Religiosity in East and West: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges from Global and Local Perspectives [1st ed.] 9783658310349, 9783658310356

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Thinking Beyond the West: Seeing Religions with Unaccustomed Eyes (James V. Spickard)....Pages 3-18
Religion, a Bridge or Barrier in Society? (Carolin Hillenbrand)....Pages 19-41
Front Matter ....Pages 43-43
Ritual Reproduction in Jewish Communities in Germany: The Case of Circumcision (Susanne Tübel)....Pages 45-59
The Case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway and the Emotional Implications of Eschatological Expectations and Membership: Non-individualized Doctrinal Beliefs Within a Highly Individualized Mainstream Society (Hege Kristin Ringnes, Sarah Demmrich)....Pages 61-75
East–West Religiosity: Some Peculiarities of Religiosity of European Followers of Eastern Teachings and Practices (Antoaneta Nikolova)....Pages 77-98
Hungary—Continuing and Changing Trends and Mechanisms of Religious Change (Gergely Rosta)....Pages 99-117
Front Matter ....Pages 119-119
Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity: An Anthropological Perspective on Post-soviet Russia (Tobias Köllner)....Pages 121-140
Muslims’ Religious Freedom and Religiosity: Measurement and Impact (Hannah M. Ridge)....Pages 141-163
Front Matter ....Pages 165-165
An Intersection of Religion and Pillars of the Mongolian Society (Danzan Narantuya)....Pages 167-181
The Contours of Religiosity in Hinduism: Locating Religious Doctrines, Interrogating Communal Behavior (Debabrata Baral)....Pages 183-204
Buddhism in Asia: Mapping the Evolving Principles of Religiosity (Koyal Verma)....Pages 205-219
Religion and Religiosity in a Himalayan Tribal Community - a Study of Jaunsaris (Ipshita Soni, Sarita Ghai)....Pages 221-231
Contextualizing Religiosity Within the Ramkatha (Mrinal Pande)....Pages 233-248

Citation preview

Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie

Sarah Demmrich Ulrich Riegel Editors

Religiosity in East and West Conceptual and Methodological Challenges from Global and Local Perspectives

Veröffentlichungen der Sektion ­Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie Series Editors Marc Breuer, Fachbereich Sozialwesen, Katholische Hochschule Nordrhein-Westfalen, Paderborn, Germany Uta Karstein, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Jens Köhrsen, Theologische Fakultät, Universität Basel, Basel, Switzerland Kornelia Sammet, Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Annette Schnabel, Soziologie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany Alexander Yendell, Institut für Praktische Theologie, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/12575

Sarah Demmrich · Ulrich Riegel Editors

Religiosity in East and West Conceptual and Methodological Challenges from Global and Local Perspectives

Editors Sarah Demmrich Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Münster, Germany

Ulrich Riegel Universität Siegen Siegen, Germany

Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie ISBN 978-3-658-31034-9 ISBN 978-3-658-31035-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6 Springer VS © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Cori Antonia Mackrodt This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Preface

The concept of religiosity is a highly individual aspect of religion. The initial examinations of the concept were shaped by Protestant and secular scholars in a culturally Western environment (Belzen 2015; Demmrich, Allolio-Näcke and Wolfradt in press) and stimulated a huge amount of research and further development within the social sciences, especially the sociology of religion. In non-Western environments, however, individualization and a self-centered perspective on religiosity seem to be of limited use in terms of adequately describing and assessing religiosity. Moreover, the recognition of Western biases in such studies already raised, some 20 years ago, the question of whether research into religiosity is actually a science of Western Christianity (Hill and Hood 1999; Loewenthal 2000; for a newer contribution see Spickard 2017). Even within the Western environment, the current concepts and instruments are sometimes only partially applicable to highly religious or orthodox individuals (e.g. Vermeer and Scheepers 2017). This observation raises the question of whether the contemporary conceptualizations and operationalization of religiosity are too strongly oriented towards the ideal of an enlightened and individualized belief. In light of these two observations, we hosted the interdisciplinary and international conference “Religiosity in East and West: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges” at the University of Munster, Germany, from 25 to 27 June 2019. More than 50 scholars from 17 countries, ranging from America and Europe to the Middle and Far East, discussed the established concepts of religiosity with the aim of expanding them and providing appropriate alternatives. On the one hand, the local approaches from non-Western sociological contexts contribute an important perspective to the contemporary discourse of religiosity research (e.g., Buddhist or Hindu religiosity), since their ideas usually start from a collective viewpoint, not from the individual (see Herriot 2009). On the other hand, a

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new understanding of highly religious, orthodox to fundamentalist milieus, which are — as counter-movements to secularization and individualization (e.g., Bruce 2008) — growing in modern societies, can also stimulate innovative and non-individualized approaches to the concept of religiosity. With this volume of conference proceedings1Religiosity in East and West: Conceptual and Methodological Challengesfrom Global and Local Perspectives in the series of the Section on Sociology of Religion of the German Sociological Association, we pay special attention to the most significant conference contributions with a sociological focus. It thereby is, to the best of our knowledge, the first presentation of a broader international platform aimed at exchanging scholarly approaches to new understandings of religiosity. The following chapters share both empirical insights in and theoretical reflections on religiosity within and beyond the European context, critically assess the applicability of concepts, measures, and empirical findings as well as presenting and discussing alternative conceptualizations from either a global or a local perspective, including how Eastern religions influence the West and vice versa. This volume opens with two contributions from a global perspective in which James V. Spickard (Redlands University, USA) takes the lead. In this chapter, Spickard shows how the social scientific approach to religion is deeply shaped by a Western-cultural understanding of religion and how this foundation biases the perception of non-Western faiths. In order to be able to see religions with unaccustomed eyes, he performs a thought experiment with us asking how the understanding of religions would look if social sciences had been invented in other areas of the world, such as in China or among Native Americans. A different but thorough global approach is taken by Carolin Hillenbrand (University Münster, Germany) when she addresses the role of religiosity in social cohesion during times of increasing tension and polarization in many societies around the world. After developing a theoretical framework of social cohesion and religiosity, which claims cross-cultural validity, she proposes multilevel analyses using a combination of several international databases to test her hypotheses. The introduction of Hillenbrand’s complex methodological framework inspires much curiosity about her future empirical work on this topic.

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additional conference proceedings exist: a special issue of the Journal of Empirical Theology (issues 1, 2020, Brill), and an edited volume with the publisher Waxmann in the series Research on Religious and Spiritual Education (in press), concentrating on theological contributions and those from religious education.

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Turning to local perspectives, the second part of the volume addresses the European context and primarily focusses on orthodox religiosities within it. For example, Susanne Tübel (University Oldenburg, Germany) questions the applicability of the Protestant-Western conceptualizations to Jewish religiosity even within the same sociological context. Using qualitative interviews, Tübel empirically demonstrates how the ritual circumcision of Jewish boys is not only independent of their own but also their parents’ individual religiosity and proposes concepts of religious obligation and a horizontal transcendence as valid alternatives. From a similar point of view, Hege Kristin Ringnes (MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Norway) and Sarah Demmrich (University of Münster, Germany) examine the non-individualized beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) in Norway, a generally highly individualized and secularized country. Based on several qualitative-empirical studies, the authors summarize how JWs cope with the negative emotions caused by this constant conflict with mainstream society and their own eschatological doctrines. By setting specific emotional goals and applying certain emotion-regulation strategies, Ringnes and Demmrich show how members of this fundamentalist, exclusive religious group increase their positive emotions, albeit while possibly endangering a healthy self at the same time. Bridging religiosity between East and West, Antoaneta Nikolova (South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Bulgaria) gives insight into a mixed methods research project on the adaptation of Eastern religious practices among individuals in three Western countries, namely Ireland, Bulgaria, and East Germany. She targets how cognitive, experiential, and behavioral aspects of religiosity change among Western practitioners of Buddhism, yoga, and martial arts. By combining sociological analysis with philosophical consideration, Nikolova concludes that the practitioners’ worldview is fundamentally changed by the long-term performance of Eastern practices centered on non-duality and plurality. Finally, Gergely Rosta (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary) examines whether the religious decline in Hungary witnessed in recent decades is continuing using data from the recent “Religious Change in Hungary“ project. According to this data, the portion of denominational membership continues to decline, while the portion of believers in certain Christian and non-Christian doctrines has increased. At the same time, other trends of secularization seem to have stopped: this includes the portion of believers in God, which has declined very little compared to its previous growth, and the proportion of regular churchgoers, which has increased slightly. All in all, Rosta concludes that the socio-political changes that have reshaped Hungary over the past decade may have also affected the development of religiosity.

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Two contributions constitute the second part of the volume and address regions which are located between Europe and Asia. Tobias Köllner (University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany) focuses on Orthodox-Christian Religiosity in Russia. Based on data from an ethnographic project in the Vladimir region located 180 kilometers to the East of Moscow, he elucidates the basic structures of both religious beliefs (evil and punishment as consequences of sinful living) and religious practices (including the veneration of icons and pilgrimage). The analysis shows that recent religiosity in Russia involves an interrelated complex of beliefs, practices and notions of belonging to some community. This religiosity turns out to be more than just an effect of ideological manipulation. Rather it seems to be a powerful means of coping with the uncertainties of daily life in contemporary Russia. With her quantitative study, Hannah Ridge (Duke University, USA) addresses the question of how state regulation of religion influences individual religiosity in countries with a Sunni-Muslim majority with the intention of uncovering internal religious diversity. She tests the applicability of the religious market theory to these countries and the proposed negative relationship between regulation and religiosity, which could not be verified by her multilevel analyses. In sum, Ridge raises concerns about the validity of the current measures of religious restrictions, such as indicators that focus on policies which probably do not influence religious life in general or individual experiences of religious freedom in particular. The third part of the volume covers studies on religiosity in Asian countries. First, Danzan Narantuya (National University of Mongolia) describes Mongolia as a country marked by tremendous political change over the last century, including the shifts from feudalism, via socialism, to today’s capitalism, and its accompanying social transitions. With an emphasis on religion and gender roles, she outlines how changing ideological systems altered the fundamental pillars of Mongolian society, which has been notably unstable for the last 30 years as a consequence of modernization processes. She explores how members of the society are seeking a replacement for their all-encompassing ideological system, primarily in Christian churches, that is capable of meeting the organizational and theological needs of today’s individuals better than the re-established Buddhist monasteries, even though both religions are contributing to the restabilization of families as one pillar of Mongolian society. Turning to the Indian context, Debabrata Baral (Bennett University, India) examines the understudied topic of religious fundamentalism in Hinduism. After offering insight into Hinduism as a peaceful religion and sketching the political developments of post-colonial India, the author shows us how India became a secular law state, respecting

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other religious traditions and practices but nevertheless retaining the prohibition of slaughtering cows. Baral puts forward his argument as to how this law of the Indian constitution gave rise to the domination of Hindus over non-Hindus and thus eventually opened the doors to religious fundamentalism and communal violence, together with Hinduism as mere performance without deeper meaning. The following paper by Koyal Verma (University of Delhi, India) explains the inter-relationship between society and religiosity within Buddhism by outlining the core principles of religiosity in Buddhism, describing the re-emergence of Buddhism in India through Nichiren Daishonin’s philosophy, and elaborating on Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a new religious movement that emerged in Japan post World War II. The contribution argues that although religiosity has been deeply tied with ritualistic principles associated with religion, however new religious movements, particularly within Buddhism, demonstrate that religiosity can be philosophically governed in the contemporary era. Humanitarian concerns are influencing religiosity in modern society. Then, Ipshita Soni and Sarita Ghai (University of Delhi, India) analyze the religious practices in a Himalayan Tribal Community of the Jaunsaris region. In this remote region, life seems to be completely dependent on nature’s benevolence. As a consequence, natural phenomena like the mountains, rivers and forests are revered and this reverence is echoed in myths, rituals and religious practices followed in everyday life. In this meaning system, the Western distinction between nature and religion is blurred: hills and rivulets denote Gods, temples are surrounded by religious groves providing them sanctity and protection, cedar trees with a temple shaped crown are worshipped as symbols of Shiva. All these natural features become totems, manifestations of the realm of sacredness and Western concepts of religiousness have not entered these meaning systems, yet. In the last paper of this part, Mrinal Pande (University of Münster, Germany) addresses popular Hindu religiosity by focusing upon the practice of Ramkatha. With ethnographic data from India, California and Italy she shows how the quest for ‘sat’ (truth) and ‘sang’ (company) contributes to the adherent’s identity within this spiritual movement. Such embodiment of lived religion, at the level of practice, and the implication of religiosity as manifested in material bodies beyond class and caste, proved to be multivalent and to convey different meanings, while simultaneously addressing complex religious and spiritual needs of its listeners and followers. To conclude this introduction, we would like to thank all the scholars who contributed to the successful formation of this interdisciplinary conference proceeding. We sincerely hope that our proceedings stimulate an international and cross-cultural scientific discourse on concepts and measurements of religiosity

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in the social sciences and induce further conceptual developments in this kind of research. Our special thanks goes also to Elske Kelm, Alina Birkmeyer, and Julie Davies who contributed, with greatest care and commitment, to the editing work and formatting of the manuscript. Sarah Demmrich Ulrich Riegel

References Belzen, J. A. v. (2015). Religionspsychologie: Eine historische Analyse im Spiegel der Internationalen Gesellschaft [The psychology of religion: A historical analysis as a reflection of the International Association]. Berlin: Springer. Bruce, S. (2008). Fundamentalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Demmrich, S., Allolio-Näcke, L., & Wolfradt, U. (in press). The psychology of religion in Germany up to 2020. In K. L. Ladd, J. Basu, V. DeMarinis, Ü. Ok, & W. Zangari (Eds.), Cambridge international handbook of the psychology of religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herriot, P. (2009). Religious fundamentalism: Global, local and personal. London: Routledge. Hill, P. C., & Hood, R. W. (1999). A preliminary note on measurements and scales in the psychology of religion. In P. C. Hill & R. W. Hood (Eds.), Measures of Religiosity (pp. 3-8). Birmingham: Religious Education Press. Loewenthal, K. M. (2000). The psychology of religion. Oxford: One World. Spickard, J. V. (2017). Alternative sociologies of religion: Through non-Western eyes. New York: New York University Press. Vermeer, P., & Scheepers, P. (2017). Comparing political attitudes of Evangelicals with the attitudes of mainline Christians and non-church members in the Netherlands. Politics and Religion, 11, 116–145. doi: 10.1017/S1755048317000566.

Contents

Conceptual and methodological challenges from a global perspective Thinking Beyond the West: Seeing Religions with Unaccustomed Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 James V. Spickard Religion, a Bridge or Barrier in Society?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Carolin Hillenbrand Europe Ritual Reproduction in Jewish Communities in Germany: The Case of Circumcision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Susanne Tübel The Case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway and the Emotional Implications of Eschatological Expectations and Membership: Non-individualized Doctrinal Beliefs Within a Highly Individualized Mainstream Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Hege Kristin Ringnes und Sarah Demmrich East–West Religiosity: Some Peculiarities of Religiosity of European Followers of Eastern Teachings and Practices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Antoaneta Nikolova Hungary—Continuing and Changing Trends and Mechanisms of Religious Change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Gergely Rosta

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Between Europe and Asia Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity: An Anthropological Perspective on Post-soviet Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Tobias Köllner Muslims’ Religious Freedom and Religiosity: Measurement and Impact. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Hannah M. Ridge Asia An Intersection of Religion and Pillars of the Mongolian Society. . . . . . . 167 Danzan Narantuya The Contours of Religiosity in Hinduism: Locating Religious Doctrines, Interrogating Communal Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Debabrata Baral Buddhism in Asia: Mapping the Evolving Principles of Religiosity. . . . . . 205 Koyal Verma Religion and Religiosity in a Himalayan Tribal Community a Study of Jaunsaris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Ipshita Soni und Sarita Ghai Contextualizing Religiosity Within the Ramkatha. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Mrinal Pande

Editors & Contributors

About the Editors Sarah Demmrich PhD, Cluster of Excellence “Religion & Politics“, Chair of Sociology of Religion, University of Münster, Germany Ulrich Riegel  PhD, Professor, Catholic Theology, Practical Theology and Religious Education, University of Siegen, Germany

Contributors Debabrata Baral  Bennett University, Delhi-NCR, India Sarah Demmrich  University of Münster, Münster, Germany Sarita Ghai  Univeristy of Delhi, New Delhi, India Carolin Hillenbrand  University of Münster, Münster, Germany Tobias Köllner  University Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany Danzan Narantuya  National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia Antoaneta Nikolova  South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria Mrinal Pande  University of Münster, Münster, Germany Hannah Ridge  Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Hege Kristin Ringnes  University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

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Editors & Contributors

Gergely Rosta  Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary Ipshita Soni  Univeristy of Delhi, New Delhi, India James V. Spickard  University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, USA Susanne Tübel  Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany Koyal Verma  University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Conceptual and methodological challenges from a global perspective

Thinking Beyond the West: Seeing Religions with Unaccustomed Eyes James V. Spickard

Abstract

Social science was invented in the West and was shaped by Western culture. This includes its approach to religion. Scholars saw that Christians cared about people’s beliefs and about who ran their churches, so they focused on these parts of religious life. They ignored much of the rest. As a result, they had trouble understanding religions for which beliefs and church organization were less important. Had social science arisen in other parts of the world, it would have emphasized different things. This chapter explores two of these. From ancient China we get the Confucian idea of a relational self. Lǐ, or the ritual regard for the people who shape us, creates dé, or virtue. A Confucian social scientist would ask, ‘Who sustains the sacred relationships on which our religious communities depend?’ From the traditional Navajo, we learn how rituals shape people’s inner experiences to restore their sense of the world’s beauty. A Navajo social scientist would ask, ‘Do rituals in other religions guide people to a sense of wholeness? If so, how?’ These non-Western ideas also have their blind spots. Even so, they let us see religion through unaccustomed eyes. Keywords

Catholic Worker · Community ties · Confucian sociology · Default view ·  Healing · Lived experience · Navajo ritual · Non-western · Sociology of religion

J. V. Spickard (*)  University of Redlands, Redlands, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_1

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1 Toward a World-Conscious Sociology of Religion We live in an interesting era. Martin Albrow (1997) tells us that the modern age, typified by self-contained nation-states, is retreating and the West no longer dominates the world economically, culturally, or politically. Suketu Mehta (2019, p. 4) tells us that “mass migration is the defining human phenomenon of the twenty-first century ”. Some migration results from climate change, poverty, and war, but much of it is driven by the West’s need for other people’s ideas. Business has long been transnational but so, too, are science, technology, medicine, and intellectual life. Realms that gather insights from around the world prosper. Those that remain parochial now fade. The social sciences of religion are on the parochial side. Both sociology and psychology were founded in the West, in a culture that was shaped by Christianity. As a result, most Westerners see Christianity as the model for all religions and have trouble understanding those religions that do not fit the model well. We need to widen our intellectual net. We need to explore other traditions for insights that our own culture neglects. In what follows, I shall speak as a sociologist. I cannot pretend to advise the other social sciences about how to practice their trade. I shall, however, point out the limitations of much sociological work on religion, precisely because it does not venture beyond its Western origins. The founders of my discipline did not have much experience with non-Christian groups. They saw that Christians cared about people’s beliefs and about who ran their churches, so they focused on these parts of religious life. They ignored much of the rest. As a result, sociologists misunderstand religions for which beliefs and church organization are not the main show. I shall first describe sociology’s default view of religion, which focuses on organizations, leaders, and beliefs. I shall trace the source of this view in the nineteenth century movements that birthed sociology and will show how it has led sociologists to ignore major aspects of religious life. Then I shall explore two cultural alternatives. The first is Confucian, the second is Navajo. Confucius famously said we should ‘honor the gods but stay as far away from them as possible’. He also emphasized right conduct and the importance of right relationships. He was, however, concerned with neither religious beliefs nor organizations. What would a sociology of religion look like, had it been founded on Confucian principles? I shall show you a few of the principles, then give you an example from U.S. religious life. I realize that European religion

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is somewhat different, but I suspect that you can find ways to apply Confucian ideas to religions on this continent as well. My second alternative comes from a Native American nation living in the southwestern United States. Traditional Navajo religion focuses on ritual, particularly on rituals that heal both individuals and communities. I shall describe how these rituals shape people’s inner experiences to restore their sense of hózhǫ́—a Navajo term that roughly translates as harmony, health, and beauty. A Navajo sociologist would ask, ‘Do rituals in other religions guide people to a sense of wholeness and a sense of rightness with the world? If so, how do they do it?’ I shall give you an example of how this works among a Catholic activist group that I know well. Just like sociology’s default view of religion, these non-Western ideas also have their blind spots. Even so, they let us see aspects of religion that our Western view typically ignores.

2 Sociology’s Default View What is sociology’s default view of religion? While everyone knows that textbooks do not represent the cutting edge of any science, they are a good indicator of what a discipline thinks is important. I have taught the sociology of religion for most of the last 30 years, and I have had a lot of time to watch textbooks change. We have a dirty secret: they do not. Sociologists emphasize the same things about religion today that they did in the mid-1980s, when I was being trained (Spickard 2017, p. 22 ff.). Yes, there are more women in the texts. There are more ethnic minorities, more attention to Islam and Eastern religions, and more attention to whatever new theories the textbook writers find most interesting. Yet the core elements remain the same: • Sociologists see religions as embedded in organizations that have official leaders. • They see beliefs as central to the religious enterprise. • They think religions are especially concerned with moral rules, both those encouraging good behaviors and those banning the bad. Why these elements? Simply because they are central to Western Christianity. This is sociologists’ model for what all religions are like. Western Christianity

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locates ‘the sacred’ either in the sacraments (which means in church life) or in the inward relationship between the soul and God. Sociology follows suit, centering its understanding of religion on church participation and on individual religiosity. Even sociologists of New Age religions, which are at best informally organized, describe an inward-facing spirituality embedded in individuals (e.g., Heelas 1996). Sociology’s default view of religion stems from the late nineteenth century, as sociologists tried to understand the massive social changes of that era. Industrialization, revolution, colonialism, and poverty transformed the way people thought, acted, and lived. Sociologists wanted to understand these trends. Karl Marx looked to economic transformations, Émile Durkheim looked to changes in the social bond, while Max Weber looked to the growth of instrumental rationalism in all spheres of life (Giddens 1976). Sociologists were not, however, the only intellectuals on the scene. Economists, political theorists, journalists, and theologians all had their own accounts to offer. The early sociologists had to distinguish their new discipline from the mass of competing views. As Manuel Vásquez (2013) has pointed out, however, sociology’s chief intellectual opponents were not other social scientists; they were religious authorities, especially in France. There, the ultramontane Catholic church had spent much of the nineteenth century opposing democracy and trying to reestablish church authority over social and political life. From the 1825 Anti-Sacrilege Act through the 1870 declaration of Papal Infallibility to the 1894–1906 Dreyfus Affair, the Catholic Church allied itself with political reaction. Sociology, on the other hand, saw itself as a progressive science, well-suited to solving social problems. The result, writes Vásquez, was that sociology saw authoritarian religion as its conceptual Other. The opposition, for sociologists, ran as follows: • Where sociology was scientific, religion was superstitious. • Where sociology was progressive, religion was reactionary. • Where sociology was oriented toward the future, religion was oriented toward the past. • And religion was, above all, embedded in hierarchical organizations that tried to enforce belief in impossible things. In short, if sociology was the future, then its opposite, religion, must be fading away (Vásquez 2013, p. 24 ff.). This is the source of ‘secularization theory’, which is alive and well in our discipline. Mainstream sociology still treats religion as a hierarchically organized, belief-oriented institution that will continue

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to lose public influence, even if it continues to play a role in individuals’ private lives (Bender et al. 2013; Spickard 2017, p. 22 ff.). Sociologists have, of course, developed other approaches, but for present purposes, I am less interested in these than I am in ideas that arise outside the West. My first example comes from ancient China. What would a sociology of religion based on Confucian principles show us about religion that the Western view does not?

3 A Confucian View Scholars disagree about whether China has religions of the kind found in the West. On the positive side, textbooks on ‘World Religions’ always mention China’s ‘big three’ traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism—and some include ‘folk religion’ as a fourth. The Chinese government recognizes five ‘official’ religious groups—Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Taoist, and Buddhist. On the negative side, these two lists do not match, and four of the five on the government list are imports. Along with similar dynamics in India, this led Chidester (1996), McCutcheon (1997), Masuzawa (2005), and others to argue that ‘religion’ is a concept that the West imposed on other civilizations, fundamentally misunderstanding them. Peter Beyer (2006) provided a more nuanced view. He argued that the term ‘religion’ was not so much imposed as co-constructed. Indian scholars resisted European efforts to treat them as ‘heathens’ by showing that they, too, had holy books, priests, rituals, and sacred sites: all attributes of ‘religions’ to their European overlords. Beyer shows that the term ‘religion’ itself arose from this encounter; previously Europeans had used the term ‘Christianity’ to describe what they were trying to impose on others. Beyer describes how late nineteenth century Chinese intellectuals considered copying the Indians, but instead they chose to retain Confucianism as a philosophy, not a zongjiao. This invented word meant ‘sectarian teaching’ and was used by these intellectuals to describe European religions, which they regarded as factional and partisan. “Those who saw [Confucianism] as humanistic, this-worldly, and moral philosophy carried the day because this view asserted both Chinese uniqueness and superiority ” (Beyer 2006, p. 237). Nonetheless, Confucian teachings have their sacred elements, which have continued across the centuries (Spickard 2017, p. 93 ff.). My attempt to identify a Confucian sociology of religion begins with these.

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Confucianism finds the sacred neither in religious organizations nor in individuals’ inwardness; it finds it in social ties. Confucian philosophy is all about groups and group living. For Confucians, the sacred lies in the ties that sustain human communities. Individuals matter, but they do so because the human Self is the spot where social ties come together. Those ties are more sacred than is the individual person who embodies them. An easy way to see this is to compare how people introduce themselves as Confucians with how they do so in the West. Each introduction shows what its tradition thinks is important. As a Westerner, I introduce myself as follows: I am Jim Spickard, Professor of Sociology at the University of Redlands, Past-President of the of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Religion, and President-Elect of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. I teach and write about social theory, the sociology of religion, and social research design. I have written six books and some 70 journal articles and book chapters. My next book is about what is happening to religion in the contemporary world.

In other words: ‘I, I, I, I, I.’ We Euro-Americans typically think of ourselves as individuals, separate from other people. Our self-definitions express this. We start with ourselves and move to include others—if we include them at all. This corresponds rather well to the Protestant emphasis on the sacredness of the individual relationship with God. Now listen to me introduce myself as a Confucian: I am Jim Spickard, son of Donald Spickard and Mary Alice Adkins, grandson of Vernon and Mildred Spickard and of Russell and Mary Adkins. I am brother to Paul Spickard, husband to Meredith McGuire, father to Janaki and Dmitri Spickard-Keeler. My teachers were George Spindler, Trent Schroyer, Charles McCoy, and James McClendon. My students include Blaine Pope, Javier Espinoza, Erin Wiens-St. John, and Julia Pazzi.

The Confucian way of speaking does not erase my individuality, but it does express it in an unaccustomed way. It points out that I am uniquely shaped by those around me. My parents, grandparents, and family formed my core personality. My marriage made me a different person, as did having the children I do. My teachers shaped me, as did my friends and the students I have had the privilege of teaching. I am simply different as the result of these relationships than I would have been without them.

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Both introductions, in fact, display true things about our Selves—specifically what each of these two cultures finds sacred. The individual is sacred to the modern West; just look at our human rights laws and our abhorrence of violating individual integrity (Spickard 2002; Fortman 2011). Classic Confucianism, on the other hand, sees the self as a nest of relationships, and it sees those relationships as sacred. One maintains them through lǐ, the practice of ritual propriety. Lǐ is the source of dé (virtue). Maintaining the sacredness of relationships is our chief religious duty—not just of leaders, but of everyone. This illuminates some of the key Confucian terms that refer to religion-like things. Take ‘ancestor worship’ and ‘the mandate of heaven’. The former involves maintaining family shrines to one’s departed forebears; the latter involves the blessings that rulers gain from acting properly toward their subjects. Both are relational. They involve maintaining the right relationships between people: within families on the one hand and between rulers and ruled on the other. Both are sacred duties—though the shape of this ‘sacred’ is very different from what we find in the West. The term ‘ancestor worship’ is, of course, a misnomer (Lakos 2010). Ancient Confucians did not regard the ancestors as ‘gods’ nor were they seen as supernatural. They were not even individualized beings. Instead they were a collective—‘the ancestors’—who reminded people of the importance of family and lineage. The ancestors anchored the individual Self in the past and connected it to the future. ‘Worshiping’ them meant to remember who one was: son or daughter of X, grandson or granddaughter of Y, and so on. To revere one’s ancestors is to acknowledge the sacredness of the relationships from which our Selves are made. ‘The mandate of heaven’ was similarly relational, but on a political, not a familial, level (Spickard 2017, p. 89 ff.). From the Shang period, China was ruled by kings whose authority depended on a traditional but evolving set of relationships with the min: their laboring but non-slave subjects. The ruler was to care for the min, at least in part because Heaven (Ti) holds them in special regard. Virtue (dé) involved treating the people well so that they would support the ruler. Everything depended on the practice of lǐ: the rules of ritual propriety that governed the relationships between people. Confucius later taught that lǐ should extend to all people, not just to the rulers. His follower Mencius stressed the importance of i (righteousness) — not, however, as the inevitable result of a set of procedures grounded in individual rights, as in the West, but as the substantive outcome of the ruler's exercise of virtue (dé). In any event, both ‘ancestor worship’ and ‘the mandate of heaven’ are at root relational. They treat the relationships between people as sacred, which makes possible a beneficial social life. For them, human flourishing is not an individ-

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ual matter but a community responsibility. Attention to that community through proper regard for others (lǐ) is thus a sacred act. Dé, or virtue, results from and also feeds this process. How might we use these insights to expand the sociology of religion? What kinds of questions would a Confucian sociologist ask? Here’s one: ‘Who maintains relationships in Western Christianity?’ Who practices the lǐ that creates the dé on which religious life depends? I cannot answer this for European religions, but I can for U.S. ones. American church life, centered on the local congregation, has historically been supported by women. Now I could demonstrate this by citing Penny Marler’s (2008) analysis of church membership statistics going back to before World War One. She shows how women’s congregational involvement has been the major factor in maintaining the health of both American and English congregations. Or I could cite Robert Putnam, whose massive book American Grace argues that pastors would do better to spend less time preaching and more time at church events, getting to know their congregants (Putnam and Campbell 2010). I shall put these scholars aside, though, to focus on something else: on American church food. Church suppers are a core part of American congregational religion, and nourishing, home-cooked food is at the heart of every communal celebration. The menus vary by region. Casserole, crispy fried meatloaf, tuna hot-dish, green beans, jello salad, pies, and weak coffee are central to the Northern White American Protestant tradition. Southern Protestants favor hot chicken salad casserole, baked spaghetti, crawfish rice, baked beans, strawberry cake, sock-it-to-me cake, pecan pie muffins, and banana pudding. Add in some fried chicken and—I’m not kidding— some ‘Shout Hallelujah Potato Salad’ and your church will have a meal. Those weekly or monthly church meals tie U.S. congregations together. Laurence Stookey (1996, p. 147) tells the story of a backwoods West Virginia Protestant congregation that renamed itself “St. Mary’s ”—a most un-Protestant name. The men of the church confessed: During the Depression we were ready to close this place down and join one of the other Methodist congregations in town. It was the women who insisted otherwise; and they kept us alive by bake sales, quilting bees, bazaars, and church suppers.

