The Transformation of the World (188 page)

CHAPTER XVIII

 

Religion

 

There are strong reasons why religions and religiosity should occupy center stage in a global history of the nineteenth century.
¹
Only for a few Western European countries at most would it be justified to treat religion as one more subdivision of “culture” and to limit oneself to its organizational constitution as a church or churches. Religion was a force in people's lives throughout the nineteenth-century world, giving them bearings and serving to crystallize the formation of communities and collective identities. It was an organizing principle of social hierarchies, a driving force of political struggles, a field of demanding intellectual debates. In the nineteenth century, religion was still the most important provider of meaning for everyday life, and hence the center of all culture associated with the mind. It took in the whole spectrum from universal churches to local cults with few participants. It encompassed in a single cultural form, and often constituted the main link between, both literate elites and those illiterate masses who could communicate only through the spoken word and religious images. Only very exceptionally in the nineteenth century did religion become what sociological theory calls a functionally differentiated subsystem, alongside other systems such as law, politics, or the economy, and hence a reasonably distinct sphere with identifiable patterns of reproduction, renewal, and growth. The huge diversity of religious phenomena, and the great abundance of literature in disciplines from the history of religion to anthropology to Oriental philology, places any kind of comprehensive account beyond reach in this book. What follows is a rough sketch of a number of selected topics.

1 Concepts of Religion and the Religious

Vagueness and Disambiguation

Globally speaking, religious phenomena do not fit together into a single overarching history like those covering the macroprocesses of urbanization, industrialization, or the spread of literacy. The claim that the nineteenth century overall
was an age beyond religion cannot be sustained, and a grand narrative other than the well-known one of “secularization” is nowhere in sight.
²
Another way of connecting things up also turns out to be a great oversimplification: No doubt the conquering and colonizing, traveling and proselytizing expansion of Europeans around the globe from the sixteenth century on created better conditions for the spread of the principal European religion, yet it seemed to keen observers in 1900 or 1914 that the influence of Christianity in the world was far slighter than Europe's political-military strength or that of the West as a whole. In many non-Western societies that were in regular contact with Europe during the nineteenth century, and in which a Westernization of lifestyles has persisted to this day, Christianity was unable to gain a real foothold. It became a global religion but was not globally dominant; the Christian offensive encountered resistance and renewal movements in its path. Religious change, however, must be seen not only as a conflictual process of expansion and reaction but also, under different circumstances, as a result of interrelations and a shared history, or as “analogous transformation” in the West and in other parts of the world, fueled by local sources and linked up only loosely or not at all.
³
Processes such as nation-state formation or mass distribution of printed matter stood in a mutual relationship with changes in the religious field that was in principle similar worldwide.

The concept of religion is notoriously hazy, and Max Weber, one of the pioneers of the comparative sociology of religion, never allowed himself to be drawn into defining it. Some old problems in this field have never been solved unambiguously, beginning with the distinction between “true” religion, “superstition,” and inner-worldly (or “philosophical”) belief systems. For instance, is Confucianism the “religion” that Western textbooks often claim it to be, even though it has no church, no conception of salvation or an afterlife, and no elaborate ritual obligations? And what of Freemasonry, an equally worldly organization? Should any cult and any religious movement be called a religion, or should the term apply only to worldviews, organizations, and ritual practices beyond a certain threshold of complexity? How important is the way in which its adepts and others see it? As conventional faiths lose support, under what conditions is it justified to speak of art or certain forms of ritualized politics as an ersatz religion? We should hesitate to follow those theorists who are interested only in discourses about religion and maintain that religious phenomena are not discernible in the reality of history. Such radical skepticism, reflecting the “linguistic turn” in the study of history, goes too far. Insight into the constructed character of concepts may then easily lead into a denial of their practical effect in people's lives. What does it mean for someone who cultivates a Hindu identity to say that “Hinduism” is a European invention? It would be problematic to conclude that because the concept of “religion” was developed in nineteenth-century Europe, the term is merely a hegemonic imposition on the part of an arrogant West.
⁴

Even so, an abstract, universal concept of religion is a product of nineteenth-century European intellectuals, most of them with Protestant leanings.
⁵
It included
the idea of a plurality of religions beyond the monotheistic trio of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but often rested on an unspoken assumption that Christianity, seen as the most advanced in terms of cultural evolution and spiritual authenticity, was the only truly universal religion. The concept combined at least four elements:
⁶

1. the existence of a pivotal holy text (such as the Bible or Koran) or a clearly defined canon of sacred writings;

2. exclusivity, that is, an unambiguous religious loyalty and identification with a religion that people consider as their own spiritual possession;

3. separateness from other spheres of life; and 4. a certain detachment from charismatic leader-figures and from excessive personalization—even if such a detachment does not always lead to the founding of a hierarchically organized church.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this concept of religion percolated into non-Occidental cultural worlds, not only via colonial channels. It was by no means always unattractive on its own grounds. There was much to be said for reinterpreting, concentrating, and systematizing religious programs and practices, following the models of Christianity and, in a different way, Islam.

