What is Religion?

[caption id="attachment_4704" align="aligncenter" width="604"] The medicine wheel, also known as the sacred hoop, is part of the system of belief and action of an indigenous culture. This image was taken from http://healing.about.com/cs/native/a/medicinewheel.htm[/caption]

The simple functional definition of religion that I use for this website is: a system of belief and action.

Actually, it is a little more complicated. Historically speaking, I think religion is: a system of belief and action of a particular group of people.

I've been thinking about definitions like that for a long time. Since 2008 I've managed to write about church history without writing about religion per se. But I'm crossing the line now. I'm doing so - not to bring anybody over to my very own "system of belief and action," but rather, because the discussion of my blogposts in a (closed) Facebook group is already starting to focus on this topic.

I've made an offer to Brent Michael Davids to write one or more guestposts. It seems that he and I are engaged in a friendly online disagreement. Anyway, Brent, I still hope that you'll take some time to write a blogpost for Stock-Mo-History.

It seems the two biggest things that Brent and I disagree on are over the questions of 1)"what is religion" and 2)"did Indians (ever) have religion?" Obviously the answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first. So I have to explain my definition of religion before I can fairly address the second question.

Admittedly, there is such a thing as "personal religion," one's own consciously chosen and unique system of belief and action. But I suspect that personal religion is about as recent a development as the personal pizza.

When Brent Michael Davids said that I "conflate" religion with culture he was right: I've tried, but haven't been able to separate religion from culture in my thinking about history.

Why do I think "personal religion" is a new development? For a number of reasons, including a relative lack of information technology until recent decades, social structures of power, and the fact that it is probably just a natural thing to "do religion" with other people. But probably my main point is that It is only because we modern Americans live in a society that values a certain kind of "individualism" that many of us are able to pull off the now-popular thing known as personal religion. We Americans value a false kind of "individualism." I say it is false because we don't usually realize that we are still as dependent on others as before, but we are just much farther removed from most of them than we ever have been before.

I know that there always have been people who were... uh... "smart enough to think for themselves." There always were people who weren't onboard with the official system of belief and action of their community. As Steve Comer pointed out in a recent Mohican News article, when indigenous people had a strong enough disagreement with the leadership of the village there was an easy solution: move to a different village. If one shaman wasn't doing it for you spiritually, you could hang with a different shaman. Then again, there probably weren't huge differences between different Mohican shamans. And again, that is my point: religion is a cultural entity.

Well, I have to admit that I have a broad definition of religion. I mean, if vision quests and special dreams are part of one's culture, that is religion to me. (Other people that probably just don't like the word "religion" might prefer to call that "spirituality.")

I suppose it is possible if somebody else has a more narrow definition of religion than I do that they might be able to successfully argue that Indians "didn't have religion" prior to white contact. But who would ever say that indigenous people didn't have a culturally-based system of belief and action? Of course they did. I think that was the norm for centuries for groups of people from all races.

 

 

Blogger's note: On Facebook, Steve Comer made the point that the Algonquians' shamans were called Powwows. I purposely used the term Shaman, because it is a more well-known word. If I was only writing for Indians (who already have knowledge of their people's pre-history, there would be no need to use the more easily understood term. July 1, 2014.