So, they named their church after the mother of Jesus. This celebrated the women who had kept the congregation alive by tending to the relationships that made them a community. It’s not just White folks. Cheryl Gilkes (2000) describes the central role that women play in African American congregations. From ‘kitchen ministry’, to

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women’s choirs, to accompanying the bereaved, to keeping the pastor fed and on track, African American churches are not the pastor-centered patriarchies that most sociologists imagine (Dodson and Gilkes 1995). They are communities. Like most communities in the United States, they depend on women’s work. A Confucian sociologist would see this immediately. The Confucian default position would see religion as embedded in relationships. It would focus less on individual ‘morality’ and more on communal ‘right action’. It would focus on the interplay between lǐ and dé, ritual propriety and virtue. It would ask who maintains the relationships that make community possible. I can imagine a society in which men might maintain these relationships, but that is not the society in which I happen to live. Contemporary sociology’s default view of religion makes women an afterthought rather than putting them at center stage. Their part in U.S. religious life is much more visible from a Confucian perspective.

4 Navajo Ritual Now for a second alternate sociology—this one based on key elements of traditional Navajo religion. Navajo healing ceremonies highlight an aspect of religious life that sociology’s default view ignores. This is the fact that rituals are more than just symbolic. They are experienced. They unfold in time, and in that unfolding they shift people’s moods and their emotional sense of their place in the universe. The Navajo Nation covers 70,000 square kilometers of desert and mountains in the American Southwest. It has its own government, justice system, and politics, with an economy based largely on minerals and tourism. Poverty is high. About a third of the people live in rural areas. Some herd and farm, though few follow a full traditional life. The Nation is religiously diverse, with lots of Mormons and Christians plus those who belong to the Native American (Peyote) Church, alongside the traditionalists. These groups are not exclusive, however. Many people take part in more than one of these ‘roads’, to use a common Navajo idiom. It is not unusual for traditional healing ceremonies to attract people of all sorts (Wyman 1983, p. 536). These ceremonies last two, five, or nine days and nights and are designed to bring health to those who are ill. They are led by hatałii, ‘singers’, who are adept at carrying one or more of the dozens of ‘chantways’ that constitute the traditional religious system (Wyman 1983).

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Families sponsor chants at times of crisis or disorder. A family member may be ill. Someone may be leaving for or returning from a trip among foreigners. That person—the ‘patient’—is the focus of the ceremony. The family will engage a hatałii who knows the specific chant deemed proper for the occasion. Here is a typical Holyway chant, just to give you an idea of what these rituals are like. It begins on the first evening with prayers to bless the hogan (the traditional circular Navajo house) in which it is to take place. The hatałii paints the patient’s body with pigments, cornmeal, and pollen. His helpers make ‘unravelers’—bundles of herbs and feathers that they place on the patient, then unravel, to symbolize release from danger. All sing and pray through the night. At dawn, the helpers built a large fire on the hogan floor, and the hatałii, the patient, and family members disrobe and sweat. The patient takes an herbal emetic and is washed, to more singing. After breakfast, the hatałii makes offerings to the Holy People, so they will come to the patient’s aid. Then the sand painting begins. Each sand painting is large and complex, depicting in symbols the mythic journey that resulted in this chant being given to the people. It usually centers on the Holy People encountered by the protagonist. It is made on the floor of the hogan by trickling dry pigments onto a smoothed bed of tan sand. The hatałii directs the work; any man who knows how may help. A six-foot painting may take four to six men three to five hours to finish. After the sand painting is done, the patient sits in its center and the singer applies medicines to various parts of the Holy People depicted in the painting. Then he touches the patient in the same places, intoning ritual prayers and songs. The patient is in this way identified with the Holy People, for his or her protection. The prayers retell the myth by which the world was created, and sand painting was given to the people. This whole process is repeated for four days (in a five-day chant). Each day has a different painting and a different myth. The last night is spent singing, ending with the dawn songs, which greet the first faint streak of light in the east. I have left out much, but I think you get the point. There is copious symbolism, but the entire ritual is a performance that unrolls in time. As Sam Gill (1987, p. 110) wrote, when looked at from the point of view of its participants, Navajo rituals. evoke and structure the images … in such a way that they create the power that can expel malevolent influences and that can reorder, and hence restore to health and happiness, a person who suffers.

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Navajo ritual language is performative in John Austin’s (1962) sense of the word. “Ritual language does not describe how things are; it determines how they will be” (Witherspoon 1983, p. 575). The rituals structure the participants’ attention, focusing it on one element, then on another, then another. Like music, they unfold in time. They create experiences, which produce a felt sense of harmony and order. This is the hózhǫ́ to which I referred at the beginning of this chapter: the sense of rightness and harmony with which the world began. In Navajo mythology, the world began with a ceremony. At the beginning of this world, all was chaos. The three lower worlds had fallen into disorder and been destroyed. All that was left was a medicine bundle: a collection of objects and powers from which the new world was to be made. Thought and speech emerged from the bundle. They took the form of a young man and woman, who thought and talked about how the world was to be. Then they built a ceremonial hogan, entered it, and spread the contents of the medicine bundle on the sand. They painted the life forms of all things that would be in the world. Then they sang through the night. At dawn, the painting was transformed into the world the Navajo know. In essence, the myth says that the world was created by knowledge. It was thought and spoken into being all at once, perfectly. Healing rituals reenact this myth alongside others that recall other parts of the Holy People’s history. They heal the patient and the community by recreating the world in its original perfection. Such rituals do not merely symbolize curing. They perform it. They restore hózhǫ́—beauty, holiness—in the same way that the myth tells us the world was made hózhǫ́ at its beginning: by Thought and Speech. For details, I refer you to my previous work on Navajo ritual (Spickard 1991, 2017, p. 181 ff.); I cannot provide more here. The point is that the Navajo participants experience this world-creation across up to nine nights of ceremony. Were the ceremonies symbolic they could be much shorter, but they are long so they can change the world in their participants’ experiencing. Those participants are changed as well. To use a philosophical term, Navajo rituals are polythetic (Schutz 1951). Like music or poetry, they cannot be summarized in ideas; such summaries do not do them justice. Instead, they have to be experienced. One can only understand a piece of music by listening to it unfold in time. The same is true for ritual. Rituals take their participants on an experiential journey, depositing them in a different place than where they began. What might this Navajo approach to ritual illuminate about other religions that the default sociological view ignores? I found it useful for understanding the

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weekly masses held by a Catholic Worker community at their home in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles (Spickard 2005, 2017, p. 205 ff.). This group of radical Catholics runs a soup kitchen on L.A.’s extensive Skid Row, gives aid and comfort to local homeless people, protests police sweeps and daily injustices, and opposes America’s many wars. They sometimes get rather creative. They bought shopping carts so that homeless people would have a way to store their goods, then sued the police who confiscated the carts as ‘stolen property’. When the city of Los Angeles refused to set up portable toilets in the Skid Row district, the Workers and their allies barricaded the men’s restroom in the City Council chambers. Having learned how it feels to have nowhere to pee, the Councilors relented. My interaction with the community began in 1991 as part of a study of religious social activists. It continued until 2004 as a long-term ethnographic project and as a field trip venue for students in my university courses on homelessness and on the sociology of religion. Somewhere during that time, attendance became personal, not just professional. Sometime during that time, I also realized that the weekly masses had much in common with Navajo rituals. Each Wednesday evening, the Worker community and their friends assembled in the living room of their house for mass. They set up chairs, used a table for an altar, and put out home-baked bread and a flagon of wine for the ceremony. There might be a priest present, especially if one had been arrested with them that morning at their weekly protest against American militarism. If not, a community member would lead the celebration. That celebration would begin informally, with people sharing news of the political and religious elites’ latest misdeeds. ‘You won’t believe what the archbishop did today!’ was a frequent exclamation, as were complaints against the latest hypocrisies that authorities had visited upon the poor. There would be a reading—usually but not always Scripture—followed by a one or two-minute homily by the priest or service leader. Then the community would add its insights and applications. These were usually social commentary growing out of the day’s news, but they could include personal prayer requests and prayers for ‘our friends on the street’, for ‘all those in prison’, for specific prisoners of conscience, and for the softening of national and Church leaders’ hearts. Though not uniformly dark, and by no means hopeless, these statements reinforced the Workers’ sense of being part of a small, faithful remnant in a world that has lost touch with God’s will. They also reinforced their wish for religious democracy. Then came a call for ‘the passing of the peace’. Though an ordinary U.S. Catholic service would see people shake hands with their neighbors or at most

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give a short hug and the words ‘Peace be with you’, the Worker service always stopped to give each person in the room a chance to hug everyone else. Everyone who could stand did so and circulated to the others. The celebrant left the head table and joined the milling throng of huggers, as each wished ‘peace’ to all. It typically took at least ten minutes before all the hugging was done, sometimes more. This did not just symbolize the community; it helped create it. It reminded people viscerally of their connection to one another and of how important that connection was in their lives. When everyone was seated again, they began the Eucharist. It, too, was participatory: people broke their own bread and lifted the cup to their own lips. At its end, a Worker brought out a huge pot of soup, setting it on the table/altar. Everyone raised a hand in blessing, and someone—never the celebrant—intoned the words that turned the soup into Christ’s body. The group rearranged the tables for a pot-luck supper and ate the soup, bread, and whatever else was presented. Then eight to ten Workers and friends took that soup down to their ‘Hippie Kitchen’, where they picked up more soup, bread, water, and hot sauce to distribute to the surrounding homeless. On a symbolic level, this event is a double mass. The first, in-house mass, recreates the Worker community and turns Workers into symbolic priests. The second, street-mass, distributes God’s love to the street people. It is not charity; anyone can walk through that soup line. I have served soup to police officers and drug dealers, to crackheads and to people down on their luck. The Workers say that God accepts all of them. Yet ideas are not the point. The whole ritual is a lived experience, which takes the participants from acknowledged depression about the state of the world to an experience of community, affirmed by the long, hugging, ‘peace be with you’. Breaking and eating the bread together and drinking the communal wine makes participation active, not passive. Working together to rearrange the room for eating, then taking their meal to people living on the streets extends both the camaraderie and the sense of common purpose. One experiences these things both with senses and with emotions. Workers spoke of the importance of feeling connectedness and good will. So did the several dozen visitors I brought with me over the years and then quizzed on their impressions on the long drive home. All spoke of a deep sense of rightness by the end of the evening. Some specifically contrasted this event with mass at their home churches, which they now found shallow. A few drew the distinction between religion as ideas and religion as lived. Most preferred the lived kind. Navajo religion understands this very well. Rituals are polythetic, not monothetic. Experiencing them deeply in time rather than merely thinking them

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reshapes participants’ emotions and restores a sense of communal purpose. For this Catholic Worker community during my time of fieldwork, it helped reestablished the communal resilience that makes long-term social activism possible. The Workers did not mark this overtly, though several confirmed it to me. Like Navajo rituals, this one picked people up in one emotional place and carried them to another. In Navajo terms, it restored the inner hózhǫ́ that made Worker life possible.

5 Now It is Your Turn Obviously, I have left much out of my account. A single chapter cannot do more than skim the surface of such phenomena. My 2017 book, Alternative Sociologies of Religion goes considerably deeper into the issues that I have raised here. It provides more support for the existence of a sociological default view of religion, much more detailed analysis of Confucian and Navajo alternatives, plus two chapters on a potential sociology of religion based on the work the fourteenth century Arab polymath, Ibn Khaldūn. My point, however, is not about Khaldūn, nor about the Navajo, nor about Confucius. It is about what we can gain from thinking beyond the West. We can build good sociologies on non-Western grounds. Those sociologies will ask questions that Western sociology does not. They will see aspects of religion that the Western default view leaves unexplored. They cannot replace Western sociology, for they, too, will have their blind spots and their limitations, yet their insights can augment our own. The three traditions I explore in my book are not special; they are simply the ones that I was capable of mastering. Other scholars have made tentative efforts to explore others (Akiwowo 1986; Payne 1992; Maduro 1993). I encourage you to apply your skills to whichever of the world’s other traditions seem to you most likely to prove able to deepen our understanding of religion. We live, today, in a single, interconnected world. We need to listen to all of its voices.

References Akiwowo, A. A. (1986). Contributions to the sociology of knowledge from an African oral poetry. International Sociology, 1, 343–358.

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Albrow, M. (1997). The global age: State and society beyond modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bender, C., Cadge, W., Levitt, P., & Smilde, D. (Eds.). (2013). Religion on the edge: De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion. New York: Oxford U. Press. Beyer, P. F. (2006). Religions in global society. New York: Routledge. Chidester, D. (1996). Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Fortman, B. (2011). Religion and human rights: A dialectical relationship. E-International Relations. 5 Dec. https://bit.ly/2zlOIOQ. Accessed: 24. Aug. 2019. Dodson, J. E., & Gilkes, C. T. (1995). There’s nothing like church food’: Food and the U.S. Afro-Christian tradition: Re-membering community and feeding the embodied S/Spirit(s). Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 63, 519–538. Giddens, A. (1976). Classical social theory and the origins of modern sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 703–729. Gilkes, C. T. (2000). If it wasn’t for the women…: Black women’s experience and womanist culture in church and community. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Gill, S. D. (1987). Native American religious action: A performance approach to religion. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Heelas, P. (1996). The New Age movement: The celebration of the self and the sacralization of modernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Introvigne, M. (2018). The Red market: The ‘official’ religions in China. Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religion and Human Rights in China. https://bit.ly/2Pc2BtI. Accessed: 23. Aug. 2019. Lakos, W. (2010). Chinese ancestor worship: A practice and ritual oriented approach to understanding Chinese culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Maduro, O. (1993). Theorizing Tecoatlaxope: For a reassessment of Latino/a religious agency. Presented at the conference Methodology, sponsored by PARAL: the Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinos, Princeton, NJ 15–19 April. Marler, P. L. (2008). Religious change in the west: Watch the women. In K. Aune, S. Sharma, & G. Vincett (Eds.), Women and religion in the West: Challenging secularization (pp. 23–56). Aldershot: Ashgate. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The invention of world religions: Or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCutcheon, R. T. (1997). Manufacturing religion: The discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. Mehta, S. (2019). This land is our land: An immigrant’s manifesto. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Payne, M. W. (1992). Akiwowo, orature and divination: Approaches to the construction of an emic sociological paradigm of society. Sociological Analysis, 53, 175–187. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3711122. Putnam, R. D., & Campbell, D. E. (2010). American grace: How religion divides and unites us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reichard, G. A. (1950). Navajo religion: A study of symbolism. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Schutz, A. (1951). Making music together: A study in social relationship. In A. Brodersen (Ed.), Collected papers II: Studies in social theory (pp. 76–97). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Spickard, J. V. (1991). Experiencing religious rituals: A Schutzian analysis of Navajo ceremonies. Sociological Analysis, 52, 191–204. https://doi.org/10.2307/3710963. Spickard, J. V. (2002). Human rights through a religious lens: A programmatic argument. Social Compass, 49, 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768602049002007. Spickard, J. V. (2005). Ritual, symbol, and experience: Understanding Catholic Worker house masses. Sociology of Religion, 66, 337–358. https://doi.org/10.2307/3712385. Spickard, J. V. (2017). Alternative sociologies of religion: Through non-Western eyes. New York: NYU Press. Stookey, L. H. (1996). Calendar: Christ’s time for the church. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Vásquez, M. A. (2013). Grappling with the legacy of modernity: Implications for the sociology of religion. In C. Bender & P. Levitt (Eds.), Religion on the edge: De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion (pp. 23–42). New York: Oxford Univ Press. Witherspoon, G. (1983). Language and reality in Navajo world view. In A. Oritz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 10: Southwest, pp. 570–591). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. WVS Association. (2014). World values survey, Wave six. https://bit.ly/2EefxrL. Accessed: 11. Dec. 2018. Wyman, L. C. (1983). Navajo ceremonial system. In A. Oritz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 10: Southwest, pp. 536–557). Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Religion, a Bridge or Barrier in Society? A research design for empirical analyses about the role of religiosity in social cohesion Carolin Hillenbrand Abstract

Polarization and civil wars across the globe lead to a scientific resurgence of the timeless question of what holds societies together. To stimulate further empirical research about the role of religion in social cohesion from a global perspective, I develop a research design as a blueprint for subsequent studies. I examine the question of how the role of citizens’ religiosity in social cohesion can be empirically analyzed for countries worldwide. Social cohesion is understood as a multidimensional construct that manifests itself in sociopolitical relationships among citizens (horizontal level) and between citizens and the state (vertical level). The core dimensions include social/institutional trust, inclusive social/national identification, social/institutional responsibility and social/political engagement. Religiosity is conceptualized with three dimensions: believing (intensity/contents of faith), behaving (prayer/service attendance/involvement in religious organizations) and belonging (religious affiliation). I systematize the variables’ relationships in hypotheses and present Multilevel Analysis (MLA) as a suitable method for their empirical testing. MLA allows for global comparative studies, considering the underlying hierarchical data structure of individuals embedded in diverse societal and religious country contexts, which themselves may exert (direct/cross-level interaction) effects. Finally, I exemplarily operationalize the variables, including controls on both levels, using appropriate databases (World Values Survey, Fox’s State C. Hillenbrand (*)  University of Münster, Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_2

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and Religion Project, etc.). This is intended to prepare theory-led empirical research in a field of high socio-political relevance. Keywords

Social cohesion · Religion · Religiosity · Multilevel analysis ·  Cross-country comparative design · World values survey

1 Introduction The question of what holds societies together is fundamental to the social sciences. It becomes particularly urgent in the face of certain challenges we experience in the world: civil wars, state collapse, polarized and fragmented societies (e.g., in Libya, the Ukraine, Spain). Thus, social cohesion as a basis for a functioning state is considered an essential political and social objective (Dragolov et al. 2016; Schiefer and van der Noll 2017; Schiefer et al. 2012). This raises the question of which factors shape a society’s cohesion. The present chapter focuses on the role of citizens’ religiosity—as a bridge or barrier in society. The founding father of Sociology of Religion, Émile Durkheim (2007 [1912]), already considered the nexus between religion and cohesion. However, as the secularization thesis—according to which religion’s relevance declines in modern societies— was prevalent in the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, little research attention was paid to the religious factor (Pollack 2018; Tschannen 1991). This changed in the 2000s when criticism of the secularization theory spread and interest in the study of religion grew (Basedau et al. 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2011; Pickel and Gladkich 2011). Nevertheless, more research is to be done concerning the specific role religion plays in social cohesion. Previous studies (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018; Delhey et al. 2018; Dragolov et al. 2016; Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a, 2014) consider particular aspects of religion (e.g., Christianity/individual faith) and of social cohesion (e.g., social capital, involving social trust/engagement)—while neglecting the concepts’ full complexity (e.g., multidimensional/multilevel character). They largely concentrate on certain (above all EU/OECD) countries—but both social cohesion and religion are particularly important in the Global South. To stimulate further research in this regard, the underlying question is:

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How can the role of citizens’ religiosity in social cohesion be empirically analyzed for countries worldwide?

In order to narrow down the complex research subject for this chapter’s scope, I primarily focus on the micro level, i.e., on people’s attitudes and behaviors, when studying the variables religiosity and social cohesion. Thus, my first unit of analysis are individuals (level I). In addition, I will consider the societal and religious country contexts in which the individuals are embedded (level II), especially when outlining the method of Multilevel Analysis. I understand a country as a sovereign state recognized by the international community and when I refer to a society, I relate to the society of that political entity (Riescher 2010, p. 405 f.; Strasser 2015, p. 225 f.). My aim is to present a research design as a blueprint for theory-led empirical comparative analyses. Beyond the scope of this chapter, further studies can then apply this framework and obtain empirical results. First, I summarize the state of research, conceptualize the variables social cohesion and religiosity and systematize their relationships with hypotheses. Second, I lay out the statistical method of Multilevel Analysis and provide an exemplary operationalization of the variables with adequate databases.

2 Theoretical Framework—The Role of Religion in Social Cohesion In the first part, I give an overview of the state of research concerning the connection between religion and social cohesion, before I specify the two central variables and systematize their relationships.

2.1 State of Research—A Brief Outline Across Various Disciplines The relation between religion and social cohesion roots in the classical works of Émile Durkheim (2007 [1912]) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1976 [1840]). They identify cohesion potentials in religion, e.g., through collective symbols and rituals, shared experiences and practices, and the integration of individuals in a higher moral community which establishes social norms and behavioral rules. The social capital literature (Coleman 1990; Putnam 2000; for an overview see

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Traunmüller 2012a) has further developed and specified the idea that religion can promote social capital (social trust and social networks). Other disciplines examine religion’s role in specific concepts that can be considered as subsets of the cohesion construct: Psychologists find relationships of individual religiosity with cohesion-conducive, prosocial behavior (solidarity, social engagement, etc.)—but also with cohesion-inhibiting, intolerant or violent behavior (Durrant and Poppelwell 2017; Saroglou 2014). Economic studies focus on religious effects on social trust, whereas the results remain ambivalent depending on data, sampling and measures of religion (Guiso et al. 2003; McCleary and Barro 2006; for an overview see Berggren and Bjørnskov 2011). Within this chapter’s scope, I concentrate in the following on recent studies that analyze the multifaceted concepts social cohesion and religion more comprehensively and in an empirical, countrycomparative way. Pickel and Gladkich (2011) find positive correlations of individual religiosity (importance of religion in life) with political trust—but negative ones with political participation and tolerance towards other social groups. Religious networks (membership and engagement in religious organizations) relates positively to social and political trust, political participation and tolerance. These mainly bivariate correlations are limited to 31 European countries, based on the European Values Survey (EVS) 1999/2000. Traunmüller (2012a) concludes in his multivariate multilevel models with data from the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002/2003 for 21 European countries that religious service attendance positively affects social engagement and social trust. Subjective faith (index of importance of religion in life/religious person/praying outside of services) only enhances social trust. Schnabel and Grötsch (2012, 2014) demonstrate in multivariate multilevel analyses based on the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2008 for 17 European countries that active religious community work increases societal trust (index of social and institutional trust). Compared to non-religious people, Catholics and members of other, non-Christian religions show lower levels of trust. Dragolov et al. (2013, 2016) analyze on the aggregated level for 34 Western (EU/ OECD) countries relations between their social cohesion index (various databases from 1989–2012) and religious vitality (percentage of religious individuals from the World Values Survey (WVS) 2009, and importance of religion in life from Gallup World Poll 2006–2008). Under the control of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), religious vitality negatively correlates with the dimensions of social networks, social and institutional trust, acceptance of diversity, perception of fairness, civic participation as well as with the total index—and positively only with

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the dimension of identification. Lately, the Bertelsmann Stiftung (2018) and Delhey et al. (2018) extended this study to 22 countries in South, Southeast, and East Asia for the years 2004 to 2015. They find negative correlations of a religious society (aggregated importance of religion in life) with social trust and acceptance of diversity (under GDP control) as well as with the cohesion index (under GDP control the effect turns insignificant). The research summary reveals that some studies examine social cohesion more comprehensively—others rather concentrate on religion. The results are ambivalent and focus mainly on certain (above all EU/OECD) states. Against this background, my objective is to provide a research design that measures both variables thoroughly in their multidimensional and multilevel character as well as their relationships from a global, country comparative perspective. To that end, I first specify the concepts social cohesion and religiosity.

2.2 Concept Specification: Social Cohesion There is no standard definition of social cohesion (Schiefer and Noll 2017). Considering it as a multidimensional construct, authors identify various indicators for its specification (for an overview see Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018; Dragolov et al. 2016; Langer et al. 2017; OECD 2011; Schiefer and Noll 2017). It is important to make transparent that conceptualizing social cohesion is never a value-free endeavor since dimensions and indicators are to be selected, which involves certain value judgements (e.g., that social cohesion requires civic engagement, see below) (Dragolov et al. 2016, p. 21 f.). The selection of cohesion dimensions for this chapter’s research design is based on the following criteria: According to my specific research interest, I mainly consult the empirical cohesion literature in which the concept is specified with the purpose of measuring it across different countries (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018; Chan et al. 2006; Delhey et al. 2018; Dickes et al. 2010; Dragolov et al. 2013, 2016; Langer et al. 2017; Schiefer et al. 2012). From those I detect the core dimensions in which most approaches coincide—their lowest common denominator. So, my concept is quite parsimony and thus broadly applicable to diverse contexts and measurable with suitable existing databases. This represents one possible and feasible way to grasp the multifaceted cohesion construct—without claiming universal definitions or measurements. Rather, the general framework set out in this chapter can be a

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starting point for comparative analyses, within which further specifications and adaptations can be made—depending on context and data availability.1 Following recent approaches like Bertelsmann Stiftung (2018); Delhey et al. (2018); Dragolov et al. (2016) and Langer et al. (2018) I focus on subjective, perceptions-based indicators (i.e., citizens’ attitudes/behaviors)—instead of mixing these with objective, aggregated measures (country’s inequality/poverty rate, etc.) (CEPAL 2010; Easterly et al. 2006; OECD 2011). This emphasis has several advantages. Cleansed of socio-economic factors, the cohesion concept gets clearer and conceptual overstretching is avoided. When socio-economic variables are not considered as components but rather as conditions or consequences of social cohesion, their interdependencies can be analyzed in further studies, providing valuable insights about influencing or output factors (Chan et al. 2006; Dragolov et al. 2016). In line with my research goal, the focus on individuals enables me to specifically examine how their religiosity directly relates to social cohesion. Since the independent variable religiosity is located at the micro level, it is congruent to conceptualize the cohesion of a society on the same level— through its members’ attitudes and behaviors that constitute it. By measuring both variables on the micro level in the first place, differentiated results about their relationships are obtained and as much information as possible is preserved.2 Sociological and social psychological research (Dickes et al. 2010; Moody and White 2003; Schnabel and Grötsch 2014) supports this approach: There, social cohesion is understood as a macro-property of groups. However, since the groups themselves cannot be asked about their cohesiveness directly, their cohesion is derived from their members’ attitudes towards this group. The cohesion dimensions identified below—trust, identification, responsibility and engagement— involve relational aspects that go beyond the individual (to fellow citizens/the

1For complementing the framework with country- or culture-specific aspects in following studies, I suggest to dig deeper into indigenous sources from the respective contexts (see Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018 and Delhey et al. 2018 for Asia; Langer et al. 2017 and Hino et al. 2019 for Sub-Sahara-Africa; CEPAL 2010 and Manrique et al. 2015 for Latin America). Since the term social cohesion originated in the West, was introduced and disseminated by organizations such as the OECD, EU or World Bank (Delhey and Boehnke 2018, p. 36), further research would benefit from identifying similar, indigenous concepts, e.g., social harmony in Confucianism, Buen Vivir in Latin America or Ubuntu in Southern Africa. 2Additional aggregation at the country level can still be done in further studies which, for instance, aim to compare the cohesion levels of countries or relate them to other macro variables.

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state). This way, the micro and macro level are linked to each other, and a society’s cohesion results from certain supra-individual attitudes and behaviors (ibid.). To sum up, social cohesion is understood as a characteristic of a state’s society which manifests itself in relationships among citizens (horizontal level) and between citizens and the state (vertical level) (Chan et al. 2006; Dickes et al. 2010). As contents of cohesion, I identify four essential dimensions—or eight subdimensions depending on the relationship level (horizontal/vertical). I briefly outline them in the following.3 The most undisputed cohesion dimension is trust because it is a significant moral resource and foundation for community and union. As subdimensions, social trust in other society members can be distinguished from institutional trust in state institutions (Chan et al. 2006, p. 294; Dragolov et al. 2013, p. 17; Schiefer et al. 2012, p. 19). Second, most specifications of cohesion include a dimension of identification. As social cohesion refers to relationships within a defined entity, it is essential that its members feel part of it and that they accept each other in their diversity as part of it. With regard to the horizontal level, I follow the argumentation that especially an inclusive social identification towards different members of society is crucial in order to ensure cohesion not only for certain, homogeneous groups, but for a society as a whole—in which usually various groups coexist. Inclusive means accepting diversity, showing tolerance and respect—beyond the own social ingroup towards outgroups like ethnic minorities or immigrants in a country (CEPAL 2010, p. 24 f.; Dragolov et al. 2016, p. 15 f.; Schiefer and Noll 2017, p. 588 f.). For the vertical level, national identification is cited as a cohesion component. This is to be considered above all in the context of multiethnic societies and strong ethnic identities or sectarian tendencies (for example in Sub-SaharaAfrica). For the cohesion of a society as a whole it is important that people feel involved in a shared national project, belonging to something bigger than just their own specific group. However, in other contexts caution is needed to avoid measuring extreme forms of national identity such as nationalism (Chan et al. 2006, p. 293 f.; Langer et al. 2017, p. 325 f.; Schiefer and Noll 2017, p. 588 f.). Third, coexistence in a community requires responsibility on the part of its members. This is expressed in social responsibility (e.g., helpfulness/solidarity)

3All

dimensions conceptualized in this chapter are to be understood as theoretical ideal types that are analytically distinguishable, while in reality the boundaries often blur. I do not claim to cover the complex phenomena in their entirety with these dimensions or to give universal definitions (which lies beyond this chapter’s scope).

