-Christian Greece and Rome, and associates it with the fine arts, literature and philosophy. In this discourse these traditions are seen as deficient to Christianity only in ethics and in the true revelation of God. The third discourse is also generally about non-Christian cultures, but rather than focusing on the arts of classical Greece and Rome it sees ancient and mythical cultures as sources of true and universal spiritual wisdom. In the nineteenth century various movements emerged – most prominently Theosophy – seeking this ancient wisdom from Indian and Egyptian traditions, as well as from Gnostic Christianity, Kabbalah and tales of Mu, Atlantis and Avalon. These were believed to contain traces

Introduction

37

of eternal spiritual knowledge that had been transmitted through time in different guises. According to Hutton, while this discourse pays great respect to Paganism, it is not itself usually seen as Pagan. The fourth discourse also associates the term with ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, but now these cultures are characterised as joyous, liberationist, life-affirming and connected with both the natural world and with a human creative spirit. In this discourse Paganism has a positive quality, specifically as the antithesis to Puritanism. Hutton ties this discourse to Romantic authors such as Keats, Shelley and Swinburne, and sees them as influences behind many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century individuals who became central in the development of contemporary Paganism. This fourth discourse eventually became the language of the contemporary Pagans. Hutton’s work The Triumph of the Moon (1999) is a thorough analysis of the cultural soil from which the movement grew. The history and development of contemporary Paganism is connected to the ethos described by Hutton as the third and fourth Pagan discourses, and particularly the latter. Given the importance of ‘nature’ and individualism, he could have considered the influence of even earlier currents in British and European cultures, such as those that produced Rousseau’s Social Contract ([1762] 2005), Rights of Men ([1791] 1999), and specifically the emergence of individualism and the idea of individual freedom (e.g., Mill [1859] 1998). These currents can, however, be seen as the groundwork for the Age of the Enlightenment, and as such taken for granted as the context in which the precursors to contemporary Paganism emerged. The intellectual roots of Paganism can be found in the Western esoteric tradition that combines material from, for example, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, astrology and alchemy. Organisations such as the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons and the Ancient Druid Order, but particularly fin de siècle movements such as Theosophy, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis, can be seen as predecessors of contemporary Paganism. The progress of this cultural trend was disrupted by the world wars, but in the mid-twentieth century new movements started to emerge. Noteworthy are the publication by Gerald Gardner of A Goddess Arrives ([1939] 1997), High Magic’s Aid: Wonderful Tale of Medieval Witchcraft ([1949] 1999, originally under the pen-name Scire), Witchcraft Today ([1954] 1999) and The Meaning

38

Post-Materialist Religion

of Witchcraft ([1959] 2004). Gardner came to be known as the founder of Wicca and, by that effort, one chief progenitor of the now multiplex phenomena of post-Second World War Paganism. After the repeal in 1951 of the Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts in Britain, Gardner started to advocate Witchcraft in the media, and the organisation of groups based on his and others’ similar ideas became easier. The movement grew and branched, and was followed in 1964 by the founding by Ross Nichols of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, as a more Pagan way of being a Druid than the largely esoteric Orders that he left. Wicca formed early in the emergence of new religions, and it was transported to the USA where it developed further. The movement also diversified, and other traditions came to be used as sources, and – in the context of the social upheavals of the 1960s in the USA – emancipatory and politicised variants formed. The number of publications on the subject increased rapidly, and, helped by better availability of information, particularly in the late 1990s through easier access to the Internet, the movement became global. The core tenets remain largely the same as those identified by Hutton as the fourth discourse. These can be observed in the meanings practitioners now give for the term Pagan. I use the term Pagan specifically in reference to these self-identifying Pagans. To a significant degree it is a consciously contrived classification that implies more coherence than actually exists. This is well presented in Graham Harvey’s definition, which acknowledges the diversity, but points out that Paganism is a diverse but cohesive array of religious activities and affiliations that can also be named ‘nature-centred spiritualities’ or ‘nature religions’. Adherents name themselves ‘Pagan’ and/or its cognate ‘Heathen’, and some use further selfidentifying labels such as Ásatrú, Druid, Goddess-Feminist, Shaman or Wiccan … [They] identify themselves with the ancestral (pre-Christian) religious traditions of Europe as re-created in the early to mid-twentieth century and in continuous evolution and construction since then. (Harvey 2006, 84–5)

This heterogeneity of contemporary Paganism is related to its history of combining British, North American and European cultural and social influences, and later those of other cultures as well. Even with this heterogeneity, Paganism is distinct from other new religions that emerged at around the same

Introduction

39

time. It is not a movement focusing on or waiting for the coming of a New Age or for spiritual transcendence to a different place. Instead, according to Harvey, Paganism is re-creating ways of relating to the Earth and is ‘at home’ on Earth (Harvey 1997, p. 1). This sets it apart from the collection of spiritual practices and movements that are generally labelled New Age. It has also followed a slightly different trajectory from the Western esoteric traditions of, for example, Aleister Crowley’s Thelema or Anton LaVey’s philosophical Satanism. Rather than focusing primarily on methods and techniques of personal growth, the emphasis in Paganism is on nature and the Earth, the relation of humans with these elements and on how different cultures have conceptualised these relations, and on finding the source of personal growth through that kind of understanding. There is, however, considerable overlap between Paganism and these other movements, and because Paganism is not so particular as to what people believe in, many Pagans in fact follow, merge and invent a number of different esoteric and spiritual traditions. The number of Pagans is difficult to estimate because there is no singular organisation with formal membership or even a group of such organisations. The majority of Pagans practise their religion in small groups or individually, only some are members of a Pagan organisation, and many refrain from publicly identifying themselves as Pagans. Analysis of the entries written in the ‘other religion’ field in the 2001 UK census revealed that 42,792 individuals identified themselves as Pagan in the UK (Weller 2008, pp. 44–5). In the 2011 census 79,467 individuals stated their religion as Paganism or a specific Pagan path.3 No such data is available for Ireland or Finland, but the Irish 2006 census (Central Statistics Office 2007) found 1,106 Pantheists, who may or may not be regarded as Pagan. In Finland the best estimates are based on the membership of registered Pagan organisations, which amounts to a few thousand individuals. It is reasonable to assume that the number of Pagans in each country is actually significantly higher than these figures indicate, but even so, contemporary Paganism is a relatively small religious movement. Contemporary Paganism is used as a case study because it is a fast-growing religion that has spread globally and adapted to different cultural contexts, apparently in sync with the social value changes suggested by Inglehart and others (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). The aim is to explore value differences between groups of people with different kinds of self-identifications, with the

40

Post-Materialist Religion

objective of finding out what kinds of values are legitimised by the different worldviews. In other words, religion is used as an independent grouping variable and values as the dependent variable. For this purpose a value survey is conducted among Pagans. My hypothesis suggests that individuals belonging to this group will have significantly different values compared to the mainstream population, particularly compared to the active members of traditional religions, with the difference in the direction predicted by general value-change models. Value data for the mainstream population is obtained from the European Social Survey (Jowell and Central Co-ordinating Team 2008).

2

Pragmatism and the study of religions

When it comes to competing knowledge claims, the study of religions is probably as conflicted as academic disciplines can be. As a field of study it is varyingly located under Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural Studies or Theology and each of these schools comes with different methodological conventions. This makes our conferences interesting. However, rather than reaping the benefit of multiple viewpoints to a common object of study, it seems that this plurality of starting points often plants scholars in the middle of arguments about the possibilities and limitations of academic knowledge. These arguments have been called ‘paradigm wars’ (Datta 1994; Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, pp. 3–13) or, in a less belligerent way, ‘paradigm dialogue’ (e.g., Guba 1990). The rift is often torn between camps of ‘understanding’ and of ‘explaining’ religion, as the approaches have been labelled (for an example of such trench digging, see the discussion in Gothóni 2005). The former camp roots for the principle of an inductive bottom-up approach to enquiry, whereby data is collected through best possible ethnographic methods, such as participant observation, interviews, focus groups, narrative and discourse analysis and other such practices. The object of study is approached on its own terms in its own territory as far as possible. The corpus of information is accumulated up to a saturation point and then used to produce generalisations and descriptions of the object of study. The latter camp, on the other hand, holds to a top-down logic of deduction, starting from a theory or hypothesis that is put on trial through the gathering of data as evidence. The deductive researchers then weigh the evidence for and against the starting hypothesis and pass

42

Post-Materialist Religion

judgement through a generally agreed-upon apparatus of testing. The testing procedures indicate the likelihood of the hypothesis to be correct and the apparatus of testing is such that people versed in deductive methods even if they are not familiar with the particular case study understand its output. The case for war between these camps is derived from the fundamental question of the philosophy of science: what is the nature of reality and what can we know about it? While some say that there is a single reality, and we can gain true knowledge of it through systematic observation and analysis, others say that, for all practical purposes, there are multiple constructed realities, and knowledge is always subjective and context dependent. At one extreme, the logical-positivist paradigm postulates a single and observable reality, which is independent and separable from the inquisitor. From that position, value-free knowledge and generalisations are possible through systematic observations, experiments and inductive logic. In an attempt to discover empirical facts that can be expressed as universal covering laws, research based on logical positivism looks for constant links and connections between events (Bhaskar 1978; Steinmetz 1998). Few scientists today believe that this is ever entirely possible. Most natural scientists believe that they can progressively pin down the facts and get close enough to reality to, at least, solve practical problems, but, particularly in social sciences, logical positivism has been discredited (Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, p. 7). Karl Popper’s (1972) argument against logical positivism focused on its two weaknesses. First, observations need to be described, and those descriptions are dependent on language that is a product of previous knowledge and cognitive processing. Researchers’ minds can never be the blank slate that could process sensory input by rational reasoning only in order to generate theory-independent descriptions. Nor is natural language ever context free and exact. Popper’s second point focused on the faulty logic of empirical verification as the bases for claims of truth. He noted that positive corroboration cannot ultimately negate the possibility of negative evidence also existing. It is therefore necessary to try to falsify scientific arguments rather that to prove them; a failure to reject a hypothesis increases its validity. According to Popper, this has implications for the logic of inquiry: while induction from observations and experiments can generate hypothesis, it is necessary to use deductive ‘top-down’ logic to test them. Though Popper’s



