|
1. Introduction: Monotheism and
Exclusivity
First, a story picked up somewhere or other
about a professor and student. The student is
thanking the professor for his time at Oxford. When
asked what he has learned, the young man answers,
"Well, sir, I think I've learned to look at all
sides of a question." The don replies: "I hope
you've also learned how to choose one." Amidst
exploration and investigation of options, the
choice of a single path may be the counsel of the
elders, tugging the young back from the brink of
religious decadence. Is it just
fin-de-siècle consumerism that sees
more individuals following two or more different
religious options? That used to be called
syncretism, usually a pejorative term in popular
religious discourse, and usually referring to a
reconciliation or merger of two different religions
into one. We need new terminology and more
sophisticated analyses for consideration of the
current and differing methods by which
nonsyncretistic combinations of religions with one
another are taking place.
My brief "Conclusion" to Locations of the
Sacred offered a summary of the ten essays
comprising the chapters of that book. Struck by the
fact that there emerged no single paradigmatic way
of being religious in contemporary Canada, I
suggested that "the locations of the sacred are
found to be everywhere and nowhere, multiple rather
than single, fluid rather than fixed, ephemeral
rather than permanent, or at the margins rather
than the centre" (James 1998, 241). Early in Carol
Shields' play Thirteen Hands a Winnipeg
housewife is asked by a pollster, "Do you think of
yourself as marginal?" Her response is "Well, that
depends on where you think the centre is."
Western monotheistic traditions assert their
exclusive claims to centrality for the religious
allegiance of individuals-one is not supposed to be
a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim and at the same
time be something else. Theism has stern warnings
against idolatry, against putting other gods before
or alongside the one supreme God. In the Hebrew
scriptures no other gods are to be worshipped than
the God of Israel. The Book of Judges makes it
clear that Yahwehism is not to be supplemented with
indigenous paganism during the settlement of
Canaan. Yahweh is not only good at delivering
slaves from Egypt and establishing a covenant with
them in the Sinai desert, but Yahweh is supreme
over nature and can look after Israel's
agricultural needs.
In Tillichian language people are cautioned not
to raise penultimate concerns to the level of
ultimacy. One is supposed to make an unconditional
commitment to a single and primary overarching
source of meaning. Redwald of Kent was a
seventh-century East Anglian king who received
Christian baptism. When he returned home, so Bede
says, Redwald succumbed to the advice of his wife
and some other "perverse advisors" and tried to
have it both ways. He "tried to serve both Christ
and the ancient gods, and he had in the same temple
an altar for the holy Sacrifice side by side with
an altar on which victims were offered to devils"
(Bede 1968, 130). A classic instance of the
apostate, and perhaps of uxoriousness too, Bede
comments that Redwald's last state was worst than
his first. Because of the demands of religious
exclusivity we have not sufficiently noticed or
analyzed some of the ways that monotheism is
actually operating in practice today. Following two
or more religious options at once may be less
marginal and more central than we sometimes
recognize.
Locations of the Sacred considered
several illustrations of how the restrictive
obligations of monotheism seemed to be compromised
or violated in twentieth-century Canada. The first
example was an Inuit group on Hudson Bay (see ch.
5). The Belchers Islands Inuit, during a crisis
cult in the early 1940s, drew upon the traditional
Inuit religious practices of shamanism in
combination with Christian theism, in what appears
to be a straightforward example of syncretism.
Newspapers of the day portrayed the Inuit
apocalyptic predictions, and especially the naming
of two members of the community as "God" and
Jesus," as an example of "distorted theology" and
the result of incomplete missionization. One sees
how at a critical juncture in their history the
Inuit reinterpreted their animistic view of a world
populated by many spirits in terms of
Christianity's ultimate metaphysical dualism of
good versus evil (Ibid., 123).
This particular aggregation of Christianity with
native traditions became a potent mix that resulted
in the tragic deaths by murder or suicide of nine
of the Inuit people. As John Webster Grant says of
such crisis movements, they are not so much
attempts to reject Christianity "as attempts to
appropriate it on terms consonant with native modes
of thought and relevant to perceived needs" (Grant
1984, 263). The history of the interaction of
native peoples in Canada with European immigrants
exhibits different ways of conjoining ancestral
religious practices with Christianity, a topic that
will get more attention later on. Though this
particular Inuit crisis cult may have been
syncretistic in part, probably their more usual
practice was to go back and forth in alternating
fashion between Christian and shamanism,
selectively and situationally.
