A Pre-Exam Flow of Consciousness

For my exam, I am expected to contemplate the most fearsome and loathsome subject any religion scholar has to face: The definition of religion. I think I could tell you, in general, what religion is, though I am better at deconstructing definitions than I am at constructing them. Definitions confine and stifle. As we cannot name G-d without being G-d, because to name something is to own and control it, so too can we not name (define) religion without that act having serious repercussions for our field and work.

Definitions of religion try to (a) give the essential nature of religion, (b) help categorize, describe and identify religion, and (c) make religions translatable for an audience. They often try to encompass all the traditions the author can think of in some way, and they also try to include some stand on why religion exists (i.e. religion is made for social control, or social cohesion, or for human comfort, etc.).

Sadly, definitions of religion are most often written by scholars who consider religion the humanities equivalent of cancer: study it, recognize its importance, but don’t catch it, and, for heaven’s sake, hope for a cure. As my friend A. has reminded me, though, they treat religion worse than cancer, because at least they recognize cancer is real.

Therefore, if any of us do try to define religion, we do it awkwardly and with heavily varied success rates. Most of the time, scholars give primacy to one side or the other of observable religion; Either religion is a set of rituals or organizations, or, which is more popular in post-Enlightenment western thought, religion is a belief system that creates actions and organizations. That is to say, scholars often base their definition of religion within the observable ethical codes expressed by religious traditions. They give priority to the internal, rather than the external.

Now this is far from saying that religionists discuss faith. Far from it. Faith for religionists is a bit like the theory that Martians built the pyramids: You can’t see evidence, so it doesn’t exist, and if you tried to argue based on it, you’d get laughed out of the academy.

To put it bluntly: Cat lovers love cats, but rarely do they like to handle their poop. This is how religionists seem to take faith. Faith is religion’s poop, and no one knows how to handle it except to pretend they don’t smell it.

So religionists stick to talking around religion: what religions do, what the say they believe, and how they function. Also, religionists love to talk about how religion will end, and stroke their apothecary’s beards and predict its demise now that the world is smarter.

And they love to ask their students to define it. Because, truth be told, no one really knows what religion is.

You may not know that. I think everyone thinks they know what religion is until you have to define it, right?

Is it belief in a deity? Then what of atheistic forms of Buddhism? Is it a set of theological beliefs? Then what of humanist Jews who practice the religious traditions of their ancestors but have not adopted their spiritual beliefs? Is it a set of rituals? Then where does belief come in? And what do we do with flag ceremonies? Is it designed by people, or revealed by a higher power?

Is it like this or that, and this or that only, or is it wider? What does it smell like, taste like, sound like? Can you pick it up?

Does it have a beginning and an end, or is eternal?

For religion to have a definition, or an end, for me, it has to have a form and a shape. It has to have an essential nature, and that is where I stumble. I understand the need to have, as Plato recommended, a vague idea of what a chair is so you know where to sit, but when you actually sit down to write an abstract and generalized definition of religion – that is where the proverbial poop hits the fan.

Religion is one of the most reified objects on the planet. If we are Catholic, than that becomes the abstract measuring stick by which we see religion. This limits one’s view a bit, and, no matter how liberal minded you are as a Catholic (or Jew, or Wiccan, etc) you will be tied to the assumptions you make about all religion based on what your own religion is like. Therein lies the pit-trap of defining religion. Once we give it a form, it is no longer accurate, and rarely do we fully understand the power and roots of our act of definition.

If you say something has four legs and a back, it may be a chair, alright, but you’ll never know what it really looks like, or how comfortable it is, or where it was purchased, will you? And don’t you, just a little bit, kill creativity in yourself if you were to design a whole new chair? Doesn’t that definition limit, just a bit?

And doesn’t it narrow your choices when looking for something to use as a chair?

“Religion,” like other large and (from my assumptions) universal concepts such as “medicine” or “terrorism” or “sexuality,” will always be with us. This is precisely because it has no distinct form, but, rather, it is something that bubbles beneath our surface. It is a part of humanity’s tool kit, and we can pull it out and use it whenever we have the need. You cannot just erase it from being. Only distinct forms of religion, such as the Church of England or Neanderthal mother worship, can fade away, but the actual impulse remains. Likewise, we can only describe the manifestation of religion, not necessarily the essence of religion, at least not in a paragraph, and certainly not completely detached from some context.

Religion is a non-thing. You can’t prepare a slide of it and look at it. It is intangible, and one thing I have learned from studying it for ten years is that the more you look at it, the harder it becomes to see.

If we took it in engineering terms, religion is an energy. Energy travels through conduits with concrete shape and specifications, and human kind has learned to use it. You can see the effects of it, you can almost see the thing itself, but you can’t destroy it, and you can’t pin it down. Energy (of which I have a wholly imperfect understanding, so be kind to my analogy), like religion, is unending and quicksilver. Once you have seen it, it has already long sense moved on.