Pragmatism and the study of religions

43

thesis has faced criticism as over-rationalising and even crippling to the scientific process (Feyerabend 1993; Lakatos 1970), his critical rationalism and his falsificationist thesis opened the way for a new paradigm. According to this new post-positivist paradigm there is an underlying singular reality, but our understanding of it is constructed. All the knowledge we can achieve is based on facts that are necessarily theory laden; research is limited and influenced by the theories, models and the other tools researchers utilise (Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, pp. 8–9). These limits are well known and acknowledged and the idea of fallibility of scientific knowledge is central for contemporary research. Researchers do not try to conclusively prove their hypothesis through accumulation of positive evidence. Instead they indicate a failure to reject it despite rigorous testing and looking for contradictory evidence. Research is, through this lens, ‘a process of making claims and then refining or abandoning some of them for other claims’ (Creswell 2003, p. 7). It aims to develop relevant true statements, which can serve to explain some aspect of whatever is being studied or to describe causal relationships. These statements can include clauses and caveats, and they are left open for review and attempts to falsify them (ibid., pp. 6–8). Furthermore, the search for causality does not necessarily mean a search for a singular and universal causal mechanism. For example, complex events can be determined by variable sets of causal factors rather than a single factor or constant set of factors, and similar events may be caused by different sets of causal mechanisms. These sets can also be unique and non-repeatable historical conjunctures, so that a single non-contextualised theory may not be able to explain an event observed in a different context (Steinmetz 1998; Bhaskar 1986; Ragin 1987). However, from the late 1950s onwards, more critical arguments against the essentialism of positivist epistemology started to gain support. According to these arguments, all knowledge is not only constructed, but does not necessarily reflect any external objective realities at all. Even the fundamental categories, classifications and terms we use to organise and describe the world are non-objective, non-real artefacts of the societies we are born and raised into (Gergen 1994). These terms and categories are created, reified and sustained over time by human societies, and modified through the cultural contacts they make. They are passed on over generations through the process of societalisation as objective truths. These constructs do not exist on the

44

Post-Materialist Religion

grounds of their objective validity, but through social processes, interactions and conventions (Berger and Luckmann 1967). From the theory of the social construction of reality it was derived that we can never have access to a valid and universal truth about an underlying reality. The emphasis in methodology shifted from ontology to epistemology; the only world we can study is a semiotic world of meanings, represented in the signs and symbols people use to think and communicate. Knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, and there can be multiple ‘truths’ about any object of study (Potter 1996; Gergen 1999). This conceptual relativism shifted the aim of the social science research programme from an explanation of causal mechanisms and processes to the understanding of contextual meanings (Creswell 2003, pp. 8–9). This shift threatened to debunk the postpositivist project of scientific discovery, especially in humanistic and social sciences. The main practical dispute seems to be about the relative importance of either internal validity (internal to the research process) or external validity (or contextual validity) of the study in question. The arguments for the former emphasise the importance of controlled research settings, so that results can be generalised and transferred to a wider population, or to a different context. The opposition sees the quality of their research dependent on the naturalness of their research setting, how well it takes into account the subjective reality of the participants of the study, and how valid the findings would appear to the participants (Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, p. 4). However, there are also arguments for a middle way. A more pragmatic and instrumentalist attitude to research methodology is becoming more and more popular, particularly in social science research that focuses on complex processes and topics. Charles Sanders Peirce was concerned about the principles for fixing the meaning of a concept that he observed in the scholarly practices of the late nineteenth century (Peirce 1972, pp. 120–37). For him Cartesian intellectualism, the idea that truth can be found through introspection and direct intuition, was as bad (or as deluded) as tradition or authority as the basis for fixing a concept. This chapter introduces pragmatism as a strategy whereby empirical facts are studied in pursuit of an explanation and new insight, rather than establishing a generally applicable description, as in inductive logic, or testing an a priori formulated theory or hypothesis, as in deductive logic.



Pragmatism and the study of religions

45

Pragmatic turns The classical era of pragmatism began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931; 1940; 1972; 1998), William James ([1907] 1995), and later John Dewey ([1948] 2004). The epistemological pluralism embedded in their work can be seen as a third option between the objectivism of positivist approaches and the relativism of constructionist approaches (Bernstein 1983; Margolis 2006).1 When Peirce presented his critique of Cartesian philosophy, in the late 1860s, the former tradition-bound understandings of the world and of humans’ place in it had already been challenged not only by Descartes, but, bit by bit, through a long sequence of philosophers and scholars in various fields. Further, empiricism and the scientific method had left Cartesian a priori reasoning wanting as a method for achieving knowledge. The most prominent examples of this at that time were Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace with their thesis on the evolution of species by natural selection, presented a decade earlier. Peirce’s work unpacked and then wrote off long-held doctrines concerning the nature of inquiry, knowledge and truth, or in his words, the fixation of beliefs (Peirce 1972, p. 120–37). His targets were specifically the method of universal doubt, the Myth of the Given (Sellars 1997, p. 14) and the ontological dualism of mind and body, or the idea that mind can be withdrawn from corporeal things (Bernstein 2010, p. 19). In other words, Peirce called for a scientific attitude and a genuine desire to find out how things are, and for the method of science rather than the assumption that through intuition, introspection and experience we can have immediate indubitable knowledge of things, and thereby firm foundations for our beliefs. Peirce disregarded Descartes’ method as a ‘sham of feigned doubts’, and his idea of the human faculty of intuitive self-consciousness as an artifice (Haack 2004). Intuitions, for Peirce, are determined by past cognitions; they result from inference and judgement that have been naturalised (Proudfoot 2012). Rather than trying to follow Descartes’ advice to doubt everything we should begin by accepting that we always enter a field of study carrying prejudices, some of which are hard to recognise in advance. No amount of feigned doubt helps in dispelling these, so ‘[l]et us not pretend to doubt in

46

Post-Materialist Religion

philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts’ (Peirce 1972, p. 86). Instead we have to be sensitive to the moments when we encounter positive reason to doubt something that we have, previously, held as unquestionably true. In a very Darwinian way – as Susan Haack points out – Peirce saw enquiry as continuous with animals’ exploration of their environment. Through the process of exploration beliefs form and those beliefs give rise to habits in the process of exploration. All human beliefs – formed in enquiry – therefore involve habits of action, and true doubt is the involuntary and unsettled state that results when experience does not agree with a ‘belief-habit’. For Peirce, the most sophisticated human cognitive activity is based on the primitive process where an organism strives to return to equilibrium: ‘a process beginning with doubt and ending when a new habit, a revised belief, is reached’ (Haack 2004, p. 7). The issue of dichotomies echoed by Latour nearly a century later vexed the classical pragmatists. John Dewey saw Western philosophy as mired with a pre-Darwinian worldview, dividing humanity from nature and mind from body2. For him [t]he world is subject-matter for knowledge, because mind has developed in that world; a body-mind, whose structures have developed according to the structures of the world in which it exists, will naturally find some of its structures to be concordant and congenial with nature, and some phases of nature with itself. (Dewey 1998, p. 145)

Dewey argued for a fundamental change in what we see as the nature of knowledge, observing that [p]hilosophically speaking, this is the great difference involved in the change from knowledge and philosophy as contemplative to operative. […] In spite of inventions which enable men to use the energies of nature for their purposes, we are still far from habitually treating knowledge as the method of active control of nature and of experience. We tend to think of it after the model of a spectator viewing a finished picture rather than after that of the artist producing the painting. (Dewey 2004, p. 122)

Wilfried Sellars (1997) revisited this question of uninvolved spectator, or, direct undetermined intuition. He suggests that our immediate awareness is sensual awareness rather than cognitive and, therefore, by itself it cannot



Pragmatism and the study of religions

47

provide such irrefutable grounding for the knowledge Cartesian philosophy hopes for. Instead, whatever knowledge is built upon such sensual awareness is built with and through concepts that are dependant on out past experiences, language and the other signs we use (Bacon 2012, pp. 72–3).3 This rendering of humanity and knowledge places us in the domain of the natural world – continuous with other animals, but still distinct in our ability to wield concepts in order to gain knowledge and understanding. Knowledge is inseparable from the praxis of inquiry through which it was formed. In Peirce’s words: ‘[t]he essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise’ (Peirce 1972, p. 144). We do not have that privileged position some of us think we have, but with our ability to use concepts we are able to do things some other animals are not capable of (or we do not know if they are). The classical pragmatists sought to replace the idea of ‘philosophy as the mirror of nature’ (Rorty 1979) with the idea that ‘[t]he mind does not observe a world complete in itself but acts in the world and, in so doing, changes it’ (Bacon 2012, p. 33, paraphrasing James 1977, p. 735). The struggle the early pragmatists faced in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century was to show that we do not need fixed foundations from religion or philosophy to make sense of our beliefs, values and commitments and, further, to show that such foundations are not available to us in the first place in any arena of human enquiry. However, they also needed to explain why this lack of foundations does not mean an inability to evaluate better arguments and hypotheses from the poor ones; that there are principles for such evaluation (Bacon 2012, p. 136). Because of the inherent fallibilism of the pragmatic stance terms such as knowledge and belief become difficult to use. If we are to always be ready to drop what we formerly thought we knew when evidence goes against it, how is one different for the other? How, then, do we evaluate contradicting beliefs?

The struggle for knowledge and good-enough objectivity Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but

48

Post-Materialist Religion determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis. Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be. (Peirce 1998, p. 216)

The logic behind abduction is identifying surprises, issues of doubt, or anomalies in observations or theoretical models, and then constructing hypotheses that might explain these surprises (Shank 1998). Abduction follows the pattern of observing a result (the surprising thing), proposing a rule that might explain the result, and explicating how the rule might be applicable to the observation in this case (Stainton-Rogers 2006, pp. 86–7). For example: to what extent can the general pattern of value change be used to explain religious change? What kinds of meanings is the general value change given in the different contexts of Ireland, the UK and Finland? And, more abstractly, what implications do these meanings have for the individuals’ outlook in life or worldview? This approach, however, does not result in an explanatory statement about cause and effect; rather, it offers an explication, or ‘an unfolding and uncovering of what is likely to be going on’ (Stainton-Rogers 2006, p. 87). There may be causal relations, but we may not be able to completely pin them all down. According to Wendy Stainton-Rogers, in situations of high complexity, explicatory research is preferable. It treats the ‘residue of the unexplained’ not as ‘an irritating “blip” to be ironed out or ignored’, but as the focus of inquiry (Stainton-Rogers 2006, p. 85). Observations are treated as clues that point to a potential explanation (Shank 1998, p. 852). Lead by these clues the researcher generates a hypothesis or a broader explanatory theory that can then be the basis for consequent empirical testing. In other words, abduction is inference to the best explanation and it is a process with the intent of exploration and theory generation rather than theory testing (Lipton 2004). Adherence to pre-existing theories would again delimit or structure the hypothesisgeneration. The open-format hypothesis can only be generated post-hoc, with sufficient knowledge of the empirical reality of the object of study, gathered with all appropriate and employable methods. What is initially taken as a unique and surprising observation is transformed by the hypothesis into an example of some more general phenomenon (Shank 1998, p. 847).