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on the horizontal level—and in institutional responsibility (e.g., observing the community’s basic rules/laws) on the vertical level (Chan et al. 2006, p. 294 f.; Dragolov et al. 2013, pp. 13–17; Schiefer et al. 2012, pp. 20/23 f.). Finally, engagement of citizens is largely mentioned as a fundamental cohesion pillar because it enables them to take part in common life and to belong to the community. On the horizontal level, this is reflected in social engagement (e.g., in organizations/associations)—which is also referred to as social networks, especially in the social capital literature. On the vertical level, I conceptualize political engagement as rather low-threshold and not very demanding (e.g., general political interest/participation in elections), which can be expressed in different political systems. The reason is the goal of broad applicability of this framework across (non-)democratic countries (Fenger 2012 pp. 43–45; Schiefer and Noll 2017, p. 588; Traunmüller 2012a, p. 56/116). Altogether, I propose the following working definition: The cohesion of a society manifests itself in social and political relationships among citizens (horizontal level) and between citizens and the state (vertical level): the greater the trust, inclusive identification, responsibility and engagement in a country, the stronger its cohesion (see Fig. 1 in Sect. 3.1 as illustration).

2.3 Concept Specification: Religiosity There is no universal definition of religion (Pollack and Rosta 2017). For this chapter’s framework within the context of attitude research, individuals are surveyed about their religion, which is not pre-defined but left to individual interpretation. However, most of the international questionnaires (see Sect. 3.2) suggest a narrower understanding of religion in the classical, institutionalized sense—while not considering broader, alternative forms. In line with my emphasis on individuals as first unit of analysis, I concentrate on religiosity, defined as an individual’s beliefs and behaviors towards the transcendent (Sherkat 2015, p. 377). Transcendence refers to a reality that “exceed[s] the differently defined area of the empirically comprehensible” (Pollack and Rosta 2017, p. 45). What this concretely comprises (one God, multiple gods, ancestral beings, etc.) is left to individual interpretation and depends on historically and culturally varying assumptions of normality (ibid.). According to my specific research objective, I take an empirical approach, conceptualizing dimensions of religiosity that can be empirically tested with relevant databases. In the context of the religious dimension research, I mainly follow the latest systematization of Pollack and Rosta (2017) as well as pertinent empirical studies (Basedau et al. 2017; Olson and Warber 2008; Schnabel and Grötsch

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2014) and identify three core dimensions.4 The believing-dimension involves the personal faith, whose intensity (how religious/faithful someone is) and concrete contents (how one thinks about God and other believers/non-believers) can be examined. The behaving-dimension comprises religious practices, such as prayer, participation in religious services or general involvement in religious organizations. The belonging-dimension relates to a person’s religious affiliation, i.e., the religion someone identifies with (Islam, Christianity, etc.) (Basedau et al. 2017, pp. 6–8; Schnabel and Grötsch 2014, pp. 384–386; Traunmüller 2012a, pp. 21/55–68). In short, my working definition is: Religiosity refers to the beliefs and behaviors of individuals towards the transcendent, expressed in the intensity and contents of their faith (believing), religious practices (behaving) and religious affiliation (belonging) (see Fig. 1 in Sect. 3.1 as illustration).

2.4 Relationships and Hypotheses In accordance with the relevant literature, I conceptualize religiosity as independent variable and social cohesion as dependent variable (Pickel and Gladkich 2011; Pollack and Müller 2013; Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a). It is plausible that the religiosity of citizens affects the cohesion of a society (at least more than reverse). However, since it is difficult to track causality, especially in the social sciences, I rather speak of role or relationship than of causal effects in this chapter. The causal language could, for example, be applied in subsequent empirical studies with longitudinal designs. An elaborate theory about the role of religiosity in society’s cohesion is missing and hitherto empirical results remain ambivalent and limited to specific countries (see Sect. 2.1). Therefore, I will not be able to cite comprehensive theories in the following, but rather collect arguments and assumptions about possible relationships. Due to space constraints these can only be shortly summarized and formulated for all cohesion dimensions together. For proceeding studies, however, I propose to further specify and differentiate the hypotheses, e.g., for each cohesion subdimension separately, in order to test for possible divergent influences. Often,

4From

Glock and Stark’s (1968) classical five religious dimensions (ideological, ritualistic, intellectual, religious experience and consequences), I exclude the dimension of knowledge (because it does not necessarily indicate the depth of personal religiosity) and of ethical behaviors (because I analyze parts of them on the side of my dependent variable and investigate to what extent they are related to religiosity), and I add Boos-Nünning’s (1972) dimension of belonging (Pollack and Rosta 2017, p. 46 f.).

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there are arguments for both effect directions. I will then decide for one side to formulate directional hypotheses which can be empirically tested—and possibly revised—in subsequent empirical analyses. So, my hypotheses are to be understood as working hypotheses for this chapter’s concrete research design. H1) Believing-dimension and social cohesion Regarding the intensity of faith, it is argued that a person’s faith contains certain world views, values and norms (Christian Ten Commandments, Torah in Judaism, etc.). Anchored in a superior transcendent power, these convictions would have great authority, shaping a believer’s general dispositions and actions—including those relevant to social cohesion (trust, identification, responsibility, engagement) (Preston et al. 2014, pp. 159–161; Traunmüller 2012a, p. 57 f.). However, the direction of the relation is not clear. According to the prominent religious prosociality hypothesis, personal faith promotes prosocial behavior like charity, solidarity, responsibility and the like (Galen 2012, p. 876; for various effect mechanisms see Preston et al. 2014, pp. 158–163). Other authors draw attention to absolutist religious truth claims and to the observation, that a strong faith could result in intolerance and devaluation of people with other or no religion (Batson 2013, pp. 88–100; Berggren and Bjørnskov 2011, p. 462 f.). For investigating the effect direction, I formulate the first working hypothesis following and testing the widely held religious prosociality hypothesis: H1a) The intensity of the citizens’ faith is positively related to social/institutional trust, inclusive social/national identification, social/institutional responsibility and social/political engagement (which make up the cohesion of a society).5

In order to somewhat clarify religion’s ambiguous role in society, I further analyze the faith contents. In analogy to the concept of bridging in social capital research, it can be assumed that more inclusive beliefs towards diverse people are conducive to the cohesion of a country as a whole with usually different social

5When

applying the framework presented here in subsequent studies, I propose to calculate models separately for each cohesion subdimension in order to obtain differentiated results – and additionally for a cohesion index as an overview. In the following hypotheses, for reasons of space and readability, I no longer list the subdimensions individually, but the summarizing term ‘dimensions of social cohesion’ implies this differentiated proceeding.

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groups (Pickel and Gladkich 2011, p. 83/85; Traunmüller 2012a, pp. 20/58–61). From this, it follows: H1b) The inclusiveness of the citizens’ faith is positively related to the dimensions of social cohesion.

H2) Behaving-dimension and social cohesion On the one hand, religious practices can be time-consuming, so that a person has less resources for other socio-political commitment (Basedau et al. 2017, p. 12 f./60; Traunmüller 2012a, pp. 61/126/158). On the other hand, prayers and service attendance can motivate the faithful and give them strength to devote themselves to others. Particularly in the social capital literature, the argument is prominent that collective rituals and experiences would connect members of society from different generations and statuses, strengthening social networks and community. This would apply even more for a broader, active involvement in religious organizations (compared to religious practices in a narrower sense like prayer or service attendance)—with the following explanation: When people’s religious commitment extends to, for instance, socio-cultural activities, they could learn a wide range of skills and behaviors such as trust, responsibility and alike, which transfer into other areas of life (Durkheim 2007, pp. 72–75/625–627; Norris and Inglehart 2011, pp. 192–194; Traunmüller 2012a, pp. 41 f./61–63). Therefore, I conclude: H2) The citizens’ religious practices are positively related to the dimensions of social cohesion. The positive relation of the active involvement in religious organizations is the strongest. H3) Belonging-dimension and social cohesion

With respect to the religious affiliation it is reasoned that people belonging to a religious community are embedded in social networks. There, they would learn and practice social norms and interactions, which in turn shape their overall attitudes and behaviors—including those relevant to a society’s cohesion (Preston et al. 2014, pp. 161–163; Traunmüller 2012a, pp. 61–63). However, regarding the effect direction, there is no evidence that certain religions have a generally supportive or inhibiting role in social cohesion (Pollack and Müller 2013; Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a). Instead, the status (minority/ majority) of one’ religion in a country seems to be decisive due to resulting in- vs.

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outgroup dynamics. Individuals belonging to a minority religion might be considered as an outgroup and devalued by the majority group, which in turn provokes demarcation and sub-grouping on part of the minority (Küpper 2010; Pollack and Müller 2013; Tausch et al. 2009). To sum up, my approach is not to compare religions as black boxes and ascribe generalized effects to Christians, Muslims, etc. per se. Instead, I assume different cohesion effects of specific faith contents and practices, lying across the denominations (see above). So, the belonging-dimension rather functions as a control variable in my framework and I attribute the direction of the relationship to the religion’s status, formulating as follows: H3) The citizens’ religious affiliation is related to the dimensions of social cohesion. A religious minority status is negatively related to the cohesion dimensions.

3 Methods and Data The second part proposes suitable methods and data for empirically testing the presented theoretical framework in a global comparative perspective.

3.1 Multilevel Analysis To empirically investigate the role of religion in the cohesion of countries worldwide, quantitative methods are appropriate, as they allow a global analysis including large numbers of cases under the control of third variables and thus enable generalizable conclusions (Lauth et al. 2015, p. 50 f.). For selecting the specific method, the underlying data structure is decisive. Religiosity as well as specific socio-political attitudes and behaviors of individuals are analyzed (level I), which in turn are embedded in diverse country contexts (level II). Since the individuals and their social contexts are not independent from each other but interrelated, a comparative design has to consider differences and characteristics of a country (e.g., degree of development/inequality) that might also influence the state’s cohesion. In particular, religious context variables (e.g., degree of secularization/ religious diversity/state-religion-relation) are expected to have an impact—either directly on the society’s cohesion or as a cross-level interaction effect on the

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relationships between citizens’ religiosity and the cohesion dimensions (Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a).6 This hierarchical data structure can be modelled with Multilevel Analysis (for detailed explanations see Hox 2010; Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2012). As an extended method of the normal Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, MLA provides correct estimates of the standard errors and more accurate results when the observations are not independent from each other. In contrast to, for example, the alternative of using fixed effects in an OLS regression, MLA enables researchers to specifically analyze various effects of state characteristics (Human Development Index (HDI), religious diversity, etc.). It links different levels of analysis (micro/macro) and examines individual and contextual effects in a differentiated manner, so that more information about these units is preserved. Individual data as well as aggregated data for countries can be integrated (see Sect. 3.2) (Hox 2010; Robson and Pevalin 2016). Figure 1 illustrates the outlined theoretical framework, modelled as MLA, including possible control variables derived from the relevant literature (see Sect. 3.2). For implementing this design in subsequent studies, I suggest proceeding as differentiated as possible (separate models for each religious and cohesion dimension) in order to capture the relationships’ ambivalence and deal with multicollinearity issues. For additional overviews, indices can be built based on factor analyses (see Dragolov et al. 2013, pp. 24–126; 2016, pp. 26–31 as a step-to-step guide for this index formation).

6In

further studies, the religious context effects could be specifically theorized and examined in detail. They have gained little attention in cohesion research so far. This is, especially concerning state-religion-relations, due to a lack of adequate data, that has only recently been developed (Traunmüller 2012b). Previous results remain limited and ambivalent: For the European context, Pickel and Gladkich (2011) find positive correlations of secularization (aggregated service attendance) with social networks – and of Protestantism with social networks and social trust. Traunmüller (2012a) identifies a negative effect of secularization (aggregated importance of religion) on social networks – and a positive one of Protestantism on social trust. According to Schnabel and Grötsch (2012, 2014), a close state-religion relation and Protestantism increase societal trust. For Asian countries, Dragolov et al. (2018) state that religious diversity (Alesina et al. 2003) is positively related to the dimension of fairness perception (controlled for GDP) and to the cohesion index (under GDP control the effect turns insignificant).

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Fig. 1   The role of religiosity in social cohesion as multilevel model. Source: Own compilation based on Bertelsmann Stiftung (2018); Chan et al. (2006); Dragolov et al. (2016); Fox (2017); Pollack und Rosta (2017); Schnabel und Grötsch (2012, 2014); Traunmüller (2012a)

3.2 Data and Operationalization For concretization, I give an example for the operationalization of the variables with adequate databases. This is one feasible way—other possibilities can be explored and realized. In line with my focus on attitude research and perceptions-based indicators, I operationalize social cohesion and religiosity with suitable items from survey databases. Examples on a global scale include the WVS, ISSP, Pew Research Center and regional barometers (Euro-/Afro-/Latino-/Asia-Barometer). For illustration in this chapter I choose the WVS because it measures the (sub-)dimensions of both central variables in a differentiated and valid way and provides for that the most comprehensive data in terms of time and space worldwide (Norris and Inglehart 2011; WVS 2020). Exemplarily, I take the - at the time of writing this chapter - latest available dataset of the sixth wave (2010–2014) with 60 countries worldwide (at least 1000 respondents per country). These sample sizes can be regarded as sufficiently large

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for a MLA (Hox 2010; Robson and Pevalin 2016).7 Within this chapter’s scope, the selection of relevant items cannot be explained in detail, but Table 1 and 2 summarize possible items for the operationalizations of social cohesion and religiosity. With respect to control variables, I detect relevant ones from the literature and list them in Table 3 (a detailed justification must be provided elsewhere). They are to be regarded as potential predictors—which of them actually find their way into the final models must be checked in each case when carrying out the analyses. For instance, multicollinearity issues must be considered as well as the overall sample size, so that the models are not overloaded but rather parsimonious (Hox 2010; Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2012). Examples for individual controls from the WVS include sex, age, level of education, income and post-materialism (Dragolov et al. 2013, 2016; Norris and Inglehart 2011; Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014). On the country level, the religious context can be specified by the degree of secularization (aggregated mean of the WVS item about religion’s importance in life), the religious diversity (usually measured by the religious fractionalization index from Alesina et al. 2003) and state-religion-relations (Norris and Inglehart 2011; Traunmüller 2012a, 2012b). With regard to the latter, the State and Religion Project around Jonathan Fox (2006) provides the most ambitious and comprehensive dataset, compared to other existing indices (Traunmüller 2012b). It measures the degree of separation between state and religion by the variable Official Religion (Fox 2017, p. 2 f.). Concerning a more detailed assessment of the characteristics of the state-religion relationship, the variables Official Support, Restrictions on the Majority Religion or All Religions and Religious Discrimination Against Minority Religions reveal information on the degree of mutual cooperation and equal treatment of all religious groups within a country (ibid., pp. 2–8). As further socio-economic and political country controls, the following are cited: level of development (HDI from the United Nations data), inequality (GINI-coefficient from the World Bank data), ethnic diversity (ethnic fractionalization index from Alesia et al. 2003),8 inner conflict (Group Grievance 7There

is no fixed convention on a minimum number of cases. Hox (2010, p. 235) gives the 30/30 rule (30 individuals/30 groups) – with modifications depending on the research foci, for example 50/20 when there is a strong interest in cross-level interactions and 100/10 when there is a strong interest in the random part. In research practice, however, MLAs are carried out even with smaller numbers (of about 20 or 30, e.g., for certain EU/OECD countries) (Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a). 8Since the fractionalization indices of Alesina et al. (2003) are limited (especially to the year of 2003), other measures should be explored in subsequent studies – for ethnic diversity see, for example, the Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (Drazanova 2019) and for religious diversity see the discussions in Pollack et al. (2012).

Source: WVS (2010)

(citizenstate)

Vertical

Institutional trust Confidence: 1) The police 2) The courts 3) The government 4) Parliament 5) Armed Forces 6) Political Parties 7) The Civil Services

Level of Horizontal Social trust relationship (citizen1) Most people can citizen) be trusted 2) How much you trust: People you meet for the first time 3) I see myself as someone who: is generally trusting

1) Trust

Dimension

Table 1   Operationalization of social cohesion

National identification 1) I see myself as part of the [country] nation

Inclusive social identification 1) Would not like to have neighbor: people of different race 2) Would not like to have neighbor: immigrants/ foreign workers 3) Child qualities: tolerance & respect for other people

2) Identification

Institutional responsibility Justifiable: 1) Claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled 2) Avoiding a fare on public transport 3) Someone accepting a bribe in the course of their duties 4) Cheating on taxes if you have a chance

Social responsibility 1) It is important to this person to do something for the good of society 2) It is important to this person to help the people nearby; to care for their needs

3) Responsibility

Political engagement 1) Important in life: Politics 2) Active/Inactive membership: Political party 3) Interest in politics 4) Vote in elections: National level

Social engagement Active/Inactive membership: 1) Sport/recreational organization 2) Art, music or educational organization 3) Environmental organization 4) Humanitarian/charitable organization 5) Consumer organization 6) Self-help group, mutual aid group

4) Engagement

34 C. Hillenbrand

Source: WVS (2010)

Intensity of faith 1) Religious person 2) Important in life: religion 3) Believe in: God 4) How important is God in your life

1) believing

2) behaving

Prayer Contents of faith 1) How often do you (inclusive) 1) The only accept- pray able religion is my religion 2) Neighbors: people of a different religion 3) People who belong to different religions are probably just as moral as those who belong to mine

Table 2   Operationalization of religiosity Service attendance 1) How often do you attend religious services

Involvement in reli- Religious affiliation 1) Religious gious organization denomination 1) Active/Inactive membership: church/ religious organization

3) belonging

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Table 3   Operationalization of control variables at individual and country level Variable Name Operationalization Level I: Individuum

Source

Sex

Item: Sex

WVS (2010)

Age

Item: Age

Education level

Item: Highest educational level attained

Income level

Item: Scale of income

Postmaterialism

Item: Post-materialist index 12-item → [most important goals of the country]: 1) A high level of economic growth 2) Making sure this country has strong defense forces 3) Seeing that people have more say about how things are done at their jobs and in their communities 4) Trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful 5) Maintaining order in the nation 6) Giving people more say in important government decisions 7) Fighting rising prices 8) Protecting freedom of speech 9) A stable economy 10) Progress toward a less impersonal and more humane society 11) Progress toward a society in which Ideas count more than money 12) The fight against crime

Level II: Country Degree of seculari- Aggregated mean of Item Important in zation life: Religion

WVS (2010)

Religious diversity Index of religious fractionalization

Alesina et al. (2003)

Statereligionrelation

State and Religion Project Separation: Variable Official Religion of J. Fox1) Cooperation and Equality: Variables: 1) Official Support 2) Restrictions on the Majority Religion or All Religions 3) Religious Discrimination Against Minority Religions

State of development

Human Development Index

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)2) (continued)

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Table 3   (continued) Variable Name

Operationalization

Source

Level of inequality

Gini coefficient

World Bank3)

Ethnic diversity

Index of ethnic fractionalization

Alesina et al. (2003)

Level of inner conflict

Indicator Group Grievance of the Frag- Fund for Peace (FFP)4) ile States Index (FSI)

Level of democracy

Democracy Indices: 1) Electoral democracy 2) Liberal democracy 3) Participative democracy 4) Deliberative democracy 5) Egalitarian democracy

Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem)5)

Note. 1)State and Religion Project: https://www.religionandstate.org; 2)UNDP: https://hdr. undp.org/en/data; 3)World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI; 4)FFP: https://fragilestatesindex.org/indicators/c3/; 5)V-Dem: https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/dataversion-10/

Indicator from Fund for Peace) and democracy (Varieties of Democracy indicators) (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2018; Dragolov et al. 2013, 2016; Schnabel and Grötsch 2012, 2014; Traunmüller 2012a).

4 Conclusion How can the role of citizens’ religiosity in social cohesion be empirically analyzed for countries worldwide? With the outlined research design I can give the following response to this research question: The role of citizens’ religiosity in social cohesion can be empirically analyzed by distinguishing different dimensions of the complex concepts, systematizing their relationships and applying statistical Multilevel Analysis to test them in diverse country contexts. Social cohesion manifests itself in socio-political relationships among citizens (horizontal level) and between citizens and the state (vertical level). The core dimensions include social/institutional trust, inclusive social/national identification, social/institutional responsibility

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and social/political engagement. Religiosity is conceptualized with three dimensions: believing (intensity/contents of faith), behaving (prayer/service attendance/involvement in religious organizations) and belonging (religious affiliation). The method of statistical Multilevel Analysis allows for the examination of the variables’ relationships, considering the underlying hierarchical data structure of individuals who are embedded in various societal and religious country contexts, which themselves may exert (direct/cross-level interaction) effects. Exemplarily, I operationalized the variables, including individual and country control variables, with adequate databases (World Values Survey, Fox’s State and Religion Project, World Bank, etc.). Overall, the presented research design is intended to inspire and prepare further empirical comparative research on the role of religion in social cohesion. This is of high socio-political relevance, especially regarding current challenges like polarization and civil wars as well as religion’s ambivalent significance in many parts of the world. We need a better understanding of how religion build bridges, not barriers in society and of what holds us together in order to ensure a peaceful coexistence of diverse people in a society.

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Europe

Ritual Reproduction in Jewish Communities in Germany: The Case of Circumcision Susanne Tübel

Abstract

The study of Jewish religion shows that many concepts developed in view of Protestant Western contexts do not fit for empirical research on elements of the Jewish tradition and its religious understanding. Analyzing the Jewish ritual of circumcision, the concept of (individual) religiosity does not seem appropriate. Individual belief and individual religiosity are no precondition for the ritual taking place on the eighth day of a boy’s life. The here-presented study aims at reconstructing the ritual structure of circumcision with regard to the level of time in Jewish communities in Germany by using empirical data from qualitative interviews. Interestingly enough, the ritual reproduction of circumcision from generation to generation is independent both from the individual religiosity of the boy and his parents. The concept of (individual) religiosity is not effective in explaining the continuing transmission of the ritual and does not seem appropriate for research on other aspects of Judaism either. Alternatively, the concept of religious obligation and a wider understanding of transcendence connecting the individual with the Jewish community and Jewish tradition are more helpful to explain the ongoing ritual reproduction.

S. Tübel (*)  Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_3

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Keywords

Circumcision · Judaism · Ritual reproduction · Temporal structure · Qualitative study · Transcendence · Duration · Tradition

1 Introduction According to the Halacha, the Jewish religious law, circumcision has to take place on the eighth day of a boy’s life. This ritual has been widely discussed in Germany (Alwart 2014; Becker 2013; Franz 2014; Herzberg 2012; Putzke et al. 2008) as well as in other parts of Western Europe and the US (Carpenter 2010; Denniston et al. 2006, 2010; World Health Organization [WHO] 2007). The general focus of these studies are legal, medical as well as medico-ethical aspects of circumcision, e.g., its legitimacy, its point of time, as well as the potential pain caused by the procedure. In addition, there are several social science analyses of the German debate on circumcision and the role of Jews therein (Bodenheimer 2012; Heil and Kramer 2012; Krall 2014; Öktem 2013; Wermke 2014b; Yurdakul 2016). However, qualitative-sociological research on the meaning of circumcision is rare (Alabay 2012, p. 135; Zabus 2010, p. 146). On the one hand, there are qualitative studies dealing with circumcision in the Muslim context (Alabay 2012; Haeger 2005). Yet, since the point of time, the ritual practice and social framing of Muslim and Jewish circumcision differ from each other, it is not possible to transfer those results to the Jewish context. On the other hand, the meaning of Jewish circumcision is subject to—non-empirical—historical, theological, body-, and gender-sociological research (e.g., Anidjar 1997; Cohen 2005; Deusel 2012; Eilberg-Schwartz 1992; Goldberg 2003; Gollaher 2000; Jacobs 2014; Jütte 2016; Konner 2009; Mark 2003). From this perspective, three salient interpretations of the ritual are relevant for the study presented here. First, circumcision seems to be a ritual of inclusion (Bauks 2016; Deusel 2012; Gollaher 2000). That is, by being circumcised, boys become part of the Abrahamic covenant, the Jewish people, and a shared tradition. Circumcision seems to be part of their identity as Jews. However, every boy or girl born by a Jewish mother counts as a Jew—with or without circumcision (Deusel 2012, p. 91). Secondly, some studies (Deusel 2012; Goldberg 2003; Wermke 2014b) stress the importance of circumcision as a mitzvah, a central Jewish obligation. Interestingly enough, this mitzvah addresses the father, who is responsible for circumcising his son, not the eight-day-old boy himself. Only if he did not do so, then the son—upon reaching the age of reli-

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gious responsibility when he is 13 years old—is obligated to get himself circumcised (Deusel 2012, p. 63). This traditionally prescribed structure of religious obligation underlines the role of the parents and their part within the transmission of the ritual from generation to generation whereas the circumcised individual seems to be less important. Thirdly, since only boys undergo the ritual, circumcision symbolizes virility and a male lineage (Anidjar 1997; Cohen 2005; Mark 2003). The boy becomes part of something ‘higher’. Again, however, his individual religiosity seems to be less relevant. All of the scientific approaches mentioned above hint at the specific structure of the ritual with regard to the level of time. This chapter explores this temporal structure from a sociological perspective based on qualitative-empirical research. However, for the analysis of the ritual, the concept of (individual) religiosity, coming from Protestant Western contexts, does not seem appropriate. Individual belief and individual religiosity are no precondition for the ritual—which is one of the reasons why it takes place on the eighth day. With regard to this early point in time, Jewish circumcision seems to resemble Christian baptism (Wermke 2014a; Zimmermann 2006). In spite of some structural similarities, Deusel (2012, p. 115) stresses the fact that circumcision presupposes inclusion into Jewish religion—by being born from a Jewish mother—whereas baptism is the act of inclusion into the Christian religious community. What is more, the transition and reproduction of the ritual from generation to generation is independent both from the individual religiosity of the boy and his parents. That is the reason why many Jewish parents decide to circumcise their son but at the same time call themselves ‘secular’. This chapter aims at reconstructing the logic of ritual reproduction with regard to Jewish circumcision. Ritual reproduction means how religious actors perpetuate the ritual and transmit circumcision from generation to generation, thereby establishing a structure of temporal continuity. The results of this study suggest that we need other concepts than individual religiosity for understanding ritual reproduction. Therefore, the following part will introduce the sociological study on Jewish circumcision that the data is derived from (II). Empirically reconstructing the temporal structure of the ritual leads to the concept of transcending oneself into the duration of tradition (III). This means that circumcision does not transmit religious ‘identity’ directly. Rather, it enables the circumcised to pass on the Jewish tradition because it transcends the individual into a continuing line of tradition. At the end of this chapter, the findings are summarized with regard to necessary conceptual change (IV). This part takes up the concept of transcendence, which is highly prominent within the sociology of religion, and shows its potential for analyzing ritual reproduction when separated from its exclusive reference to individual religiosity.

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2 Research Questions and Study Design An essential part of the study presented here was to analyze the specific structure of the Jewish ritual of circumcision with regard to the level of time (Tübel 2019). With the help of qualitative empirical data, the study reconstructed how circumcision is experienced temporally and what kind of temporal structure unfolds based on the ritual reproduction of circumcision from generation to generation. The study is based on qualitative empirical data from 11 expert interviews with rabbis, circumcisers and religious scholars as well as 21 narratively oriented family interviews. Whenever possible, these family interviews were conducted with the parents and their children together. Sometimes the children could not participate in view of their age or only the mother or the father were present. The narrative style of the interviews fulfilled the purpose of focusing on the temporal structure. This research method takes the underlying temporality of reality into account. The study aimed at reconstructing the ideal type (Weber 1922/1951, p. 190; Weber 1922/1972, p. 4) of Jewish circumcision and its temporal experience based on the varying orientations, experiences, and semantics within the field. Thereby, research considered not only the circumcised boy but also his parents and other persons directly involved in the ritual, like the mohel, the ritual Jewish circumciser. Research took place within the Jewish and Muslim field in Germany.1 For the analysis, however, the focus was on the Jewish ritual using the Muslim cases for comparison and contrast. Grounded theory was applied both for the overall study design and for the interpretation of the empirical data (Corbin and Strauss 2015; Strauss 1998; Strübing 2018; Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2014, pp. 190–223). This style of qualitative data analysis takes the principle circularity of the qualitative research process into account. Interpretation of the empirical material starts directly with the collection of the first interviews. These findings guide the search for new interviewees—a process called theoretical sampling (Corbin and Strauss 2015, pp. 134–152)—as well as the contents of the next interviews and their interpretation. Doing so with the help of alternately open, axial and selective coding, constant comparison and the writing and rewriting of theoretical memos leads to a theory grounded in the empirical data. As a result, a core category links all theoretical concepts developed within this process together.