In China, for example, people had for centuries spoken only of
jiao
—roughly translatable as “doctrines” or “orientations,” mostly with a plural sense. In the late nineteenth century, a wider concept was imported via Japan from the West and incorporated into the Chinese lexicon as
zongjiao
(the sign prefix
zong
denotes ancestor or clan, but also model or great master).
⁷
This neologism shifted the emphasis from a plural simultaneity of teachings to the historical depth of a convergent tradition. At the same time—and here lies the special interest of the Chinese case—a limit of adaptation was reached. For the Chinese elite refused to go along with the attempt by a number of late imperial scholars (and ultimately, in 1907, by the Qing Dynasty itself) to turn the prestigious Confucian worldview (
ru
) into a Confucian religious faith (
kongjiao
).
⁸
“Confucius”—the iconic sage whom the Jesuits created around 1700 out of a complex legacy handed down over the centuries—was presented by Kang Youwei and his comrades with some success as the symbol of “Chinesehood” and then of the Chinese nation.
⁹
The revolution later dethroned this figure in the name of Marx and Mao, but he underwent an amazing rebirth in the late twentieth century and, with the founding of the first Confucius Institute in 2004 (in Seoul), became the patron of the foreign cultural policy of the People's Republic of China. Under imperial China (until 1911) and the Republic of China (1912–49), all endeavors to impose a state Confucianism by analogy with Japan's state Shintoism ended in failure. The European concept of religion here reached the limits of its exportability, and around the turn of the century China's opinion leaders (without always being aware of it) paradoxically inclined toward an
older
construct in which Europeans had had a hand:
the “philosophical” Confucius, whom the Jesuits had rehabilitated against the “neo-Confucianism” prevailing at the time.

Elsewhere, this concept of religion imported from Europe had a strong social, and sometimes also political, impact. In Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, there were efforts to combine tradition and fresh imagination in carving out a more distinctive religious profile. This led in Islam, for example, to an emphasis on the sharia as binding religious law and in Hinduism to a stronger canonization of the Vedic scriptures as against other writings in the classical heritage.
¹⁰
Moreover, the plethora of new nation-states that emerged in the twentieth century established the idea of one official religion in place of the premodern hierarchy of different faiths. This made a new type of
religious
minority possible, in a situation where all citizens were formally equal, and at the same time bred religious conflicts that special laws for each group could resolve only with difficulty. Tendencies to religious uniformity and a more clear-cut identity mostly developed with other religions in mind, and often in direct confrontation with them. This complex reordering of the global religious landscape through emulation and demarcation was a major new development in the nineteenth century.

World Religions

One legacy of the nineteenth century that still marks public language is the idea of “world religions” towering like mountains above the topography of human faith. In the new discourse of religious studies (
Religionswissenschaft
), a wide range of orientations was condensed into macrocategories such as Buddhism or Hinduism, and these “world religions,” together with Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and not uncommonly Confucianism, allowed for a mapping of religions that allocated them to major “civilizations.” Experts used the crude grid of “world religions” as the basis for elaborate classifications of faith systems or sociological types of religion, with the underlying assumption that all non-Europeans were firmly in the grip of religion, and “Oriental” or “primitive” societies could best be described and understood in terms of religion; only enlightened Europeans were credited with the achievement of breaking the intellectual constraints of religion and even to relativize their own belief system, Christianity, by looking at it from the outside in.
¹¹

This approach, shallow as it might seem to us, made some sense in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, these societies—with the partial exception of China, because of its rich historiographical tradition—revealed themselves to Western scholars mainly through texts of a religious character (Max Müller's famous fifty-volume collection of translations,
Sacred Books of the East
, appeared between 1879 and 1910). On the other hand, it seemed to Europeans that the most threatening resistance to colonial conquest came from religious dignitaries and religiously inspired movements.

The thesis of the primacy of the religious in non-Western societies contributed to a lasting dematerialization, dehistoricization, and depoliticization of the
way in which those societies were understood in the West. Clichéd equations (“Hindu India,” “Confucian China”) still imply that religious modernization is confined to the West, that it is the only civilization in the world to have declared religion a private affair and grounded its image of itself on secular “modernity.” Talk of “world religions” is not entirely misguided. But it should not mislead us into considering particular religions as self-enclosed spheres in which any development is autonomous and barely subject to outside influences. Such an approach brings with it a level of political drama: visions of a clash of civilizations presuppose powerful blocs defined in terms of religion.

Revolution and Atheism

The nineteenth century opened in Europe with a general assault on religion. To be sure, elites had been overthrown and rulers executed in previous revolutions too. But the attacks of the French Revolution on the church and religion as such, prepared by theoretical critiques and anti-ecclesiastical polemic among radical Enlightenment authors, had no historical precedent and were one of the most extreme aspects of the whole upheaval. Church property was nationalized as early as the end of 1789. And although clerical deputies representing the first estate had made possible the conversion of the three-tier Estates-General into a revolutionary national assembly in June of the same year, the church was quickly excluded as a factor in the French power game. Catholicism lost its status as the
religion d'État
, and the clergy forfeited a large part of its traditional income. All monasteries were dissolved—a process that Emperor Joseph II had already initiated in the Habsburg Empire. The break with the pope, now regarded as one foreign monarch among others, came in 1790 over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Priests, or anyway a section of them, had already joined the state payroll without offering much resistance. Now the revolutionary legislators went a step farther, declaring them to be civil servants and incorporating them into the new administrative hierarchy, so that they were now chosen by secular bodies and had to swear loyalty to the state. This led to a deep split between those who agreed to take the oath and those who refused, between the French (Constitutional) Church and the Roman Church. It would be the basis for the persecutions that hit parts of the French clergy over the following years—although the conflicts seem rather innocuous in comparison with the religious civil wars in early modern France.