The second instance considered in Locations
of the Sacred arose from an examination of the
novel Obasan, Joy Kogawa's partly
autobiographical rendering in fiction of the
evacuation, internment, and dispersal of Japanese
Canadians during War World II and after (see ch.
10). Several cases could be chosen to show how
Christian and Buddhist practices sometimes
oscillate or occur together throughout the novel.
At one point during the internment in the former
mining town of Slocan in the British Columbia
interior, Naomi, the young narrator, recounts the
funeral practices after the death of her
grandmother. First, they hold a wake in the Odd
Fellows Hall, with an Anglican funeral service
following on the next day. But after the Christian
funeral, because the grandmother's husband is
Buddhist, a truck transports her coffin up the
mountain for cremation that night. Subsequently her
husband receives her ashes and bones for burial.
Watching the cremation, the seven-year-old Naomi
thinks of the furnace in their house back in
Vancouver, remembering her aunt had told that "it's
in the heat of fire where the angel is found"
(Kogawa 1983, 131), a reference to the fiery
furnace of the Book of Daniel from the Hebrew
scriptures. But Naomi's aunt had also said that
"the best samurai swords are tempered over and over
again in the hottest flames" (Ibid.), an
explanation that draws upon a Japanese example. The
fire of the cremation is thus interpreted by Naomi
from two cultural vantage points.
Though in Obasan Naomi's grandmother is
accorded death rituals from two different
religions, Christian and Buddhist, the Christian
funeral and Buddhist cremation are kept separate.
They are brought together and reconciled only in
the narrative mind of Naomi and in the convergence
of the explanations. Japanese converts to
Christianity sometimes yearn for Buddhism's death
practices, especially the connection with their
ancestors established there. An elderly Japanese
professor of religions who had become a Christian
and been ordained a minister after the War told me
before his death how he had arranged for a Buddhist
burial. He saw the neglect of the ancestors as
Christianity's largest failing from a Japanese
perspective. Buddhist cremation removes death's
impurities and transforms the corpse into purified
ancestral spirit. At the end of Obasan
Naomi--so obviously a devout Christian in many
ways--prays to her dead mother as a source of
benediction and protection (see Earhart 1984,
60-61; cf. Reader 1991, ch. 4; James 1998,
234-35).
2. Moving Back and Forth
Examining some other examples from Japan and
from Canadian native peoples may help us see what's
going on here. Anyone who has visited religious
sites in Japan straightaway observes that
frequently one finds a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist
temple adjacent to each other. Sometimes the shrine
and temple are found within the same precincts so
that devotees can move quite readily from Shinto
observances to Buddhist practices without any
apparent sense of conflict or tension. At the
Shinto shrine people purify themselves at the basin
near the entrance, then ring a bell to wake the
kami and clap their hands before offering
prayers. Perhaps they stop to purchase a fortune.
The same people then move on to the nearby Buddhist
temple where they bow before images of deities,
chant their sutras, and throw coins in an offering
box. Though conducted under the auspices of
different religions, the observances fit together
and complement one another.
Religious responsibilities in Japan, it is well
known, are shared between these two major religions
so that one is said to be "born Shinto, and die
Buddhist." Shinto looks after the rituals of
fertility and birth while Buddhism attends to the
practices relating to death. Today one might add
that many Japanese also "marry Christian" and turn
to New Religions in a time of crisis or for
spiritual healing. Though less visible and lacking
incorporation into formal religious structures, the
underlying influences of Taoism and Confucianism
provide a longstanding part of the Japanese sense
of order and of the family. As Ian Reader states
it, the religious world of the Japanese is not
governed by cognitive belief, but by situational
requirements (1991, 21-22). As one of Reader's
students told him, "her parents sent her to a
Christian school because of its good academic
reputation, bought her Buddhist amulets and prayed
at Shinto shrines before examinations, and
celebrated New Year, o-bon, and Christmas"
(Ibid., 51-52).
