The Denton Conferences on Implicit Religion

Papers 2010

• Rebecca Aechtner — Jugendfeier: a secular humanist youth rite-of-passage ritual

  The German Humanist Association explicitly identifies itself as a ‘secular cultural organisation’ offering ‘an alternative to the traditional Christian culture.’ As a secular ‘worldview community’ they attempt to provide ‘a humanist life stance relevant to this world’ without the restrictions of dogma, myths, and superstitions. Even though the Humanists reject the necessity of religion, they cannot be described without referencing what they are not – religious.

  While catering to the needs of its members, the humanists have begun offering life-cycle rituals, or rites-of-passage rituals to mark important stages in the individual’s life, mostly adapted from mainstream Catholicism and Protestantism: baby-naming, confirmation, weddings, and funerals. Thus, by presenting a holistic worldview and offering corresponding rituals, the Humanists are becoming increasingly analogous to a religious body.

  Drawing on recent fieldwork, this paper examines the implicit religious nature of Jugendfeier, the humanist youth initiation ritual, its secular alternative to Christian confirmation. Despite the fact that the humanists offer competitive ideological and cultural surrogates to the Church and her traditions, they cannot fully remove themselves from the religious arena and its rhetoric.

• Carl Becker — Religious experiences in everyday Japanese life

  Western definitions of religion frequently fail to acknowledge ways in which non-Western people have profoundly religious sensibilities. This study examines the experiences of Japanese college students to suggest (1) aspects of Japanese religiosity, and (2) a more holistic perspective on religious experience. Students were asked to report their anomalous experiences; this data is compared to that of students from other cultures. This study concludes that Japanese people have a broad range of anomalous experiences that might well be considered religious experiences in a different culture.

• Dagmar Corry & Christopher Lewis — Through the lens of implicit religion: creativity and spirituality in coping

  Background:	How might personal commitment, in either religious or secular forms, help in the process of coping? Whilst the beneficial effects on mental health of creativity and spirituality as separate entities have been well documented, little theoretical attention appears to have been given to the interactive effect of the two constructs in coping, nor are there any empirical studies.
  Aims:	This study aimed to find support for the hypothesis that a combination of creativity and spirituality is used in coping.
  Method:	Ten interviews were carried out with artists, prayer group members and service users. The data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis as it is concerned with individuals’ perception of events and their meanings.
  Results:	The results showed that irrespective of gender, age and marital status, the majority of participants define themselves as both creative and spiritual and resort to a spiritual attitude and creative expression in order to cope with stress.
  Conclusions:	The results supported the hypothesis and indicate that the combined use of two particular forms of personal commitment, namely creativity and spirituality, is of immense importance to the participants who felt they would not cope as well without it.

• Giuseppe Giordan — Towards a common-sense religion: the young and religion in Italy

  The culture of pluralism, understood as the legitimation of the most diverse life options, seems to unite more and more both church-goers and non church-goers, even in a country like Italy where Catholicism still holds a position of “relative monopoly”. A research carried on with a sample of 800 Italian eighteen year old young people has highlighted their opinions about a few particularly “hot” questions inside Catholicism: women’s and homosexual people’s ordination, priests’ marriage, Holy Communion for divorced people who are re-marrying, the relation between various religions and truth. Although a few differences remain between those who regularly take part in religious rites and those who don’t, a “common sense religion” seems to be emerging which, through progressive erosion of the differences between these two groups, legitimates the freedom of choice for the individuals, especially for what concerns the ambit of the individual life.

• Roger Grainger — The Wood and the Fire: on the difference between spirituality and any kind of religion

  Despite a tendency to confuse implicit religion with spirituality, the two are entirely different. Implicit religion is focused, whereas spirituality is essentially vague, until it has been defined in operational terms as a religious construct; that is, a system or identifiable structure, whether it be some kind of social organisation, a self-consistent theory, or ‘simply a story’. This being so, there is less difference between explicit and implicit religion, than there is between either of those two and spirituality. Phenomenologically speaking, spirituality precedes religion of any kind whatsoever, and to identify it with implicit religion is completely to misunderstand Bailey’s original idea.

• Ted Harrison — The ministry of the empty church

  Rural churches which operate an open door policy receive a regular stream of visitors. Some are walkers or cyclists just passing by, others are regular visitors who find it personally enriching to spend time alone in a quiet place.

  These people do not appear on any church roll and are not counted as congregation even though they use the church as a place of prayer and private spiritual contemplation.

  Sometimes an incumbent only learns of the existence of one of the regular solitary worshippers when relatives ask for a funeral to be held at the church because ‘the place was so important to the deceased’.

