Cultural Religion Versus Scholarly Religion

If you explain a basket of beliefs to a large crowd, you can be assured that in your absence they will form conclusions and opinions about their new religion that you didn't want them to form. So, is the 'religion' you have founded best described as the beliefs of the masses, or the beliefs of the 'experts' at the top? When the top priests disagree with the guys on the ground, which set of beliefs and practices is the 'real' religion? Is a religion the grassroots beliefs of people on the ground, or is it the well-considered philosophies and beliefs of the founders and scholars? The problems involving the tussle between popular cultural forms of religion (low-brow religion) and intellectual faith (high-brow), have concerned scholars through history₁.

1. Cultural Religion, Scholarly Religion
2. Should the Grassroots or the Experts Define a Religion?
3. The Indomitable Market of Magic, Versus Religious Professionals
4. Conclusions

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1. Cultural Religion, Scholarly Religion

The grassroots religion is frequently a mixture between common culture and a set of practices which have been called a 'religion' by others. Villages and counties can sometimes adopt a new religion and the only outward signs are that the shrines in the local places of worship get new figurines, or, the gods and spirits get new names and updated stories. The practices themselves are sometimes what the religion is, no matter the named theology that is placed on top of them to explain them. A top-down change will often fail to change the practices on the ground. Grassroots changes are hard to predict or control. Take Hinduism... the religion itself is a collection of folk practices, sayings, stories, traditions that we Westerners took to categorize under a single name₂. Hinduism is a grassroots religion. Also take as an example the Reformation and other top-down attempts at changing the religious landscape in the UK; they nearly all failed, resulting merely in name-changes.

Religion, or a set of religious ideas, are sometimes moved from one culture to another. The Theosophists brought Indian spirituality to the West, interpreting it through a Western, formal framework, and changing its character. The strict, teacher-student, lifelong disciplines of the East were decimated into what is now known broadly as the New Age, as a large number of non-theologians took to it. This mix between one scholarly interpretation of religious beliefs and its interpretation within a new culture is typical of how 'new' seeming religions can emerge from old practices.

2. Should the Grassroots or the Experts Define a Religion?

2.1. The Grassroots Element Should Define the Religion

The beliefs of the majority of the adherents of a religion should define the core of the religion. They will form the future priesthood (whom we will call the 'experts' here to avoid what could be seen to be religion-specific language). It doesn't matter what the academics say the tents of a religion are if it isn't what the bulk of the followers actually believe. As new understandings and developments spread amongst the adherents, then, such things become part of the religion. This is better than having clerics at the top invent new clever doctrines, and then forcing them on to the populace, as has happened so many times in the history of organized religions.

2.2. Actually No They Shouldn't

Mass rule has too many problems and implications for the religion as a whole. Fickle followers, en masse, can take up any number of fancy new beliefs, practice new fads, or reject chunks of the theology, but their blundering could easily make a quagmire of complex ideas and turn them into shallow, misunderstood slogans, rather than a coherent belief system. We saw the monotheists, such as Moses, emerge and preach a strict no-idols religion. But the same religion evolves, by mass consensus, to include the worship of a variety of saints and figures of saints, many of whom are merely pre-Christian personalities renamed in Greek, Latin or English, and given an updated martyrdom story. This is no way to search for the truth! The experts and the clerics should probably be the ones keeping things together and saying what is, and what isn't, part of the religion.

2.3. The Experts and Clerics Should Guard the Religion

Theology can be complicated. It requires more than merely choosing to believe, but, it involves the careful working out of the philosophies and intricacies of what beliefs really mean. So many beliefs that are held by the mass populace make little sense, and many of them actually go against what a religion should stand for. The guardianship of a religion against frivolous and trendy beliefs must be taken upon the shoulders of those who have committed time and study to the tenets and history of the religion. That way, policy declarations will be carefully checked against existing doctrine to make sure no contradictions or falsehoods emerge. The beliefs of the original founder(s) of the religion can only kept alive through the vigilance of such scholars, and therefore these clerics should have the final say on what, exactly, the religion is.