Byron Earhart suggests that seven major areas of
Japanese religions--Shinto, Buddhism, Taoism,
Confucianism, Christianity, folk religion, and New
Religions-constitute "many traditions within one
sacred way." The participation by Japanese people
in most of these traditions, "simultaneously or
alternately," is "a way of life that is constructed
and supported by most of the individual
components," Earhart states (1984, 22). Ian Reader
confirms this view and claims that they "work
together rather than conflict with each other"
(1991, 44). In a similar vein Winston Davis
usefully differentiates the "genuine" pluralism of
western cultures, where choosing one alternative
makes commitment to the others impossible, from
what he terms Japanese syncretism in which "these
alternatives coalesce, or dovetail, and, over the
course of time, tend to become layered,
obligatory modes of behavior and/or belief"
(1992, 31). The term "syncretism," however, implies
too unified (and perhaps too structural) a merger
of opposing practices into one; it is preferable to
find some other way of describing the notion of
layering and dovetailing, thereby preserving the
picture of separate things fitting together without
loss of their distinctiveness. Davis makes a
worthwhile clarification though when he states
"whereas in the west it was heresy (or pluralism,
as it is called today) which seemed to threaten the
unity of Christendom, in Japan, it was monopraxis
(emphasis on a single religious practice) that
posed the greatest menace to the traditional
integration of society" (Ibid.). In Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam the integrity of society
required "belief in one God, one faith, and one
religious practice" (Ibid.) while Japanese
integration depended on a multiplicity of gods and
faiths.
In 1995 a priest in the Shinto sect of Konkokyo,
speaking to a group of students from North America
visiting in Osaka, summarized his own background
this way: "My personal history has some uniqueness
because I studied Christian theology in Kyoto; I
studied Buddhism in the United States; and then I
became a Shinto minister. It is a typical
post-modern way of life for the religious person."
His explanation is instructive and suggestive: what
might appear to be "unique" from the standpoint of
his western guests he interpreted as "typical" of
the fragmentation of post-modernity with its loss
of hegemony. Perhaps the Japanese example of
offering many traditions for practitioners to draw
on may provide a pattern to explain certain
features of contemporary North American
religion.
The Cree people of northern Quebec exhibit a way
of being religious similar to the Japanese people,
though perhaps with greater separation among the
different traditions. In the National Film Board
production, Cree Hunters of Mistassini, a
film crew follows a group of Cree during a winter
spent in their hunting camp in the early 1970s. In
the course of the film several families are shown
engaged in traditional religious rites related to
hunting: they tie the bones of animals in a tree;
they place some flesh from a pregnant cow moose
into the mouths of the foetal calves to ensure
continuation of life; after the kill of large game
there is drumming at the feast and the men rub bear
grease into their hair. Throughout the film there
is no depiction whatsoever of any kind of Christian
observance, but we know from other sources that
when the Cree returned to the village of Mistassini
during the summer months, they practised
Christianity. It as if the new religion is for
village life while ancestral practices related to
hunting are for life on the land. As with the
Japanese, situational needs determine which
religion is being followed at a given time.
Adrian Tanner, writing about his life with the
Cree of Mistassini in the early 1970s, says that
everyone was Anglican. When they were in the
settlement most people attended Sunday services,
baptisms, and weddings. During the summer in
Mistassini, Tanner states, traditional Cree
practices were limited to "two or three major
feasts, gossip about suspected sorcery, and a rare
'shaking tent' performance" (1979, 25). But in the
winter "balance between European-based and
Indian-based religious sources is reversed with the
latter becoming most common" (26). During the
winter Christianity was limited to the display or
reading of religious books stored in a decorated
bag or to observances of taboos on Sundays and
Easter. Otherwise, traditional Cree religious
practices, especially rites of hunting divination,
were observed on a daily basis. Tanner claims that
each religious tradition is connected with a
specific mode of production: "traditional Cree
religious sources predominate in the context of the
hunting group, while Christian sources are most
apparent among the Indians in the context of the
cash economy and at the level of the village of
Mistassini Post" (109). He explains that "the two
traditions are not in conflict, since each has its
own social context, the settlement sector for
Christianity, and the bush sector for Cree
shamanistic religion" (211). Because of the lack of
conflict between the two religions, syncretic
developments did not take place (Ibid.). As the
occasion or the season required the Cree people
went back and forth between two religious
traditions, but without bringing them together to
forge some kind of synthesis. As with the case of
Japanese religions, the practices are alternated
rather than synthesized, according to situational
demands.