Pragmatism and the study of religions

49

Dewey introduced the term ‘warranted assertability’ to replace ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief ’ (Bacon 2012, p. 55–6), avoiding the trap of what Bernstein calls bad relativism, or ‘the sort of relativism that claims that there is really no truth (except truth for me or my group), no objective facts, and no universal validity claims’ (Bernstein 2010). This ‘warranted assertability’ is arrived at through collective inquiry, not through imagination operating within an individual consciousness. The intersubjective account of inquiry presented by the pragmatists portrays knowledge not as a sharp-edged entity, but, rather, as a web of beliefs. Rather, as Bacon summarises, ‘knowledge is a collection of mutually supporting beliefs and inquiry is not built up step by step from a single premise but is the result of many different findings’ (Bacon 2012, p. 20). Peirce gives us a powerful metaphor for understanding the differences between these two conceptions of inquiry, suggesting that ‘[r]easoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected’ (Peirce 1972, p. 87). Reflexivity takes the place of indubitable foundations, ‘[f]or empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’ (Sellars 1997, p. 79). Enquiry, then, is weaving and re-weaving the web of beliefs and mending it where and when needed (Bacon 2012, p. 96). Robert Brandom sees the difference between foundationalism and pragmatic epistemology as the difference between Newtonian and Darwinian paradigms of treating empirical observations. According to him ‘[u]nderstanding whose paradigm is Newton’s physics consists of universal, necessary, eternal principles, expressed in the abstract, impersonal language of pure mathematics’. Whereas ‘[u]nderstanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s biology is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable practical reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats’ (Brandom 2004, p. 2). The ‘foundations’ for knowledge are our ‘prejudices’, or the beliefs that have been established in inquiry and that are presently not in question. Peirce insisted that inquiry does not aim at truth but at security from doubt; inquiry is exclusively about securing beliefs that are free from doubt. Peirce writes that:

50

Post-Materialist Religion the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. (Peirce 1972, p. 126)

It is natural for us to regards our prejudices – beliefs that are currently fixed and stable – as truth, but these foundations do not give us such a metaphysical guarantee as to be treated as the truth (Bacon 2012, p. 54). Instead, we have to be aware of our prejudices and be ready to revise or overturn them, but even so, we can rely on them unproblematically until a reason to doubt them is encountered (Peirce 1972, pp. 86–7). Compared to Peirce and Dewey, Rorty’s position leans more toward relativism. He argues that knowledge is not about the relation between the world and our descriptions of it and that ‘we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation’ (Rorty 1979, p. 170). By giving up representationalism, Rorty hopes, we allow the different areas of culture to occupy different roles without giving any area epistemic privilege (Bacon 2012, p. 97). Further, ‘[e]mpiricism’s appeal to experience is as inefficacious as appeals to the Word of God unless backed up with a predisposition on the part of a community to take such appeals seriously’ (Rorty 2007, p. 11) and ‘[o]ur acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional’ (Rorty 1991, p. 13). Rorty denies all authority outside of the authority given to arguments by conversational peers, rejecting any ‘source of normativity other than the practices of the people around us’ (Rorty 2007, p. 107). Rorty asserts that the causal pressures of the world impose authority over us only through the vocabularies we create to cope with them and the reception this vocabulary receives from us and others (Bacon 2012, p. 100). This position is in stark contrast to the way Actor–Network Theory acknowledges the influence non-human things have for human practices, including the processes of inquiry and science, as Latour’s and others’ studies have shown. From this perspective Rorty’s solution to relativism appears to be a kind of distributed intellectualism. Rorty’s emphasis on social justification as a measure of knowledge can be seen as a step too far toward ‘bad relativism’.



Pragmatism and the study of religions

51

Or, to borrow from Latour’s argument, why bring back the nature/culture distinction after Peirce rejected it? Rorty’s counterargument is that this position does not commit him to believing that the particular communal beliefs and justifications are all there is or that one cannot judge between better and worse justifications. He argues that even though two alternative beliefs can be epistemologically equally valid it does not follow that there are no objective criterion for choosing between the alternatives (Rorty 1991, p 89). What Rorty is saying is that there is no neutral territory from where one can decide between the alternative beliefs. With no neutral territory Rorty’s position leaves us with arguments for and against different views, with the act of argumentation as the ultimate proving ground for these views. Is there really no middle ground between the superhuman scientist observing from neutral territory and a warrant of assertability merely through social justification? Or, in Hilary Putnam’s words, ‘a middle way between reactionary metaphysics and irresponsible relativism’ (Putnam 1999, p. 5), ‘[w]hether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted’ (Putnam 1992, p. 21). Jeffrey Stout (2009) further points out that even though inquiry is conceived as an essentially social activity this does not mean that being correct or justified should be understood as ‘conforming to social consensus, for all of us could be wrong about the topic being discussed’ (pp. 7–8). Putnam suggests that we ought to recognise that the processes of inquiry in physics, ethics and all human inquiry are structurally the same and that their aim is achieving similarly generalisable and warranted assertions. This way pragmatism does justice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without having us recoiling into ‘metaphysical fantasy’ (Putnam 1999, p. 4). Putnam argues that giving up metaphysical standards for objectivity does not mean abandoning Dewey’s idea that there are ‘objective resolutions for problematical situations’ and that these can be seen as the pragmatic solutions for coping found by humans operating within the world. This is, for Putnam, objective enough (Putnam 1992, p. 178). With this attitude to knowledge we can refocus our attention from the origins and essence of ideas to their consequences for our conduct.

52

Post-Materialist Religion

Pragmatism in the study of religions Richard Rorty’s pragmatism is often the avenue that connects pragmatism to the study of religions. Among the new pragmatists Rorty produced the major critical discussion on the position and nature of religion in societies and in individuals’ lives (1979; 1982; 1998; Rorty and Vattimo 2005). Pragmatism is intrinsic in his work, conveyed by his treatment of religion and related concepts. These concepts he associated with a particular way of thinking, rather than with belief-content or other particularities they often come with. In Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism (1998) Rorty lays out his epistemology and, doing that, provides us with one possible definition of post-materialist religion: You are a polytheist if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs. […] To be a polytheist in this sense you do not have to believe that there are nonhuman persons with power to intervene in human affairs. All you need to do is to abandon the idea that we should try to find a way of making everything hang together, which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell all of them the same thing. (Rorty 1998, pp. 23–4)

The twenty-first century has seen a modestly growing interest in pragmatism in the study of religions. A collection of essays edited by Stuart E. Rosenbaum was published as Pragmatism and Religion: Classical and Original Essays (2003). Through diverse approaches it focuses on the influence or presence of religious commitments on the development of American pragmatism, and provides an interesting insight into various schools of thought in this matter. However, it is not attempting a substantial methodological contribution and does not deliver one. In Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Religion and Ethics (2012) G. Scott Davis argues for a pragmatic attitude in the study of religions and, further, suggests that one should abandon the pursuit of theory in the study of religions. Instead, he likens the function of ‘religion’ to that of “‘politics,” “literature,” and “art,” sequestering a particular body of behavior and its products for a specific critical purpose’, adding that ‘[t]he population under study doesn’t even need to have an analogous term in its conceptual arsenal’ (p. 3). ‘Religion’ (in quotes) is for him an etic category



Pragmatism and the study of religions

53

that is useful for picking out meaningful sets of behaviour regardless of the status of the term in any particular population. Davis’s ambition is to lay out a roadmap of the best practices for approaching the kinds of human phenomena that can be classified under ‘religion’. Davis’s homage to Richard Rorty is clear in his mission statement. His principal criterion is that the methodology has to take into account ‘the local qualifications, and the unmeasurable probabilities that complicate the situation’. To this end, ‘[t]he methods available for the student will be whichever ones he thinks may prove useful for his purposes’ as long as the student can convince his or her peers of the worth of the findings. He argues, further, that ‘understanding religion requires nothing more than the sensitive and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by the best available ethnography set in the best available historical narrative’ (Davis 2012, p. 3). However, Davis also makes it clear that there are right methods and there are wrong methods. Finding the suitable methods is to him ‘a lot like gardening: judicious pruning and weeding open up the space essential to the flourishing of the field’. As a yardstick he, somewhat confusingly, uses Peirce’s account of inquiry, arguing that ‘when suggestions stray too far from [it] they are likely to lead us down blind alleys into dead ends’ (Davis 2012, p. 3). Throughout his book Davis makes it clear that in his view the kind of theorising found in natural sciences is not at all suitable for the study of human phenomena, particularly those as complex as religion. In the process of weeding, he finds that ‘[i]n some cases it will prove possible to rein in the excesses of some professed theorist, while retaining his or her helpful insight’. Mary Douglas’s and Clifford Geertz’s pragmatic rereading of Durkheim and Weber is apparently in this category, but ‘the wide-eyed naïveté of cognitive studies and the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion – there’s not enough to bother and both should probably be uprooted altogether’ (ibid., p. 4). Davis’s critique of cognitive studies stems, he states, not from their being cognitivists, but rather because ‘they just don’t tell us anything interesting about the inferential relations that hold between our target population’s beliefs, desires, expectations, and the like’ (ibid., p. 122). Further, he argues that [a]ny general account of a human institution, including the various practices that we include under religion, will not only be irredeemably speculative but

54

Post-Materialist Religion generally pointless. The standing possibility for critical innovation and debate means that norms generally, and the descriptions based on them, are always subject to revision. That norms are fluid doesn’t, of course, mean that they are arbitrary. (Davis 2012, p. 97)