  The proposed paper will examine the way rural churches are used outside times of public worship. It will draw on the evidence contained in visitors’ books, anecdotal evidence from incumbents and churchwardens plus accounts of conversations held with visitors met by chance.

  It will look at the role of the accessible ancient sacred sites in modern Britain and assess how important it is that they make no explicit religious or credal demands on the visitors who use them.

  The paper will also ask how the wider church, the custodians of the buildings, can best encourage and evaluate this ministry.

• Anderson Jeremiah — Local Religious Practices and Dalit Christians: observations from a rural Paraiyar community in Tamil Nadu

  Contrary to the popular notion that human communities voluntarily subscribe to religious structures, the author’s fieldwork among rural Paraiyar Christians in north Tamil Nadu in south India has yielded interesting insights into this assumption. This community does not just receive, perceive and passively consume the religious symbols, rituals and spirituality they are presented with. But rather, they take an active role in appropriating, interpreting and reshaping the components of Christian belief, doctrine, and ritual in their own way, in order to benefit and fulfil their desires and ambitions within their complex social life. Very often communities practically define their socio-cultural boundaries and identities through their religious affiliation. This research paper seeks to understand how people use their Christian identities, principally their names, symbols, and locality to both negotiate and redraw existing cognitive and social boundaries. This paper will show how one particular marginalised community use religion to negotiate their space in a caste-dominated village.

• Chris Lewis & Mary Lewis — From here to there: Implicit Religion & the Psychology of Religion

  In response to the work of Gollnick (2002), Lewis (2005, 2006) provided evidence that the term ‘implicit religion’ is not widely used within psychology. The aim of the present study was to compliment this previous research by examining the departmental affiliation of the authors who have published in the journal Implicit Religion. Of the articles published between 1998 and 2009, few authors were found to be affiliated to departments of psychology. In contrast researchers from departments of Theology and Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology were found to be the most common authors. In addition, the majority of authors were male and from the UK and North America. These findings provide further empirical evidence to support the conclusion drawn by Gollnick (2002) and Lewis (2005, 2006) that the term ‘implicit religion’ has not gained the widespread attention of psychologists of religion. Suggestions for promoting the term ‘implicit religion’ and the journal Implicit Religion outside the current areas of influence are outlined.

• Paul Nathanson — From Dr Kildare to Dr House: the decline of a mythical archetype in medical scientism

  Secularity is a defining feature of modernity, and yet it could be argued that modern societies have rebelled over and over against secularity. One way of doing so has been to abandon organized religion. But because no society can do without some form of religion to provide coherence—intellectually, experientially, aesthetically, morally, socially, politically, and so on—many people have replaced organized religion with implicit (or secular) religions. Among the most effective and pervasive has been scientism, especially medical scientism. What can give people more firmly grounded hope, after all, than the continually expanding list of breakthroughs in medical science and technology? In this presentation, however, I will examine portrayals of medicine in popular culture to show that even medical scientism has its ups and downs. More specifically, I will show a powerful shift from the physician as mythical hero to the physician as ordinary mortal to the physician as cynical neurotic.

• Mandy Robbins & Leslie Francis — ‘I am spiritual, but not religious:’ an empirical enquiry into the implicit religion of 13- to 15-year-olds
• Linda Rudge — ‘Hearing Heaven’: a philosophical enquiry into the relationship between popular music and contemporary spirituality

  This paper will explore the idea that contemporary identities in secularised societies are formed through the powerful and almost omnipresent forces of mass communication media – specifically, for the purposes of this paper, through popular music.

  Exploring the comment of the controversial playwright, Dennis Potter, that ‘cheap songs so-called do have something of the Psalms of David about them’ this paper will juxtapose some of the themes and poetry in the psalms of traditional religion, with the themes and poetry apparent in the spiritualities of contemporary society in the UK. This juxtaposition will be presented in the session through illustrations from a small selection of the ‘cheap songs’ of the last fifty years, in order to explore musical experiences that provide rituals for a secularised age. Delegates are welcome to bring their own examples to share.

• Philippe St-Germain — Doubles and doppelgängers: religious meaning for the young and old

  The theme of the double — or doppelgänger — has an illustrious history in various art forms, including literature, painting and cinema; it carries heavy symbolic undertones, be they mythological, religious, philosophical or psychological. From fetches and evil twins to alter egos, doubles are less pure replicas than sometimes radically inverted personalities; expecting to find the Same, we might be confronted with the Other. In this paper, I will first recall some of the meanings attributed to the double over the years, emphasizing its religious elements. Turning to contemporary phenomena, I will then try to show how this theme helps to understand some of the activities through which younger generations express themselves as they embark on strongly ritualized ventures: in many ways, the young construct their identity by projecting (on a screen, a page, a wall) what they wish to be. These often richly symbolic representations are like many creative selfportraits and, given their importance in the young’s journey towards adulthood, can be considered as being part of rites of passage.