2.4. The Experts and Clerics Probably Shouldn't After All

The final say is that the experts and clerics of a religion should probably not be given the reigns to the religion. Over and over throughout history, the saddle has been given in such a way, and the resultant path that the religions plod down is the one which sees a harsher and harsher Authority enforce a stricter and stricter doctrine. That is what happened as the Pauline-Cappadocian Christians took over Christianity in the fourth century, and wiped out all the wonderful diversity that comprised early Christianity in the first three centuries such as the Ebionites, Gnostics and Arians. The symptom of an ever-tightening opening of understanding afflicts most religions that come to ruled by theocrats; it then takes the emergence of 'prophets' (Weber) to describe visionaries who break the mould and force the religion into schism in order to expose new understanding. This is an all-too-familiar history of the world's organized religions.

Another shortfall is that as the clerics embrace dogmatism and change becomes taboo, the religion ceases to react to new information. It ossifies, and then comes into increasing conflict with science and with the changing morals of society. Religions need to be adaptable, and that, most the time, means that those 'of understanding' are normally the ones holding the doctrine back, until eventually the whole religion is discredited. No, unfortunately religions should not be the preserve of the clerics.

2.5. Pragmatism: Defining Religions According to What is Useful

We have eliminated all those who would contend to define a religion. The masses need to be held in check to guard against rampant fads and shallow understandings, but, the clerics tend to choke a religion through increasingly narrow interpretations of its truth.

When defining whether a religion is best understood as the majority of believers do, or as the academics do, there is no clear line to tread. The path of most outsiders is to call all forms, high and low, the same thing. So, a 'Christian' is both a layman who calls himself a Christian but can't recite more than a verse or two of scripture let alone explain the complexities of the Trinity, and the same name applies to the religion of the Latin and Greek speaking acolytes. It gets confusing when they start espousing opposite doctrines. The pragmatic answer is to merely speak of the religion in the plural. There are Buddhisms, Christianities, Hinduisms₂ and Islamic religions. This also takes into account the fact that many religions have been completely re-conceived since their inception.

Theologians will tend to take the side of the 'professionals', and stick to the more formal, written, codified forms of religion. They will consider other elements, not discussed in literature, to be anomalies, sinful, and mistaken. Anthropologists on the other hand, will usefully examine the actual practices of the people on the ground, and will therefore sometimes report that a religion of a local area is one thing, while theologians say it is another. This is the pragmatic approach to describing religions in action.

3. The Indomitable Market of Magic, Versus Religious Professionals

3.1. Magic as a Grassroots Phenomenon

It is generally not worth trying to define magic (or religion), but it should suffice to say here that it includes things like good luck charms, fortune telling, astrology, mediumship etc. The historian Prof. R. Hutton reports about magical practices in his book on modern Paganism, noting how the whole arena of magic is scorned by clerics within most organized religions. Momen (1999) concurs:

“It is obvious that many [charms] - perhaps the majority - are Christian in character. They quote from the Bible, or appeal to the Trinity, or to Jesus, or to saints. In most cases, to be sure, they are using the trappings and symbols of Christianity with little regard to what churchmen would have regarded as its essence; the Bible, for example, is regularly treated as a magical object in itself. [...] This is, however, a large part of what popular Christianity had always been about, and, something that had caused learned and devout members of the faith to teat their hair at intervals ever since the time of the Church Fathers.”

"The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft"
Prof. R. Hutton (1999)₃

It is not just a phenomenon in Christian populations:

“The religious professionals in each religion will usually look down upon the manifestations of popular religion. They will often refer to them as a corruption of the true religion or as evidence of the ignorance or sinfulness of the mass of the people. The truth is somewhat more complex than this. Popular religious practices fill some of the needs felt by ordinary people - needs that the official religion ignores. Thus, for example, most varieties of official religion disapprove of, or even forbid, recourse to talismans, spells, charms and other forms of magic. They are also against necromancy, astrology and other occult practices. Yet, in almost every society, these elements can be found in popular religion. [...] People regard these popular elements as an integral part of the religion and they are thought to derive their power and efficacy through the spiritual forces of the religion. For example, in most Muslim countries, amulets are worn as a magical protection against danger. These amulets usually contain verses from the Qur'an, which is considered to be the source of their power. Such practices persist despite the prohibition against them in the official religion.”