3. Religious Dimorphism
Cornelius Jaenen and John Webster Grant have
both pointed out the discrepant understanding
between what missionaries thought they were
offering to natives and what the native peoples
thought they were doing when they accepted
Christianity. As Grant proposes in Moon of
Wintertime, Indians found in Christianity an
opportunity to supplement, not replace, their
traditional ways (1984, 249). In a paper given at a
conference at the University of Toronto in 1984,
the year that John Webster Grant's magisterial book
appeared, University of Ottawa historian Cornelius
Jaenen proposed a model to explain how a First
Nations person could adhere both to the new
religion and to a traditional belief system. He
called this compartmentalized dualism "religious
dimorphism" (1985, 185).
Jaenen set forth a typology of four negative and
four positive responses on the part of Amerindians
to European missions in New France. They ranged
from aggressive rejection of Christianity at one
extreme to complete acceptance at the other (Ibid.)
The response of the greatest number of so-called
converts, Jaenen argued, was "religious
dimorphism," that is, "simultaneous assent to both
the old ways and the 'new religion,' each
compartmentalized and called upon as circumstances
and needs dictated" (Ibid., 192). This
"internalized dualism" enabled natives to draw upon
both Christianity and their own inherited
traditions selectively and situationally, and to
cope within two different cultures. The key to the
success of this dualistic operation is to maintain
its compartmentalization, especially where the
beliefs are mutually contradictory. In fact, the
French missionaries recognized that the way to get
rid of this dualism was to impose a Catholic
society. The dualism of dimorphism differs from
syncretism, another of Jaenen's eight typological
responses to missions, in that the syncretic
response fuses elements of both religions to form a
new system different from either of its
forerunners.
In general, dimorphism refers to the occurrence
of two distinct forms within one type. The literal
meaning of dimorphism is "having two forms." The
Oxford English Dictionary gives various
examples of dimorphism, most from the second half
of the nineteenth century, in geology, zoology, and
philology. So, "aragonite and calcite are
dimorphs;" "the worker bee is a dimorphic female;"
and, a foreign word may come into English in two
different ways; for example, the Latin ratio
as ration and reason. The term seems most used in
zoology where dimorphism can be seasonal, sexual,
or functional (suggesting all kinds of rich
metaphoric possibilities for religious studies
scholars to borrow, mine, exploit, or play with).
Incidentally, Professor Jaenen indicates that
except in papers and addresses he himself has not
further extended or developed the term since he
first used it in 1984. He remarks, though, "I
sometimes chide my colleagues of Presbyterian
background that this model most closely fits the
typical Calvinist business man-a Christian on
Sundays and a pagan during business hours!" He
adds, "of course I only make such comments when
speaking to friends who know where I am coming
from..." (Personal communication, 19 December
1997).
In botany, dimorphism may refer to two different
forms of leaves or flowers developing on one plant,
or within the same species on distinct plants. The
Random House Dictionary gives an
illustration of a single fanwort plant, rooted in
the bottom of a pond and growing above the surface
of the water. This solitary plant displays
different leaves, depending on whether they are
submerged beneath the water or floating above it.
This example may provide an illuminating parallel
for exploration into how a single human being can
follow two different religions, each one related to
a specific context or environment. Applied to
communities rather than to individuals, these
considerations might lead to the kind of ecology of
religions that Ake Hulktkrantz has suggested,
stressing the formative interplay between religion
and the natural environment.
To repeat: the exclusivity of western religions
means they do not mix well with other religions,
either by amalgamation or by alternation. In
general any kind of fusion or synthesis that
involves monotheism combining with something else
is frowned on-or simply not acknowledged. A clear
example of such a view is found in John
Stackhouse's article in The Globe and Mail
entitled "Native Religion? It's Christianity" (A15,
6 September 1993). (Though the provocative title
was probably not supplied by Stackhouse, it seems
to represent his intentions.) Stackhouse argued, on
the basis of the 1991 census figures, that
"Canadian aboriginals ... overwhelmingly saw
themselves as Christians." Further, he stated that
journalists, academics and others "must stop
exaggerating the influence of native spirituality
among today's aboriginal people." Finally, in most
cases "the actual religion of Canada's
natives is not 'native religion,' but Christian
faith". Responding by letter a few days later Wayne
Holst pointed out that the categorizations of the
census did not capture the reality of how native
people affirm both their own traditional spiritual
heritage and the Christian faith. Holst explained:
"I have learned that native people do not tend to
draw lines of demarcation between spiritualities."
But while Holst suggests that authentic
spiritualities for natives all emanate from a
single source, Stackhouse seems to prefer to
distinguish the "primary religion" of Christianity
from native religions, presumed at best to be
secondary.
