Belief II

In addition to the interesting responses from Swanditch on the last Belief post, I received an email response from a friend living abroad in a rather homogenous and conservative religious community. She shared her thoughts on the difficulty of maintaining a self-identity in a society where one was not able (or allowed) to continue one's own practices (religious or otherwise). She ended by noting some of her frustration at the closed nature of the society in which she currently lives: "I can't help but wonder what the state of our world is, when such a large religious population cannot conceive of accepting the validity of another person's [beliefs, especially] since [the community's religious] perspective often dictates a whole host of life choices, not simply private religious practices."

Her comments raised a number of issues for me. First, the benefit of a pluralistic society is the ability to find a community with which to practice. Maintaining a distinct sense of self in the absence of such a community (i.e. a community that shares ones language, culture, practices) is difficult, if not impossible. Second, when one considers traditional religious communities in other (even remote) parts of the world, one wonders how they relate, say, to globalization, colonialization, and wester hegemony. That is to say, should we understand their rigidity part of a long-standing faith-tradition or as a distinctly modern response to these factors (i.e. as the foreign homologue of christian fundamentalism in the US).

The most interesting question, however, comes in the last sentence of her response (see above). Different forms of God-Talk are intertwined with "a whole host of life choices." And, in fact, I think it would be incredibly difficult to draw any sort of clean distinction between private and public practices. Even those practices which we might be tempted to treat as private (personal prayer, meditation, alter bows, etc.) are most often anchored in the very public practices of a larger community (corporate prayer, group mediation, ceremonial commemorations, etc). Perhaps one unique feature of modern pluralism is the rise in personal hybridizations that combine forms of practice from various communities. This sort of hybridization further fragments God-talk in that we are unsure of how to locate each individual in relation to various religious traditions. We might even wonder if such private conceptions of god-talk are intelligible at all. (Curiously, we can trace this notion of purely personal or private conceptions of the Divine - at least in the west - directly to the Protestant Reformation.)