1All

ter.

quotes in German language were translated into English for the purpose of this chap-

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Typically, grounded theory studies follow a certain paradigm, which means looking for conditions and consequences, strategies as well as interactions (Strauss 1998, p. 63). For this study, a slightly different paradigm was used which integrated theoretical concepts that were relevant for the analysis as part of the underlying social theory. According to his New Phenomenology, Hermann Schmitz (1964, p. 153; Schmitz 2019) differentiates between three kinds of temporal experience. First, there is the experience of an objective time (Lagezeit) based on a relative order between different dates. E.g., we know that the year 2019 was before the year 2020 and after that, there will be the year 2021. Living in a modern society we are used to this kind of temporal experience. We arrange different dates in a proper order of ‘before,’ ‘contemporaneous’ and ‘after.’ We thereby establish a chronological way of ordering matters and measuring temporal lags, which is independent from the individual self. Secondly, there is a kind of temporal experience called modal time (Modalzeit). This means the absolute, non-relative classification between past (what is no more), present (what is now) and future (what is not yet). Modal time relates to subjectivity and the mineness (Meinhaftigkeit) of experiences as there is only one absolute ‘now’ for every living individual. Writing these lines is what I experience right ‘now,’ and the moment will be irretrievably gone once I send the manuscript to the reviewers. However, relative time and modal time are not easy to distinguish during our common-sense experience, since we typically project modal time into the relative order of dates. Doing so, we usually define past as what comes before and future as what comes after the present (Schmitz 1964, p. 154). Thirdly, there is duration (Dauer), a gliding temporal continuum. It means the experience of continued existence. For example, I continue to be the same person that I was yesterday and will be in the future. In contrast to finding oneself within an individual absolute now, it is undecided if something that continues is in the past, in the present or in the future. These three additional analytical differentiations were helpful in taking a closer look at the temporal structure of circumcision. Apart from ordering different points of time, they were useful to reconstruct the temporal experience of the participants and the structure of ritual reproduction. In the following section, three different quotes will exemplify the results of the study. The interviews presented here describe the course of ritual circumcision in an ideal–typical way.2 The interpretation process went through several rounds of coding, comparison,

2Since

data must be made anonymous, all names and places have been changed.

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recoding and theorizing (Tübel 2019, pp. 122–139). Due to lack of space, this chapter focuses on the theoretical model derived from this process. As a result, it presents only a summarizing analysis of the empirical data.

3 Transcending into Duration—The Temporal Structure of the Ritual Reproduction The following quote is from an interview with a liberal Jewish rabbi. He refers to a conversation between himself and one of the members of the Jewish community questioning circumcision on the eighth day. He thereby takes up an argument often used by the opponents of circumcision in Germany, namely, to wait until the boy can decide for himself: Aron: He said, “I have to believe in it, and be convinced of it and then let myself be circumcised.” And I said, “That has nothing to do with it, circumcision is just our sign (1) that we accept God’s covenant (2) and whether you work for it or not, that is your decision, but circumcision is so to say (1) what comes before.” That‘s why it really is with children, they cannot decide themselves, otherwise we could say, “Let‘s wait until they are 60 years old and if they have led a good life as Jews, they may be circumcised,” or something like that, but then I say, “That is just not that.” (1) But that God has actually made a covenant with us, quite unconditionally (2) and has said, “I will be your God, and you my people, and for that, as your sign, you are circumcising your children.” But it is not as if, it is not even written that, when you do not circumcise the children, then the covenant is broken, it is not like that, but you just do not carry the sign of the covenant anymore. So that's why I would say someone who isn't circumcised is of course still Jewish […] but when it comes to parents (2) saying “The child should later decide for itself” I think, “That is not the thing, you are the one who is responsible, not the child.” Well, that's why it's the eighth day, and that’s why the father is obliged. (Transcript interview Aron, ll. 1915–1939)

First, Aron describes the perspective of the member of the Jewish community who seems to be skeptical towards circumcision on the eighth day (“I have to believe in it and be convinced of it and then let myself be circumcised “). However, Aron strongly rejects this interpretation of the ritual as an individual confession of faith (“That has nothing to do with it”). In contrast, he explains the complex temporal structure of circumcision that underlines the responsibility of the parents. Describing circumcision as “our sign (1) that we accept God’s covenant,” Aron uses a kind of wording that opposes the framing of circumcision as an individual

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decision. Obviously, circumcision is not a sign you can mark yourself with but goes back to the Abrahamic “covenant.” Those who carry the sign “cannot decide themselves”—and are thus not responsible for their own circumcision. Instead, circumcision is “what comes before.” Moreover, the parents—resp. the father— are responsible for initiating the ritual (“you are the one who is responsible, not the child “). They are the ones who “do not carry the sign of the covenant anymore,” if they do not circumcise their children. In contrast to their obligation, it is a free and individual decision of the circumcised man to “work for it or not.” Using a hypothetical scenario (“otherwise we could say ‘Let’s wait until they are 60 years old and if they have led a good life as Jews, they may be circumcised’”), Aron adds a third interpretation of the ritual. As opposed to the already rejected interpretation as an individual confession of faith and his take on the ritual as an enduring sign of the covenant, circumcision could be interpreted as a reward for leading “a good life” as a Jew. However, the temporal structure of the ritual seems to be vice versa: At the very beginning, at the eighth day of life, circumcision marks somebody with the sign of the covenant. The circumcised boy gradually decodes this sign in the course of growing up. It might even be a future guideline for living a good life as a Jew. Still, the covenant holds “quite unconditionally “—almost without any individual commitment. By this means, the individual carrier of the sign transcends into duration (Schmitz 1964, p. 153), symbolized by the covenant. That is, the covenant does not address an individual person in his relationship to God, but the Jewish “people.” What is remarkable here is the circuitous temporal structure of the ritual. Circumcision is what comes before any individual decision—neither that of the child, nor that of his parents. That is, the ritual is independent from individual religiosity. It is not even the founding point for a religious membership since every son born by a Jewish mother counts as a Jew. Instead, Aron refers to an ever-continuing Jewish community, the Jewish tradition resp. ‘the Jewish people’ as an explanation for the responsibility of the parents. This is reminiscent of Hervieu-Léger (1993/2006) speaking of ‘religion as a chain of memory’—that is, founding in tradition. In sum, we can say that the commitment structure prescribed by the Jewish religious law is the structural condition of a way of handing down a tradition that replicates itself. The eighth day as a specific point of time for circumcision was also a matter of discussion in the interviews with Jewish families about the circumcision of their sons. The following interview with Anna and Boris partly took place in Russian language and was conducted with the help of a Russian-speaking cointerviewer (Im) in addition to the author (I). Due to medical reasons, only their third son was circumcised on the eighth day whereas their first son was circum-

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cised after three months and their second son when he was two weeks old. Below, Boris explains why circumcision on the eighth day is still important to him.3 Boris: In religious law, in principle, it is not necessarily the law that it’s the eighth day, right? There are different opportunities, if the baby is sick or.. but if it is possible, there is no other thing but sick, it has to be the eighth day. In the Jewish Talmud God has said, “on the eighth day you have to be circumcised, that is your..” (2) well, that is what you believe (we think) believer or what’s it called? Bepa дa [belief yes]? Im: It is belief. I: mhmh Boris: Yes mhm. (1) Well, we don’t do it because of, um, I did not think of (2) our religion as I did this, yeah? We always do that and hope that will keep going just like that (Transcript interview Anna and Boris, ll. 1856–1869)

Boris starts his explanation by referring to “religious law.” It prescribes circumcision on “the eighth day” apart from only few exceptions (“if the baby is sick”). Together with the second interviewer, Boris explores his relationship to these religious requirements calling it “belief” (“Bepa дa [belief yes]?”; “It is belief”; “Yes mhm”). However, he rejects this kind of religious reasoning, but underlines the importance of becoming part of a shared tradition (“I did not think of (2) our religion as I did this, yeah? We always do that”). Boris uses the term “always” that shows the importance of the temporal category of duration for the ritual of circumcision. Likewise, the rather individualizing classifications of modal time (past, present, future) are becoming less relevant. Even in reference to future circumcisions, Boris stresses the continuity of the tradition as the prime motive for the religious practice (“hope that will keep going just like that”). That is, the meaning of circumcision depends on its continued perpetuation. Again, this shows the peculiar temporal structure of the ritual. It dissolves the individual into the duration of tradition, a temporal continuum. In comparison with the first quote, it stands out again that circumcision is not a sign of individual religiosity—neither that of the parents nor that of the children. Moreover, it is not a way of transmitting a religious ‘identity.’ In fact, it is the continued transmission of the capability of handing down the tradition. Thereby, the individual transcends subjectivity and dissolves himself into the ever-continuing duration of a shared tradition.

3Interjections

in Russian language were translated into English for the purpose of this chapter and in the following quote put in square brackets.

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Before this concept of transcendence is taken up in the last part of this chapter, a third quote from one of the family interviews will substantiate these findings. In the following, Dora explains the importance of circumcision for her family. The meaning of the ritual—which is for Dora linked to the history of her family— depends on the same temporal structure mapped out above. Dora: Even before I was pregnant, well, let’s say, it was always clear to me that if I get a son, then he will be circumcised. And for me it is also important because I had a Jewish father […] he is no longer alive, and um, he, he was circumcised. I knew that. […] He was not religious, but he always knew that he was Jewish, he was never ashamed, but he was rather proud to be Jewish and he had passed on to me lots of emotionally positive things, identification, Jewish identification, and that was, well, and of course what adds to this is that I had such a strong relationship to my father that I (1) as a matter of course that if I get a son, then this links the generations. And this is also what actually happened, well, I named my son after my father, for example, it is a tradition, if the father dies, you take a name to honor a deceased person and so I named my son after my father and it was clear that, well, that yeah, he would pass on our tradition. (Transcript interview Dora, ll. 134–161)

In Dora’s eyes, circumcision is a religious practice that bridges the gap between different generations. It does not only concern her son, but it is important for her as well (“for me it is also important”). Even more, it connects her son to her father (“he [her father] was circumcised”; “he [her son] would pass on our tradition”). Again, circumcision seems to be something that endures, even though circumstances might change. That is why Dora takes circumcision for granted (“it was always clear,” “as a matter of course”). The ritual is also important for her self-understanding as a Jew (“if I get a son, then he will be circumcised”; “Jewish identification”). However, it does not transfer a certain ‘Jewish identity’ directly. Instead, sticking to your family tradition und practicing Jewish rituals like circumcision is a way of performing and thereby perpetuating ‘Jewish identity’. Again, duration becomes an important category since it is undecided if this identity exists in the past, present or the future. Dora meets her “identification” as a Jew with the help of rituals (“I named my son after my father, for example”). Circumcision seems to play a major role in keeping up that tradition while at the same time it evokes a male lineage from her father to her son and future male family members to be circumcised (Anidjar 1997; Cohen 2005; Mark 2003). Only the male body is able to carry the specific sign of circumcision. Still, the ritual bridges not only the gap between male members from different generations (“this links the generations”) but also includes Dora as a mother—since she is the one initiating the ritual for her son (“for me it

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is also important”). The continuity of the tradition crystallizes and materializes in the embodied symbol of circumcision. However, the ritual does not only ascribe to a single male circumcised person, but it is rather about the interconnection between different members of a lineage. By circumcising their son, the parents performatively invoke their own religious inclusion as Jews. At the same time, this anticipates the son’s prospective individual process of religious inclusion. That is why circumcision transmits not only a certain ritual and an abstract ‘Jewish identity’ but also the commitment to perpetuate the tradition (“it was clear that, well, that yeah, he would pass on our tradition”). In other words, circumcision passes on the capability to pass on the tradition. Thereby, the ritual transcends the individual subject—being circumcised here and now—in favor of a temporal structure underlining the continuity of tradition in the sense of duration. The term ‘transcendence’ has a long tradition within religious research. It describes religious experiences in which the individual feels dissolution into a ‘higher’ sphere of reality. The concluding part of this chapter suggests conceptual change as it is possible to use the term not only for experiences of individual religiosity but also for rituals such as circumcision in which individual religiosity is less important.

4 The Concept of Transcendence in a New Light This chapter analyzed the temporal structure of Jewish circumcision as a way of dissolving the religious individual into a tradition existing in the state of duration—that is, a state of continuity independent from both a relative order of time and the categories of modal time (past, present and future). The concept of individual religiosity is not effective in explaining the continuing transmission of circumcision—and it does not seem appropriate for research on many other aspects of Judaism either. Alternatively, the concept of religious commitment, which connects the individual with the Jewish community and Jewish tradition, is more helpful to explain the ongoing ritual reproduction. That is, parents initiating the ritual of circumcision are committed to placing themselves within an ever-continuing ‘chain of memory’ (Hervieu-Léger 1993/2006). In doing so, they transcend their individual selves into the indivisible duration of tradition. However, this term of transcendence is slightly different from the one that is traditionally connected with experiences of individual religiosity by researchers of religion. In his famous study ‘The varieties of religious experience,’ William James (1902/1997) describes the particular state of mind during religious experiences. The personal self dissolves into something ‘higher’—a ‘Higher Self’

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outside the individual being (James 1902/1997, p. 79). Quite similarly, Émile Durkheim (1912/1981) speaks of losing oneself during experiences of ‘collective effervescence,’ which he describes as an ecstatic feeling within a community. This state of mind enables the individual to get in touch with the sacred—as opposed to the profane sphere of life. The individual transcends itself and merges into the transpersonal power of the collective (Durkheim, 1912/1981, p. 209). Referring to both James and Durkheim, Hans Joas (2008) also discusses ‘the experience of self-transcendence.’ He describes it as a feeling of going beyond the boundaries of the self, as a way of exceeding oneself. While most researchers of religion— including the three mentioned here—try to explore the ‘other,’ the ‘unavailable,’ the place into which the individual self dissolves, the empirical data presented here shows that all of these descriptions share the same logical structure with regard to experiencing oneself. In terms of the differentiations introduced as for the level of time, we can describe it as a shift from the focus on an absolute here and now in the individual present to the state of duration that continues between generations. This approach is similar to Alfred Schütz’ ideas on transcendence, who distinguishes between three different modes: 1) small transcendences, which transcend the here and now in everyday life, e.g., remembering something; 2) medium transcendences, that enable us to understand other persons; and 3) great transcendences (Schütz and Luckmann 1975/2003, p. 593). Only the latter are able to bridge the gap between different spheres of reality and thereby to get in touch with the religious world. However, all three forms share the same meaning of transcendence, that is, to go beyond a certain experience (Schütz and Luckmann 1975/2003, p. 596). Typically, sociologists of religion analyze this form of ‘beyondness’ as a way for the individual to get in touch with the ‘divine,’ the ‘sacred’ or the like. In contrast to that, the focus on the shared logical structure of dissolving the individual self leads to a new concept of transcendence that includes even phenomena that are not explicitly described as ‘religious.’ In this case, we could speak of an ‘inverted transcendence.’ This conceptual change helps to grasp the meaning of circumcision in many Jewish families who characterize themselves as ‘secular.’ It includes a secularized form of transcendence since there is no need for a reference to a ‘higher being’ such as God. To sum up, we can say that circumcision is not only about the boy himself, his potential status passage and experience of the ritual but also about his parents, who make the decision, initiate, organize and embellish the ritual. It becomes clear that circumcision is not so much about the transmission of religious ‘identity’ but rather about the transmission of the capability of continuously handing down the Jewish tradition. This resembles Hervieu-Léger’s (1993/2006) approach of ‘religion as a chain of memory’. However, a theoretical shift with regard to the

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concept of transcendence helps to redirect sociology’s classical focus from individual religiosity to the concepts of religious obligation and ritual reproduction. Thus, the results presented here contribute not only to filling the gap of research concerning Jewish circumcision but also show how sociology of religion can benefit from taking temporal aspects of social practice into account. For the time being, it is an open question whether this is a specifically Jewish understanding of transcendence or maybe also applicable to other contexts and religions. This leaves room for further research on Jewish circumcision and the particular understanding of transcendence it entails.

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The Case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway and the Emotional Implications of Eschatological Expectations and Membership: Nonindividualized Doctrinal Beliefs Within a Highly Individualized Mainstream Society Hege Kristin Ringnes and Sarah Demmrich Abstract

Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) is a worldwide end-time-oriented religious community with a strong Christian fundamentalist connotation, characterized by a unitary doctrinal context, which creates a non-individualized religious environment for individual adherents. In contrast, the Norwegian context, which is considered here, is characterized by secularization and individualization, also with regard to afterlife beliefs since only one-third of the population believes in any life after death. Being member of a religious group that is in constant conflict with mainstream society, such as JW, may lead to negative emotions and therefore, our studies applied an emotion-regulation perspective to outline the most significant emotional implications of eschatological expectations and active membership in this group. One such implication is that individual JWs show emotion goals, which are tied to the religious goals of surviving death H. K. Ringnes (*)  MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] S. Demmrich  University of Münster, Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_4

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and living forever in a paradise on earth where the emotion of happiness will predominate. In addition, JWs predominately use the group-based regulation strategy of social sharing (i.e., sharing emotion-eliciting events with other ingroup members) and cognitive emotion regulation (i.e., positively redefining difficult situations), in which emotional forecasting plays a central role. In conclusion, being a JW in a Western individualistic context could be a double-edged sword: on one hand, it implies meaning through its exclusivist and superior claims, and on the other hand, the mismatch with broader society may lead to a disturbed self. Keywords

Jehovah’s witnesses · Emotion · Emotion regulation · Eschatology ·  Non-individualized religious environment · Fundamentalism

1 Introduction In this chapter, essential psychological aspects of membership of Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) are elaborated with a focus on the emotional implications of membership in this end-time-oriented, non-individualized, as well as unitary doctrinal religious group. The chapter highlights how JWs have access to and use cognitive and social emotion regulation strategies. The data are obtained from qualitative interviews with JWs in Norway. The data collection (July 2010 until July 2012) began with participant observation at a Norwegian JW congregation and included visits to and interviews at the former U.S. Headquarters of JW in Brooklyn. The main material consists of interview data from 29 active and dedicated adult Norwegian JWs. The study design was abductive, combining openness towards the initial research process with theorydriven data analysis (see Ringnes et al. 2019). While the detailed results based on this material have been published earlier (Ringnes 2020; Ringnes and Hegstad 2016; Ringnes et al. 2019,2017), we are going to outline the most significant findings regarding the emotional implications of the strong end-time orientation we have identified among JWs. This eschatological orientation is present at the meso level of JW communities in the form of official doctrine as well as the micro level of JW adherents. In general, end-time orientation is a relevant part of religion, defined as an entity with doctrines, ethics, organization, and symbols. It is thus a relevant part of religiosity,

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which is religion’s correlate—but not equivalent—at the level of human beings. Therefore, a person’s belief in a religious doctrine is an act of religiosity (Belzen 2015). Of course, individual religiosity is more than believing in meso level doctrines; it is a “multifarious and multiplex phenomenon” (Belzen 2001, p. 46) that is “characterized by convictions, evaluations, and wishes, whose content is not given by nature but determined by systems of convictions, values, and mores of particular cultural communities” (Belzen 2015, p. 204). Although JW theology is unique—for example, JWs refuse medical blood transfusions (Ringnes and Hegstad 2016)—this religious community shares features with other religious groups. For example, it is an eschatological orientation that sets high ethical standards for its members, including obedience to a unitary doctrine, as well as a strong ingroup-outgroup division. That JWs share such characteristics with other groups (see Almond et al. 2003) may broaden the implications of the research results presented here.

2 Characteristics of Jehovah’s Witnesses JW (officially called the Watchtower Society) is a religious group with around eight million adherents worldwide (Knox 2018). Norway, the context in which these studies were conducted, contains approximately 12.500 active JWs (Statistisk sentralbyrå 2016). In 2015, more than one in eight active JWs were located in the United States, where the group was founded in the 1870s by Charles T. Russell (Knox 2018). In a religious landscape study by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center (Lipka 2016), JWs are described as having a high level of racial and ethnic diversity. Compared to other U.S. religious groups, JWs score high on measures of religious activities and commitment, like prayer, scripture study groups, and attendance of religious services. Nine out of ten JWs regard religion as very important to their lives, 90% say that they believe in God with absolute certainty, and 94% confirm that the Bible is the word of God (Lipka 2016). JWs have congregations in 240 countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe, and thus studies must look beyond its birthplace and toward its global community (Knox 2018) such as the here-presented studies that were conducted in Norway. In the Norwegian context, which is a highly secularized and individualized context, the majority of individuals is alienated from churches (Pollack and Rosta 2017). In contrast, the identity of active JWs is shaped in a non-individualized way by a unitary doctrine that sharpens the whole theology to end-time expectations. Together to its time of origin in the late nineteenth century, JWs are regarded as a religious community (also: New Religious

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Movement, short: NRM) with a strong exclusive and even fundamentalist connotation (Pratt 2010). End-time orientation Future expectations influence current decisions and goals as well as emotions here and now (D’Argembeau et al. 2011; Gilbert and Wilson 2007). JWs’ worldview is characterized and dominated by an end-time oriented theology, according to which Armageddon will come soon and a paradise will be restored on earth. In other words, JWs focus on an anticipated future in which the current evil world will collapse and an entirely different, throughout positive world will arise. JWs expect an overall emotionally positive atmosphere in paradise that is primarily characterized by happiness and an absence of negative emotions, in contrast to their current emotions (Ringnes et al. 2019). On the contrary, individuals in Western societies in the Northern Hemisphere tend towards highly individualized afterlife beliefs, which may be independent of familial religious socialization (Misailidi and Kornilaki 2015). Even among those who faithfully follow a religious tradition, there can be variance in individual beliefs about the afterlife due to heterogeneity within religious groups (McGuire 2008). One explanation for this phenomenon is a lack of focus on afterlife doctrine in mainstream churches, which often causes individuals’ beliefs in the afterlife to arise outside of church settings (Singleton 2015). In the Norwegian context, 33.6% of the population definitely or probably believe in life after death, 54.3% believe that a life after death does not exist, and 21.1% do not know whether there is an afterlife or not. Moreover, 25.7% believe in heaven, whereas only 14.2% believe in hell (ISSP 2018). In sum, a majority of the Norwegian population does not believe in an afterlife. Additionally, other studies identified that a positive image of God prevails among Norwegian samples, without a prevalent focus on the millennium or Armageddon (Repstad 2015). Therefore, the Norwegian context greatly differs from the catastrophic end-time orientation of JWs (Ringnes et al. 2019). Unitary doctrinal context JWs define themselves as the one true Christian group in opposition to liberal or modern theology (Beckford 1975; Holden 2002). As they see it, they have restored true Christianity after a long period of apostasy. The official JW doctrine is expressed in the internal publications, including a translation of the Bible (www.jw.org). Previous research has identified that JWs have a rather literalistic understanding of their doctrines as propositions about objective realities (Hegstad 2009; Repstad 2009).

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Unitary doctrines are a central part of JWs’ identity, as all members receive intensive doctrinal training and the group is organized in a way that demands uniformity of beliefs from its members (Beckford 1975). All information is transmitted by the JWs’ central headquarters, called the Governing Body, to individual members (Holden 2002). Textual obedience to official doctrine is an inherent part of membership in JWs, and an individual JW who does not accept all parts of the formal doctrine may be forcibly excluded from the group (Ringnes 2009). One especially strict demand for individual JWs is the theologically based refusal of medical blood transfusions. This means, for example, that female JWs are at increased risk of maternal morbidity and mortality due to hemorrhages (Gupta et al. 2012; Singla et al. 2001; Van Wolfswinkel et al. 2009). As a result, the medical community has responded with increased biomedical research in an effort to reduce the death risk among JWs (Høiseth and Kongsgaard 2009). The attendant risk, however, is that of being excluded from the group, which is linked to doctrinal commitment and a strong ingroup-outgroup division. The specific topic of this chapter is the eschatological doctrine of JWs, which follows the same transmission as other doctrines from the headquarters to individual members. Each JW learns that the end is close, as described in the newer JW literature (e.g., Watchtower 2016). It is proposed that the Bible outlines the signs of the end times, including global war and escalating chaos, worldwide disease and hunger, widespread lawlessness and religious confusion, moral and social breakdown on an unprecedented scale, good news of God’s kingdom preached worldwide, and the existence of critics that deny that the end is near: “Jesus said that upon seeing ‘all these things,’ we would know that the end is close at hand (Matthew 24:33)” (Watchtower 2016). The article from the Watchtower titled How This World Will Come to an End (Watchtower 2012) describes what will happen immediately prior to the dissolution of the world. First, world leaders will declare peace and security as nations may think that they are close to solving global problems. Then, sudden destruction will instantly fall upon ‘Babylon the Great’ (i.e., all false religions will be attacked and destroyed), in which the United Nations will play a role. JWs will be attacked, and then “Jehovah [God’s proper name] will use Jesus and the armies in heaven to help God’s people (Revelation 19:11–16). This attack will be ‘the war of the great day of God the Almighty,’ which is called Armageddon.—Revelation 16:14, 16” (Watchtower 2012, p. 6). Armageddon is described in the online article Armageddon—A Happy Beginning (Watchtower 2005) as the global war of Jehovah. To achieve justice, he “has appointed his Son to wage a just war in order to do away with this entire wicked system” (Watchtower 2005). Individuals are said to have been given the opportunity for survival and salvation; “those who respond favorably to the good news

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can survive Armageddon and live forever in perfection on a paradise earth (Ezekiel 18:23, 32; Zephaniah 2:3; Romans 10:13),” and “Armageddon will signal a happy beginning for righteous individuals, who will live forever on a paradise earth.—Psalm 37:29” (Watchtower 2005). JWs’ eschatology presupposes two possible scenarios for the salvation of the individual. While 144.000 believers will go to heaven and take part in Christ’s rule, most believers will live an eternal life on earth. The group of 144.000 believers will be given spiritual bodies to reside in heaven, while the inhabitants of paradise will have physical bodies (Watchtower 2015). As most of the 144.000 have already died, life in paradise on earth is the main possibility for believers living today, according to official JW theology. JWs describe the biblical paradise on earth as an environment in which Satan will be restrained; wickedness, violence, and warfare will be gone; there will be enough food for all; everyone will enjoy good health, with aging reversed until an ideal young age; and dead JWs will be resurrected, as will those people who did not have the opportunity to choose or abandon JW doctrine during their natural lives (Watchtower 2006). While the eschatology of other religious groups often understands the relationship between this world and the coming salvation as indirect (i.e., only describable through images and metaphors), JWs understand their doctrinal statements about the renewed world more literally. They propose that paradise will be rebuilt on earth and its inhabitants will have physical bodies. This doctrine implies a direct continuity between life as it is now known and life in the renewed world. Non-individualized religious environment The religious environment in so-called Western countries, and especially in Norway, has been described with diverse research constructs, such as secularization, pluralization, individualization, emphasis on personal experience, and decline of traditional religious institutions (see Pollack and Rosta 2017; Zinnbauer and Pargament 2005). Individuals in such societies often believe in and practice elements from various religious and cultural traditions, and high heterogeneity can now be expected even within religious groups (McGuire 2008). The tendency towards individualization in Western countries in the Northern Hemisphere, which involves a focus on personal experience, has broadened social scientific theories and studies on religion by including spirituality (e.g., Austad et al. 2013), which is linked to individualized and, eventually, non-institutionalized practices (Heelas and Woodhead 2005). Such a self-defined worldview, which is shaped by the sociological processes of modernity, lacks of a firm collective confirmation and might be therefore

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pervaded with uncertainty and doubts (Giddens 1991). At the other end of the individualization spectrum is “obedience to the doctrines of a religion or spiritual perspective” (Singleton 2015, p. 169) on which individual JWs are located with their adherence to the authority of the Watchtower Society as an obligatory part of their membership. Thus, they prioritize their social identity as a JW in the self, which decreases uncertainty and doubts (Herriot 2009), but simultaneously inhibits the development of personal identity (Coates 2013).

3 Emotional Implications of End-Time Orientation A central goal of this chapter and earlier publications (Ringnes and Hegstad 2016; Ringnes et al. 2017, 2019) is to investigate the emotional consequences of JWs’ unitary doctrinal beliefs among members. We also focus on the emotional impact of the conflict between mainstream society at the macro level, the religious group of JWs at the meso level, and on individual JWs at the micro level. Based on theological analysis of three key characteristics of JWs presented in the earlier part of this chapter, emotional implications for individual JW adherents are summarized below. The conclusions are primarily derived from our empirical findings, but other results are included in order to complete the picture. Emotion regulation goals among JWs Adult individuals constantly regulate their emotions in various ways for various reasons and goals. Emotion regulation strategies are used to achieve these emotion regulation goals by decreasing, increasing, or maintaining positive or negative emotions (Gyurak et al. 2011). Similar to other goals that humans set for long-term aspirations and short-term acts (Carver and Scheier 2013), emotion goals (e.g., the goal of being happy) are important life goals of individuals. They are defined as “the cognitive representation of a particular emotional state that is the desired end-point” (Mauss and Tamir 2014, p. 361). Activating emotion goals is a necessary precondition for emotion regulation (Mauss, Bunge, and Gross 2007). A common goal is to downregulate negative emotions and upregulate positive emotions, but it is also possible for an individual to accept negative emotions or even increase and intensify them (Netzer et al. 2015; Tamir and Bigman 2014) and thereby decrease positive emotions (Gross 2014), at least in the short term. Religion shapes emotion goals (Vishkin et al. 2014) because it prescribes which emotions are (un)desirable. Every religious tradition differs in its

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emotional prescriptions (Riis and Woodhead 2010). According to the aforementioned studies on Norwegian JWs (Ringnes et al. 2017), the main goal of JWs is to increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions. In connection to their central eschatological beliefs, an important life goal is to survive death and live forever in a paradise on earth, accompanied by the emotional goal of full happiness in the long term. This goal motivates engagement in group-based emotion regulation to manage their current lives. JWs do not expect to obtain full happiness here and now. Life challenges as well as struggles connected to the requirements of being an active JW lead to some negative emotions. One example is the group-based upregulation of fear related to blood due to the JWs’ Bible-based doctrinal requirement of not accepting medical blood transfusions. Blood is seen as dangerous and something that must be avoided and they focus on the negative health consequences of medical blood transfusions (e.g., risk of AIDS, longer recovery after surgery). This doctrine strengthens the ingroup-outgroup division, since JWs define this unique doctrine as being part of ‘the Truth’ (Agroskin and Jonas 2013) and it functions psychologically to increase JWs’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in the interim between the present and paradise, which upregulates fear. This rejection of life-saving transfusions, which threatens the lives of adherents, starkly contrasts the hope of surviving Armageddon and therefore not dying and consequently, it creates a cognitive dissonance between JWs’ willingness and unwillingness to sacrifice their lives. According to the study results (Ringnes and Hegstad 2016), JWs cope with this cognitive dissonance by focusing on the future and eternal life in paradise as well as by denying the risk of early death by obfuscating the potential negative consequences of refusing blood. Even if increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions are the main goals of JWs, due to their larger end goal of eternal life, current negative emotions could have motivating functions when reappraised theologically. This is an example of what Burris and Petrican (2014) described in relation to the long-term religious goal of salvation: a religious end goal can be reached through short-term negative emotional states due to the potential that “negative is positive” (p. 111). Negative emotions are, among JWs, deemed to be correct and expected in the end times, in combination with happiness as a foretaste of the positive emotions of paradise. This phenomena of ‘negative is positive’ was identified earlier among mystics in Christianity, Hasidic Judaism, and Sufi Islam, who perceive melancholy to be a path to God and salvation (Rubin 2007, as cited in Burris and Petrican 2014).