Theresa Smith observes that the majority of the
Ojibwe on Manitoulin Island in the late 1980s
practised both Christianity and traditional
Anishnaabe ways. Because they understood Kitche
Manitou and the Christian God to be one and the
same, she says, and thereby seeming to be in
agreement with Holst, they experienced no conflict
between these two traditions. But Smith implies the
presence of dimorphism when she claims that while
Catholicism might be practised at a conscious level
ancestral beliefs were operating constantly at a
subconscious level: "The traditional Anishnaabe
ways are held at a somewhat deeper level than the
Christian beliefs" (36). Here, some kind of
separation between the two ways of being religious
is suggested.
To return once more to the examples I considered
in my book. The Belchers Inuit and the Japanese
Canadians of Kogawa's novel confronted an
insurmountable triple impossibility: they could not
assimilate themselves completely to the majority
culture's Christianity; they could not simply
maintain their ancestral traditions of shamanism or
Buddhism; and, they could not, nor were they
encouraged to, merge their traditional ways with
the European religious ethos. But the way of
religious dimorphism has to be distinguished both
from a synthetic blending of two religious
traditions and from a progressive passage through a
number of religious options. In general, it is the
compartmentalization of the two ways of being
religious that keeps each separate from the other;
it is having two or more traditions operate at
different levels; or, it is drawing upon one
religion or another selectively and situationally,
depending on the needs or the circumstances.
Perhaps religious dimorphism is most clearly
illustrated-the clarity being enhanced by
geographic distance--by a student of mine who says
she is Roman Catholic when she is in Canada and
Hindu when she is in India.
4. Relating Religion to Culture
To this point the examples being considered
imply that religious dimorphism with its strategy
of compartmentalization may be useful at an early
stage of religious acculturation, perhaps becoming
counter-acculturation or resistance at times of
crisis, or syncretism that attempts to bridge the
old ways and the new. In actual practice, however,
I want to suggest that religious dimorphism (or
even polymorphism) may be the characteristic method
by which most Canadians encounter and live out
their experience of the sacred as it manifests
itself in a myriad of forms and places. Perhaps in
the context of pluralism, or amidst a decline in
religious hegemonic culture, dimorphism becomes
more apparent. As Cornelius Jaenen comments,
"Probably all individuals hold beliefs which are
mutually contradictory but these produce no
behavioural crises so long as they remain
compartmentalized" (Ibid., 193). Northrop Frye used
to tell a story from Stephen Leacock about the
Presbyterian minister who also taught ethics in a
college. The simple strategy used to manage these
different roles was, as teacher, giving the
students three parts Hegel and two parts St. Paul,
whereas on Sundays, as minister and for his
parishioners, he reversed the dose and gave them
three parts St. Paul and two parts Hegel (Frye
1971, 227). Frye says this story reflects a time
when the major cultural force in Canada was
religious; it was time when no great degree of
separation was required to manage roles that today
we would think of as being rather different. When
Frye related this joke at Queen's University in the
early 1980s, he commented that it was typically
Canadian, explaining that its account of the
relation of religion to culture would only be
intelligible within Canada.
Already we have slipped over into a different
aspect of the subject under review here. We have
moved from examination of a dimorphism of two
different religions to an investigation of religion
in relation to culture. In part, Jaenen's comment
about everyone holding mutually contradictory
beliefs opens this door. For the religion one holds
may come into conflict not just with other
religions but with other attitudes, worldviews, and
ideologies from various parts of culture. How are
these conflicts to be reconciled? Perhaps
monotheists do not see such a conflict as critical
or fatal as long as the conflict lies between faith
and culture and not between two ways of being
religious.
More than twenty years ago Tom Faulkner was
first considering the possibility of hockey having
religious meaning for Canadians. Faulkner says that
people have to find ways of moving among the
different worlds represented, perhaps, by business,
sports, church, and the academy, "donning and
abandoning new roles as required." He maintains
that "the person does not have available to her one
sacred cosmos which convincingly superordinates all
reality." Instead, he argues, "she must cobble
together her own religion, constructing it from
material borrowed from her encounter as a sort of
consumer with the different sacred cosmoses made
available to her by the different competing
ecclesiae of her society" (Sinclair-Faulkner
1977, 388).