This critique appears to extend to the principles of the scientific method more generally, when Davis states that ‘[i]f scientists are making decisions about what is close enough to count as “regular,” then it’s not regularity per se, but the choices of the researchers that are at work’ (Davis 2012, p. 30). This seems contrary to Peirce’s argument for the scientific method as a superior form of inquiry, an argument he presents in his 1877 essay The Fixation of Belief (1972, pp. 120–37). Peirce saw in the method of natural science something that should be, as far as possible, reproduced in other domains of inquiry. However, he also expressed his view that the ‘Fact’ presented as the end product of inquiry is never ‘a slice of the Universe’ in all its infinite detail: I must first point out the distinction between a Fact and what in other connexions, is often called an … Occurrence. An Occurrence, which Thought analyses into Things and Happenings, is necessarily Real; but it can never be known or even imagined in all its infinite detail. A Fact, on the other hand is so much of the real Universe as can be represented in a Proposition, and instead of being, like an Occurrence, a slice of the Universe, it is rather to be compared to a chemical principle extracted therefrom by the power of Thought; and though it is, or may be Real, yet, in its Real existence it is inseparably combined with an infinite swarm of circumstances, which make no part of the Fact itself. It is impossible to thread our way through the Logical intricacies of being unless we keep these two things, the Occurrence and the Real Fact, sharply separate in our Thoughts. (Peirce MS 647, p. 8, quoted in Rosenthal 1994, pp. 5–6)

The fact is extracted from a real occurrence, yet that fact as proposed cannot take into account or even fully imagine the ‘infinite swarm of circumstances’ that really are intimate with the actual occurrence. Fact, then, always comes with some degree of uncertainty – they are always a little vague. The standardised notation in the reports of quantitative studies is there for the purpose of notifying the reader of this modicum of uncertainty. The point of talking about facts rather than educated guesses (even while admitting this vagueness and the possibility of error) is that in order to proceed with inquiry we must treat indubitable knowledge as true. That is, if we have no reason to doubt a



Pragmatism and the study of religions

55

piece of knowledge arrived at through rigorous inquiry, it is, to us, as good as a fact. For Davis, however, ‘[t]he upshot of [the pragmatic] turn is to recognise that understanding religion and religious practices needs nothing more, theoretically, than the imaginative juxtaposition of the sort of data provided by history and ethnography’ (Davis 2012, p. 120). He continues that ‘[u] nderstanding the practices of religion is no different in principle from understanding the practices of the natural sciences’ (ibid.). With this I agree completely, and an example of this is when the work in the field of Science and Technology Studies by Latour and others is used as an exemplar to follow when studying the practices of religion. I also, to some extent, agree with Davis’s point that ‘[w]hen we want to know about gods, ghosts, rituals and rewards, we should go to the scholars who can tells what, in their best estimations, the people we’re interested in said or wrote about those topics and how that information fits into the web and woof of their lives’ (Davis 2012, p. 122). Nevertheless, I disagree with Davis’s dismissal of methods on the grounds that they cannot tell ‘us’ anything interesting and his view that all general accounts of human institutions, such as religion, are irredeemably speculative and pointless. The way I see it, Peirce’s hypothetical inference is speculative with a purpose of proposing accounts of various degrees of generality, and this strategy is particularly well suited for the study of complex socio-psychological topics, such as religion. However, moderating Davis’s statement more towards Wayne Proudfoot’s (2012) analysis of the matter, we should not dismiss methods wholesale, but rather be critical of the questions for which these methods are claimed to provide answers. Proudfoot gives an example of how a lack of understanding of the historicity of concepts leads to unwarranted specificity in the setting and the conclusions of an otherwise interesting study. In an experimental study of the effect of Buddhist meditation practices on brain activity, in the field of affective neuroscience, Antoine Lutz and others (2004) found that ‘mental training involves temporal integrative mechanisms and may induce short-term and long-term neural changes’, concluding that their study is ‘consistent with the idea that attention and affective processes, which gamma-band EEG synchronization may reflect, are flexible skills that can be trained’ (Lutz et al. 2004). As a finding this is both interesting and

56

Post-Materialist Religion

important, and lends support for the claims proponents of, for example, meditation, yoga, mindfulness and NLP make for the benefits of their practice. In the course of the article, though, they are more specific regarding the type of meditation that instigates these changes. They talk about a ‘nonreferential compassion meditative state’ (p. 163–9) and more specifically ‘unconditional loving-kindness and compassion’ (ibid.), a particular Buddhist concept, which is bound to be understood differently by the Buddhists and the non-Buddhist control group. This unnecessarily specific concept in the experiment set-up confounds the effects of the long-term practice with the difference in the way the groups understood the exercise. Proudfoot rightly tasks the researchers for their problematic naturalisation of the concept compassion, in other words, for their assumption that that concept is naturally given rather than being an amalgam of a number of specific cultural historical developments. He calls for critical examination of the concepts we use. This is the task Harvey, Primiano and others have undertaken with regard to religion. As Proudfoot points out, ‘the work of scholars in the humanities and social sciences to historicise what has been naturalised is not in opposition to scientific study of humans as natural creatures’ (2012 p. 199). In my view both scientific study of humans as natural creatures as well as humanities and social sciences are needed and should be seen as of equal value, but also understood as enterprises with fundamentally different repertoires of questions. The work of Haidt and others – in rethinking moral judgement – serves as an example of studying humans as natural creatures as well as cultural individuals. With regard to Peirce’s dismissal of intuition as immediate cognition, I argue that their work offers an example of a combination of what Sellars calls sensual awareness as moral intuition and conceptual awareness as moral justification. We are so immersed in our everyday concepts that we can easily forget their past, but we can also become so sensitised to particularistic thinking that we forget what is shared in our embodied humanness. For this reason researchers should be open to all methods of research, as long as these advance the investigation towards better explanations and more nuanced understanding. There can be many explanations of reality, and the better explanations are the ones that produce more anticipated outcomes. In other words, the research process should follow the dictatorship of the research question, not that of the method (Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, pp. 20–2).



Pragmatism and the study of religions

57

Research objective and the methods used My objective is to better understand the nature of a change whereby secularisation and new religious movements emerge as significant features of late modern societies. For this purpose my aim is to identify associations between people’s values and the different religious identities they give themselves. Further, I test the individualisation theory of religious change and try to identify different kinds of individualistic and collectivistic modes of social interaction among the Pagans and a control group from the mainstream population. The quantitative part of this work consists of a survey to explore the links between individuals’ religious association and their values. The survey collected data on value priorities and modes of social interaction from adults (18 years or older) who are living in Ireland, the United Kingdom or Finland, and who identify themselves as Pagans. This group represents the new religions that have emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, roughly around the time when – according to the intergenerational value-change model – the prevalence of post-materialist values started to increase. The Pagan survey ran in three phases over eight months from September 2007 to April 2008. Contemporary Paganism as an emergent religion is compared with mainstream religious groupings. Two psychological value instruments were included in the questionnaire. Value priorities were measured with a 21-item value questionnaire designed by Shalom Schwartz and others (Schwartz et al. 2001), which is based on the model of basic human values developed by Schwartz (1992). Modes of social interaction were explored using an instrument designed by Harry Triandis and others to measure egalitarian and hierarchical variants of individualistic and collectivistic modes of interpersonal relations (Singelis et al. 1995; Triandis 1995; Triandis and Gelfand 1998). Two sets of control data are used for comparison. The European Social Survey (ESS) provides data on general value priorities in the three countries for the mainstream religious groupings, and data collected from a sample of Open University students – as a proxy for the mainstream population – is used to examine the modes of interpersonal relations and how these relate to values. An Actor–Network Theory approach is used to map how and where Paganism is put and held together and who and what things are involved in this. This participant observation took place in several locations over three

Post-Materialist Religion

58

years from Autumn of 2005 to June 2009. In 2008 and 2009 I also conducted a series of thematic interviews of a small sub-sample of Pagans, focusing on their views on the relation of Paganism to the mainstream culture, their value priorities and their view on changes in society and specifically in the prevalent values.

Measuring post-materialist values Inglehart’s theory of post-material value change has been widely employed to illustrate and explain processes of social change. Either a four- or a twelveitem battery for measuring post-materialism has been included in several surveys since 1970, including large international longitudinal studies such as the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey (World Values Survey Association 2014). The items to measure post-materialism are, in the twelve-item version, presented in three lists of four items and from each list the interviewee is asked to select the most important and the next most important item. List 2 contains the items that are used in the four-item version. The questionnaire is presented in the surveys as follows:4 People sometimes talk about what the aims of this country should be for the next ten years. On this card are listed some of the goals which different people would give top priority. Would you please say which one of these you, yourself, consider the most important […] And which would be the next most important? List 1: A high level of economic growth Making sure this country has strong defence forces *Seeing that people have more say about how things are done at their jobs and in their communities Trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful List 2: Maintaining order in the nation



Pragmatism and the study of religions

59

*Giving people more say in important government decisions Fighting rising prices *Protecting freedom of speech List 3: A stable economy *Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society *Progress toward a society in which Ideas count more than money The fight against crime

The Post-Materialism Index is created by summing the number of postmaterialist items (indicated by an asterisk above) that are marked as either the first or second most important goals. This produces a range of 0 to 5. Inglehart’s thesis, and the evidence from the international longitudinal studies, suggests a strong relation between people’s first-hand experience of living in a world and the priorities they hold. Figure 2.1 shows the cohort to cohort differences in Post-Materialism Index based on integrated World Values Survey and European Values Survey data from 1981 to 2008 in three European countries. In these three countries emphasis on post-materialist values is greater the younger the cohort – apart from a dip in the war generations in the Great Britain and Ireland and minor fluctuation. The data for the youngest cohort in Ireland is not available, and in the other two countries the youngest cohorts have lower index scores than expected from the model. Inglehart’s methodology has also met with critique. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) follow the same cohorts in surveys from 1970 until the present.5 From the pattern of data they infer that the post-materialist change they observe is indeed between cohorts rather than being caused by age or period effect linking the change with several socio-economic indicators (pp. 100–1). However, David Voas and others argue that with mechanical procedures and evidence from data alone one cannot confidently state whether a pattern is caused by age, cohort or period effect, or a combination of these (Crockett and Voas 2006; Browning et al. 2012; Luo 2013). Substantial subject knowledge is required, but in Inglehart’s defence it can be argued that linking

60

Post-Materialist Religion

Figure 2.1. Post-materialist values per birth cohort in Finland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Source for the data: World Values Survey Association 2014.

socio-economic context with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory can provide this support. This leads to another potential issue. Scott C. Flanagan (1982) and Darren W. Davis and Christian Davenport (1999) argue that Inglehart fails to demonstrate that Maslow’s individual-level theory of psychological development and motivational needs can be translated to societal level attitudes in the way he does; the Post-Materialism Index is not based on value measures that could be unproblematically linked to the universal and relatively stable hierarchy of needs, but instead it measures specific social and political attitudes that are more fluid and at least to some extent culturespecific. Later studies have shown that this worry should not be exaggerated, demonstrating that post-materialism is strongly associated with a broader values space rather than just being limited to political and social attitudes (Braithwaite et al. 1996; Wilson 2005; Beckers et al. 2012). Nevertheless, others have noted that because values are frequently confused with attitudes, particularly in survey studies, and measured with sets of attitude questions in specific domains of life such as religion, morality or



Pragmatism and the study of religions

61

politics, most empirical value studies do not provide integrated understanding of socially meaningful issues (Halman and de Moor 1994, p. 22; Schwartz 2001). The recent development of the post-materialist value change theory is also problematic from the standpoint of the study of religions. Norris and Inglehart (2004) link the feeling of existential security with the likelihood of individuals being religious. The experience of growing up in less secure societies will heighten the importance of religious values, while conversely the experience of more secure conditions will lessen it (pp. 3–25, italics added). It seems that by religion they mean Christianity and other religions that emphasise particular kinds of beliefs and the idea of a community of people who believe likewise (e.g., the ‘World Religions’). This is also reflected in the work by Inglehart and Welzel (2005). The ‘Traditional–Secular–Rational’ dimension in their study is associated with that particular subtype of individual worldview. A more nuanced method is needed to identify properties of ‘post-materialist’ religion and to reclaim the concept from its inherited simplistic association with only security needs, low in Maslow’s hierachy. For this reason I employ Shalom Schwartz’s model of basic human values.