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Emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and social sharing among JWs This chapter focusses on two emotion regulation strategies of active JW members: cognitive reappraisal and social sharing (Ringnes et al. 2017). Both were reported by the interview participants as necessary for maintaining their belief and activeness in the religious group. Additionally, both are highly intertwined, as social sharing is actively used to support appraisal and reappraisal strategies. Cognitive reappraisal refers to altering emotions by changing the way one thinks (McRae et al. 2012). One subtype of cognitive reappraisal found among JWs is emotional forecasting, defined as the forecasting of future emotions in order to regulate emotions here and now (Ringnes et al. 2017, 2019). In other words, cognition about an emotional future is a means for emotional regulation in the present. Figure 1 illustrates how emotional forecasting is an intertwined process of accepting negative emotions, and at the same time expecting more positive future emotions. The positive future prospect then contributes to the downregulation of negative emotions in the timeline between now and then (Paradise) (Ringnes et al. 2019, p. 125). Personal expectations of positive emotions in paradise are tied to, for example, better health, security, finding a partner, or more time for hobbies like skiing and knitting. The latter shows that despite the close ties of individual eschatological beliefs to the official doctrine, future expectations vary individually and are influenced by the broader culture of mainstream society as knitting and skiing are

Fig. 1   Emotional forecasting as an emotionregulative strategy between present time and future. © Brill

Yet: Negative Emotions must be StatusNow–Not Expected

Regulates Difficult Emotions Status Then-In Paradise:Positive Emotions

Interim: Emotional Forecasting of Positive Emotions

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typical Scandinavian activities. Additionally, women who adhere to JWs expect to take a part in working life in paradise: women will “increasingly [be involved] in work leadership, and other women would be a part of the heavenly administration” (Ringnes et al. 2019, p. 127). This expectation of gender equality clearly differs from the more traditional gender roles among JWs (Chryssides 2016) but aligns with mainstream Norwegian society, which is one of the most gender-equal countries in the world (World Economic Forum 2020). This probably influences individual JWs’ eschatological belief of gender equality in paradise on earth. Beyond emotional forecasting, more cognitively laden reappraisal strategies are present among JWs. As mentioned previously, the obligatory refusal of blood transfusion is theologically reappraised as a positive sign of obedience that leads to eternal life in paradise (Ringnes and Hegstad 2016). Other individual sacrifices due to life choices, such as self-exclusion from higher education, careers, material standards, or having children, are also reappraised as meaningful choices and investments that will be recompensed in the future. For example, the mandatory task of proselytizing is experienced as emotionally difficult, since knocking on doors and interacting with strangers leads to continuous rejections and ridicule. The uneasiness of door-to-door preaching is theologically reappraised using the biblical metaphor of Proverbs 29:25: “Fear of man is a snare, but the one trusting in Jehovah will be protected.” This religious practice is reframed as a life-saving activity in two ways: first, recruited newcomers are included in the hope of survival of death, and second, it is a sign of belonging to God’s people, who will be granted eternal life in paradise (Ringnes et al. 2017). The last socially-based emotion regulation strategy that we would like to mention in this chapter is social sharing. Social sharing is applied to regulate emotions by having open conversations with another person about the circumstances and emotional reactions related to a particular emotion-eliciting event (Rimé 2007). For example, JWs administer the norm to practice proselytizing with a partner, and this social sharing regulates difficult emotions in relation to this often-burdensome assignment. In addition to negative emotions, proselytizing successes are shared with other JW adherents (Ringnes et al. 2017). Sharing negative experiences with others will eventually reduce the negative emotions, even if sharing temporarily gives rise to more negative emotions (Rimé 2007, 2010). Additionally, social sharing of positive experiences reactivates and capitalizes on positive emotions (Quoidbach et al. 2010; Rimé 2010) and can serve to strengthen social ties (Duprez et al. 2015). In the specific case of JWs, Ringnes et al. (2017) found that group-based religiosity makes social sharing a dominant emotion regulation strategy in addition to cognitive reappraisal, supporting the doctrine, and emotion goals.

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4 Conclusion Theological analysis of JWs uncovered three key characteristics as a non-individualized, unitary doctrinal religious context characterized by a strong end-time orientation. More specifically, individual JWs close adherence to their group’s official doctrine is in conflict with Western countries’ highly individualized mainstream societies (e.g., Zinnbauer and Pargament 2005), which tend to be at the other side of the spectrum (Giddens 1991; Singleton 2015). However, within JWs’ strict, uniform doctrine to which adherents must be obedient, there is space for individualization among JWs in the form of individual eschatological images, which are influenced by the culture at the macro level. For example, knitting, skiing, and gender equality are included in the individualized afterlife beliefs of JWs in Norway (Ringnes et al. 2019). The central aim of this chapter was to outline the emotional implications of these key characteristics of JWs. As was shown, emotional forecasting of future happiness and other emotion regulation strategies of cognitive reappraisal and social sharing help JWs cope with prevailing negative emotions. We conclude that JWs’ religiosity from an emotion-regulative research perspective could turn out as a double-edged sword: on one hand, doctrines and individual beliefs seem to have a strong positive impact on JWs’ currently felt emotions and create a system that gives purpose and meaning to their lives. On the other hand, JWs’ view of their environment and the world as wicked could result in a mismatch between JWs and the goals of their social surroundings. This discrepancy could be a psychological risk for JWs (Kalokerinos et al. 2016; Zwingmann and Murken 2000) as it could result in, for example, social exclusion. From the perspective of religious fundamentalism, religious exclusivity and superiority as well as the claim that JWs are restoring ‘the Truth’ and a strong dualistic worldview heighten adherents’ self-esteem (Herriot 2009). Therefore, JWs, as members of a fundamentalist religious group, should exhibit lower neuroticism (e.g, Saroglou 2002). The question at this point is whether the psychological cost of this high self-esteem is worth it since adherents of such groups “lose the main source of information upon which realistic views of the self and levels of self-esteem should be based: the reaction to them of a wider variety of others” (Herriot 2009, p. 178). Therefore, future studies should focus more on the potential (mis)match between JWs’ and their surroundings, as well as tendencies toward or manifestations of psychotic disorders instead of on wellbeing and neuroticism among JWs and members of other groups with a fundamentalist ideology and organization (see Almond et al. 2003).

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East–West Religiosity: Some Peculiarities of Religiosity of European Followers of Eastern Teachings and Practices Antoaneta Nikolova Abstract

The paper aims at studying a relatively new kind of religiosity that combines the peculiarities of both East and West religiosity. This is the religiosity of the European followers of Eastern teachings and practices. Being a relatively new phenomenon, this kind of religiosity poses many conceptual and methodological questions. What are the traits of this religiosity? Does it combine the features of East and West religiosity or is it an entirely Western phenomenon? Could it be at all defined as religiosity? Are Eastern teachings and practices in the European context religions? Where is the difference between religiosity and spirituality? In order to answer these questions, philosophical considerations and sociological observations are combined: groups of followers of Eastern teachings in Bulgaria, Germany, and Ireland are studied but the interpretation is predominantly in terms of philosophy. Therefore, not as much the manifestations of the religiosity of these groups are considered but rather the transformation in the worldview via the practices of Eastern religions is analysed. Keywords

East religiosity · West religiosity · Eastern teachings · Yoga · Buddhism ·  Martial arts

A. Nikolova (*)  South-West University “Neofit Rilski”, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_5

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1 Introduction The paper aims at studying a phenomenon that is recently getting a wider popularity in Europe, namely the tendency of Europeans to follow teachings and practices with Far-East origin. Some of these teachings have relatively apparent religious context, while others, like yoga, martial arts and different kinds of meditation, are experienced predominantly as practices for self-development and healthy life style. Nevertheless, all these teachings and practices have their religious implications. The question of this study is whether and how they influence the religiosity of Europeans who practice them. This question, however, comes down to the issue what religiosity means and whether there is any difference between East and West religiosity. Religiosity is a complex and multidimensional category. Its understanding depends to a great extent on the approach that will be used for its study. The problem is much more complicated when East and West religiosity are compared. In all approaches to religiosity, however, two main dimensions could be distinguished: an external one that is connected with its expressions and an internal one that concerns the beliefs, experience, and self-estimation of persons. Both dimensions are interconnected and interdependent. Yoga practices, meditations, and martial arts could be regarded as expressions of the external dimensions of Eastern religiosity. When they replace, complement, or fill in the existing or missing external dimensions of Christian religiosity of Europeans, they inevitably could influence its internal dimensions as well. In this study, the transformations in the internal dimensions of religiosity are discussed. Therefore, religiosity is considered in three main aspects that are related to these dimensions, namely cognition, experience, and self-estimation of behaviour. In order to understand whether there are changes within these aspects of religiosity among the European followers of Eastern practices, we should briefly discuss what are the peculiarities of Eastern religiosity in the abovementioned aspects. Since religiosity or its lack is developed on the basis of a particular religion (Bogomilova 2019), we should briefly discuss the peculiarities of Eastern religions that differ from those of the Western ones and, therefore, might influence the religiosity of Europeans who follow them. Although it may be difficult, and even methodologically risky, to sum up the various Eastern religions under a common denominator, some generalisations are still possible. In the study, a multidimensional approach to religion is used; especially the seven dimensions definition presented by Ninian Smart in his book The World’s Religions. These dimensions are considered in accordance with the three aspects of religiosity. Therefore, we will discuss the world view that Eastern religions

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suggest, the main kind of experience that they encourage, as well as their place within society and the relations with other spheres of human life that they offer, since the latter influences the possibility to distinguish religious and secular behaviour.

2 Peculiarities of Eastern Religions and Religiosity Narrative and doctrinal dimensions of religion and cognitive aspect of religiosity Eastern and Western religions developed different visions of reality and the human place in it. These different visions determine different cognitive aspects of East and West religiosity. The main difference could be found in the difference of the basic myths: those of oneness and of separation (Campbell 1991). The most important feature of the worldview of Eastern religions could be named non-duality. Non-duality is a complex idea that recognises on one side the duality of the visible world, accentuating on the other side on its ultimate oneness. It is important to note that this oneness is expressed in terms that are far away from the Christian idea of God and divinity. So, oneness in Buddhism is expressed in terms of void (shunya) and suchness (tathata) and the only aspect that resembles the European understanding of what God should be is the concept of dharmakaya or the body of truth, reality, law of Buddha. In Daoism, oneness is expressed with such concepts as qi, Wuji, or dao. All of them present reality as fluid, dynamic, energetic, and changeable, imply its transformative essence, and are far from the Christian concept of God. In fact, neither in Buddhism nor in Daoism there is a concept of God as supreme, personal transcendent being and Creator. In contrast to Daoism and Buddhism, in Hinduism there is an idea of God and gods. God, however, is not the Ultimate reality. God, or Isvara, is understood as the first stage of unfolding of the unnamed oneness, Tad ekam (that one), into multiplicity, on the one hand, and as our cognitive approach to this oneness, on the other. The vision of non-duality has several important consequences. Being, in fact, a vision of oneness, it sees the unity of all opposites and particularly the unity of subject and object, the psyche and the cosmos, of micro and macrocosm. This is especially underlined in Hinduism where according to Upanishads, Brahman, the ultimate essence of the objective reality, is equal to Atman, the ultimate essence on the subjective level. The ‘great sentence’ (mahavakya) of the Upanishads states: Ayam atma bráhma (this Atman is Brahman). In such a way “the spiritual masters of the upanishadic era, so to speak, objectify the subjective principle

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and subjectivise the objective one realizing ātmán as an absolute equivalent of the bráhman at the level of the subjectivity” (Bratoeva 2012). Therefore, they explain both categories, Atman and Brahman through each other (Oldenberg 1997). This vision of ultimate oneness and identity of cosmic and psychic principles is connected with a vision that our perception of ourselves as separated and isolated entities is false and misleading. All Eastern teachings deny our identification with the little ego, and accentuate on the great wholeness and unity that is our real nature. Another consequence from the vision of non-duality is the understanding of reality in terms of interconnections and mutual dependence. This is clearly expressed in the Buddhist idea of mutual arising and the Daoist concept of response. In such a way, Eastern religions offer a vision of reality that differs from that established within the Western culture. As Carl Gustav Jung points out, “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his” anima “is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.” (Jung 1969, p. 759). So, the doctrinal dimension of Eastern religions offers different variations of the vision of oneness that include oneness of transcendent and immanent, material and spiritual, human and divine as well. This differs significantly from the Christian understanding that clearly separates these spheres. The vision of the Ultimate reality as an impersonal immanent principle also differs from the Christian idea of personal and transcendent God. The different cognitive basis of Eastern religions supposes differences in other aspects of religiosity—experience and behaviour as well. Experiential dimension of religion and experience Since in Eastern religions either there is no idea of God or god is understood not as much as a transcendental but rather as an immanent principle, the inner practice, searching within, is the most significant one. And since Eastern teachings insist that our perception of the world in terms of separation is wrong, this practice aims at achieving new abilities and transformation of our perceptive apparatus. The practice is based not on faith and relying on some outer force but on efforts of self-transformation and self-development in such a way that the person will achieve an entirely new status. This is close to the main aim of the Orthodox Church “to lead a person to theosis (or divinisation)“ (Ierofey 2009), to transform the man into a God-man. But while in Eastern religions human beings rely pre-

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dominantly on their own efforts and a shift in perception is important, this aim in Orthodox Christianity “is not a problem of mental perception of truth, but the transfiguration and divinisation of man by grace” (ibid.). The practices that are developed by Eastern religions could be named with the common name of ‘yoga’ used in its broad sense as techniques for working on the psyche and consciousness. These techniques can be performed equally with or without any faith and attitude to divinity. They, however, are transformative and their correct performance eventually leads to a different perception of reality, or a different state of consciousness. According to the Eastern teachings themselves, this new perception could not be explained in terms of the concepts developed for the world of duality: “Neither subjectively perceiving, nor objectively perceiving, nor perceiving in both ways, neither collective perception, nor perception nor non-perception; unseen, not to be apprehended, not to be grasped, without sign of separation, unimaginable, unindicable, the essence of the consciousness of the Self, in which the manifest world ceases, full of peace, benign, secondless, this is held to be the Fourth Consciousness, this is the Self, Atma, this is the goal of wisdom” (Mandukya Upanishad, 7, tr. Charles Johnston).Transformation or altered state of consciousness is an aim of Eastern practices. On the other side, this new state of consciousness is the base for the theological and philosophical principles and considerations. Therefore, in the case of Eastern religions, the religious dogmas and philosophical discourse depend to a great degree on practice and could not be understood without it. One of the most important practices in all teachings is the so called ‘meditation’. Meditation exists in Christianity as well. The term itself was used in Western Christianity in the Middle Ages to signify a special spiritual concentration and prayerful focus on God. There is an important difference between Eastern and Christian meditation, however. The latter is always connected with a prayerful communication with God and could be interpreted in terms of spirituality as a focus of the spirit towards God. The former is based on psychological techniques often with pure instrumental character and, therefore, has direct effect on the psyche and perceptive abilities that do not depend on the belief system of the performer but could change it. In such a way, instead of the prayerful personal connection with God, Eastern religions offer well elaborated psycho-techniques for impersonal merging into the ultimate non-dual unity. Social dimension of religion and self-estimation of religious behaviour The idea of unity or non-duality is one of the most important ideas in the dogmatic dimension of Eastern religions. Ultimately, it leads to lack of opposition sacred-profane, especially in the non-dual visions of Buddhism and Daoism.

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Besides, while in Western culture religion, philosophy and science were gradually well distinguished, Eastern religions, in their origin were not separated from the other spheres of human activities and components of culture as philosophy, art, science and so on, and embrace many aspects of everyday life. For example, one of the ways Eastern religious/spiritual ideas enter Europe is through such a poetic form as haiku. There is no strict separation between religious and secular behaviour within these Eastern traditions. Of course, the behaviour of a strict or very religious person in Christianity is also difficult to be differentiated into religious and secular. While, however, it could be defined as predominantly religious, the behaviour connected with Eastern religions is or seems to be rather secular. Therefore, they often are regarded not as religions but as teachings, practices, or a kind of spirituality. In recent decades, researchers report a change in the way religion and spirituality are estimated. While traditionally religion had more positive connotation than spirituality, since the end of the last century spirituality has increasingly “acquired a specific positive connotation through its association with personal experiences of the transcendent” (Zinnbauer et al. 1997, p. 551). Spirituality is described in terms of freedom, choice, personal responsibility, flexibility, nondetermination, “the need for well-being and meaning in daily activities” (Garelli 2007, p. 318), growing, thriving. Religion and religiousness, “in contrast, has been negatively tagged by some as a hindrance to these experiences” (Zinnbauer et al. 1997, p. 551), as “being dogmatic or encouraging cult and fundamentalist behaviour” (Schlehofer et al. 2008, p. 412). One of the results of opposing religion and spirituality is the fact that there is an increasing number of people “who see themselves as spiritual but not religious”. Researchers explicitly accentuated that these people “tend to experiment with New Age or Eastern practices”. (Marler and Hadaway 2002, p. 297). Significant for the social dimension of Eastern religions that might impact the third aspect of religiosity is the fact that while in Christian cultures religion, church, and faith could be distinguished, in Eastern cultures there is no such institution as a church and it is not the issue of faith but of true knowledge that is important.

3 Scope of the Performed Survey If Eastern and Western religions differ in cognitive, experiential, and behavioural aspects, what would be the religiosity of people raised in Western cultures and following Eastern teachings? In order to answer this question, a research in three

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European countries—Bulgaria, Germany, and Ireland—was performed during the period between October 2017 and September 2019. These countries have different geographical location as well as religious background. They are located in three different parts of the EU: Bulgaria at the southeast border of EU, Germany in the middle of EU and Ireland in the northwest end of EU. They have different religious and spiritual backgrounds being representatives of the three main Christian denominations (Orthodox Bulgaria, Catholic Ireland, and the historically connected predominantly with Protestantism Eastern part of Germany). They have also different history of religion in their societies: a strong role of religion in establishing the national identity for Bulgaria and Ireland, long history of relation between Christianity and Islam in Bulgaria, relation between Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany and Ireland, atheistic communist period in Bulgaria and East Germany. The study was performed in groups practicing yoga, Buddhist meditations and martial arts in these three countries. Since there is a large amount of schools and branches of Eastern teachings, the study was reduced to such with relatively longand well-established traditions in the respective country. For yoga these were groups of Satyananda yoga in Bulgaria and Ireland as well as a variety of small yoga groups in Germany; for Buddhism—groups of the Diamond way in Germany and Bulgaria and of Rigpa in Ireland; for martial arts—groups of Tai Chi and Qi Gong in the three countries. In the study, quantitative as well as qualitative methods for data collection were used. The quantitative method was in a form of questionnaires. Since the main aim was to understand the inner dimensions of religiosity, the questionnaires were structured in such a way as to allow as much as possible a freedom of answers. Therefore, a variety of options was offered. Most of the questions allowed more than one answer. Very important was the possibility to give free answers to almost every question, which was marked by the option “something else”. Besides, people were encouraged to express additional opinion and attitude through underlying or crossing out answers, commenting questions, and offering and answering their own questions. In most of the cases, questionnaires were accompanied by a participant observation and additional discussions with the responders. Moreover, in-depth interviews with teachers and participants with long practice were performed as well. The survey is based on 86 questionnaires with people practicing yoga in Bulgaria, 56 questionnaires with people practicing yoga in Ireland and 48 questionnaires with people practicing yoga in East Germany; 30 persons practicing Buddhism in Bulgaria, 14 in Ireland and 18 in East Germany; 16 persons practicing martial arts in Bulgaria, 33 in Ireland and 20 in East Germany.

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4 Results of the Performed Survey Cognition In order to understand whether, due to Eastern practices and teachings, there are some changes in the cognition, people were asked to report possible changes in their understanding in accordance with a three-level structure: human being— world—Higher reality (Table 1). A great amount of the respondents practicing yoga confirmed that their practice changed their previous ideas about themselves, the world, and the human place in the world. Compared to other countries, Bulgarian yogis gave relatively fewer affirmative answers than other yogis. To a great extent, this is due to the longer existence of yoga practices and Eastern ideas in Bulgaria where during the period of socialism, in the 1970s and 1980s, yoga was officially supported by the government. Besides, Bulgarian yogis that participated in the study were relatively older and with a good level of education. In free texts, they themselves explained the reasons as follows: “because before I started my yoga practice, I knew a lot”; Table 1   Is there anything in this thinking that shook or changed your previous ideas? Bg yoga Yes, the understanding of

Ir Ge Bg Ir Ge Bg yoga yoga Buddh Buddh Buddh ma

Myself

31 36%

53 36 12 94% 75% 40%

8 57%

9 50%

3 14 8 19% 42% 40%

The world

29 34%

33 31 9 59% 64% 30%

3 21%

11 61%

5 7 6 31% 21% 30%

The relation between human and the world

31 36%

28 27 7 50% 56% 23%

3 21%

12 67%

1 6%

10 9 30% 45%

The purpose of human 28 life 32%

19 13 6 33% 27% 20%

3 21%

5 28%

1 6%

8 4 24% 20%

The Higher reality

27 31%

33 19 4 59% 39% 13%

3 21%

2 11%

0 0%

4 0 12% 0%

Almost not

17 19%

2 3%

0 0%

0 0%

5 3 31% 9%

No

9 1 1 10.4% 1.7% 2%

0 0%

4 22%

4 6 1 25% 18% 5%

7 4 14% 13% 3 10%

Ir ma

Ge ma

4 20%

Note: Bg = Bulgaria; Ir = Irleand; Ge = Germany; Buddh = Buddhists, ma = people practicing martial arts

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“yoga rather deepened the ideas I already had”; “yoga just confirmed my feelings and attitude towards myself, others, the world, the higher reality”. Buddhists and people practicing martial arts gave fewer affirmative answers than yogis and almost refused to discuss “Ultimate” or “Higher” reality since there is no such concept in the teachings their practices are related with. Therefore, their negative answers can be interpreted as a confirmation that their attitude was influenced by their practices. In the questionnaires, the responders had an explicitly highlighted option to indicate in a free text the idea that was the most impressive for them. There were several categories of answers. One of them concerns concrete concepts and ideas belonging to the respective teaching. For yogis these were: the idea of chakras; the philosophy of karma; the idea of reincarnation, rebirth and evolution of the soul. Buddhists were impressed by the ideas that we have no soul; that everything is a dream; and the law of cause and effect. Another category concerns the self-understanding and self-estimate. Yogis accentuated on such ideas as: to look within and to change yourself completely; self-awareness; awareness; freedom of awareness; non-attachment; harmony between body and soul; the body-mind-emotion connection; to become better, regardless of beliefs, education or job; the idea of self-development and spiritual growth; the idea of self-knowledge, of the possibilities that are within myself and depend only on myself; the idea that we should overcome and eliminate desires in order to overcome suffering and to leave the circle of rebirths. For Buddhists, the ideas that: “we can grow our potential”; “the change happens in your own centre (middle point)”; “the idea we are Buddhas irrespective of whether we know it or not” were impressive. The third category was about the understanding of the connections in the world. For yogis, the most important were: compassion; nonviolence, love for all living beings; the oneness of the world; the harmony of the universe; the idea that we are all part of one whole; the idea that one has to be in inner harmony and to find balance first within him/herself in order to be able to help others; the idea of connectivity, unity; the realisation that my soul is a part of the divine essence; changing myself changes everything around me. For Buddhists these were: the idea that every being is inherently perfect and every situation is perfect as it is; the idea of compassion; all beings have Buddha nature, are Buddha, and seek happiness; connection with oneness and the world; the opportunity to be; interconnectedness; the idea of unity of everyone and everything. People practicing martial arts marked in a free text that they were impressed by ideas (and feeling) of freedom, peacefulness, and inner calm, the ideas of

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h­ armony and balance, the lack of boundaries, mastery of power and its constructive application on oneself and others. There are clearly distinguished differences in the answers of people with different Eastern practices. People practicing Satyananda yoga in Bulgaria and Ireland were very apt to give long and diverse free answers and additional explanations, while the people from the smaller yoga groups in Germany almost did not use this option. The Buddhist groups of the Diamond way gave a few free answers, in that they were very similar to each other, evidently due to the wellstructured and ordered training they received. On the other side, answers of Rigpa Buddhists in Ireland were in a form that resembles yogi’s answers. The reason might be in the much freer style of their training and meditation. People practicing martial arts were less inclined to share their understandings in free text. Some of the German responders even noticed that martial arts are simply body exercises and have nothing to do with ideas and attitude to reality. The freest answers came from one of the groups practicing martial arts in Ireland whose teacher was able to combine practical performances with a delicate revealing of its worldview basis. From all the proposed and free answers, it is obvious that the understanding and attitude of people to themselves, to nature, universe and Ultimate reality could be changed through Eastern practices but this depends on the way this practice is taught. People were impressed by the ideas of unity and oneness that we revealed as a peculiarity of the doctrinal dimension of Eastern religions. In that, these ideas are not some abstractions but are interpreted as possibilities for inner development and deepening of the connection and harmony within the universe. Religiosity and experience The next group of questions aims at revealing the importance and the transformative role of the inner practices for self-development that are peculiar for Eastern religious experience. The first question aims to realise the personal meaning of the practices for the people performing them (Table 2). For this question, there are visible differences between the answers of the followers of different teachings and different countries. Yogis from all countries and especially from Bulgaria marked several answers and there are many who marked almost all of them excluding religion. Favourite is the answer that the practice is a path of self-improvement. A great number of people recognise yoga practice as way of life, search, spiritual journey, connection with their true self as well as discipline and responsibility. Buddhists also regard their practices mainly as a path for self-improvement. In that, there are visible differences with answers in different countries. B ­ ulgarian

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Table 2   What is your practice for you? Bg Ir Ge Bg Ir G Bg yoga yoga yoga Buddh Buddh Buddh ma

Ir ma

Ge ma

Connection with the Divine/Light/ Truth/

25 23 16 0 29% 41% 33% 0%

8 57%

9 50%

5 14 31% 4%

Path of self-improvement

56 37 29 12 63% 66% 60% 40%

6 43%

13 72%

1 6%

Connection with my true inner Self

27 17 23 0 31% 30% 48% 0%

6 43%

5 28%

2 9 4 12% 27% 20%

Way of life

31 28 17 13 36% 50% 35% 43%

6 43%

2 11%

3 15 5 19% 45% 25%

Search

30 8 18 0 35% 14% 37% 0%

3 21%

3 17%

1 6%

3 9%

Spiritual journey

28 21 15 0 32% 37% 31% 0%

5 36%

3 17%

1 6%

6 0 18% 0%

Freedom

21 17 31 14 24% 30% 64% 46%

1 7%

11 61%

3 9 6 19% 27% 30%

Openness

21 20 18 0 24% 35% 37% 0%

4 28%

13 72%

0 0%

Discipline/responsibility/ rules

30 20 14 4 35% 35% 29% 13%

2 14%

2 11%

3 20 6 19% 60% 30%

Wisdom

23 11 11 12 27% 19% 23% 40%

7 50%

0 0%

3 10 2 19% 30% 10%

Transformation

15 15 17 2 17% 26% 35% 6%

6 43%

2 11%

3 9 12 19% 27% 60%

Philosophy

13 12 9 0 15% 21% 18% 0%

5 36%

3 17%

1 6%

3 9%

Creativity

12 19 11 0 14% 34% 23% 0%

2 14%

3 17%

1 6%

6 3 18% 15%

Religion

0 0%

1 7%

0 0%

0 0%

2 6%

2 3%

2 4%

0 0%

5 25%

23 9 69% 45%

1 5%

5 2 15% 10%

4 20%

0 0%

Note: Bg = Bulgaria; Ir = Irleand; Ge = Germany; Buddh = Buddhists, ma = people practicing martial arts

Buddhists had very similar and definitive choices marking almost equally only four of them: freedom, way of life, path of self-improvement, and wisdom. Besides, neglecting offered options, they offered their own answers revealing better the way they perceived their practice: work with the mind and awareness

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of its true nature and potential; daily work with the mind; performing a practice that helps all sentient beings including myself. German Buddhists paid attention to more options but only three of them prevailed over all others: way of selfimprovement, openness, and freedom. It is remarkable that freedom is important for German yogis as well. Irish Buddhists evaluated most of the possible answers almost equally with slight emphasis on self-unfolding and wisdom. People from most of the groups of martial arts left many options unchosen or chosen by a small number of people. Bulgarians did not distinguish any of the answers. Irish accentuated on discipline; Germans on transformation. In tune with the idea that there is nothing divine, no absolute truth as well as no duality and, therefore, there is no place for ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ some of the respondents crossed out the options ‘divine’, ‘truth’, ‘philosophy’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘religion’. The next question is connected with the previous one and aims at revealing more concretely which aspect of the practice is important for the people (Table 3). According to these answers, most of the yogis evaluate positively both the opportunities for inner development such as meditative practice; work on body, psyche, mind, and consciousness as well as the opportunities for communication with like-minded people and advanced teachers who guide them and whom they can follow. Many people evaluate positively the philosophy of these teachings and the feeling of meaning that they give. Buddhists pay attention to the meditative practices, the opportunity for self-development and the roles of teachers, but not so much to common activities. Both groups from the Diamond way, which have very strictly determined algorithmic and structured practices, gave very clear and determined answers. Especially indicative are the answers of Bulgarian Buddhists who underlined the great role of teachers in their practice. People practicing martial arts also value the work on themselves and the opportunity for self-development. The survey points to the conclusion that people pay more attention to their personal development than to their group entertainments. According to the data Irish from all groups evaluated better the ability to communicate with likeminded people and the good atmosphere in the places for practice. Less attention to common activities is paid by Bulgarian responders as well as by people practicing martial arts from all countries. The survey reveals that in tune with the main peculiarities of Eastern experience, the European followers of Eastern practices, report that the inner work is of great importance and regard their practices predominantly as paths for inner development and transformation through which one could discover his/her inner essence. In that, this practice is understood in terms of freedom and relaying on