From this quotation two terms warrant some more
attention, deserving to be teased out a bit
further. First, the verb "to cobble." This
"cobbling together" of one's own religion does not
mean reconciling and harmonizing all of the
disparate elements in some kind of grand
constructive and synthesizing enterprise. Cobbling
is a seat-of-your-pants, makeshift, provisional
kind of endeavour. It's a way of making do and
getting by with what you happen to have at hand.
You use binder twine and fence wire or, today, duct
tape; you straighten out a few nails taken from a
six-quart basket. "To cobble" means "to mend or
repair roughly or clumsily, to patch up" (OED).
(The term is not, incidentally, derived from the
Old French coubler, to join or couple.)
Reconciling the incongruities and conflicts among
all the disparate pieces seldom actually takes
place, or if it does, then it may be a largely
intellectual endeavour. For instance, a theologian
might struggle to work out the contradictions
between her feminism and her Christianity, or
another very thoughtful Christian might try to
think through an existential encounter with the
sacred in the natural world in terms of what the
biblical record says about divine revelation in
history. These examples show the efforts necessary
to achieve consistency when religion is understood
as a cognitive endeavour. Usually, though, as Tom
Faulkner says, people tend more often to don and
abandon various roles as required and thereby to
keep them separate and out of conflict with one
another. This enterprise has more to do with
behaviour than with belief.
The second thing from the description of how the
sacred cosmos of hockey relates to other competing
options is the notion of the consumer. The consumer
frequently becomes the metaphoric exemplar for the
activity of taking a little of this and a little
bit of that to cobble together a religion. When I
ask my students to propose various secular
correlates of religion, that is, to suggest
ordinary-life activities in which people today
might encounter the sacred, they frequently mention
shopping as a possibility. They point out how
shopping centres commonly have become the focus for
communities, their architecture taking on the
grandeur and being accorded the effort once
bestowed on churches. They think too of how
activities of consumption relate to power,
transcendence, iconography, and arete, and how
advertising, business, and marketing determine so
much of how governments are run and decisions made
within communities. Consumerism is frequently
mentioned in discussions of the secularization
process; accordingly, it is usually talked about in
derogatory terms as something inimical to
religion.
Sociologist Reginald Bibby developed his
fragmentation theory of religion into a full-blown
metaphor of the consumer and the marketplace in his
often wrongheaded though popular book of the late
1980s, Fragmented Gods. There Bibby contends
that "the gods of old have been neither abandoned
nor replaced" by Canadians. "Rather, they have been
broken into pieces and offered to religious
consumers in piecemeal form" (1987, 85). Bibby's
religious consumers draw on religion selectively,
pushing their supermarket carts down an aisle
labelled "Religion," choosing various items to
place in their baskets and take home with them.
Perhaps it's a baptism, maybe later a confirmation
or bar mitzvah, then a wedding or a funeral.
Religious ceremonies are selected particularly at
crucial junctures in people's life-passages, such
as birth, maturation, marriage, and death.
Reginald Bibby's own negative theology of
culture tended to put a rather rigid
division-indeed, an opposition--between religion
and culture-whereas my own, mostly following
Tillich, sees the one more as an aspect of the
other. Bibby, for example, worries (to quote from
the second page of his book) that "religion has
become little more than a cultural product" (2).
Fragmentation occurs, he states, when religion is
seen primarily as a human phenomenon. Religion
becomes "worth listening to," Bibby states on the
second-last page of his book, "when religion claims
to be more than culture" (270).
To cobble together various fragments, taking
first a bit of this and then a bit of that, may be
lamentable from the standpoint of an older
religious hegemony with its intuition of a single
superordinating sacred cosmos and a unified
culture. The consumer's tendency to pick and choose
what is placed in the shopping basket signals, in
this understanding, the decline or fragmentation of
organized religion in contemporary culture. But
taking religious pluralism in its contemporary
context seriously might mean, instead of putting
religion in opposition to culture, recognition of
viable and manifold locations of sacrality. Demands
and expectations for exclusive devotion, fidelity,
and consistency (even on the part of western
scholars of religion) may inhibit our investigation
of new modalities of religiousness.
Now all of this may be sounding a little bit
more "old hat" and less new hat than at the outset.