Basic human values Social psychologist Milton Rokeach argued, based on experimental and survey research, that there are only a limited and definable number of values that respond to the needs of human nature (1968; 1973). These act as the internal reference points that all people use to formulate attitudes and opinions. He classified these into two types: terminal values reflect desirable goals, and instrumental values reflect the means to achieve these goals. He argued that the universality of the relational arrangement of values that is based upon their relative importance to the individual is highly significant. By measuring the relative ranking of the different values it would be possible to predict a wide variety of patterns of human behaviour, including political affiliation and religious belief. Schwartz developed Rokeach’s relational value model further. According to Schwartz the main features of the basic values derived from an array of research can be summarised in six points:

62

Post-Materialist Religion

1 Values are beliefs, cognitive structures that are closely linked to affect. When values are activated, either by being threatened or by being expressed, they become infused with feeling. 2 Values refer to desirable goals. For example, social equality, fairness and helpfulness are all values. 3 Values transcend specific actions and situations. This feature of values distinguishes them from narrower concepts like norms and attitudes, concepts that usually refer to specific actions, objects or situations. 4 Values serve as standards or criteria. That is, values guide the selection or evaluation of actions, policies, people and events. 5 Values are ordered by importance relative to one another. The ordered set of values forms a system of value priorities. 6 The relative importance of the set of relevant values guides action. Any attitude or behaviour typically has implications for multiple values. For example, attending church might express and promote Tradition, Conformity, Security and Benevolence values for a person, but at the expense of Hedonism, Self-Direction and Stimulation values. Consequently, it is the tradeoffs among the competing values that are implicated simultaneously in the attitude or behaviour that guides them. Each value contributes to action as a function both of its relevance to the action – and hence the likelihood of its activation – and of its importance to the actor. (Schwartz 2001, p. 262) Like Inglehart, Schwartz also draws from Maslow’s model of the hierarchy of needs. He reasoned that the basic values likely to be found in all cultures are those that represent the most fundamental of needs: universal requirements of human existence, such as biological needs, requisites for co-ordinated social interaction, and demands of group functioning. He analysed reports of value studies from various countries around the world identifying and grouping the values found in these studies under a defined set of ten interrelated value types (Schwartz 1992).6 These are listed in Table 2.1, each defined in terms of its central goal. This value inventory is the basis of several survey instruments, of various lengths and styles, that can be used to measure an individual’s emphasis on the different value types.7



Pragmatism and the study of religions

63

Table 2.1. The ten value types of Schwartz’s value model Self-direction Stimulation Hedonism Security Conformity Tradition Benevolence Universalism Achievement Power

Independent thought and action; choosing, creating, exploring. Excitement, novelty and challenge in life. Pleasure and sensuous gratification for oneself. Safety, harmony and stability of society, of relationships and of self. Restraint of actions, inclinations and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms. Respect, commitment and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide the self. Preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom one is in frequent personal contact (the ‘in-group’). Understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards. Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.

Source: Schwartz 1992.

Another assumption in Schwartz’s theoretical model was that the values must be seen in relation to other values. For this reason, he proposed a value structure that is organised according to the relationships between these values. In other words, each value type is compatible, to varying degrees, with some of the other value types, and directly opposite to others. The rationale for this is that when individuals pursue something they see as being of highest priority in their life, these pursuits have psychological, practical and social consequences. These consequences mean that the pursuits can conflict or be congruent with the pursuit of other things on a very concrete and practical level to the individual. For example, the pursuit of personal power may be in conflict with the pursuit of enhancing the welfare of others. On the other hand, seeking personal power may be congruent with the pursuit of achieving success in one’s profession (Schwartz 2001, p. 268). According to this model, there is a continuum from reconcilable to irreconcilable principles that a person can hold, which can be graphically represented as a curve or a circular pattern, shown in Figure 2.2. Those on the opposite sides are farthest apart in people’s associations, and those next to each other are closest. The study also revealed two

64

Post-Materialist Religion

Figure 2.2. The relative positions of the ten value types in Schwartz’s value model. Source: Schwartz 1992.

major dimensions – or higher-order types – of basic human values. One dimension ranges from values that emphasise the conservation of the status quo (tradition, conformity and security) to values that emphasise openness to change (self-direction, stimulation and hedonism). The other dimension is a measure between altruism and egoism, where one pole marks emphasis on self-transcendence (benevolence and universalism) and the other marks emphasis on self-enhancement (power, achievement and partially also hedonism). The structural and relational regularity means that it is possible to study the distinctive value patterns of different groups and cultures, and



Pragmatism and the study of religions

65

explore possible connections between value differences and various social, cultural and environmental factors (e.g., Ramos 2006).8 The 21-item Portrait-Values Questionnaire (PVQ–21) I use was developed by Schwartz and others (Schwartz and Bardi 2001; Schwartz et al. 2001) as a shorter and more accessible tool for value inventory (for a test of concurrent validity, see Lindeman and Verkasalo 2005).9 This is also the instrument used in the European Social Survey that provides the data I use as comparison to the data I collected among the Pagans. Schwartz’s value survey has been used in studies exploring how individuals’ religiosity affects their value priorities. In general, the conclusion of these studies has been that religiosity is positively associated with Conservation values and to a lesser extent with Benevolence, and negatively associated with Openness-to-Change values (Huismans et al. 1992; Schwartz and Huismans 1995; Roccas and Schwartz 1997). However, these studies have focused on traditional religions, mostly different Christian denominations. Only two of the twelve studies reviewed by Saroglou and others (2004) had Muslim respondents and three had Jewish respondents. Valerie Braithwaite and others (1996), Marc Wilson (2005) and Tilo Beckers and others (2012) have studied the relation between the basic human values and Inglehart’s materialism–post-materialism construct. Braithwaite’s study compared Inglehart’s method with Rokeach’s and the other two compared it with Schwartz’s method. These studies found that post-materialism is negatively associated with security type values and positively associated with universalism and self-direction types. Most notable was the negative association between post-materialism and emphasis on security. Figure 3 shows cohort analysis of Schwartz’s security value type with pooled data from all six ESS survey rounds for Finland, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Although the timespan is shorter than in Inglehart and Welzel’s study the pattern of the cohort difference is the same. Here the youngest cohort has consistently the lowest score on security and the oldest the highest. Within-cohort variance is generally low, but with a curious dip in the 2004 Irish figures.

66

Post-Materialist Religion

Figure 2.3. Security values for birth cohorts in pooled ESS round 1 to 6 data from Finland, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Source: ESS Round 1–6 2013.

Modes of interpersonal relations Two general cultural types have been suggested in previous literature: individualistic and collectivistic. These can be seen at the individual level as psychological traits whereby people come to prefer – or see as normal – certain kinds of modes of interpersonal relations, and as such they can indicate variability in the types of legitimating frameworks individuals seek and subscribe to. The dual concept of Individualism–Collectivism was first defined in cross-cultural psychology by Geert Hofstede (1980). He called these culture-specific mental programs. Harry Triandis saw them as cultural syndromes, or ‘pattern[s] characterised by shared beliefs, attitudes, norms, roles and values that are organised around a theme and that can be found



Pragmatism and the study of religions

67

in certain geographic regions during a particular historic period’ (Triandis 1995, p. 43). Underlying individualism is the assumption that one could belong to any number of changing, emerging and dynamic groups, any of which may be useful to the self at one time or another and almost none of which is mandatory. A collectivist perspective is that the self is a component of the in-group rather than an independent entity and that these in-groups are fixed by some quality that is normally beyond the individual’s control (Oyserman 1993, p. 1007). A predictable relation of these perspectives to religious affiliation is the basic assumption of the individualisation model of religious change. Maxim Voronov and Jefferson A. Singer (2002) argued against the use of Individualism–Collectivism as a strict dichotomy. They noted that individualism and collectivism are not stable psychological traits, but, rather, they should be seen as patterns of behaviour that are based upon various ecological and cultural-contextual factors. Although these factors result in seemingly predictable and stable behaviours that have been interpreted as collectivistic or individualistic syndromes, the behavioural patterns are more dynamic and context sensitive than psychological traits would be. Therefore they are context sensitive, variable and mutable when these factors change. In other words, rather than viewing the constructs as rigid classifications, they are here thought of as variations in emphasis on the different schemes people can employ when they focus attention on aspects of self as related to others. Various sets of constructs have been suggested as sub-scales or types of Individualism–Collectivism. For example, Marilynn B. Brewer and Ya-Ru Chen (2007) postulated that there are two types of collectivism. Both types focus on in-group rather than out-group, but mean different things by an in-group. Similar to the distinctions between weak and strong ties (Granovetter 1983), ‘relational collectivism’ is based upon personal relations whereas ‘group collectivism’ is based upon categorical group memberships. Anu Realo and others (1997) argued that collectivism can focus on different kinds of social relations, such as family, peers or society, making it a more target specific construct. In a later study Realo and others (2002) found three individualism components: autonomy, mature self-responsibility and uniqueness. Most relevant for the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric social interactions is the distinction between horizontal and vertical Individualism–Collectivism,

68

Post-Materialist Religion

where the horizontal pole tends to view people as essentially equal and the vertical pole sees hierarchy structures as natural and necessary (Singelis et al. 1995; Triandis 1995; Triandis and Gelfand 1998). The 32-item questionnaire published by Triandis (1995) is the one I use in the surveys. The instrument explores the extent to which individuals see themselves as parts of a collective, emphasise their connectedness to other members, and are motivated by its norms and the duties imposed by it, and to what extent people are primarily motivated by their own preferences, needs, rights and the contracts they have established with others, independent of any determined community. Furthermore, it asks whether individuals are seen as essentially the same and equal, or are people differentiated by some quality and seen as unequal. Table 2.2. gives brief descriptions of the four theoretical constructs of horizontal and vertical Individualism–Collectivism. In the theoretical model, the four constructs are posited to form two dimensions, but this has not been supported by empirical findings. The inter-correlations between the scales suggest that the constructs do not always align according to the two dimension model (Li and Aksoy 2007). The actual components of interpersonal relations and their position in relation to each other can therefore be different from the theoretical model, and this needs to be tested before proceeding with analysis. The Individualism–Collectivism instrument is used to draw inference as to whether the individual sees strong ties or weak ties as the norm and whether he or she sees symmetric or asymmetric communication as natural, or preferable. I posit that the patterns of preference measured by the instrument are different modalities of interpersonal relations, and while individuals can have different repertoires of these modes, each activated in different contexts, in a survey set-up the respondent’s ideal – or idealised – mode will be recorded. This signifies their view on how relations to others should be construed.