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Table 3   Which aspect of your practices do you like the most? Bg Ir Ge Bg Ir Ge Bg yoga yoga yoga Buddh Buddh Buddh ma

Ir ma

Ge ma

Meditative practice

39 51 26 24 45% 91% 54% 80%

10 71%

11 61%

5 12 9 31% 36% 45%

Work on body, psyche, mind, consciousness

53 42 43 6 61% 75% 89% 20%

6 43%

5 28%

8 15 16 50% 45% 80%

Opportunity to develop myself

21 9 8 12 24% 16% 16% 40%

5 35%

9 50%

8 19 6 50% 57% 30%

Ethics

13 17 5 8 15% 30% 10% 26%

1 7%

2 11%

2 6 2 12% 18% 10%

Philosophy

26 29 15 6 30% 51% 31% 20%

7 50%

2 11%

2 6 2 12% 18% 10%

The entire way of life

31 30 11 12 36% 53% 23% 40%

5 35%

1 5%

2 5 3 12% 15% 15%

Feeling of meaning

23 14 17 20 27% 25% 35% 67%

4 28%

2 11%

2 2 12% 6%

0 0%

Ability to communicate with like-minded people

15 27 13 8 17% 48% 27% 27%

3 21%

3 16%

5 3 31% 9%

1 5%

Teacher(s)

26 24 18 24 30% 43% 37% 80%

3 21%

2 11%

0 0%

5 4 15% 20%

The good atmosphere in the 14 28 26 7 places where I practice 16% 50% 54% 23%

6 43%

6 33%

0 0%

11 0 33% 0%

Everything mentioned above

2 14%

0 0%

1 6%

8 0 24% 0%

25 21 8 8 29% 37% 16% 27%

Note: Bg = Bulgaria; Ir = Irleand; Ge = Germany; Buddh = Buddhists, ma = people practicing martial arts

one’s own efforts in contrast to Christianity, which is understood in terms of rules and dogmas. In terms of the Eastern idea of oneness, connection with the inner self is interpreted as a connection with the Higher reality as well. This conclusion from the questionnaires is supported by interviews as well. As an Irish yoga teacher explicitly states, “Yoga is about finding out yourself. You have to find yourself because if you take something from outside then it is meaningless. If you take the rules of the church, you will never have your own experience. That is why practices of yoga is all about awareness… we are practicing—to realise, to be free to have a conscious choice. In

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Since in Eastern tradition the Ultimate reality is not only transcendental in Western terms but immanent as well, in interviews there are almost no comments on its outer aspects. Finding ourselves means finding the Cosmic principle as well. One of the respondents explained: “When I do yoga, I meditate; my meditation relates me to the fact that we are in a divine universe governed by a divine mind that is for all things located in the galaxy” (P. S., Bulgarian yogi). For yogis, discovering our inner self is equal to discovering our divinity. “In monotheism of Vedanta”, explains N. G., a Bulgarian yoga teacher, “there is a moment when I have to find out that I AM and there is a process of merging… Yoga is a process of connection of the individual consciousness to the cosmic one” (N. G., Bulgarian yogi). This connection and finding out of the self has a direct impact on the person’s self-unfolding: “Yoga develops all qualities, everything is purified, reordered, harmonized, qualities, talents are awakened, new talent can be awakened—to write, to paint, to sing” (N. G., Bulgarian yogi). While Bulgarian yogis are apt to speak in more philosophical and abstract terms, the Irish ones are more concrete and practical revealing the experience of the subject-object connection at a level of everyday life: “When I do yoga and when I do meditation I feel like I have a heightened awareness of the world around me … I find that the more present I am, the better I am as a communicator… meditation makes you calmer and more self-aware, it makes you better at your work, so I find that there is a practical application.” (A. C., Irish yogi). According to German yogis, Eastern practices could give “meaning to our life “ through the vision of “the connection between all things” (S., German yogi) and “wise attitude to nature” (G. F., German yogi). Buddhists did not speak about self but about nature of the mind and consciousness. Buddhists from the Diamond way preferred to cite the words of their teacher Lama Ole Nydahl: “Liberation is the first step in which a person no longer experiences himself as a body that gets old, gets sick and dies, nor is it the thoughts and feelings that constantly come and go. At this level, we know that we are not one or the other, so we stop experiencing ourselves as a target. We can't get out of there because the idea of ​​ self or ego is gone. Subject, object and action merge into one whole…”

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People practicing martial arts put the emphasis on the concept of all-embracing energy: ‘The inner styles to which Tai Chi belongs are mainly about meditative techniques,… the development of the inner Qi energy that connects us with everything else’ (S. S., Bulgarian martial arts practitioner). In spite of the form, people from all groups regard inner practices of self-development that are peculiar for Eastern traditions as important and in one way or another reveal that these practices have a transformative role on their worldview. Religiosity and behaviour The next group of questions aims to reveal the attitude of people to religion and especially to Christianity and the way they see the connection between their practices and religion (Table 4). As can be seen in Table 2, most of the people practicing yoga do not regard their practice as religion. In that, or maybe because of this, most of them do not see any contradiction between their practice and Christianity and can combine both in their life. They, however, would like to distinguish Christianity as an idea and spirit from its historically established institutional forms and some of them even underlined this in free additional texts. This is in line with the distinction between church and religion that could be made within Christianity. Most of the Buddhists, especially in the well-structured Diamond way, do not see similarities between their practice and Christianity. Additional remarks by Bulgarian Buddhists stated: ‘there is appropriate teaching for each person, but they cannot be mixed’; ‘Christianity works with concept, we are going beyond this’; ‘both lead to different goals and are suitable for different people’. German Buddhists noticed: ‘Love and compassion are considered in the same way but the goal to end the suffering and to experience the space and joy is fundamentally different’. Buddhists of Rigpa tradition whose meditative practices are different from those of the Diamond way and closer to those of yogis, are closer in their answers to yogi’s answers as well. People practicing martial arts gave a variety of answers. The Bulgarian group, where martial arts are combined with some yoga practices, gave answers that are very similar to the answers of yogis. The students from the Irish group of martial arts emphasising on philosophy distinguish Christianity as a religion from their practice, which they define rather as a teaching, a way of life, a system of self-development. Some of the German respondents commented that they could not answer this question since they are atheists. However, there are enough people who see an essential connection between their practice and the ‘spirit’ of ‘true’ Christianity.

0 0%

I have no opinion in regard to this question

13 23%

0 0%

0 0%

3 5%

No, they are totally different

9 10%

Yes, Christianity is a religion, and my practice is a teaching, a way of life, system of self-development

8 14%

5 9%

21 24%

Yes, they could even enrich each other

12 21%

3 3%

27 48%

Yes, I can do my practice and be a Christian

3 5%

They are compatible only in some aspects

15 27%

Yes, with true Christianity

11 19%

7 12%

18 32%

Yes, with the spirit of Christianity, but not with the institution

21 37%

Ir yoga

No, Christianity is a religion, and my practice is a teach- 3 ing, a way of life, system of self-development 3%

50 58%

Yes, both are different paths to the same goal

Bg yoga

Table 4   Do you think your practice is compatible with Christianity?

12 25%

0 0%

6 12%

6 12%

4 8%

13 27%

15 31%

5 10%

14 29%

17 35%

Ge yoga

0 0%

15 50%

3 10%

26 86%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

Bg Buddh

2 14%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

3 21%

4 28%

0 0%

6 43%

5 35%

0 0%

2 11%

1 5.5%

11 61%

5 28%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

7 39%

Ir Buddh Ge Buddh

1 3%

0 0%

7 21%

0 0%

3 9%

4 12%

0 0%

4 12%

6 18%

Ir ma

0 0%

1 5%

7 35%

0 0%

0 0%

3 15%

3 15%

4 20%

0 0%

Ge ma

(continued)

2 12% 9 27% 0 0%

0 0%

0 0%

1 6%

2 12%

2 12%

3 18%

5 31%

4 25%

4 25%

Bg ma

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2 2%

Without answer

0 0%

1 1.7%

Ir yoga

1 2%

1 2%

Ge yoga

0 0%

3 10%

Bg Buddh

5 35%

1 7% 7 39%

2 11%

Ir Buddh Ge Buddh

Note: Bg = Bulgaria; Ir = Irleand; Ge = Germany; Buddh = Buddhists, ma = people practicing martial arts

2 2%

Bg yoga

Something else

Table 4   (continued)

0 0%

1 6%

Bg ma

2 6%

1 3%

Ir ma

0 0%

2 10%

Ge ma

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The next question aims to reveal how people would define themselves in regard to their religious orientation (Table 5). This question also supposed more than one answer and some of the yogis from each country marked several answers. Most of the yogis defined themselves as ‘spiritual’; many accepted the answer ‘a person who follows his/her own path’. The answers ‘religious’, ‘believer’ as well as “atheist” received the least marks. Quite a lot of Bulgarians regard themselves as believers but only two of them are in that “religious”. It is remarkable that Bulgarians distinguish ‘faith’ and ‘religiosity’. We should pay attention that most of the people who answered the questions in Bulgaria are of middle and upper middle age, i.e., persons who were born during the period of atheistic socialism. Besides, due to other historical circumstances as well, such as lack of independent Bulgarian church during the Ottoman occupation, Bulgarians show an ambivalent attitude towards religion and are much connected with their folk believes such as a faith in some power, not especially in a Christian God. It is indicative that the only answer that Bulgarian Buddhists choose is that they are atheist. German Buddhists also identified themselves with only two of Table 5   Would you define yourself as: Bg Ir Ge Bg Ir Ge Bg yoga yoga yoga Buddh Buddh Buddh ma

Ir ma

Ge ma

Atheist

3 3%

2 5 3.5% 10%

4 13%

3 21%

5 28%

1 6%

2 6%

5 25%

Religious

6 7%

1 2 1.7% 4%

0 0%

3 21%

0 0%

2 2 12% 6%

0 0%

A believer

31 36%

4 7%

6 12%

0 0%

3 21%

0 0%

7 0 43% 0%

0 0%

Spiritual

36 42%

45 80%

25 52%

0 0%

9 64%

5 28%

2 15 5 12% 45% 25%

A person who follows his/her own path

27 31%

9 16%

17 35%

0 0%

4 28%

4 22%

4 7 13 25% 21% 65%

Nothing of the above describes me

2 2%

3 5%

1 2%

7 23%

0 0%

2 11%

2 7 0 12% 21% 0%

Something else

0 0%

2 1 3.5% 4%

19 63%

0 0%

2 11%

0 0%

0 0%

1 5%

Without answer

3 3%

0 0%

4 13%

3 21%

5 28%

0 0%

3 9%

0 0%

5 10%

Note: Bg = Bulgaria; Ir = Irleand; Ge = Germany; Buddh = Buddhists, ma = people practicing martial arts

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the answers (atheist and spiritual). Both groups belong to the Diamond way and prefer not to speak in terms of religious or not-religious identity, underlying that Buddhism could not be grasped in terms established in Western traditions. They prefer to describe themselves neither as religious, nor as atheist nor as believers and neither even as spiritual, since spirituality is a term of dual thinking and Buddhism works on the level of non-duality. The term that is appropriate according to them and which almost all of them offered as an additional answer is just ‘Buddhist’ or ‘a person practising Buddhism’. Answers of Irish Buddhists are almost homogeneously distributed among all options. With Bulgarians practicing martial arts there is no dominant answer. Irish groups accentuated on spirituality. People from the German groups prefer to present themselves as following their own paths. Interesting and indicative for the flexible meaning of contemporary concepts is a definition of a Bulgarian respondent who combined several of the options and defined himself as “a spiritual atheist following his own path” (V. G.). Most of the people practicing martial arts prefer to distinguish their practice from religion and are not inclined to present themselves in terms of religious-atheist dual. Most of the respondents of interviews explicitly distinguish religion and spirituality as well. They regard their practices in terms of spirituality and/or as being beyond religions: “Religious and spiritual are very different… Yoga is beyond religions” (S. M., Irish yogi); “Yoga is above religiosity” (I. D., Bulgarian yogi). Regarding yoga in terms of spirituality and as being above religions, most of the respondents (as it is obvious from questionnaires as well) do not see any contradiction between their practice and Christianity: “Yoga does not prevent us from being Christians” (G. Z., Bulgarian yogi). Even more, most of the yogis are convinced that yoga can only help to understand better one’s own tradition: “Yoga will help you to practice your religion even better” (G. Z., Bulgarian yogi). Interviews and free texts in questionnaires reveal that Bulgarians are apt to regard Eastern teachings in terms of their philosophical basis and emphasise the core unity of Christian and Eastern ideas, Irish criticise the psychological impact of their traditional religion and oppose Christianity and Eastern teachings, while Germans demonstrated a tendency to think in a perspective of history, seeking a spiritual connection between Eastern teachings and their own pagan and mystical traditions. Most of the followers of Eastern teachings are convinced that these teachings are only superficially connected with a particular religion and that their essence is a universal wisdom that just could have different manifestations. This is stated especially clearly by Buddhists. Many of them, especially German Buddhists,

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definitively indicated that Buddhism is universal, and they do not connect it with the East. The universality of Eastern tradition allows “anyone, whether Christian or atheist … to benefit from meditation… and other practices”. (T. D. a German teacher in martial arts). Many of the respondents compare Eastern and Western way of thinking and attitude to the world. The Eastern one was connected with living experience and practice. Almost every one of the respondents underlined the practical side of Eastern teachings. “Yoga is a system of human perfection, it is not only a philosophy but also a practice, a way of life” (G. Z., a Bulgarian yoga teacher).

5 Conclusions On the basis of the performed survey, the conclusion could be made that among the European followers of Eastern practices, the three aspects of religiosity that are under consideration are influenced by these practices. The research shows that the cognitive aspect or the worldview of Europeans following Eastern paths and having long and regular practice is influenced by the dogmatic dimension of Eastern religions. This is obvious not only from the affirmative answers in the questionnaires but from the rejected answers as well. The influence of Eastern vision is evident even in the way the answers are presented. Thus, while in yogis’ answers the unity of plurality—typical of Hinduist tradition—could be seen, Buddhists’ answers and the answers of the people practicing martial arts are in tune with the vision of void, non-duality, and the concept of clear consciousness that is peculiar for Buddhism and to some extend for Daoism. In accordance with the ideas of oneness in Eastern religions and in contrast to the subject-object dichotomy of Western thinking, most of the respondents revealed a tendency to see the world in terms of harmony and unity, rejecting the ego and seeking the true higher self or pure light consciousness. In that, most of the Europeans who follow Eastern teachings are well educated. Therefore, they usually are aware of the philosophical aspects of the teachings connected with their practices and even find scientific confirmation of their ideas as well. In this they differ from the followers of these teachings in the East where the religious aspect is dominant. The good philosophical background is especially characteristic of Bulgarian and German yogis, Bulgarian Buddhists and part of the groups practicing martial arts in Ireland and Germany. The reasons for this could be sought in both objective circumstances—a relatively long history of yoga

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practices and interest to Eastern teachings in Bulgaria, peculiarities of Orthodox Christianity—and subjective factor—teachers of martial arts in Ireland and Germany who are able to reveal skilfully and unobtrusively the worldview basis of their practices. In general, Bulgarian followers of Eastern practices are more interested in the practices’ theoretical background, people from Ireland in their practical application and social implication, and people from Germany pay attention to both the theoretical and historical meaning of their practices. The experiential aspect of religiosity also reveals common features as well as differences in accordance to the particular practices and country. Meditative practices are evaluated highly by all Buddhists groups as well as by Irish yogis. All yoga groups as well as German groups of martial arts regard their practices mainly as a work on body, mind, psyche and consciousness. For both German yogis and Germans practicing martial arts this work is the highest valuated option. People practicing martial arts in Bulgaria and Ireland pay attention to the opportunity of self-development as well. From interviews and free answers it is obvious that the inner practices of self-development are regarded—in tune with the Eastern vision of oneness—not only as means for individual growth but rather as a way for helping others: “One has to be in inner harmony and to find balance first within him/herself in order to be able to help the others”, as one of the Irish yogis wrote as a free text. This achievement is understood as awareness—understanding and experiencing the things as they really are. Regarding the third aspect of religiosity that is under consideration, most of the European followers of Eastern practices do not regard themselves as religious. They consider religion as a limitation and emphasise that the practice they follow has a universal sense. Many of them, especially Buddhists, accentuated on the very fact of practise. This practise is interpreted in terms of freedom, free choice, and personal responsibility that does not rely on anything but personal efforts. Many of the respondents, especially from Catholic Ireland, who felt limited by their own traditions, find in these practices a new sense of liberty. In some cases, they find new rules and limitations but since it is a free choice and a personal decision, it is regarded as acceptable. One of the here-presented findings of this new kind of limitation are the very strict and similar answers of the Buddhists of the Diamond way who repeated literally the same formula. For historical reasons and peculiarities of Orthodox Christianity, Bulgarians—except the strictly trained Buddhists—are more likely to regard Christianity as an option that could complement their Eastern practices. From the free answers and interviews it is obvious that East Germans from all groups are less apt to discuss Christianity except in its mystical forms and find links between Eastern practices and their pre-Christian heritage.

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In contrast to the presence of these practices in the East, in the European conditions the organisation of the groups of followers is usually intimate, familylike, and gives a feeling of finding the lost home and belonging—a feature that in many aspects differs from the experience within their Christian tradition as well. At the same time, Europeans following Eastern practices have a feeling of the universality of the underlying teachings that goes beyond any particular belonging. Maybe because of this reason, there are many new forms of teachings that are very far from their origin. There are practices that try to keep the essence of the Eastern teachings without presenting or following any expression of Eastern cultures. Therefore, we could ask how much the essence is connected with its expression. Will we lose the essence if we take it out of its usual context or will we create something new, maybe on a better level? This is a question for a further research.

References Bogomilova, N. (2019). Postmodern transformation of religion. In N. Bogomilova (Ed.), Religion and social ecology (pp. 6–50). Sofia: OMDA. Bratoeva, M. (2012). The primordial soundless sound: The AUM and the four quarters of atman in the Mandukya Upanishad. NotaBene, 23. https://notabene-bg.org/read. php?id=248. Accessed: 20. March 2020. Campbell, J. (1991). The masks of God: Oriental Mythology (Vol. 2). London: Arkana. Garelli, Fr. (2007). Research note between religion and spirituality: New perspectives in the Italian religious landscape. Review of Religious Research, 48(3), 318–326. Ierofey, V. (2009). Pravoslavnaya dukhovnost’. Moskva: Svyato-Troitskaya Sergiyeva Lavra. Marler, P. L., & Hadaway, C. K. (2002). “Being Religious” or “Being Spiritual” in America: A zero sum proposition? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 41(2), 289– 300. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5906.00117. Oldenberg, H. (1997). The Doctrine of the Upanishads and the early Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publ. Schlehofer, M., Omoto, A. M., & Adelman, J. R. (2008). How do “Religion” and “Spirituality” differ? Lay definitions among older adults. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47(3), 411–425. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00418.x. Smart, N. (1998). The world’s religions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jung, C. G. (1969). The difference between eastern and western thinking. Psychological commentary on ‘The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation’. In C. Jung (Ed.), Collected Works (vol. 11, 2nd edition, pp. 159–787). Princeton University Press. Zinnbauer, B. J., Pargament, K. I., Cole, B., Rye, M. S., Butter, E. M., Belavich, T. G., et al. (1997). Religion and spirituality: Unfuzzying the fuzzy. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 36(4), 549–564. https://doi.org/10.2307/1387689.

Hungary—Continuing and Changing Trends and Mechanisms of Religious Change Gergely Rosta

Abstract

The religious change in Hungary since 1990 is characterized by a dual process. After a short period of general strengthening of religion, which was already observed in the 1980s, the church-related religiosity began to slowly but steadily decline. In parallel, there was a further increase in the dimension of faith and some other individual forms of religiosity. For a long time, studies from 2008 (EVS, ISSP) were the latest sources of empirical evidence for these processes. However, a number of representative surveys have been conducted in the past year, using a separate religious block to study religion along several dimensions in Hungary (EVS 2017/18, “Religious Change in Hungary” project). In the light of the results of these recent studies, the paper seeks to answer the question of how trends and mechanisms of religious change continued in Hungary after 2010. According the results of the empirical analysis, certain trends did not change. The proportion of denominational membership continued to decline, while the proportion of believers in certain Christian and non-Christian doctrines increased. At the same time, other trends have stopped, or even seem to be reversing. This includes the proportion of believers in God, which has declined very little compared to previous growth, and the proportion of regular churchgoers, which in turn has increased slightly. Besides ongoing secularization and religious individualization processes, the

G. Rosta (*)  Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_6

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socio-political changes that have characterized Hungary over the past decade may have affected the development of religiosity, too. Keywords

Religious change · Hungary · Secularization · Religious individualization ·  EVS

1 Introduction It was in 2008/2009 that the last waves of the European Values Study (EVS) and the International Social Survey Project (ISSP) provided us with an in-depth empirical overview about the religious landscape in Hungary. Data from recent surveys such as the EVS 2017/18 and a nationwide representative research project called “Religious Change in Hungary”, compared with results from earlier surveys with similar focus allow us again after a decade a comprehensive and longitudinal study of trends in religious change in Hungary. Considering religious change, 10 years are not a particularly long period. Change in the societal level of religiosity often follow the patterns of generational exchange, with younger cohorts more and more replacing the elder ones (Voas 2009; Voas and Doebler 2011; Voas and Chaves 2016). This process is a rather slow one. However, there have been significant changes in Hungary in many respects between 2008 and 2018, some of which also have religious relevance. In terms of the changing position of religion in the Hungarian society before 2010, of course, the most important milestone was the fall of communism in 1990. As we know from several sources, the situation of religion in the former socialist countries did not show a uniform picture either before or after 1990 (Pollack 1998; Müller 2013; Pollack and Rosta 2017). Hungary, with its Catholic-majority and significant Calvinist minority, and with a higher degree of social modernization than many other countries in the former Eastern bloc, has not experienced the degree of religious recovery that is most characteristic of postsocialist countries with an Orthodox majority. Certainly, one of the main reasons for this is that, unless in e.g. in Poland or Russia, religious identity is historically a less important part of Hungarian national identity—not least because of the denominationally mixed population (Spohn 1998). The relatively great distance between religion and politics in Hungary is also shown by the fact that in 1990

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one of the most liberal laws on churches of the entire former Eastern bloc was passed by the parliament, which did not distinguish between “traditional” and “new” religions, and conditions for the state's recognition of churches was quite easy to meet. From a legal point of view, the separation of church and state has been realized to a greater extent in Hungary than in most of the other post-socialist countries (Schanda 2003). The most important change compared to the era before 2010 is the new, particularly friendly politics of the current political towards the so-called “historical” churches. Protecting Christian culture is one of the top priorities of the governing coalition of Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP). Just to mention two key elements of this religion- and church-friendly politics: firstly, the new church law from 2011 makes a legal distinction between historical/large churches and smaller/younger religious communities, in favour of the former (Jusic 2017). And secondly, there is a rapid process of increasing the number of churchrun educational institutions previously run by municipalities (Pusztai 2013). This process is supported by the state in various ways. Another, more symbolic evidence of the importance of supporting religion by the current government is the establishment of a State Secretariat for the Aid of Persecuted Christians in 2016. Such developments are not unique in post-socialist countries. Especially in countries where nationalism and religion go traditionally hand in hand, and/or where newly (re)gained national independency sought for a religious legitimacy, political support for churches has had a long tradition since 1990. This is the case especially in countries with Orthodox tradition like Russia or Romania (Köllner 2016, 2020; Stan and Turcescu 2011), but also in some other countries with Catholic majority like Poland or Lithuania (Buzalka 2007; Streikus 2011). However, this was rather untypical of Hungary before 2010, even if conservative governments have always had a closer relationship with traditional churches than the socialist-liberal governments. Socio-political developments generally do not directly reflect in religious beliefs, but they may have an impact in the long run. Still we can raise the question whether this changing political climate had an impact on self-reported individual religiosity in the short term. However, the direction of this potential effect is not necessarily straightforward, as it may lead both to a rise of rather extrinsically motivated religiosity (Allport and Ross 1967), or to a decline as a counter reaction to political expectations, or—following the argumentation of the theory of religious market—because of the weakening competition on the religious market (Iannaccone 1991; Finke and Stark 1992). Another important socio-economic development during the last decade with potential influence on religious change might be the level of existential security

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or material well-being. Also from this point of view, there are significant differences between 2010 and the current situation. Studies ten years ago took place in the midst of the global financial crisis, which hit Hungary quite extensively. In contrast, after the crisis subsided, the country's economy returned to growth after 2012, and by 2018 this was also reflected in a significant rise in wages. One interpretation of secularization says that increasing material well-being and existential security can lead to a decline of religion as less and less people see the need to provide religious explanations for the existential risks witnessed in their lives (Norris and Inglehart 2004). At the same time, not only wealth, but also levels of social inequality have increased. The GINI index rose sharply after 2008. The degree of inequality was thus higher than in other countries in the region (Czech Republic, Slovakia) and only in Poland is still higher. The rise of social inequalities may have an opposite effect on subjective existential security and, consequently, on religiosity, since many people see the change in welfare relative to others as a decline (World Bank 2019). The question remains open whether these mechanisms will have an impact on the societal level of religiosity in such a relatively short term. Post-2010 socio-political changes may have altered previous religious trends. But what exactly characterized the religious change in Hungary before 2010? Briefly, the following trends concerning religiosity were present in Hungary: According to Miklós Tomka, religiosity began to rise in Hungary in the 1980s based on several indicators. The majority of society was religious, as it is still now, but within it, individual, non-church, or loosely related forms of faith, “believing without belonging” (Davie 1994), were more widespread. These two types were still detectable after the fall of communism (Földvári and Rosta 1998). The process of religious revival continued for the first time after 1990, but later the trends based on different indicators of individual religiosity diverged. On the one hand, there was a slow but steady decline of church-related forms of religiosity like church membership and church attendance until 2008. On the other hand, more individualistic forms of religiosity like belief in different things, or the frequency of private prayer showed further increase. It seems like the trends of the two types of religiosity, running side-by-side upwards until the mid-1990s, have come apart, with church religiosity starting stagnating and later declining, whereas non church-related religiosity further increasing (Földvári 2014; Rosta 2017; Tomka 2010a, b). Different trends in belief and church practice is not very unique in the post-communist religious landscape, though it is more characteristic for countries with Orthodox heritage (Borowik 2002). However, there was a difference not only in the direction of quantitative change according to different measures of religiosity, but also in the mechanism

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behind these changes. Declining church religiosity was mainly a result of the abovementioned generational exchange, with more or less stable levels of religiosity within the generations. Such processes have their deep roots in the socialization processes during childhood and youth. However, increasing faith seems to be happen within birth-cohorts, which might be the result of changes within the personal biographies. In other words, this is a process of change in the relationship of individuals to faith (Rosta 2007). The impacts on individual life paths are usually divided into two types: historical and age effects. While the former emphasizes the impact of the biological aging of the individual and its implications, the latter puts forward the impact of historical events that affect society as a whole. There are different views as to which mechanism is behind the rising individual faith in Hungary. According to Miklós Tomka, it is an age effect i.e. older people tend to turn to faith and religion, which offsets the weaker religiosity of young people (Tomka 2010b). Others say that this change affects the younger age groups at least as much as the older age groups, so it has to be rather a periodical, or historical effect (Hegedűs 2008; Rosta 2012). In this paper, I intend to examine the extent to which past trends in religiosity in Hungary have continued or changed since 2008, the time of the last comprehensive surveys. The empirical analyses are mainly based on the results of the two recent studies already mentioned, the EVS 2017/18 and “Religious Change in Hungary” (RCH) survey. The Hungarian wave of EVS was conducted in 2018, the fieldwork of the RCH-study in 2019. In addition, I used data from three other studies, in which religion does not play a central role, but nonetheless included questions related to religiosity. The first one is the Hungarian survey of the 2016 wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), the second one is the Time Use Survey (TUS) of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office and the third one is the 2016 wave of the National Youth Survey (NYS). The ESS, like the other two studies mentioned above, is representative of the Hungarian adult population, while the TUS represents the Hungarian population aged 10–84, whereas the NYS is based in a sample from the youth population of Hungary between 15 and 29. Statistical analysis of the data is based on an examination of temporal changes in frequencies of different religious indicators, such as denominational belonging, frequency of church attendance, belief in God, in a life after death, in heaven, in hell, in re-incarnation, as well as the image of God or super-natural respondent believes is. An analysis of the within-cohort changes of the frequency of church attendance and belief in God shall provide evidence about the mechanisms behind religious change in Hungary. Each of the databases used for the data analysis

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have representative samples of 1000–1500 respondents for each point of time. Data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS 26 software. Denominational affiliation Trends in denominational affiliation show a continuation of earlier decline, but at least no change of trends. According to the EVS data, less than half of the adult Hungarian population consider themselves to be of a religion or denomination (Fig. 1). The latest ESS shows a slightly higher value, but the proportion of those who claim to belong to a denomination is less than 50%. Ten years earlier, the proportion of the members of denominations was still above 50%, and in the 2011 census, 55% classified themselves as members of denominations. Membership in different denominations was affected in about the same way by a slow erosion, which means that membership rates in different denominations have practically remained unchanged for the past ten years among those who belong to a denomination. In 2018, three-quarters of the members of denominations are (Roman or Greek) Catholic, 19% Reformed (Calvinist), 3% Lutheran, and 3% other. The 2011 census also shows similar proportions of denominational members: 71% were Catholic, 21% Reformed, 4% Lutheran and 4% other. These figures also show that although a significant number of new religious communities appeared in Hungary after 1990, or even before, they have not been able to gain a significant membership to date. Among the New Religious Movements, the Hungarian-founded Church of the Faith (Hit Gyülekezete), an Evangelical-Pentecostal Christian denomination, is definitely worth mentioning. Also 70 60

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Fig. 1   Denominational belonging, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018 ESS 2004, 2014, own computations)

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the ISCON movement shows significant presence and is quite successful in collecting financial donations. However, the membership of all NRMs together does not reach 1% of Hungarian society. According to the latest EVS data, only 13% of those who do not currently belong to a denomination said they had previously been a member of a denomination. This suggests that the decline in denominational membership is not primarily due to changes in individual life courses, but to a lower proportion of denominational membership among younger generations. In contrast to denominational membership, the proportion of those who consider themselves religious or non-religious has practically not changed compared to the 2008 EVS survey. The only significant difference is that slightly more nonreligious people today categorized themselves as “convinced atheists” (7%) than ten years earlier (3%), and accordingly, in the last study, slightly fewer simply said “non-religious” as before (37% and 41% respectively). However, slightly more than half (53%) of those surveyed continue to consider themselves religious, regardless of whether they attend church or not. This ratio is only one percentage point below the 2008 figure. This also means that the proportion of those who claim to be religious but don’t belong to a denomination has increased. Of the combined categories of denominational and religious identification, the two largest are of the same size: both religious church members and non-religious non-members make up 37–37% of the total sample. Church attendance Another important and frequently used measure of institutional religiosity, besides denominational membership, is the frequency of church attendance. This indicator shows a different trend, than the denominational membership. Compared to the early 1990s, ten years later, masses and worship services were attended in Hungary at a lower rate weekly or at least monthly. These two categories accounted for less than one fifth of Hungarian society, while those who irregularly or never attended churches accounted both for about two fifths. Later, these rates tended to stagnate, or slightly fluctuate without a clear regular trend. If we can believe the data for 2019, the proportion of those who attend church services regularly has increased slightly compared to previous years and has again reached one-fifth of the total adult population. At the same time, however, the group whose share declined was not of those who have never attended church, but those people who attend church services irregularly. The latest data show signs of a trend towards a slow polarization of religiosity positions. The two poles of

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religiosity seem to undergo similar processes. While a small proportion of those who used to go to church rather occasionally attend the holy mass or other church services at least once a month now, another part of this group has moved further away from churches and denominations. However, further studies are needed to determine whether we can really talk about a trend change and polarization, or it is just another fluctuation in the sampling estimate (Fig. 2). According to the National Youth Surveys, the 15–29 age group is less religious in all respects, including church attendance, than older adults, and has not experienced increases in each birth cohort over the years (Rosta 2013; Hámori and Rosta 2013). In the 2016 wave of NYS, only 4% of 15 to 29 years-old Hungarians said they go to church at least once a week, and another 5% less frequently but at least monthly (Székely and Szabó 2016). However, this would mean that the number of people visiting church regularly would have to decrease if there was no other effect but only demographic change. Since this is not the case, we need to look for the cause in some kind of change in the individual life courses. It is here that the factor already mentioned in the introduction, that is, the firm commitment of the current political leadership to Christianity, comes into play. Another possibility is age effect, that is, older people become more religious, and this effect not only offsets, but even goes beyond the negative impact demographic change. The mechanisms of religious change within birth cohorts will be discussed later. Another question is, whether there was a real increase in the number of actual regular church attendees in the last years, or only in the self-reported attendances.