After all, H. Richard Niebuhr, in Christ and
Culture, offered something comparable to
dimorphism as one of the ways in which Christians
had typically worked out the relation between God
and the world. There Niebuhr termed it the "Christ
and Culture in paradox" position. He also called it
the "Dualist" position, and identified some of its
proponents as Paul, Marcion, Augustine, Luther, and
Kierkegaard. But the great difference between
religious dimorphism and Niebuhr's dualism is that
he is talking about how Christians of a certain
kind relate their Christian lives to their lives in
culture. The issue with Niebuhr is more the kind of
value attributed to culture by Christians than
operating within a context of religious pluralism
in which the religious consumer ceases to give a
total and unconditional allegiance to a single
source of meaning.
Canadians of European descent tend to take it
for granted that their religion, usually
Christianity, exists (whether actually or
potentially) in some pure form, untrammelled with
any kind of contamination from "culture." Perhaps
they assume this most readily if they are born and
grow up within Canada. Yet even they struggle (or
perhaps they do not struggle, being unconscious of
the issues) to reconcile the old with some form of
the new. How are feminism, political beliefs, or
New Age spirituality, to cite a few examples, to be
reconciled with monotheistic traditions? Within
western religions syncretism tends to be a bad
word; and, religious pluralism sometimes tends in
practice to mean, not the coexistence of different
religions, but subsuming the other under western
monotheism and calling it "inclusiveness." For
instance, to incorporate the native practice of
burning sweetgrass into a Christian communion
service is more take-over or cultural appropriation
(if practised by non-natives) than it is
interreligious dialogue and reciprocity.
5. Syncretism and Eclecticism
Religious dimorphism (and that may not, after
all, be the best phrase) needs to be differentiated
from syncretism; perhaps it also needs to be
distinguished from another term with negative
connotations, eclecticism. Much of Wade Clark
Roof's description of the religious journey of the
baby-boomers in A Generation of Seekers
carries this mood of disapproval of eclecticism as
something casual, less than serious, or
unprincipled. Drawing on Martin Marty's work of the
1960s Roof comments that whereas an older spiritual
style depended on "homogeneity" (that is, "assent
to the details of a grand theological or
philosophical system"), today the range of options
makes possible syncretism and eclecticism, or less
elegantly, "mixings and matchings" or "a
pastiche-style of spirituality" (1993, 245).
Such examples as "macrobiotic kosher-observant
Jews" or "Creation-Spirituality Catholics" border
on the uncomplimentary or derisive. But Roof also
speaks more positively of the "mixing of codes" as
experiential concerns supplant inherited doctrinal
norms. When Roof refers to the new contemporary
forms of multiple associations as a "multilayered
spirituality" (201), a more affirmative and
constructive expression comes into view.
Scholars of contemporary religions need to find
some way of getting at what's going on without
resorting to older notions of an illegitimate
syncretistic fusion of belief systems or to
contemporary contemptuous references to a casual
New-Age eclecticism. Even the discussion by Robert
Bellah et al in Habits of the Heart
of "Sheilaism" has the nuance of something
slighting about it. Sheila Larson was a nurse whose
self-defined faith was named after herself. Her
Sheilaism meant being kind and gentle with
yourself, taking care of others, believing in God,
but without going to church, and seeing Jesus in
oneself. Yet for the authors of Habits of the
Heart this individualistic "Sheilaism"
continued the deist tradition in American religion,
and represented the transformation of "external
authority into internal meaning" (Bellah et al
1985, 235). It might also, this "therapeutic
privatization, the shift from casuistry to
counselling" (224), be becoming the norm in
contemporary religious life. Rather than regarding
Sheilaism as an inferior or lazy form of
religiousness, perhaps the amount of sheer effort
behind such a mélange needs to be
acknowledged. As Lorne Dawson has remarked, people
who are trying to put together a multi-layered
spirituality may be working a lot harder at finding
an authentic way of being religious than did their
parents for whom being religious offered no
conflicting choices or options (Personal
communication, 14 May 1998).
Finally, since so much of the authority of how
we view contemporary religion in Canada derives
from statistically-based surveys, two approaches to
surveying ways of being religious in Canada might
be usefully contrasted. A recent Angus Reid poll
begins with the premiss that analyzing
denominational identity has little value as
organized religion loses its hold over people.
