Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
There are the beginnings of an interesting apologia for religion. I’ve seen it many times of late, most recently in a NYT article by chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords, Jonathan Sacks. His choice of references tells the tale. He recounts how Robert Putnam, author of the influential essay “Bowling Alone” (and a Unitarian clergy btw), went on to search for the sources of social capital. He found it in religious communities and congregations.
Sacks concludes his essay countering the oft-cited decline of religious affiliation and belief by claiming Putnam’s work finds religious organizations a necessary counter to the otherwise fragmented society of the secular individualist. A similar note was struck in another NYT article, In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent. This article takes notice of the outpouring of religious communities in the wake of the Newton tragedies and wonders where the humanists are?
Without getting into a debate about the fact that many folks who show up in traditional religious communities are in fact secular humanists I want instead to point to the instrumentalist assumption behind the article’s title. The good religionists have shown up while the less worthy humanists are assumed to have stayed home.
What I want to highlight is how both articles point to a functional or instrumental test of religion’s value. That is, if individualism needs countering, turn to religious communitarianism. If a crisis occurs in the community, the religious communities show up, trumping the secular humanist, (also the individualist from Sacks article?), who apparently does not.
Both articles may well point to an existing reality, again I would challenge that they do, but that’s not the point here; however, their main argument is a curious one. That is, religious communities are good because they a) counter the solitary turn of contemporary consumer capitalism and b) show up in times of crisis. Let’s grant for now that these two things are the case; they still present a peculiar rationale for religious community. It is an instrumental one. In other words, religious communities are good (and by implication necessary) if they create a social benefit.
Here’s my point: social benefits are side bars for religious communities which exist to promote and extend in time a particular metaphysics. The Judaeo-Christian communities promote a monotheistic God who does real things and presides over the reality which we experience. If you don’t believe this, you don’t belong to the community. This metaphysical salute, or belief, or faith is necessary, the sine qua non of both Jewish and Christian religious organizations.
So, you can’t go backwards from the social benefits to the metaphysics. Which is just what those do who promote the value of religious organizations by flagging their communitarian nature or their good works. You have to have the metaphysics first. In other words, the religious community that does not have its metaphysics in order is not, ipso facto, a religious community. It’s something else. But, if an organization with its metaphysics in place defines itself as religious, then social good is a side benefit, perhaps a valued one within the community, but very far from its primary purpose. To argue otherwise is to take a cynical position vis a vis religion where belief becomes a stalking horse for social welfare.