Survey procedures The respondent’s modes for interpersonal interactions were explored with the 32-item version of the Individualism–Collectivism questionnaire that Harry Triandis (1995, pp. 205–6) suggests to be used when the aim is to discern the egalitarian and hierarchical (horizontal and vertical in his jargon) aspects of



Pragmatism and the study of religions

69

Table 2.2. The horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism Horizontal individualism includes the conception of an autonomous individual and emphasis of equality. It allows individuals to do their own thing without the restraints provided by in-groups, but it may lead to social isolation, in which individuals do their own thing but no one approves of what they do. Vertical individualism includes the conception of an autonomous individual, and acceptance of inequality. With its emphasis on competition, it is likely to result in creativity and high effort, but may result in extreme stress, especially after failures in competition. Horizontal collectivism includes perceiving the self as a part of the collective, but seeing all members of the collective as the same; thus stressing equality. It is likely to lead to much social support and sociability, but could absorb much of the individual’s energy in social relationships, thus decreasing productivity. Vertical collectivism includes perceiving the self as a part (or an aspect) of a collective and accepting inequality within the collective. It provides protection and security and reduces the need for personal decisions, which some people find anxiety provoking. Source: Triandis and Gelfand 1998.

Individualism–Collectivism. The respondent’s value priorities were studied with a 21-item questionnaire based on Shalom Schwartz’s model of basic human values (Schwartz et al. 2001). Opportunity sampling was used because there is no reliable information available on the size or demographic characteristics of the Pagan population and even if there was there is no method for achieving a truly representative random sample of Pagans in any of the surveyed countries. Different survey formats (paper and electronic) and different distribution locations and strategies were used to improve the representativeness of the sample (de Vaus 2002, pp. 89–90; Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998, p. 73). The target number of cases was 400, to achieve a sampling error no higher than 5 per cent at 95 per cent confidence level, assuming representativeness of the sample and high heterogeneity of the population (de Vaus 2002, pp. 80–2). The locations for the initial survey distribution were selected on the basis of previous research on Paganism in the three countries. A location with the largest potential Pagan community in each country was selected. A secondary smaller location was selected from a different region in each country, based upon its significance to Pagans in that country. The locations selected were Dublin and Cork in Ireland, London and Avebury in England, and Helsinki and Turku in Finland.

70

Post-Materialist Religion

The survey was distributed in three phases. In the first phase, paper questionnaires were handed out at Pagan meetings in the areas of study. Visits were organised to Pagan meetings in each location, with the exception of Cork, to introduce the research project, and to hand out the questionnaire to interested individuals. Meetings were selected on the basis of information gathered from Pagan magazines, web pages and mailing lists. Before entering the meetings, the organisers were asked for permission. Reception of the survey was good, and people were generally interested in survey research on Paganism. In the second phase, paper questionnaires were delivered by mail either via key informants or directly to respondents. Key informants were asked to forward survey invitations to closed members-only mailing lists. A number of forms and return envelopes were sent to these key informants, and they then delivered the forms to the interested individuals. People also approached me directly via e-mail for the questionnaire. A total of 399 paper questionnaires, 299 in English and 100 in Finnish, were delivered.10 In the last phase an electronic version of the survey was set up using a commercial web survey company.11 English and Finnish versions of the electronic survey were created that were identical with the paper version. A set of links to the survey was generated with an identification code that made it possible to identify which link was followed to the survey. The links were then posted to various Pagan mailing lists, with the covering letter and the introduction to the survey. Lists where membership was moderated and limited to Pagans were chosen, based upon the descriptions provided for the lists, to represent a wide range of geographical areas and different audiences.12

The Pagan sample The paper and pencil survey produced 112 responses, with 76 of the 299 English and 36 of the 100 Finnish forms returned. The electronic survey was completed by 85 per cent of the people who started filling in the form, and produced 370 complete English and 46 Finnish responses. The total number of responses from the paper and electronic surveys was 528. Of these 43 were from Ireland, 401 from the UK and 84 from Finland.13 The Pagan path was



Pragmatism and the study of religions

71

indicated by 513 respondents. People who indicated their primary religious or spiritual path as esoteric, Satanist, New Age, Christian, atheist or Buddhist were excluded.14 After excluding the 30 responses that stated paths that, for the purposes of this study, were defined as non-Pagan, and forms with incomplete data, the total number of valid responses was 451. The descriptive statistics for the Pagan sample are shown in Table 2.3. Even though it is not possible to differentiate between age, cohort and period effects with a sample that is collected in one period of time, generations within that sample can be used to represent individuals born in the different periods of Inglehart’s value-change timeline. For this purpose, the sample was divided into broad birth cohorts. The oldest cohort, born before 1958, have grown up when, according to Inglehart and Welzel (2005, pp. 99–107), the vast majority of living individuals emphasised materialist values. The median cohort, born between 1958 and 1977, grew up during the transition period from mostly materialists to mostly post-materialists. The youngest cohort has grown up at a time when people they interact with are more likely to embrace post-materialist values. In the Pagan sample 21 per cent were born before 1958, 57 per cent from 1958 to 1977, and 22 per cent after 1977. The

Table 2.3. The Pagan sample UK n Gender Birth cohort Education

Total

Female Male Born before 1958 Born 1958 to 1977 Born after 1977 No official Basic Secondary First degreea Second degreeb Higher degreec

208 142 87 209 54 8 3 55 155 107 22 350

%

Ireland

Finland

n

n

59 21 41 12 25 5 60 24 15 4 2 1 1 0 16 2 44 14 31 16 6 0 100 33

%

64 50 36 18 15 3 73 23 12 42 3 0 0 6 6 29 42 15 49 15 0 3 100 68

Total

%

n

%

74 27 4 34 62 0 9 43 22 22 4 100

279 172 95 256 100 9 9 86 184 138 25 451

62 38 21 57 22 2 2 19 41 31 6 100

a

e.g., BA or vocational diploma in the UK, first degree or diploma in Ireland, and FK or AMK in Finland.

b

e.g., MA.

c

e.g., PhD.

Post-Materialist Religion

72

Finnish sample is by far the youngest (62 per cent born after 1977), and the UK sample the oldest (25 per cent born before 1958). Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (62 per cent) were women, reflecting the estimated gender ratio observed during fieldwork in various Pagan meetings and gatherings in the countries studied. This gender imbalance was most pronounced in Finland, where 74 per cent of respondents were women, whereas in the UK the figure was 59 per cent. The Pagans are also relatively highly educated, with 41 per cent holding BA or equivalent degrees, 31 per cent MA and 6 per cent PhD. The Finnish sample is least educated, reflecting the large proportion of young respondents. The valid cases were arranged into subgroups, based upon the Pagan path they are following. These are shown in Table 2.4. Five of these subgroups are well-established major branches of Paganism, or otherwise common selfdescriptions: Wicca or Witchcraft, Druidic, Shamanic, Heathen and Pagan. In addition to these, three compound groups were created. These collect various self-identifications based upon common themes found in the descriptions and definitions the respondents had given. A group labelled ‘Nature’ includes paths and path descriptions that emphasise nature, ecology, the Earth, animism and pantheism. A group labelled ‘Reconstruction’ includes reconstructions of

Table 2.4. The Pagan paths represented in the sample UK Wicca or Witchcraft Druidic Shamanic Heathen Pagan Naturea Reconstructionb Goddess focusc Other Total

Ireland

Finland

Total

n

%

n

%

n

%

n

%

80 32 17 29 87 24 47 11 23 350

23 9 5 8 25 7 13 3 7 100

10 6 1 0 4 6 3 0 3 33

30 18 3 0 12 18 9 0 9 100

21 1 5 5 14 7 10 1 4 68

31 2 7 7 21 10 15 2 6 100

111 39 23 34 105 37 60 12 30 451

25 9 5 8 23 8 13 3 7 100

With descriptions including eco-pagan, pantheist, animist or emphasis on nature, ecology or the environment. b With emphasis on reconstruction of a culture specific tradition, such as Brythonic, Celtic, Finnish, Egyptian and Mithraism. c With specified emphasis on female deities, for example Reclaiming Wicca, Goddess spirituality, etc. a



Pragmatism and the study of religions

73

different traditions based upon various cultures and mythologies that do not fit under, or distance themselves from, the five established branches, such as Brythonic, Celtic, Finnish and Egyptian traditions, Mithraism and people who self-identify simply as polytheists. The third group was labelled ‘Goddess focus’ and it includes, for example, Goddess spirituality, Reclaiming Wicca and those who emphasise various goddesses in their path description. A survey of Open University students was organised with the help of the Open University Survey Office, and in collaboration with the Institute of Education Technology (IET). The student sample acts as a proxy for determining the value structure and the distribution of Individualism and Collectivism. The data from the survey remains the property of the Open University Survey Office, and can be used in further studies by the IET, linking the findings with learning outcomes. The Open University student survey ran from 15 July to 21 August 2007, just before the start of the Pagan survey. The Survey Office selected a random sample of 500 UK-based students on an undergraduate level course in 2007. The Survey Office sent printed survey questionnaires, with a covering letter and a return envelope, to the participants. No incentive for responding to the survey was given. The students were invited to take part in a survey of differences in Individualism, Collectivism and value priorities among the Open University student population, and they were told that it was part of a research project to examine the distribution of different value priorities among the general population of the UK. A follow-up letter was sent to the participants who had not responded after three weeks. The questionnaire form included only the Individualism–Collectivism scale and the values questionnaire, as described above. Demographic information was added to the responses by the survey office. For data protection and privacy reasons I was only allowed to know the gender and age of the participants. Table 2.5. shows that the Pagan and the Open University student samples are comparable in their gender and birth-cohort distributions. The age range of Open University students was from 17 to 64 with a mean of 39.7 (SD = 12.7) and 68 per cent of respondents were women. Men were older (mean = 43.3, SD = 13.92) than women (mean = 38, SD = 11.7). When split into three birth cohorts, 20.8 per cent were born before 1958, 55.4 per cent from 1958 to 1977 and 23.8 per cent after 1977.