Instead, the Angus Reid pollsters turned to a
categorization based on levels of doctrinal
orthodoxy and participation in personal religious
devotions. One result of this survey is a table
entitled "Six Schools of Thought on Faith," a
cluster-based analysis of beliefs that puts forth a
spectrum including atheists, agnostics, theists,
and so on. While the aim is, in part, to take
private faith seriously, one still wonders about
the value of reducing religion in Canada to some
form of cognition in which people are measured
according to the degree to which they subscribe to
orthodox beliefs (Andrew Grenville, "God and North
American Society: Contrasting Attitudes and
Affiliations," a paper presented at Queen's
University, 16 May 1998). The approach is
reminiscent of an earlier Angus Reid poll, the
subject of a cover article in Maclean's
magazine that proclaimed "God Is Alive" (12 April
1993). The Maclean's report argued, based on
the degree to which people held Christian
doctrines, Canada could be said to be "an
overwhelmingly Christian nation, not only in name,
but in belief" (32).
Another, contrasting, approach is represented in
a study done by Environics in 1993. Commissioned by
Vision-TV, this study was entitled "A Survey
Regarding the Spiritual Dimension in the Canadian
Public." Here the surveyors examined religion that
was based neither on denominational identification
nor on theological or credal formulations. In this
study 59% of Canadians agreed with the statement
"I'm not a religious person, but I am a spiritual
person"; 46% did not believe in traditional
religions, while 70% had constructed "their own
personal religion." Among young people 60% believed
that "all religions are equally valid" (See The
Globe and Mail, 7 December 1993).
6. Conclusion
As religion in Canada late in the twentieth
century becomes more highly personal and
individual, we should expect it to continue to be
characterized more by an eclectic spirituality (or
whatever better-sounding terminology we can muster)
cobbled together from various sources rather than a
monolithic and unitary superordinating system of
beliefs. The means scholars use to get at how
people are being religious will have to go beyond
surveys examining denominational adherence, church
attendance, traditional devotional exercises, or
profession of particular beliefs. Perhaps even more
crucial scholars of religions must guard against
assuming as normative for their work the possibly
blinding or confining exclusivity of monotheistic
traditions. To find the sacred moved away from its
customary centre and to the nooks and crannies of
contemporary life, especially at the horizons of
the ordinary, taken-for-granted world of every day,
is what we should expect
to be the future of
religion in Canada into the next millennium. We
have to be alert to the ways that people are
combining two or modes of religiosity without
denigrating such an enterprise or assuming it to be
an inferior or casual kind of religiousness.
References
Bede. 1968. A History of the English Church
and People. Rev. ed. Trans Leo Sherley-Price,
rev. ed. Baltimore: Penguin.
Bellah, Robert N. et al. 1985. Habits of the
Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American
Life. Berkeley: U of California Press.
Bibby, Reginald W. 1987. Fragmented Gods: The
Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada.
Toronto: Irwin.
Davis, Winston. 1992. Japanese Religion and
Society: Paradigms of Structure and Change.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Earhart, H. Byron. 1984. Religions of Japan:
Many Traditions Within One Sacred Way. Harper:
San Francisco.
Frye, Northrop. 1971. "Conclusion to A
Literary History of Canada," in The Bush
Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination.
Toronto: Anansi.
Grant, John Webster. 1984. Moon of
Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada
in Encounter since 1534. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Jaenen, Cornelius J. 1985. "Amerindian Responses
to French Missionary Intrusion, 1611-1760: A
Categorization." In William Westfall, Louis
Rousseau, Fernand Harvey, and John Simpson, eds.
Religion/Culture: Comparative Canadian Studies/
Études canadiennes comparées.
Canadian Issues, vol. 7. Ottawa: Association for
Canadian Studies. 182-97.
James, William Closson. 1998. Locations of
the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and
Canadian Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.
Kogawa, Joy. 1983. Obasan. Markham, ON:
Penguin.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1951. Christ and
Culture. New York: Harper & Row.
Reader, Ian. 1991. Religion in Contemporary
Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1991.
Roof, Wade Clark. 1993. A Generation of
Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby
Boom Generation. New York:
HarperCollins.
Sinclair-Faulkner, Tom. 1977. "A Puckish
Reflection on Religion in Canada." In Peter Slater,
ed. Religion and Culture in Canada/ Religion et
Culture au Canada. Waterloo, ON: Canadian
Corporation for Studies in Religion. 383-405.
Smith, Theresa S. 1995. The Island of the
Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the
Traditional Ojibwe Life-World. Moscow:
University of Idaho Press.
Tanner, Adrian. 1979. Bringing Home Animals:
Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the
Mistassini Cree Hunters. St. John's: Institute
of Social and Economic Research, Memorial
University of Newfoundland.
|