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Fig. 2   Frequency of church attendance, 1991–2019 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018, ESS 2004, 2014, RCH 2019, own computations)

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In other words, the question is how much actual behavior is consistent with the reports in this regard. It could be effectively decided by counting the number of actual church visitors on Sundays. A big and growing difference between both groups could be interpreted as a hint for church attendance growingly considered as a socially expected behavior at least in parts of the society. According to the most recent time use survey conducted by the Central Statistical Office in 2010, about 9% of the Hungarian population between the age of 10 and 84 years went actually to church on a given Saturday or Sunday (Church attendance on workdays is characteristic for less than 1%, with a significant part of these likely to go to church on weekends, too). This value is equivalent to the share of self-reported weekly church attendance. However, taking into account that, in principle, some of the less frequent church attendees are also visit church on a randomly selected weekend, it can be said that the observation of the actual activity by time use research shows lower levels of church attendance than the frequency estimated by ordinary surveys. The question remains open until the next wave of the time use study, whether this gap has changed during the last decade. Religious belief Another important dimension of religiosity is religious faith. The 2017/18 wave of the European Values Study raised question about belief in only five religious doctrines, including four Christian and one non-Christian, while many more have been asked before. Here, like in the case of denominational membership, continuing trends are shown, which represents a further increase in four out of five indicators. The existence of God remains the only religious teaching in which the majority of Hungarians, about two thirds, believe. However, according to the latest wave of EVS, the slow rise in this respect since the change of regime in 1990 has not continued. In contrast, more people believe in life after death, in heaven, and in hell, than a decade earlier. When looking at faith in God and beliefs in other teachings combined, it seems that the proportion of people who believe in “something” has not increased, but that the range of faith among believers has widened, though again not much. The share of believers in at least one of the four Christian-based teachings was 70% in 2008 and in 2018 as well. At the same time, the proportion of believers in at least two different teachings was 40% in 2008, 44% ten years later. The proportion of those believing in God and in at least one other teaching increased from 39 to 43% in the last decade. Compared to earlier times, beliefs exclusively in God have become rarer, and the proportion of those who associate their divine beliefs with some other religious belief has increased.

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Fig. 3   Religious belief, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018, own computations)

The proportion of both the believers in God and those who consider themselves religious is greater than those who attend church regularly. This is not a new phenomenon either, and highlights the fact that, in some respects, churches have only a limited capacity to meet religious needs. In addition to believing in Christian religious doctrines, the questionnaire also asked about belief in re-incarnation. The question sought to clarify the meaning of the term as precisely as possible. The increasing proportion of believers can be also observed here. Today, slightly less than 30% of Hungarians can identify with the claim that “we had previous lives and will be born into this world again” (Fig. 3). There was also a question in the questionnaire of EVS about the image of God respondent believes in. One of the options was, in accordance with the teachings of the Christian religions, God as a person. The other option was a less specific conception of a spirit or life force. Based on data from previous EVS waves, three important findings could be made in Hungary: • In all three waves since 1991, more people believed in God as a person than in a spirit or life force. • The increase in belief in God is primarily due to the spread of the non-personal image of God. While the proportion of those who believe in God as a person rose from 39 to 41% between 1991 and 2008, the proportion of those who believe in a more diffuse image of God increased from 9 to 23% during the same period.

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• The combined ratio of the two categories is lower than that of those who answered yes to the simple question of faith in God. This means that a part of those believing in God is unable to say exactly what image of God their faith is closer to. The results of the 2018 wave partially confirm, but partially modify these trends. Although there are still more believers in God as a person, their proportion has fallen significantly compared to 2008. In 2018, compared to 41% ten years ago, only 33% believe in this type of God (It should be noted that in 2018 the wording of the question has changed compared to the previous waves. While until 2008, “personal God” was the first answer in the questionnaire, in the last wave it was “God as a person”. It is possible that the change in the distribution of answers is partly due to this fact). In contrast, the proportion of believers in the supernatural as a spiritual being or life force has continued to grow and is approaching the size of the first group. (29%) Nevertheless, the combined proportion of the both groups (61%) still lags behind the nearly two-thirds of those believing in God, as previously seen. And, just as with the believers in God, the sum of these two groups is also showing a slightly lower rate than ten years earlier (2008: 63%) (Fig. 4). One specific form of religious individualization is the so-called bricolage, or patchwork religiosity (Davie 1994, 2002; Hervieu-Léger 1990, 2000; Wuthnow 1998). The believer does not stand on just one single religious tradition but

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Fig. 4   Belief in a personal God vs. spirit or life force, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018, own computations)

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chooses from a “menu” of religious teachings according to his or her own religious needs. This can mean the selection from more than one religious tradition. There are many forms of this type of religiosity, which is why a comprehensive empirical examination is not easy to conduct. In the present paper, I make only one attempt to do so by examining how the size of the group of those is changing, who consider their faith in a life after death, a fundamentally Christian concept, to be compatible with their faith in re-incarnation, a central concept of several Indian religions. In the 1990s, as Fig. 5 shows, the proportion of those who only accepted the Christian teaching increased sharply, while believing exclusively in re-incarnation or believing in both became slightly less frequent. Later, however, the relationship between the two teachings changed in terms of the proportion of believers in them. The proportion of those who accepted one of the two teachings fell after the turn of the millennium, while the proportion of those who shared the two concepts increased. Thus, in 2018, as many people believed in reincarnation and in life after death at the same time as they did in just life after death (Of course, it is not inconceivable that a part of those who believe in both will interpret their post-death life as a rebirth on this earth in another body, and not in terms of the Christian concept of the last judgement and resurrection). Mechanisms of religious change As mentioned in the introduction, not only did the trends of temporal change show differences between the various religious indicators, but also the mecha-

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Fig. 5   Belief in life after death and/or re-incarnation, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018, own computations)

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nisms by which these changes were caused. While the slight decline in church attendance was mainly due to demographic change and, in connection with that, to differences in religious socialization between birth cohorts, whereas the increasing belief was rather due to changes in the individual life courses, that is, some who did not believe before, started to believe. Do these differences still exist today? How is this statement changed by the fact, that church attendance has slightly increased in the meantime? I am going to seek for answers to these questions in the followings. The analysis of the longitudinal change of religious indicators by birth cohorts allows the examination whether within- or between-cohorts differences play a greater role in the overall change. If the demographic change is the decisive one, than the differences between the cohorts are much greater than those within the cohorts. If changes in the individual biographies is more important, than the opposite is true (A disadvantage of this procedure is that, because the subsamples of each birth cohort are quite small, the associated estimation errors for these cohort samples are larger than for the whole sample. Thus, the differences that appear to be relatively large are not necessarily statistically significant). Looking at the change in the frequency of church attendance based on birth cohorts, the following statements can be made (Fig. 6): In the oldest age group, 82 or over, there is a decrease in the share of those attending regularly church. In many cases, this is due to medical rather than inherently religious reasons that prevent regular church visits. In contrast, the proportion of those attending religious

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services regularly increased significantly during the last decade among those who were born between 1937 and 1954. Especially in the post-war cohort, the change is striking and without a previous sign. Because the change does not affect all groups, only the elderly, there seems to be an age effect in work here. However, since such an age effect could not be found ten years ago, a cohort-specific historical effect in the sense of political changes influencing different generations differently could be an alternative explication. This potential explanation may be reinforced by the fact that older age groups are particularly susceptible to the conservative politics of the governing parties, as studies on electoral behavior show (Enyedi et al. 2014). In addition to the more or less natural link between age and the tendency to conservatism, this is also related to the fact that the proportion of people with a lower education, who also tend to vote above average for the ruling parties, is higher among the elderly. However, further research shall investigate the potential impacts of government politics towards religions on the individual religiosity. In contrast, for those born after 1955, almost no change has been observed over the years. These cohorts show a more or less constant level of regular church attendance, which is significantly lower than that of the older birth groups. This is a sign of an apparent inter-cohort effect as it was shown already in the previous waves of EVS. Cohort analysis shows a different picture in the case of the belief in God. In addition to the stagnation of the share of believers among the eldest, the proportion of believers increased in almost all other age groups until 2008. The only exception was the birth cohort born between 1982 and 1990, whose percentage of believers stagnated at around 60%. The rise was particularly striking for birth groups with a very low proportion of believers in 1990. This process seems to have come to a stop during the last decade. Within birth cohorts, there was hardly any change between 2008 and 2018. This means that the slight decrease in the number of the believers is probably the result of demographic change, as the declining membership of older birth groups continues to believe in God to a higher extent than the younger ones (Fig. 7). Although a religious influence within the cohort appeared alongside the generational influence on church attendance, as seen before, the impact of religious socialization remains significant. This is mainly due to the difference in religiosity between cohorts born before and after World War II. However, how does this relationship appear in the data? Here, I can only deal with this issue from two aspects. One is how the proportion of those who received regular religious instruction during their childhood changed between birth cohorts. EVS examines this through the regularity of religious practice at the age of 12 years. The other aspect is the effectivity of this religious instruction: what proportion of those who

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Fig. 7   The share of those believing in God, by birth cohorts, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018, own computations)

received religious instruction in their childhood, that is, attended the church at least once a month, still go to church present days same regularly. Figure 8 gives answers to both questions.

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Fig. 8   The share of those attending church at least monthly at the age of 12 and effectivity of religious socialization (the rate of monthly or more regular church attendance compared to the same frequency at the age of 12), by birth cohorts, 1991–2018 (in %). (Source: EVS 2018, own computations)

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Respondents born before 1945 report that regular attendance of churches at childhood was not typical of the society as a whole, “only” for two thirds it. For those born between 1945 and 1990, the proportion gradually dropped to less than one-third. Those born in the 1980s and 1990s and spent at least part of their childhood and adolescence after the fall of communism, under the conditions of returning to religious freedom, have reported of increased religious practice during their childhood, compared to the previous generations. But not only was religious instruction more widespread in the pre-war generation, but also the effectiveness of this religious socialization on adult religious practice was stronger. While 42% of those born between 1928 and 1945 who attended church at least once a month in their childhood do so even today, the share among those born between 1964 and 1981 is only 28%. It may be stated that not only did the post-war generations receive religious education less than the previous generations, but that this smaller group also retained their faith less often. It is not only the higher proportion of those who visited church regularly in their childhood, that makes a difference between the youngest and the two elder birth cohorts. Also the effect of childhood religious practice on their later religiousness is somewhat stronger.

2 Summary The results of recent Hungarian studies on religiosity can be summarized in a way that they are very much in line with the previous situation. At the same time, we can discover some changes in both trends and underlying mechanisms of religious change. Just like a decade ago, the majority of the Hungarian society believes in God, approx. half of it is religious according to the own account and belonging to a denomination, but only a minority practices religion regularly. Certain trends did not change. The proportion of denominational membership continued to decline, while the proportion of believers in certain Christian and non-Christian doctrines increased. At the same time, other trends have stopped, or even seem to be reversing. This includes the proportion of believers in God, which has declined very little compared to previous growth, and the proportion of regular churchgoers, which in turn has increased slightly. Certain polarization processes can also be observed in relation to religiosity. Not only the proportion of regular religious practitioners but also those who never go to church have increased. While earlier there was little difference between post-war birth cohorts in terms of regular religious practice, according to the lat-

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est survey results, the proportion of both childhood and current religious practice is higher in the youngest birth cohort, compared to earlier generations. The complex process of religious change in Hungary cannot be explained by a single factor. Secularization and religious individualization processes, two trends running parallel previously, are supported by the latest data, too. However, some other changes, most notably the slight increase in church-related religious practice, are difficult to fit into this framework. Nor can we ignore the socio-political changes that have characterized Hungary over the past decade and which, as mentioned in the introduction, may have affected the development of religiosity, too. The extent to which these effects, particularly the increase in the number of church-maintained schools can have an impact on religiosity in Hungary on the long run, may be the subject of further research. In this context, the examination of the religiosity of young people shall play a key role. This paper has been realized under the research project “Religious Change in Hungary”, implemented with the support provided from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary, financed under the K_17 funding scheme (Project Nr. 119679).

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Between Europe and Asia

Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity: An Anthropological Perspective on Post-soviet Russia Tobias Köllner

Abstract

The post-Soviet religious revival in Russia was one of the key issues for challenging secularization theories. But when addressed in more detail, it becomes clear that the religious renaissance described by politicians and the clergy has to be analyzed in more detail. Their optimistic evaluations suggest about 80% of all ethnic Russians to be affiliated with Russian Orthodoxy. Clear differences, however, become obvious when methods for measuring religiosity based on ethnic affiliation, religious self-identification and religious practice are compared. Here, a number of particularities in Eastern Christianity have to be taken into account because religious beliefs are intimately linked to the right religious practice; and the affiliation with the religious community is stressed as such. In this way, it becomes possible to challenge the Protestant bias, as Talal Asad has done (1997, p. 48), and to understand notions such as ‘Orthodox atheists’ where people feel attached to the community of Russian Orthodoxy without holding significant religious beliefs. Herewith, I would like to emphasize the socialist legacies in post-Soviet Russian religiosity. It may sound strange at first that atheist Soviet everyday practices have such a strong influence on post-Soviet everyday religiosity. But thanks to previous work we know very well how Soviet tactics such as the establishment of social networks of mutual benefit known as blat are highly important until today. This is particularly relevant for elite people such as businesspeople who have a deeply T. Köllner (*)  University Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_7

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personal relation to the clergy and sometimes make use of their religious networks to enhance their political ambitions. Keywords

Russia · Eastern christianity · Russian orthodoxy · Religiosity · Postsocialism ·  Ethnography · Social and cultural anthropology · Sociology of religion ·  Anthropology of christianity

1 Introduction Since the 1980s, the world witnessed an unprecedented re-emergence of religion in the public sphere and countries with such diverse backgrounds as Iran, Poland or the United States provided key evidence for this (Casanova 2001). The postsocialist religious revival since the late 1980s provided yet another example for this. Small wonder, then, that the postsocialist religious revival in post-Soviet Russia became one of the key examples for criticizing the secularization thesis. The key theories used for this are the ‘deprivatiztion of religion’ (Casanova 2001) and the ‘desecularization of religion’ (Berger 1999). Indeed, with religion moving into the public sphere, a considerable increase in religious belief and practice is observable. Nevertheless, statistics provided by state agencies, some public-opinion research institutions, and some social scientists have to be handled with care. Claims of 80% or even more of the population to be adherents to traditional religions overestimate the number of practicing believers and ignore the diverse connections people have with religion. Here, anthropological approaches have helped make our understanding of religious belief and practice more precise by offering detailed accounts. When analyzing Russian Orthodox religiosity, attention has to be drawn to its particularities. At first, the bias to emphasize religious belief has to be mentioned. Drawing on Talal Asad’s famous critique to focus exclusively on notions of belief (1997, p. 48): “It is preeminently the Christian church that has occupied itself with identifying, cultivating, and testing belief as a verbalizable inner condition of true religion”. Indeed, Eastern Christianity never emphasized the belief dimension as strongly as it was common in Protestantism or Catholicism (2013, p. 6). Instead, in Eastern Christianity the right belief is closely related to right practice. Thus it is primarily the right religious practice which is emphasized by Eastern Christians (Bremer 2016, p. 40 f.; Hann 2012; Hann and Goltz 2010, p. 15 f.).

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Orthodox Christianity, then, is characterized by “practical theology of the icons, the worship of the saints and of places of their burial, the place of prayer in everyday life” (Orsi 2017, p. 65). In addition to belief and practice, notions of belonging to the community of the faithful are important. In this case, ethnic understandings of being Russian intermingle with the religious identification of being Orthodox. Karpov et al. (2012) have pointed to the social construction of such notions and called this ethnodoxy by which they refer to: “an ideology that rigidly links a group’s ethnic identities to its dominant faith” (ibid., p. 639). Here we have to keep in mind that there is a strong support of the state for bringing Russian Orthodoxy to the public sphere (Benovska-Sabkova et al. 2010; Köllner 2018). Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether this is ideology only. Moreover, it is important to note that although the role of the state for this is very relevant there is a lot of competition, misunderstanding and open conflict between both spheres too (Köllner 2019, 2020a). Indeed, most Russians share the notion of a close connection between Russian Orthodoxy and the nation, which is perceived to be based on Russian tradition and constitutes a ‘chain of memory’ (see 2000, 2008). Since the 2000s at the latest, this notion finds expression in an ever more positive attitude towards Russian Orthodoxy that is described as an ‘pro-Orthodox consensus’ (Kääriäinen and Furman 2007, p. 20; Agadjanian and Rousselet 2011, p. 17 f.). This research is drawing on the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork in the Vladimir region where I conducted two extended field stays from 2006 to 2008 and 2013 to 2016. Vladimir has about 380,000 inhabitants and is situated 180 km to the East of Moscow. It was the spiritual center of Russian Orthodoxy until the fifteenth century and continues to play an important role until today. Although it is called the ‘heart of Russia’ or ‘soul of Russia’ to this day, it, nevertheless is not exceptional compared to other regions with a predominantly Orthodox population in European Russia. During the research, I conducted participant observation, collected more than 100 semi-structured interviews that have been recorded and a number of conversations without recording. Among my interlocutors were priests, believers, politicians, businesspeople, teachers, journalists, scientists and others.

2 Orthodox Religiosity in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia I have not collected any historical data on my own, but would like to briefly summarize the most important discussions in this field. To be sure, there was no single pre-Soviet or socialist religiosity. Thus, there is some risk to simplify the

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complex historic situation at that time. Nevertheless, I think it is important to summarize at least some of the discussions because this helps to put the ethnographic data given later on into the right frame. Religiosity in Czarist Russia Until the October Revolution in 1917, Russian Orthodoxy was the state religion and every ethnic Russian was considered Orthodox by birth. In most cases, lifecycle rituals such as baptisms, marriages or funerals were carried out in the parish community that served as the center of the local community. However, many parishes lacked the means and opportunities to carry out the liturgical celebrations in full scale, as it was common in well-known monasteries (Binns 2005, p. 108). In particular rural parishes were poor and had to sustain the life of the priest and their families. According to some descriptions, the knowledge about basic theological matters at that time was poor and “In the eyes of many peasants the rites of the church were nothing more, but also nothing less, than particularly effective magical performances” (Buss 2003, p. 50). Thus, religiosity in Russia often was characterized by the notion of double belief (dvoeverie) that incorporated traditional pagan and magical beliefs along the official teachings of Orthodoxy (see Rock 2006, 2007 on double belief). Due to the lack of a social mission, a limited education of parish priests and their additional obligations a lethargy of parish life was widespread (Paert 2010, p. 103). As a result, new forms of eldership (starchestvo) emerged. In addition to their spiritual function, these elders were relevant in nation building because they had to “actively dissociate themselves from accusations of dissent, and to demonstrate their loyalty (blagonadezhnost’) to autocracy and Orthodoxy” (Paert 2010, p. 91). In relation to the emergence of elders, pilgrimages to well-known monasteries became increasingly popular where many of these elders were based. Although related to the official church in one way or the other, this rather was an informal form of ministry (Paert 2010, p. 4). Nevertheless, this revival of Russian spiritualism in the nineteenth century later came to be sawn as the renaissance of Byzantine hesychasm of the fourteenth century, a particular form of mystical prayer of the heart (Hann 2014). Religiosity in Soviet Russia Soon after the Soviets came to power in 1917, religion was marked as superstition and persecuted. Lenin distanced himself from religion and separated Church and state. This freed the Church from too heavy state interference but left it without protection. First repressive measures began soon after when churches were closed down for various reasons and the land of the church was confiscated

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(Köllner 2018). In addition, church schools were nationalized and religious education banned from public schools (cf. Köllner 2016, p. 368). Unprecedented killings of believers, clergymen, nuns and monks took place and reached its climax in the 1930s under Stalin. As a result, the Russian Orthodox Church “stood on the brink of total destruction” with only slightly more than 100 churches open to service in 1939 out of several thousand at the beginning of the socialist era (Chumachenko 2002, p. 3 f.). It was only after the beginning of World War II that Stalin was seeking new allies and turned to the Church again. At that time, the Church had to accept the conditions offered by Stalin that placed it “in the complex and contradictory position of a preferentially protected confession that was simultaneously controlled by the state” (Chumachenko 2002, p. 36). After some time of relaxation, it was in the 1960s when the Church was facing a new anti-religious campaign initiated by Chrushchev before the relation became more ambivalent again under Brezhnev (Freeze 2009). Religion was banned from the public sphere, harassed and intimidated but tolerated in the private sphere. Tamara Dragadze called this the ‘domestication of religion’ (1993). During the socialist period, religion as such was not only suppressed but also received new understandings and took new modes of religiosity (Pelkmans 2009, p. 5). Not all of them have been recorded by researchers which makes it difficult to give a complete picture. Nevertheless, the Soviets did not succeed to extinct religion. Attempts to verify the decreasing importance of religion in the 1930s failed. In Vladimir region, for example, 53.9% of the respondents to a survey considered themselves as believers (Konstantinov 2003, p. 9). It was only in the 1960s and 1970s, when religion lost its credence and a majority of respondents declared themselves non-religious. Yet, religious life-cycle rituals persisted even at that time. Baptisms were widespread and religious practices still influenced funerals. This was related to the fact that the elderly still were more attached to religion than the younger generations, and were tolerated to do so (Dragadze 1993; Rogers 2009). In addition, some religious sites remained intact despite all attempts to damage them (Rock 2012). At these sites, religiosity persisted although the religious veneration lacked the guidance by priests in many cases (Huhn 2014; Rock 2012). To sum up, it could be said that religious faith and practice persisted under communist rule but were influenced by socialist ideas and practices. In addition, it is important to note that there were considerable differences between different regions and during different periods of history. In Ukraine, for example, religious faith persisted and was more intense than in other parts of the Soviet Union because churches were opened again during the German occupation and not closed immediately after the Soviets returned.

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Religiosity in Post-Soviet Russia Since the 1980s, the socialist ideology lost considerable power to integrate the population. More and more parts of the population looked for new forms of moral guidance and became interested in religion and Russian history (Zigon 2011). Already in the late socialist period, more and more people showed an increased interest in the significance of icons, cult objects and relics (Köllner 2018, p. 1088 f.). New churches were built and old ones refurbished which created a completely new landscape filled with religious symbols and religious sites. This was particularly important because Orthodoxy is still characterized by a particular valuation of non-verbal imagistic modes of religiosity in addition to basic axiological teachings (Naumescu 2007). Nevertheless, the image of a glorious religious revival seems to be misplaced. Many of the adherents of religion converted only recently and attach very diverse meanings to Orthodoxy, which are based on local interpretation and might contain magical beliefs too (Gurchiani 2017, p. 515; Köllner 2013a, b; Lindquist 2006; Pelkmans 2009). This leaves room for maneuvering, flexible interpretation and, at times, creates an ‘alternative hierarchy’ of religious authorities at the margins of official Orthodoxy (Knox and Mitrofanova 2014, p. 53). In addition to such new forms of individual religiosity, there exist massive changes on the institutional level. The Russian Orthodox Church, once heavily contained and intimidated, today plays a crucial role for society again (Curanović 2012; Köllner 2020a; Papkova 2011; Richters 2013; Stoeckl 2014; Tocheva 2017). Although such a role is welcomed in general, some parts of the population criticize this (Mitrokhin 2004; Uzlaner 2019), for example when it comes to the introduction of religions education in state schools (Köllner 2016; Ładykowska 2016). Inside the Church, new reforms have been carried out in order to improve knowledge of believers. Since 2010, for example, new positions inside parishes have been established such as social workers, catechists or particular supporters for young believers (Knox and Mitrofanova 2014, p. 57). Moreover, attempts have been made to implement compulsory catechization before taking important sacraments such as baptism or marriage (ibid.). Moreover, the Church as an institution became a major player in charitable work which was less important before (Caldwell 2004, 2017).

3 Religious Beliefs Conceptions of Evil (zlo) Until today, notions of evil are of special importance in Russian Orthodoxy because they are vividly discussed in church circles and cause deep-seated anxieties and fears. Even more, some priests consider fears to be a necessary precondi-

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tion for belief, which sustains them. The evil takes very different forms and besides notions about possession by demons, evil spirits and the Devil, new anxieties about life in modernity have developed. One recent example is the ongoing dispute about Individual Tax Numbers (INN in Russian) and other digital numbers or bar codes imprinted on passports, ID cards, insurance cards and work permits (see also Agadjanian and Rousselet 2005, p. 33 ff.). Even in conversations with me, some priests argued that no one knows what numbers are printed on barcodes and in the worst case one carries such a document with the number ‘666’, the sign of the Devil. According to their argumentation, one aligns with the Devil if one carries such a sign, and, thus, one cannot be a good Christian. In the neighbouring city of Suzdal’, for example, there was a big conflict some years ago when local believers decided to burn their passports in public. As a result, they got into trouble with the police and other authorities. The administration of the Russian Orthodox Church distanced itself from this practice, but on the local level, some priests still were involved in the affair. There are more examples to this issue and similar debates exist about the intentional pollution of modern goods and food products by Western companies, which aims to weaken Russia and its spiritual strength. In order to clarify these issues, I would like to give some examples from my fieldwork. One example is the businessman Ivan. I met him through the network of the company where I was working as an intern for more than eight months. His company was situated less than 100 m from our office and we met for lunch regularly or I visited him in his company. At that time, he was in his mid-fifties, married and ran a real estate business together with his wife. Ivan is an Orthodox believer although his father who was a committed communist did not welcome this. In contrast, his mother was closer to the Church because her father had been a priest. During socialism, Ivan studied engineering in St. Petersburg in one of the best academies of the USSR and worked as the head of a technical department. In his position, he was responsible for the construction of the thermal protection shield in the Russian space shuttle program called ‘Buran’. In 1990, he had to leave the company and began a new career in the real estate sector. In 1995, Ivan left the firm and started his own business with the help of other businesspeople. In his real estate company, he is the owner and his wife supports him as an accountant. I learned from Ivan that he had his office blessed by a priest and I was interested what the reasons were for him. Therefore, he explained to me: There is this delusion/illusion, which people had. It has been said, that there are … many people saw it. That there are poltergeists. That there is something, well, that there are wandering souls (neupokoennye dushi), after a violent death (nasil’stvennaia smert’) and so on. [pause] I don’t want this to happen in my office.