74

Post-Materialist Religion

Table 2.5. Comparing the Pagan and the Open University student samples Pagans Gender Birth cohort Total

Female Male Born after 1977 Born 1958 to 1977 Born before 1958

Open University students

n

%

n

%

279 172 100 256 95 451

62 38 22 57 21 100

88 42 31 72 27 130

68 32 24 55 21 100

Fieldwork procedures I conducted participant observation in several Pagan meetings and gatherings from 2005 until 2009 in Helsinki, Turku, London, Avebury and Dublin. Some of these events were in places that are significant for Pagans – such as sites where there are Neolithic or other pre-historical remains and places that are associated with mythical or historical events – and some were venues where Pagans organise their regular meetings, which have no intrinsic importance to them. These were usually the common room of a pub or a hired meeting hall for larger gatherings. The largest of these were the three Witchfest gatherings (2005, 2006, 2007), attracting nearly 1,000 participants each year, three calendar rituals in London (Spring Equinox, Lammas and Yule 2007) attracting between 50 and 100 participants in each event, and a Pagan ritual in Avebury during a lunar eclipse in February 2007. Other events I followed were the Helsinki Pagan Pride in June 2006, the Glastonbury Goddess conference procession in August 2007, and summer solstices in Stonehenge (2008) and Avebury (2009). I also travelled with Pagans to sites that are significant to them in Ireland (Tara) and England (Stonehenge, Avebury, West Kennet Long Barrow, Silbury Hill, Wayland’s Smithy, The Uffington White Horse and Glastonbury Tor). I interviewed seventeen Pagans in twelve interview sessions and three e-mail interviews. The interviews focused on three main topics: 1) the relationship of individual and community, or how the individual is seen in relation to others, and the kind of changes the participants have observed in these communities and in society in general; 2) what participants see as



Pragmatism and the study of religions

75

the central values, or the most important things, in life for them; and 3) how Paganism is seen in relation to mainstream religions, and what is seen as particularly attractive in Paganism. The interviews were analysed in order to find out how Pagans rationalise their value priorities: for example, how individual freedom and responsibility are motivated as a basis of morality, what kinds of legitimisations are offered for the values they hold, and to what extent these can be seen as examples of a private moral reflection process and post-conventional morality. The participants for the interviews were chosen from among Pagans who have been involved in Paganism for a long time and who are active and central figures in their respective communities. Seven participants were from Ireland (Rick, James, Joanna, Godwin, Fred, Beth and Peter), five from England (Danielle, Gary, George, Kenneth and John), three from Finland (Maija, Tomi and Fergus) and two from Scotland (Frida and Leah).15 The participants were approached either directly during a meeting or via someone I had met at one of the meetings. People who have been involved in the Pagan movement for a long time were chosen in order to gain insight into the relations of the Pagans and the Pagan movement to society, and into the changes in these relationships over the years. Therefore the participants represent more senior people in the movement rather than the whole movement. The youngest interviewee was in her late 20s and the oldest was in her late 60s.

3

Religious identity and values

In this chapter I explore the value priorities of Pagans and different groups of the mainstream population. The mainstream data was obtained from the representative national samples collected in the third round of the European Social Survey (ESS; Jowell and Central Co-ordinating Team 2008). A panel of three countries – Ireland, the UK and Finland – is used to compare the value priorities of groups representing old and new religions and different positions on religion. The countries are compared to see if a different religious history and cultural background has an effect on values or the post-materialist value change process. From the ESS sample I constructed five groups based on individuals’ religious belonging, participation and self-reported level of religiosity. To corroborate the theory of monotonic intergenerational value change, it is expected that in all countries and all groups, the younger cohorts attribute progressively greater importance to post-materialist priorities, such as universalism and self-direction, and less importance to materialist priorities, such as security (Smith and Schwartz 1997, p. 91). Pagans are expected to emphasise post-materialist values more, indicating that Paganism provides a supporting and legitimating framework for individuals who have that kind of value priorities.

Data from the European Social Survey The European Social Survey aims to map long-term attitude trends in Europe’s social, political and moral climate, and to measure and interpret changes over

78

Post-Materialist Religion

time in people’s values. The survey has been run on every other year since 2002 and the 2012 round is the sixth in the series. Data collection for the third round was completed by the end of 2007, coinciding with the time I collected the Pagan survey data. The ESS is funded by the European Commission, the European Science Foundation and national academic funding bodies, and the datasets are made available for academic research purposes (Jowell and Central Co-ordinating Team 2009). Data collection in the ESS is based on hour-long face-to-face interviews. A core questionnaire, supplementary questionnaire and two or more different rotating modules are used for each round, selected from suggestions sent by multinational teams of researchers. Sampling and interviews were conducted by national statistics agencies1 following the guidelines laid out by a central co-ordinating team. The objective of the sampling procedure was full coverage of the residential population in each country, with a target sample size of 1,500, selected by strict random probability methods, making the survey representative of all persons aged 15 and over, with no upper age limit. In the Republic of Ireland sampling was based on the selection of addresses from GeoDirectory, in the UK it was based on the selection of addresses from Postcode Address Files, and in Finland it was based on the selection of individuals from the population register. The original English questionnaire was translated from an annotated source questionnaire to ensure that the translation conveys the same meaning in each language. In Finland the questionnaire was administered in either Finnish or Swedish, depending on the first language of the interviewee. In Ireland and the UK the questionnaire was administered in English. The data I use as comparison is from the third round of ESS, completed in 2006 or 2007 in the three panel countries.2 Response rates were 56.8 per cent for Ireland, 54.6 per cent for the UK and 64.4 per cent for Finland. The Schwartz values instrument was part of the supplementary questionnaire, which was administered as part of the face-toface interview in the UK and as a self-completed questionnaire in Ireland and Finland (Jowell and Central Co-ordinating Team 2008).



Religious identity and values

79

Country samples To make the respondents’ age range compatible with the Pagan sample, I included individuals who were at least 18 years old at the time of the survey and who had fully completed the values inventory. I then divided these into the five groups based on the religion indicators and the same three birth cohorts as the Pagans. The demographic information and sample sizes for each country are shown in Table 3.1. below. In order to create comparable categories for the level of education, I re-coded the level of education as a sequence from ‘no official degree’ to ‘higher academic degree’. The per-country differences were consolidated by re-coding the level of education based on the ESS level of education classification and years of full-time education for each case. People who have passed GCSEs in the UK, intermediate certificate in Ireland, and second stage of primary school in Finland are considered to have basic education. Those with A levels or NVQ3 in the UK, leaving certificate in Ireland, and matriculation examination or vocational school diploma in Finland are counted as having secondary education. Cases that have been coded as ‘Post-secondary, non-tertiary’ or as ‘First stage of tertiary’ with up to 16 years of education were re-coded as first degree, and over 16 years as second degree. Second degree also includes cases in Ireland with ESS coding ‘Second stage of tertiary’ and up to 21 years of education. After the re-coding the UK sample has the largest proportion of people with only basic education and Finland has the lowest (26 per cent). However, in the UK and Ireland more people have first degrees than in Finland. While this re-coding method does not guarantee exact coding of particular degrees and qualifications, it produces a roughly comparable estimate of the level of education in terms of the approximate scope of the highest qualification achieved plus years of study. According to national census data for the Republic of Ireland for 2006 (Central Statistics Office 2011), 86.8 per cent of Irish are Catholic, 4.4 per cent have no religion, and 3 per cent belong to the Church of Ireland or Protestant denominations. In the ESS data for the Republic of Ireland, of the people who answered the questions about religion, 75.4 per cent were Catholic, 19.1 per cent do not belong to any religion, and 3.9 per cent are other Christians (including the Church of Ireland, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and other

80

Post-Materialist Religion

Christian denominations). The difference from the census statistics is considerable in the case of those who do not belong. This may reflect the differences in the formulation of the question. In the ESS, personal association with a religion or denomination was questioned rather than official membership. The question was ‘Do you consider yourself as belonging to any particular religion or denomination?’ In the census, the question was simply ‘What is your religion?’, with options for Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, Islam, other religion and no religion. The Office for National Statistics (Office for National Statistics 2004) reports that in 2001 71.6 per cent of the UK population said that their religion was Christian, 2.7 per cent are Muslim, and 15.5 per cent have no religion. In the ESS data 22.2 per cent are Protestant, 8.9 per cent are Catholic, 13.6 per cent stated other Christian denominations (adding up to 44.8 per cent Christian), and 51.6 per cent do not belong to any religion or denomination. As in the Irish case the difference may be explained by the different ways of formulating the question. In the census form the question was ‘What is your religion?’, with options for none, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and any other religion. According to the Finnish Population Register (Valjus 2007), in 2006 82.4 per cent of the Finnish population were Lutheran, about 1.1 per cent were other Christians (mostly Eastern Orthodox), and 15.3 per cent were not members of any registered religious association. In the ESS data 59.6 per cent are Protestant, 1.5 per cent are other Christian, and 38.4 per cent do not belong to any religion. The Statistics Finland figures are based on data from Population Information System, which contains constantly updated information on individuals. This records official membership of a registered religious organisation rather than the individual’s sense of belonging. As with the Irish and the UK samples, differences in percentage shares can be explained by a different methodology and formulation of the question.