Some people will use the water analogy, as in religion is like the flow of water from one point to another – it changes surface and speed, and cannot be harnessed fully. I can dig this, but religion, for me, is much more free than water. Water has a density to it – it is inherently earthbound. Religion, more accurately, is not water as a liquid, but as a vapor. Traditionalists want religion to come in ice form, frozen into a solid shape. Liberals want it to be water – partly because this is oh so deliciously hippy and gynocentric imagery, but mostly because they want to promote an idea of progression or evolution of religion. But religion is gaseous in its natural state

Remember, religion is so light that immigrants carry it over in a nap sack, so it has to be lighter than air. Also, it cannot spill, dent or shatter, can it? Otherwise, it would not have survived the unification of the brain hemispheres, or Luther, or Auschwitz, or television. The vapor, like faith, is ephemeral and without form, it can only be contained, not molded.

For example, we speak of "Judaism,” but that is false. There are millions of "Judaisms." There are over 13 million Jews in the world and each has his or her own Judaism, unique to the way that person constructs their identity and place. The best we can do is to group these people into kinds, such as Orthodox or Reform.

But, then, at each point in their life, the person's particular Judaism is also different, so we not only get linear variation, but also circular, temporal and circumstantial, like a spiritual fractal, as Murph the math whiz reminds me. My Judaism when I speak of it to you is different than the one I present to others. So with in just myself I have a dozen different Judaisms. That does not mean there isn't a core, that which is the tradition as I have inherited it. But, rather, like a pearl, the layers change it, and, like a pearl, it changes in the different lights

I can present Judaism with authority, not because I am a rabbi, but because I live the faith as I see fit. My Judaism is merely the one which I present. In reality, Judaism is one of those pointillist paintings, you know? From a distance, you see a picture, while up close, you see a million dots. Some would say these dots are unconnected, but they are still made of paint.

And before you come at me with an Asadian attack, I don't believe that my individualist understanding of religion is strictly post-Luther or post-Enlightenment. I think that religion has always been this way, Luther merely reflected what people were doing anyway. I don't believe even the basest of cave men was devoid of his own sense of his religion. That is why we have Socrates, Jesus, Abraham, Mohammad, the Buddha, Plato... Each one just had the charisma and rhetorical abilities to make his own faith a popular and public idea.

But where was I?

The danger of making concrete something that is inherently non-material is that you lose the variation. That is when people start to feel they have to right to burn the witches, never realizing that there is always the witch, the conservative and the iconoclast in each of us, depending on the moment. We all adapt – religion’s face is the negotiation between what we have been told is right and what we believe to be right. In a way, religion is that mediation between the transcendent and the material.

That is what is fascinating about studying religion – it is never the same river twice, to return to the water analogy and to steal an image from Wittgenstein. Religion is a composite of authority, tradition, texts, life, agency and subjectivity, and that is the basic point that makes defining it impossible for me. That grey zone and variation, for me, eludes capture and confinement into boxes.

It is true that, as scholars, we do need some functional definition of religion, at least enough so that we can know what to look for. Sort of akin to needing to know roughly what a wall is before you can find the light switch, eh? Mine happens to be “I know it when I see it,” but I have a feeling that that would not win me any points on this exam.

My other working definition in order to locate religion and religious behaviour to study is “that which someone presents as having religious value is religion.” Too simple? Very likely, but I feel that this also prevents us from missing phenomenon we might otherwise over look. The revolutionary idea here? Why not ask religious people what religion is, and stick to the particular forms?

The more mankind tries to bottle and contain and segregate religion, the more it bursts forth, because, in all honesty, man needs faith or some kind or sort. Faith in what is his own decision, but it must exist. Even atheism is a type of faith; you have faith that G-d doesn't exits. And it does take a lot of faith to say "hell doesn't exist and I am going to live this way, even if I am wrong about it."

Whenever you give primacy to one reified concept of religion, you lose a lot – you focus on a tree to the point of missing out on a wonderful forest, a precious forest that is ours to protect and enjoy as part of our human heritage and shared culture.

(Aside: So now religion is a forest?? Ok… fine.)

This forest has trees; the trees have branches; the branches have cells, and so forth. The Tree Itself is composed of the bark, the cork, the cells, the veins, the leaves, the fruit, etc. Each of these things represents an aspect of the tree, but each of these things is no more The Tree Itself than is any one part less a part of the tree than another. For what can we say is the essential part of the tree?

But the forest also has shrubs, grass, birds and rain. And also wonderful amounts of mulch – that which enriches the soil and feeds the trees, made from other trees that have long since died. Somewhere between the food of the tree, the parts of the tree, the product of the tree, The Tree Itself, the birds who live in the trees, and the animals that takes shelter in it… therein lies religion, along with the loggers who kill the trees, the wardens who protect it, and the entirety of the forest itself as a primordial network of flow (not to mention the literary or conceptual idea of the forest that doesn’t even depend on a single acorn to grow).

None of this ramble is a new concept, so don’t accuse me of patting myself on the back (all none of you who are still reading). But I do like to remind people of this issue when they ask me to define religion.

I know, you see, that if I could define religion, religion would be not worth studying.
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