• Israel Selvanayagam — Dimensions of Religion: Progressive Enumeration in the Study of Religion

  Efforts at precisely defining religion continue and approaches to the study of religion continue to grow. It is more and more realised that religious life is immeasurably complex and attempts to simplify result in further complication rather than clarification. As such, yet another attempt has been made, that is to identify and illustrate the basic aspects, modes, or, more popularly, dimensions of religion. Again there is no promise of consistency among scholars. There have been changes in the understanding even by a particular scholar. This paper identifies different enumerations of the essential ‘dimensions’ of religion, in passing pointing out some illustrations of these. Then it proposes an addition of two dimensions, which are perceived to be important for greater grasp of religious life. Although its implication for understanding implicit religion is not discussed, it is hoped, the discussion will contribute in terms of drawing attention to what is happening in the field of the study of explicit religion. It might also help to refine the nature and function of implicit religion and the way it differs from explicit religion.

• Tania ap Siôn — Freemasonry through the eyes of Anglican clergy: insights from implicit religion?

  The nature of the relationship between Freemasonry and Christian Churches has been controversial since it emerged in an organised form with the formation of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717. Unlike other Christian Churches, the Church of England has never consistently pronounced against Freemasonry, although a range of views are evident as illustrated by the General Synod Debate in 1987. The present study approaches Freemasonry from the perspective of 518 Archdeacons, Area Deans and Rural Deans in the Church of England, and explores the connection between their conceptions of Freemasonry and Ninian Smart’s (1989, 1996) seven recognisable components of religion articulated as the ritual or practical dimension, the doctrinal or philosophical dimension, the mythic or narrative dimension, the experiential or emotional dimension, the ethical or legal dimension, the organisational or social dimension, and the material or artistic dimension. The significance of the results is then discussed with regard to implicit religion and perceived relationships between Freemasonry and the Church of England.

• Barbara Walters — The liturgy of the banquet as implicit religion

  The proposed paper and music-text analysis of BNF 1143, one of three versions of the office for the feast of Corpus Christi, is embedded in a larger work, part of which has been published in journal articles and a book with Vincent Corrigan and Peter T. Ricketts.1 BNF 1143 is a musical manuscript devoted entirely to the new feast and contains a version of the office generally believed to be the work of the Saint Thomas Aquinas at the end of his theological career. The new and unpublished analysis to be presented expands on the earlier focus, analyzing “borrowing” and/or various types of inter-textual relationships and biblical concords between the version of the office found in BNF 1143 and Saint Thomas’s sermon on Luke 16. The analysis of liturgical music, examined within the historically specific geo-political terrain and system of meaning in which it initially appeared, presumes that medieval liturgy functioned as a site of struggle between and within textual and quasi-literate communities. As such liturgical analysis provides important clues on communication and group dynamics within and between monolithic cultural systems in the high medieval period in Western Europe. Especially the analysis of source chants of BNF 1143 discloses an inclusive if problematic subtext for an imaginary community of otherwise marginalized religious women and martyrs as well as “others” who are portrayed as excluded from the banquet.

• Emyr Williams, Leslie Francis & Ursula Billington — The Williams Scale of Attitude towards Paganism: development & application among British pagans

  This paper builds on the tradition of attitudinal measures of religiosity established by Leslie Francis and colleagues with the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity (and reflected in the Sahin-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Islam, the Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism, and the Santosh-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism) by introducing a new measure to assess the attitudinal disposition of pagans. A battery of items was completed by members of a Pagan Summer Camp. These items were reduced to produced a 21-item scale that measured aspects of paganism concerned with: the God/Goddess, worshipping, prayer, and coven. The scale recorded an alpha coefficient of 0.92. Construct validity of the Williams Scale of Attitude toward Paganism was demonstrated by the clear association with measures of participation in private rituals.

• Katherine Young — Promises of Immortality: the revival of medical scientism

  If in some venues of popular culture the physician as mythical hero have shifted to physician as ordinary mortal and then to cynical neurotic, in other venues new heroes are being born—those who are trying to liberate the body from finitude through science and technology. In this presentation, I will compare the implicit religion of two popular versions of medical scientism: Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old and Simon Young’s Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto. Both authors turned personal health crises into journeys through medical science and holistic practice to argue that immortality is indeed possible.