verbava все записи автора Jose Casanova – Public religions in the modern world

It is well known that the conflict between the church and the new science, symbolized by the trial of Galileo, was not about the substantive truth or failstry of the new Copernican theories of the universe as much as it was about the validity of the claim of the new science to have discovered a new method of obtaining and verifying truth.

***

Since religious institutions undergo a process of differentiation and institutional specialization similar to that of other institutional domains, religious roles also become specialized, "part-time roles" within the individual conscience. The more the performance of the nonreligious roles becomes determined by autonomous "secular" norms, the less plausible become the traditional global claims of religious norms.

***

If the temple of ancient polytheism was the Pantheon, a place where all known and even unknown gods could be worshiped simultaneously, the temple of modern polytheism is the mind of the individual self. Indeed, modern individuals do not tend to believe in the existence of various gods. On the contrary, they tend to believe that all religions and all individuals worship the same god under different names and languages, only modern individuals reserve to themselves the right to denominate this god and worship him/her/it in their own peculiar language. Rousseau's "religion of man... without temples, altars or rituals," Thomas Paine's "my mind is my church," and Thomas Jefferson's "I am a sect myself" are paradigmatic "high culture" expressions of the modern form of individual religiosity.

***

The cultic form of modern polytheism is not idolatry but human narcissism. In this particular sense, the cult of the individual has indeed become, as foreseen by Durkheim, the religion of modernity.

***

To say that "religion is a private affair" not only describes a historical process of institutional differentiation but actually prescribes the proper place for religion in social life. The place modernity assigns to religion is "home,' understood not as the physical space of the household but as "the abiding place of one's affection" (Webster's). Home is the sphere of love, expression, intimacy, sentimentality, emotions, irrationality, morality, spirituality, and religion.

***

The most endearins and enduring inheritance from Puritanism, the Protestant ethic, continued to dominate public morality, the American way of life, and, one could add, the American self. Evangelical Protestantism not only not only had democraticized Calvinist but also had democraticized its culture of self-control, industriousness, and the renunciation of pleasures. "Temperance," the most ancient of virtues, defined as "habitual moderation of the indulgence of the appetites and passions," had always been one of the four Christian "cardinal virtues" along with prudence, justice, and fortitude. Puritain ascetism made it into the cardinal virtue.

***

The welfare state, World War II, and the post-World War II economic boom made possible the rapid assimilation of the non-Protestant immigrant population into "the American way of life." As Will Herberg has pointed out, by the mid-1950s, Protestant-Catholic-Jew had become the three denominational forms of a new American civil religion that had the Protestant ethic and faith in America's millenial role as its moral and doctrinal core.

free_readings