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Despite the fact that Ivan received a technical education and as a leading bureaucrat must have been exposed to socialist propaganda and indoctrination, he is troubled by uneasy feelings that poltergeists or wandering souls might be present in his office and disturb him at work or harm him. Although he is mentioning other people’s belief in the first part of the quotation (“It has been said”), it becomes clear in the end that he shares the uneasy feelings. Consequently, he ordered a priest to bless his office and to protect him there. In my view, this shows quite clearly that people turn to religion when they have uneasy feelings or face personal problems. However, it must be kept in mind that Russian Orthodoxy is one option among others. Moreover, it becomes clear that belief and practice are interrelated. In order to counteract his fears (belief) Ivan turned to a priest and relied on his blessing (practice). Punishment (nakazanie) Another particularity in Orthodoxy is an understanding that relates illness, misfortune and accidents to one’s previous sins. According to this teaching, a punishment might happen during one’s lifetime and not on the Day of Last Judgement only. Among the laity in Russian Orthodoxy, there are plenty of rumours speculating about the misdeeds as reasons for illness and accidents. In this way, people are confronted with accusations about possible reasons for their bad luck. In addition, priests also take advantage of this understanding and actively use it during conversations with believers. As a result, these beliefs have become important means for conversion and a more active engagement with Russian Orthodoxy. One case in point is the account of the businessman Pavel who was in his early forties at the time of my fieldwork in 2007. He was still enrolled at the university in order to become a construction engineer when he thought about opening his own business. In order to obtain the necessary starting capital (pervichnyi kapital) he started to engage in trading icons together with a friend who was studying at the same university. Buying icons cheap from people in need of money and selling them at a higher price in Moscow or St. Petersburg, they managed to obtain $20,000, which was a lot of money in the early 1990s. With their starting capital, they opened one of the first shops in Vladimir where they sold technical equipment. Soon afterwards, Pavel moved on and opened a construction company which he runs until the present day. There was a big demand for icons and they became expensive. We made our starting capital by dealing a little bit with icons on the market which we sold to collectors. Although it is, of course, a big sin (bolshoi grekh).

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And we came back, having been very successful, came back very happy, and in the back [of the car] lay many, many icons which we had bought very cheap. On the way back we had an accident, a serious accident, where the car crashed completely … and I broke my spine. That’s all. For me it was a sign that what I did was not right. I immediately gave up (Ia srazu brosil). This means, I never dealt with icons again. […]

Pavel’s account is an especially fruitful example because he addresses an issue put forward by many Russians. Until today, most Russians tend to perceive businesspeople to be morally questionable who became rich by ‘selling their motherland’ or committing crimes and sins. The evidence for this, however, is scarce. Some of these recent complaints are based on socialist morality and have been rephrased in religious words (see also Köllner 2012, p. 76). Often critique is voiced about speculation without additional value, corruptness and deceit. In particular, the way in which starting capital is accumulated is criticised and one can hear many rumours about leading oligarchs and businesspeople on the local level alike: some are accused of having dealt with weapons, others of having cheated clients or employees. The general feeling is that ‘the first million is always a dirty one’. In my view, Pavel is reflecting on this issue and uses ideas from socialist times (starting capital, the character of capitalism) and fills them with what he heard in church circles and read in religious textbooks. To be sure, trading with icons is considered a serious sin (grekh) in Orthodox teachings among the laity and among the clergy. Even Pavel himself acknowledges the sinfulness of his behavior. What is more striking, however, is the clear relation he drew between the trading in icons and the accident they had. He himself understood the accident as a sign by God who was punishing him for his sins with a heavy fracture. This is striking because Pavel had a very distant relation to the Church at that time. Nevertheless, he knew about this teaching and acted accordingly; he immediately gave up dealing in icons and never dealt in them again. Why did he knew what to do and how to interpret the accident? In contemporary Russia, numerous stories and rumours describe people who went away from God and end up in some sort of tragedy. Pavel came across such stories as well, because they are distributed in everyday discourse and not limited to church circles only. Out of the sudden, he found himself in a similar experience, as it has been described in church discourse and in textbooks. Pavel’s case is especially striking because he came to religion at the age of 20 when he was enrolled as a student. At that time, he took to books and developed an interest in religious matters without being confined to genuinely Russian Orthodox teachings. At the time of his accident, he remembered these stories and evaluated his own behavior.

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Magical Beliefs The re-emergence of religion in post-Soviet Russia, however, is not limited to Russian Orthodoxy only. Instead, there seems to be a tendency where meanings from different religious traditions are combined. One major trend in doing so are magical beliefs, which are widespread. To be sure, magic never disappeared and always played a crucial, if often hidden, role in Russia. After the end of socialism, however, it came out into the open and emerged in the public sphere (Lindquist 2006, p. xv). The reasons for this are manifold, but magic as a way to secure agency seems to be very important. According to Galina Lindquist, who was the key scholar studying magic in contemporary Russia, magic is “about cultural tools to change people’s subjectivity in ways that makes their lives livable. It is about hope, the existential and affective counterpart of agency that replaces it where channels for agency are blocked” (2006, p. 4). In particular, among people facing existential fears magic became widespread although it was stigmatized by the Church and by official discourse. In her account, Lindquist gives one particularly illuminating story from her acquaintance Misha. “This stone was all I had in this life to rely on. I had nothing else. The State would not help me. My relatives are far away, and they themselves are up to their ears in trouble. And I have no friends here [in Moscow] — only business partners, and they won’t help you.” Lindquist 2006, p. 207

4 Religious Practice Despite strong support for Russian Orthodoxy, the level of religious practice, however measured (church attendance, prayer, adherence to Lent) remains low (Borowik 2002; Filatov and Lunkin 2006; Kääriäinen and Furman 2007; Sokolova 2005). This finding is confirmed by a survey organised by the Vladimir eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, which indicates that church attendance in Vladimir is less than 0.5% of the inhabitants on a normal Sunday (personal communication from Father Aleksii Golovchenko). Taking into account that daily services take place in the morning and evening, sociological surveys mention about 7% that visit the church at least once a month (Kääriäinen and Furman 2007, p. 21). As these figures indicate, people in contemporary Russia affiliate with religion tentatively only. Therefore, the significance of the Eucharist (prichastie) and confession (ispoved’) is limited to a circle of people who are very close to the Church. They are called ‘inchurched believers’ (votserkovlennye

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liudi), which characterizes them as being in the process of deeply engaging with the Church and following clergymen’s prescriptions strictly. For the large majority of Russians, however, showing feelings of deep devotion in public seems to be problematic. Even in such cases where a closer attachment to Orthodoxy was mentioned, often a restriction followed: “Of course we do not pray to such an extent that the head breaks (golovu razbit’sia)”. Analyzing my material, it seems to me as if these believers feared to look foolish when showing their religiosity too openly. One reason for this might be the image of religion during the socialist period. At that time, religion was depicted as superstition and conceived of as a sign of backwardness (Curanović 2012, p. 43 f.; Paert 2010, p. 42; Steinberg and Wanner 2008, p. 2). Blessings Blessings of many items of everyday use (cars, flats, offices, etc.) have become very popular in recent years among many groups of Russian society. For this, a priest is invited to the home, the office or the company (usually shortly before Easter, the main festive day in Orthodoxy) to carry out the blessing with holy water. In addition, my observations and my interviews indicate that most Russians hesitate to attend the blessing, but perceive it to be the priest’s duty. For the blessing, priests are considered as experts that ensure the authentic handling of the rite. Most Russians, then, perceive their own presence and knowledge as unimportant and inadequate. In contrast, most priests underline the importance of the participation and presence of the believers for the success of the blessing. Priests consider especially the joint prayers to be important. In addition, my ethnographic data suggests that blessings are perceived as a means of protection against various forms of evil. As an indicator of protection, priests put four stickers on the walls of the house or office that show a cross, one in each direction. The practice of blessing became quite popular in Russian society. It follows a general trend and today many Russians are eager to bless their belongings. In so doing, however, the meanings attached are very diverse and sometimes include notions, which do not belong to the official teachings of the Church. They are combined with other religions and seem to be one element among others. This understanding has been described as ‘just in case’ attitude (see Köllner 2012, p. 87–115). Icon Veneration One of the most popular religious practices in contemporary Russia is the veneration of icons in churches, at home, in offices or at sacred places. Icons have high relevance for the clergy and laity alike because they are considered

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miracle-working (Shevzov 2000). In addition, icons are used for many other purposes such as protection from evil forces and to fulfil important means in everyday life. In addition, icons serve as means to communicate with the sacred and are accessible to everyone. This is highly relevant because other sacred ceremonies such as the Eucharist or blessings need the participation of the clergy. For the use of icons, however, all believers are able to communicate directly with the sacred. In this understanding, each icon has a particular meaning and so believers turn to them under specific conditions. For example, there are icons said to protect against fire, others that protect against illness and yet others which are considered to protect the Russian Federation as a whole. The most important icons in contemporary Russia are dedicated to St Nikolai, performer of miracles (Nikolai Chudotvorets), and various icons dedicated to the Mother of God such as the Mother of God of Kazan. Moreover, it is interesting how icons become part of the sacred canon in Russian Orthodoxy. For this, they have to undergo a process under the auspices of the Church authorities. At times, however, new ‘icons’ emerge outside the Church hierarchy when portraits transform into icons and are connected to miracles (see Kormina 2013). During this process, ‘political games’ between competing factions take place and ‘lay professional believers’ play a crucial role (Kormina 2013, p. 106). In addition, there are other examples where people have been successfully canonized by the Church. One example for this is the last emperor of the Russian Empire, Czar Nikolai II, who was canonized with his family in 2000 as passion-bearers (strastoterptsy) (Rousselet 2011). In addition, further victims of the Soviet purges have been canonized under the category of New Martyrs (novomucheniki). Pilgrimage In contemporary Russia, pilgrimages have gained in popularity, and monasteries, churches, and other sacred sites attract many believers (Kormina 2012; Panchenko 2012). Among the most popular pilgrimage sites in the central part of Russia are Sergiev Posad (veneration of Sergii Radonezhskii), Optina Pustyn’ (veneration of Amfrosii Optinskii), and Diveevo (veneration of Serafim Sarovskii). Besides these well-known sites, there are monasteries, miraculous icons, and holy springs of local importance, which are also visited and venerated by many believers. Nevertheless, this does not indicate any glorious religious revival, as described by the Church and the state. Instead, I suggest to understand this as a more complex trend, which is made possible by an individual and collective search for belonging. Among the pilgrims we find both, deeply devout ­believers

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(Naletova 2010) and, as Jeanne Kormina (2010) has shown, pilgrims who have much more mundane ambitions. The second form of religiosity, then, is not deeply related to the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution and such pilgrimages were compared to tourism, as it reflects a deep longing for authenticity (Kormina 2010). Nevertheless, both forms are important and contributed substantially to a growing popularity of pilgrimage in postsocialist Russia. Due to the increased importance of pilgrimage, the Church has initiated some measures to take control of the vibrant development. Currently, the Church attempts to exercise more influence on pilgrimage practices and attached meanings. One of the initiatives is to organize pilgrimage trips by local eparchies or monasteries under the direct auspices of the Church (Kirill 2004, p. 6 ff.). This would challenge tourist agencies offering ‘tours to monasteries’. Instead, the pilgrimages offered by the Church are guided by priests and attempt to initiate inchurchment (votserkovlenie) (Kirill 2004, p. 9). In addition, a central pilgrimage center opened in 1999, which organizes conferences, seminars and round tables for the clergy and laity. A further initiative is the journal “The Orthodox Pilgrim” (Pravoslavnyi Palomnik) that is published since 2001 (Kirill 2004, p. 7). Charitable Giving Another practice, which gained in popularity in post-Soviet Russia, are charitable contributions to people or institutions in need. As in other Christian doctrines, Orthodox charity is perceived as a Christian duty towards people in need. Throughout history the Church itself, as Lindenmeyr (1990, p. 680) argues, sponsored relatively few charitable institutions of its own, but stressed the “individual, moral nature of giving”. This coincides with my own findings during fieldwork and in the archive of Vladimir. Accordingly, charity is perceived as a personal duty that is considered essential for salvation (Lindenmeyr 1990, p. 680). This is related to the fact that charitable giving, labour contributions and donations to the Russian Orthodox Church are often morally charged and carry moral meanings. In many cases, charitable giving is related to notions of penance and considered to bring spiritual benefits (Köllner 2011). Besides charity for people in need, donations to the Church were widespread in pre-revolutionary Russia, and are so until today. In particular, the erection of new churches or the refurbishment of existing ones is important. In many cases, the construction is supported financially or with labour contributions. In this way, the Church plays a crucial role in collecting charitable giving until today and attracts the largest part of it. This was unusual during the Soviet period and shortly afterwards because the Church was not allowed to collect charitable contributions.

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5 Religion and the Nation In addition to religious beliefs and religious practice, I would like to draw attention to the connections between Russianness and Russian Orthodoxy. For many Russians, their belonging to Russian Orthodoxy is mainly based on ethnic identity—‘ethnic’ Orthodoxy. Kääriäinen and Furman (2007, p. 16) point in the same direction with their category of ‘ideological’ Orthodoxy (ideologicheskoe pravoslavie). An indirect relation to belief characterizes this kind of religiosity. Religion, then, becomes a kind of symbol, which emphasizes attachment to the ethnic group and agreement to its ideological underpinnings. This trend is related to the fact that after the demise of socialism, communism as an ideology has lost most of its former prestige and most of its power to convince people. Consequently, many Russians emphasize their ethnic identity and try to differentiate themselves from other people inside and outside the Russian Federation (Köllner 2020b). Orthodoxy has become one of the essential markers of being Russian and many Russians claim membership to Orthodoxy on ethnic grounds, although they have a loose relation to the parish community or the Church. Similar perceptions have been reported for pre-revolutionary Russia, where Orthodoxy was perceived as “proto-national identity that began with the local parish or village and expanded to include the entire empire” (Angold 2006, p. 363). Such seemingly continuous developments, however, have to analyzed carefully because similar phenomena might be related to completely different understandings. These developments are related to an increasing importance of nation building and nationalism in general, which is actively fostered by state authorities since the various colored revolutions took place (Mitrofanova 2005; Laruelle 2009, 2012). Here one has to keep in mind that the nation is a construct, an imagined community: “Indeed, all communities that are larger than the village ones with their face-to-face contacts are presented as communities.” (Anderson 2005 [1983], p. 16). Therefore, the nation is not something given, but must be actively produced and constructed. In the case of the Russian Federation, this is largely related to Russian Orthodoxy. According to Jutta Scherrer, “Orthodoxy [is the] core of the unified Russian history, national culture and statehood and thus also the most important factor for the ‘rebirth’ of Russia” (2003, p. 80). This argumentation is confirmed by recent analysis where it is argued that “the real importance of the church [is]: to act as a shield behind which the nation could hide” (Herpen 2016, p. 135). If these attempts are successful, however, remains an open question. At the moment, the relation between Church and state is characterized by a complex entanglement that includes cooperation, competition and conflict, and no clear-cut instrumentalization (Köllner 2020a).

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6 Conclusion In this article, it has been argued that religiosity in post-Soviet Russia is characterized by three different, yet interrelated, phenomena: religious beliefs, religious practices and notions of belonging to a religious community. In so doing, I have criticized notions of a moral or religious vacuum and attempts to describe the re-emergence of religion for ideological reasons only. To be sure, attempts to use religion for political purposes are there but remain largely without clear results. On the contrary, the results are very diverse, and I have described how religious beliefs serve as a basis for various religious practices and how they are reflected in such practices. Especially the notion of evil and the understanding of punishment on earth had a substantial impact on religious practice, as indicated in the beginning. For many Russians, evil forces pose a serious challenge and one needs strong assistance for resistance. Although Russian Orthodoxy is by far the most important provider for support against evil forces, yet it is not the only one. Some trends in contemporary Russia, for example, indicate a strong importance of magic. Many practices such as blessings or icon veneration relate to the idea of influencing the divine. Therefore, many of the religious practices described are used for establishing self-assuredness and control in situations that are very difficult. In such a context without trust and institutional security, religious practices, in analogy to magic, allow to build the image of a more stable framework. Religion gives hope in insecure situations and a feeling of self-assuredness, which allows to regain agency. In addition to this, old patterns of identification were lost and gave way to a new central discourse based on Russian Orthodoxy. This process originated in the center, being encouraged by leading politicians such as President Vladimir Putin. However, in its design and implementation such processes are reflected at the local level, too, where a reorientation and an increasing importance of the national idea is equally relevant but clashes with other articulations and ambitions. To conclude, it is fair to say that the promotion of Russian Orthodoxy in the public sphere, the creation of an ‘authentic landscape’ with religious symbols and an ever-increasing importance of pilgrimages, processions and venerations contributed to a conflation of the national and the religious. Yet, it could be questioned whether this really means that Russian Orthodoxy has gained in relevance and that the secularity of the state has been weakened substantially. Quite the contrary might be true because the reappearance of religion in the public sphere as such is no evidence for its growing importance. In that case, religion might be visible in the public sphere but remains largely subordinated to secular authorities and their objectives.

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To conclude, let me also mention the limitations of this article. The material is based on ethnographic fieldwork in European Russia in an urban setting among relatively well-off persons such as businesspeople and politicians. As a result, the findings presented here are largely drawing on their notions and understandings. Therefore, it was not my intention to develop an all-encompassing formula for religiosity in Russian Orthodoxy because this would neglect the complexity of ways how people relate to religion in contemporary Russia. Still, there might be other approaches and the descriptions here have to be complemented by research in other places of the Russian Federation and among other layers of Russian society.

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Muslims’ Religious Freedom and Religiosity: Measurement and Impact Hannah M. Ridge

Abstract

Multiple measures of religious freedom and states’ regulation of religion are at work in sociology of religion. These scales apply one score to a country or to a subset of its policies. A uniform state score conceals the internal religious diversity and the heterogeneous experiences of religious freedom that can result. These, in turn, encourage ecological fallacies and mask the disparate impact that religious freedom for one’s own community and for other groups can have on individuals’ preferences and decisions. To demonstrate the value of measuring and studying religious freedom at the individual level, this study applies individual-level assessments of freedom and religiosity from SunniMuslim-majority countries to the religious market theory literature. It shows that restricting individuals’ religious freedom suppresses religious belief and behavior. Restrictions placed on other groups, however, can have independent positive and negative effects on religiosity. The study also raises concerns about the ability of current measures of religious freedom to measure individuals’ freedom, at least in Muslim-majority countries. Keywords

Islam · Religious freedom · Regulation · Religiosity · Measurement · Mosque ·  Prayer · Religious market theory

H. M. Ridge (*)  Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 S. Demmrich and U. Riegel (eds.), Religiosity in East and West, Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_8

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1 Introduction Multiple measures of religious freedom and states’ regulation of religion are at work in the sociology of religion literature. These scales can apply one score to a country generally or assign a few scores based on various aspects of the states’ policies towards religion, such as those that favor religion against those that regulate it. Assigning uniform state scores, however, presents methodological challenges in application. These ratings cover over the internal religious diversity within the states. This, in turn, conceals the heterogeneous experiences of religious freedom that can result from state policies. Applying ratings to the entire country encourages ecological fallacies and masks the disparate impact that religious freedom for one’s own religious community and for other groups can have on individuals’ policy and action preferences. To demonstrate the value of measuring and studying religious freedom at the individual level, this chapter utilizes a set of surveys from Sunni-Muslim-majority countries that asked about the freedom members of the individuals’ religion had to practice their religion and the freedom of members of other religions to practice their religion. It applies these individual-level assessments of freedom in combination with questions about religious religious belief and behavior to the religious market theory literature. Religious market theory proposes that the production and consumption of religious products reflect both state regulation of religious communities and individuals and religious groups’ need and ability to compete for members. State policies favoring religious freedom or religious monopolies have both been theorized to increase religiosity in their publics (Iannaccone 1995; Finke 2013). Previous studies of the religious market theory, which have concentrated on Western and Christian-majority countries, have relied on aggregate measures of religious freedom and religiosity, drawing conclusions about individual nature based on group data. This methodological problem is avoided by the application of individually-assessed religious freedom measures for members of the respondents’ own religion and for members of other religions from surveys in twenty-two Sunni-Muslim-majority countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Employing those distinct evaluations together represents more accurately the level of regulation in the entire religion market. This chapter shows that restricting individuals’ religious freedom suppresses their propensity to both religious belief and behavior. Perceiving restrictions placed on other groups, however, can have both positive and negative effects on individuals’ religiosity. These independent effects from Sunni Muslims and others’ religious freedom demonstrate the value of focusing on individuals’ assess-

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ments of religious freedom in their lives and country. By comparing the results from models employing state regulation of religion scores and individual-level religious freedom scores, the study also raises concerns about the ability of current measures of religious freedom to measure individuals’ freedom, at least in Sunni-Muslim-majority countries.

2 Religious Market Theory Religious market theory (RMT) conceives of religions as products individuals purchase for consumption from religious leaders. Regulations are restrictions on the freedom citizens would otherwise experience. RMT proposes that deregulation would allows individuals to choose a religion “without penalty” (Finke 2013, p. 2). Religion providers distinguish their offerings by beliefs, strictness, and social service provision in order to attract more members (Iannaccone 1992; Iyer et al. 2014). This process repeats over time as individuals choose whether to change products or levels of consumption. Because of individuals’ religious freedom, new and old providers must balance being responsive to demand and modifying the product to attract consumers without polluting the brand by instability (Iannaccone 1991, 1995). Deregulation is influencing the behavior both of producers and consumers. Restricting freedom make it less likely that citizens “will find a religious movement suited to them” (Fox and Tabory 2008, p. 246). Due to low natural barriers-to-entry and diverse personal preferences, an unregulated religious market displays “competitive pluralism” (Gill 2008, p. 42). Market share ultimately reflect the entrepreneurialism of the religions’ leaders (Pearce et al. 2010). Researchers have applied multiple measures of regulation and freedom to understand the connection between a free market for sellers and consumers and increased consumption in studies that have generated inconsistent results. Iannaccone (1991) looks at the presence of a national religion. Chaves and Cann (1992) create a six-item index for religious monopoly based on establishment and financial support. North and Gwin (2004) use a nine-item index, including having an official religion, required group registration, censorship, religious education, restrictions on missionaries and conversion, and funding. McCleary and Barro (2006) focus on whether a state has an official religion and whether the government controls appointment of religious leaders. Fox and Tabory (2008, pp. 252–254) construct six separate indexes of regulation, called “official support,” “general restrictions,“ “religious discrimination,“ “religious regulation,” and “religious legislation.” Each of these systems generates ratings of religious

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freedom for a country as a whole and applies that rating to country-aggregate measures of religious belief and behavior. Ruiter and van Tubergen (2009, p. 866) recognized that this system introduced a statistical problem: “[a]n important drawback of this macro-oriented research is that inferences about micro-level processes are based on aggregate statistics, possibly leading to ‘ecological fallacies.’” Religious belief and religious participation are instances of individuals acting within their personal circumstances. These persons should be analyzed separately. Ruiter and van Tubergen (2009) introduced studying the effect of regulation on individuals’ religious behavior. Their 20-item index of regulation, however, is still a countrywide score. These country regulation variables overestimate government’s capacity to regulate religious groups and religious belief and behavior and to regulate it uniformly. Even in repressive environments (ex: state-backed monopolies or vehemently anti-religious regimes) grey and black religious markets form (Minarik 2018; Yang 2006). These policies are also not targeting all groups equally. Furthermore, citizens are not necessarily aware of all state regulation. Some regulations are remote from the public or target only some groups. These regulations thus would not drive consumption choices. National ratings are then inadequate metrics of restrictions on religious freedom. This issue can be circumvented by applying individual-level measure of religious freedom.

3 Individual Freedom in the Religious Market The utility of measuring freedom at the individual level can be demonstrated by applying the individual measurements of freedom for members of one’s own religion and members of other religions to the RMT literature. The fundamental prediction of RMT is that regulation decreases religiosity. This pattern is first tested using state-level ratings of religious freedom (H1). The relationships between the national scores for regulation of religion and religious belief, the importance of religion, and frequency of prayer and service attendance are considered in this chapter. This variety of variables helps demonstrate whether regulation reduces participation similarly across several dimensions of religiosity. To address the concern that national-level measures are second-best proxies of individuals’ levels of religious freedom, the study also examines the effect of individually-identified levels of freedom on individuals’ belief and behavior. RMT suggests that freedom encourages individual involvement and belief, because people have greater capacity to produce and consume a preferred religion. Religious belief and behavior should increase as religious freedom increases (H2).

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Given the individual focus here, an additional concern can be addressed. In attributing a single national score, scholars have tacitly assumed that all citizens in that state are equally impacted by whatever policies fed into the scale. This is not a realistic assumption. Regulations supporting or suppressing religious groups often apply unevenly between groups. In market language, consumers should be influenced by the taxes and subsidies applied to the variety of products they could consume. RMT proposes that any regulation suppresses consumption, meaning individuals are less religious if members of other religions are less free (H3a). Citizens’ could, instead, just ignore other consumers’ experiences on the religious market. Alternatively, witnessing an alternative product being taxed may lead consumers to increase consumption of their chosen product because the implicit social support increases its apparent veracity or reduces the relative cost of their consumption (H3b). In this case, consulting the individual-level data as a measure of religious freedom would allow a more nuanced understanding of citizens’ behavior in the religious marketplace and improve on uniform national freedom ratings.

4 Materials and Methods Data This study utilizes two surveys conducted in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe by the Pew Research Center in 2008–2009 and 2011–2012. [1] The first set of surveys were taken in sub-Saharan Africa (Pew 2010). The second focused on states with large Muslim communities (Pew 2012, 2013). The intention here is to focus on Muslims’ freedom, beliefs, and behavior. As such, non-Muslim respondents are culled from the African surveys. The Pew Research Center removed Algeria and Iran from its publications, so these states are not included in this study. The sample is restricted to Sunni-majority countries. Muslims who identified as Shi’ite or with a sect were also dropped, so the sample includes only those who indicated that they are Sunni or ‘Just a Muslim.’ This helps ensure that those evaluating their own religion are of a shared religious group, while the ‘other’ religion(s) they consider would be minority religions. This system mirrors the focus on Christians’ religious behavior in Christianmajority countries in the originating literature. The resultant dataset has 21,587 respondents from twenty-two nationally-representative surveys. The countries are Albania, Bangladesh, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, Senegal, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

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Studying Muslim respondents supplements the previously predominantly Christian-focused literature. Previous studies have included “several major Asian countries“ and a “few predominantly Islamic countries,” but Christendom predominates (North and Gwin 2004, p. 108). Although the Muslim-majority state governments may not encourage religious pluralism and inter-religious movement, “Islam in the global age has been increasingly fragmented, and multiple agencies, including populist preachers, Sufi masters, lay pious intellectuals, and officially sanctioned clergy compete for the loyalties of Muslims “ (Tezcur et al. 2006, p. 220). This pattern mirrors the intra-Christian competition that spurred Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark’s work. The surveys included several measures of religious observance. Respondents were asked if they believe in ‘one God, Allah, and his prophet Muhammed.’ For behavior, respondents were asked ‘how often do you attend the mosque for salah and Jum’ah Prayer,’ how frequently ‘[o]utside of attending religious services, do you pray,’ and whether they ‘fast, that is avoid eating during the daytime, during the holy month of Ramadan.’ They were also asked ‘[h]ow important is religion in your life.’ Their responses are measured at the individual-level, not aggregated to national-level percentages. Examining multiple dimensions of religiosity is consistent with the RMT literature (McCleary and Barro 2006; Fox and Tabory 2008). Other factors that could influence religious behavior are taken into account. Modernization theory predicts that religiosity declines with education, economic development, and democratization (Lerner 1958; Taylor 2007). Security secularization theory proposes that as individuals feel less existential insecurity, they feel less need to turn to religion for protection (Norris and Inglehart’s [2004] 2011). Economic development proxies for such security. In both theories, then, strong economic circumstances would be tied to reduced religiosity. Norris and Inglehart’s ([2004] 2011) argue that, when available, individual-level measurements related to existential security should be employed, rather than national ratings. This is possible in this dataset, and their advice is taken. Standardized variables for individual assessments of ‘the current economic situation in our country’ and of their ‘personal economic situation’ assessments are used here. Higher scores indicate worse perceived conditions, thus greater insecurity. Information on respondents’ education was not included in the released dataset and thus could not be included. Gender and age are incorporated due to cohort and lifecycle effects and the influence of gender norms and distinctions in Islamic law. Gender is a binary variable for male. Age is a factor variable of five-year increments with 40–44 years as the reference category. A previous communist regime indicator variable is

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used due to the anti-religious policies of communist governments (Froese 2004). A rural residence indicator is also included. A binary variable distinguishes respondents who identified themselves as ‘Just a Muslim’ rather than Sunni. The sample is demographically diverse (see Table 1). Belief in Allah is nearly universal. While Islamic orthodoxy includes belief in Allah, atheists may continue to identify as Muslims from habit or heritage. Rates of fasting during Ramadan and believing that religion is very important in life are high. More than of half the sample reports attending the mosque at least once a week and more than twothirds pray at least daily. The population is split evenly between men and women and between urban and rural residents. Nearly a sixth live in previously-communist countries. Consistent with the literature, national measures of regulation are included. Multiple metrics are invoked to account for misspecification in any one measure or conflicting results from different systems. The state scores are significantly but imperfectly correlated with each other (Table 2). By each national metric, as well as individual assessments of religious freedom, the countries show a broad distribution of levels of regulation (Fig. 1). One metric is the religious freedom scale ‘v2clrelig’ from the Varieties of Democracy Database for 2009 and 2012 respectively. This scale uses country

Table 1   Summary Statistics Variable

Mean

Standard Deviation

Minimum

Maximum

Attend Mosque at Least Weekly

0.52

0.50

0

1

Pray Daily

0.66

0.47

0

1

Fast for Ramadan

0.88

0.33

0

1

Belief in God

0.98

0.15

0

1

Religion in Very Important

0.79

0.41

0

1

National Economy

2.54

0.96

1

4

Personal Economy

2.34

0.86

1

4

Male

0.52

0.50

0

1

Age

4.15

2.40

1

9

Rural

0.49

0.50

0

1

Formerly Communist

0.16

0.36

0

1

Muslims’ Religious Freedom

3.70

0.58

1

4

Minorities’ Religious Freedom

3.58

0.67

1

4

148

H. M. Ridge

Table 2   Correlation of Religious Freedom Measures Varieties of Democracy Varieties of Democracy 1.00 Grim/Finke GRI

Grim/ Grim/ Muslims’ Finke GRI Finke GFI Freedom −0.52 1.00

−0.31

Grim/Finke GFI Muslims’ Freedom Minorities’ Freedom

0.59 1.00

0.06 −0.13 −0.02 1.00

Minorities’ Freedom 0.08 −0.13 −0.02

0.52 1.00

Note. All correlations significant p