Method of classification into groups based on religious self-identification Because Christianity is the majority religion in all three countries, it was chosen to represent traditional mainstream religions. My assumption was that



Religious identity and values

81

Christians are not a homogeneous group, but there are different subgroups with different value priorities. One obvious method to divide Christians into subgroups would be to use denomination as a grouping variable. However, this is problematic because there are no representative data for the major denominations (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican) in each of the countries I compare. Furthermore, previous research has suggested that religiosity and religious participation are more significant factors in people’s value priorities than denomination (Schwartz and Huismans 1995; Cukur et al. 2004; Fontaine et al. 2005; Roccas 2005). For this purpose, three Christian groups were created based on four variables indicating belonging, religiosity and religious activities. The groups are intended to represent different extremes of the possible combinations of these variables. Table 3.1. shows the demographic statistics and division in the groups per country. The relevant questions about belonging and religiosity in the ESS survey are ‘Do you consider yourself as belonging to any particular religion or denomination?’ and ‘Regardless of whether you belong to a particular religion, how religious would you say you are?’, with a 0–10 scale from not at all religious to very religious. In the former question, according to the ESS interviewer’s instructions, the emphasis is on personal association rather than official membership. The questions about religious activity focused on the frequency of collective and private rituals, and were ‘Apart from special occasions such as weddings and funerals, about how often do you attend religious services nowadays?’ and ‘Apart from when you are at religious services, how often, if at all, do you pray?’ A seven-point scale from every day to never was used for the frequency items. The religiosity index was used to divide those who say that they belong to one of the Christian denominations into a moderate religiosity group and a high religiosity group. Participation at least once a month was considered regular participation. Those who see themselves as moderately religious (1–5 on the self-reported religiosity index) and neither attend religious services nor pray at least once a month were included in the group labeled Cultural Christians. The highly religious group (over 5 on the self-reported religiosity index) was divided into Active Christians who attend religious services and pray regularly, and Passive Christians who do not attend services regularly. The resulting three Christian groups are therefore: 1) the ‘Cultural Christians’ who see themselves as only moderately religious and neither pray nor participate

82

Post-Materialist Religion

Table 3.1. The European Social Survey sample UK Gender Birth cohort Education

Group

Total

Female Male Before 1958 1958 to 1977 After 1977 No official Basic Secondarya First degreeb Second degreec Higher degreed Non-religious Non-belonging Cultural Christians Passive Christian Active Christian

Ireland Finland

Total

n

%

n

%

n

%

n

%

1015 865 895 694 291 0 879 218 437 321 25 373 747 244 244 272 1880

54 46 48 37 16 0 47 12 23 17 1 20 40 13 13 15 100

488 399 345 367 175 44 285 199 259 79 21 70 180 114 73 450 887

55 45 39 41 20 5 32 22 29 9 2 8 20 13 8 51 100

496 467 486 311 166 26 242 370 145 154 26 65 344 166 288 100 963

52 49 51 32 17 3 25 38 15 16 3 7 36 17 30 10 100

1999 1731 1726 1372 632 70 1406 787 841 554 72 508 1271 524 605 822 3730

54 46 46 37 17 2 38 21 23 15 2 14 34 14 16 22 100

Note: These are not representative samples of the countries. While the ESS data is representative by design, 85 non-Christians and 621 Christians were excluded by the grouping procedure, and 91 cases were excluded because of missing data. a

e.g., A-levels or NVQ3 in the UK, leaving certificate in Ireland, and matriculation examination or vocational school diploma in Finland.

b

e.g., BA or NVQ4/5 in the UK, first degree or vocational diploma in Ireland, and FK or AMK in Finland.

c

e.g., MA.

d

e.g., PhD.

in religious activities regularly; 2) the ‘Passive Christians’ who see themselves as highly religious, but do not participate in religious activities regularly; and 3) the ‘Active Christians’ who see themselves as highly religious and pray and participate in religious activities regularly. In addition to the Christian groups, two other groups were established from the ESS data. The first are people who say that they are not at all religious. The second are those who say that they do not belong to any religion, but are at least minimally religious, with self-reported religiosity of 1 or higher. This group can be seen as those who ‘believe without belonging’, to use Grace Davie’s phrase (Davie 2000, p. 3). As is obvious by the grouping procedure, the aim was not to obtain nationally representative groupings – the procedure excludes some individuals



Religious identity and values

83

– but rather the groups are used to gauge what effect participation in religious activities has on values. The excluded group are those Christians who do not see themselves as very religious but attend and pray regularly. This groups is mainly from Ireland and in the analysis did not differ significantly from the other Christian groups in that country. The justification for dropping this group was the lack of a sufficient sample in the other countries and the need to keep the definition of the groups such that religious identification and participation remain as separate defining factors between the groups. In other words, the groups compared are intentionally maximising differences in these factors. When comparing the country samples in the ESS data, 51 per cent of the Irish sample is highly religious and active Christians, whereas in the other countries the largest group is the Non-Belonging. About 20 per cent of the UK sample, but only 8 per cent of the Irish and 7 per cent of the Finnish samples, are non-religious. The mean religiosity index is 4.11 for the Non-Belonging group, 3.45 for cultural Christians, 7.11 for passive Christians and 7.82 for active Christians. When the five groups are added to the data from the Pagan survey, the total number of valid cases is 4,181, shown in Table 3.2. The proportion of women is higher in the Pagan and the more religious Christian groups, whereas the Non-Belonging group is equally divided, and there are slightly more men in the cultural Christian and Non-Religious groups. The Pagans have higher levels of education, with 78 per cent holding a degree, while the other groups are at nearly equal levels with each other. The Pagan and the Non-Religious groups are the youngest, and the more religious and active groups are progressively older. Mean ages for groups are 43.8 for the Non-Religious, 45.5 for Non-Belonging, 47.9 for cultural Christians, 53.2 for passive Christians and 55.4 for active Christians.3

Validating the theoretical value model The internal consistency of the values scales was determined for combined Christian, Pagan, Non-Belonging, and Non-Religious groups with Cronbach’s coefficient alpha statistic. Furthermore, the theoretical model that postulates

Post-Materialist Religion

84

Table 3.2. Groups based on self-identification PG n

%

NR n

%

NB n

CC %

n

%

PC n

%

AC n

%

Total n

%

Gender Female Male

279 62 217 43 634 50 222 42 398 66 528 64 1999 54 172 38 291 57 637 50 302 58 207 34 294 36 1731 46

Birth cohort Before 1958 1958 to 1977 After 1977

95 21 169 33 488 38 93 43 340 56 503 61 1726 46 256 57 225 44 515 41 205 39 189 31 238 29 1372 37 100 22 114 22 268 21 226 18 76 13 81 10 632 17

Educationa No official Basic Secondary First Second Higher Total

9 9 86 184 138 25 451

2 2 19 41 31 6 100

3 178 97 134 84 12 508

1 35 19 26 17 2 100

15 475 300 264 189 28 1271

1 37 24 21 15 2 100

3 208 129 118 62 4 524

1 40 25 23 12 1 100

13 230 128 132 90 12 605

2 38 21 22 15 2 100

36 315 133 193 129 16 822

4 38 16 24 16 2 100

70 1406 787 841 554 72 4181

2 38 21 23 15 2 100

Note: PG=Pagan, NR=Non-Religious, NB=Non-Belonging, CC=Cultural Christian, PC=Passive Christian, AC=Active Christian. a

See Table 3.1. for notes on the categories for level of education.

the relations of the different human value types (shown in Figure 2 in Chapter 2) was tested using a protocol recommended by Schwartz in the proposal document for implementing the values instrument for the ESS (Schwartz 2001). Scores for each value type construct were computed as a means of the items measuring that type. Indices for the higher-order value types were computed according to instructions by Schwartz (2001, p. 288), whereby self-transcendence is measured by the mean of the benevolence and universalism items, self-enhancement by the mean of power and achievement items, conservation by the mean of tradition, conformity and security items, and openness-to-change by the mean of self-direction, stimulation and hedonism items. Because individuals use response scales differently (for example some avoid extremes while others may avoid the medium points), the responses need to be controlled for this scale-use effect (Grimm and Church 1999). Schwartz (1992) explored different methods for achieving



Religious identity and values

85

this. His recommendation was that each individual score is centred on the mean response of that individual to all items. Following Schwartz’s guidelines I centred the value type scores by subtracting the individual’s total mean response score from the value-type scores. Cronbach’s coefficient alpha statistic indicated that reliability was adequate for all the groups for the higher-order value types (from 0.60 to 0.76), but low for some of the individual value types (from 0.15 to 0.76). Low alpha reliability for the individual value types is expected because the items measuring the ten value types were selected to cover different conceptual components of each value type, rather than to measure a singular concept redundantly, as is the usual case in survey instruments (Schwartz 2001, p. 277). Tradition, for example, appears particularly weak. It is a combination of humility and the importance of religious or family traditions, and has low alpha for the non-religious, the non-belonging and the Pagan groups, possibly reflecting the ambivalence of the scale for them. They may interpret the term religion used in one of the items as referring to the institutionalised form of religion from which they are distancing themselves, but may still have high regard for family and for cultural traditions and customs. Also, the association of the humility component with tradition may vary greatly in these groups. Nevertheless, Schwartz justified the tradition value type as a broad measure of submission of self to external forces in the wider reality (2001, p. 303). Overall, the alpha statistics are at the same level as those reported by Ramos (2006, p. 42) for the ESS round 1 data, and by Schwartz (2001, p. 311) for a pilot sample (n = 444) in his proposal document.

Testing the relational value structure To test the validity of the model of distinct and relational value types, the value structure was plotted on a two-dimensional space for each of the groups separately using SPSS multidimensional scaling procedure (PROXSCAL), with the non-centred raw scores of the 21 value items and the centred value type means.4 This was done separately for the ESS sample and the Pagan sample. Figure 3.1. shows the multidimensional diagrams for PVQ–21 items and the ten value types for the ESS sample (n = 4730) and Figure 3.2. shows these for the Pagan sample (n = 451).

86

Post-Materialist Religion

Figure 3.1. Value structure for the ESS sample with the twenty-one value items (left) and the ten value types (right). Note: Dispersion accounted for items/types = 0.98767/0.99765, normalised raw stress = 0.01233/0.00235, Tucker’s coefficient of congruence = 0.99382/0.99882. Normalised raw stress measures the misfit of the data, while the dispersion accounted for and Tucker’s coefficient of congruence measure the fit. Lowerstress measures (to a minimum of 0) and higher-fit measures (to a maximum of 1) indicate better solutions.

Figure 3.2. Value structure for the Pagan sample with the twenty-one value items (left) and the ten value types (right). Note: Dispersion accounted for items/types = 0.97178/0.99741, normalised raw stress = 0.02822/0.00259, Tucker’s coefficient of congruence = 0.98579/0.99871.



Religious identity and values

87

The dimensionality of the higher-order value types was tested using the Pearson correlation. As predicted by the model, the higher-order types form two negatively correlated pairs: conservation and openness-to-change define one bipolar dimension (p