"The Phenomenon Of Religion" by M. Momen (1999)₄

In history puritanical reforms would sweep the land every so often, instigated by religious professionals' anxiety over the general populace's petit fascinations. "The Need for Dogma: Why Some People are Determinedly Religious" by Vexen Crabtree (2002) argues that such needs will always need to find an outlet. Other authors such as the sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson (1966) have argued that by suppressing magical thinking, some organized religions have suppressed the very instincts that allow people to believe in religious ideas at all₅.

Such tugs of war between professional religionists at the top, and the grassroots religion at the bottom, are not just a Western or Christian phenomenon. Take Daoism, a 2400-year old atheist Chinese religion has to do with cause-and-effect in a cosmic sense. The masses mix it with a multitude of superstitions, as Prof. Partridge reports:

“Daoism as a religion has, over many years, absorbed many 'folk' beliefs as well as aspects of Buddhism and Confucianism. Consequently, there is much to do with spirits, sorcery, exorcism, fortune-telling, the promotion of amulets and talismans and geomancy. For example, a common form of geomancy that has, in recent years, become very popular in the West is feng shui (wind and water).”

"Encyclopedia of New Religions" by Prof. Christopher Partridge (2004)₆

3.2. Western European Christianity Went Too High-Brow

Christianity has waned in most of Europe. As its popular, common roots have disintegrated it has left a gap in British culture for magical thinking. This waning was partially because Christianity has remained for a century or two, an entirely high-brow affair. As Christianity in Western Europe has become dry, all those masses who belonged to the cultural version of Christianity, 'unchurched', have now largely lost their way. In the UK "between 1979 and 2005, half of all Christians stopped going to church on a Sunday"₇. This gap has been steadily filled by the growing Occult, New Age and Pagan movements. These are some of the most liberal religious movements it is possible to imagine, and yet their own 'professional' elements, the organizers and writers, have divided magic into 'low' and 'high' along familiar cultural-religion and scholarly-religion lines:

“One of the specifically modern characteristics of [magic] is the label of 'low magic', devised by the 'high' magicians of the occult revival. They used (and use) it to denote all those practices that [...] were not part of their self-consciously learned tradition. In particular, such activities belonged to the world of popular belief and custom [and] practical remedies for specific problems.”

"The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft" by Prof. R. Hutton (1999)₈

4. Conclusions

Religions are combinations of grassroots practices and cultural norms with high-brow theologizing and intellectualization. The two forms of a religion often battle against each other. It is not right to limit definitions of what the 'true' religion is to either the beliefs of most of the adherents (who might en masse be taken in by fads) nor limit it to what the academics and clerics say, who only represent a small portion of the religion. Therefore the only sensible pragmatic route is to consider religions to be pluralities and umbrella terms. Folk practices are often resilient to top-down declarations of what is or isn't supposed to be part of a religion, and often reforming popular beliefs results only in name-changes and other surface changes, leaving underlying practices more or less as they were.

The grassroots of a religion is nearly always a combination of beliefs and practices from multiple historical sources. Magical thinking, ritualistic habits and popular beliefs all tend to survive within a culture even though its official religion may change. On the other hand, the formal and scholarly religion of clerics and religious professionals is complex, more complete, text based and resilient to change. It is demanding to study and frequently convoluted because the religion's scholars debate the weakspots and difficult spots of the tenets and work out complex theologies to circumvent them. The more difficult the area of study of a religion, the more maze-making its scholars will do in attempts to explain away irrationality. But the more complex and difficult the intellectual aspect of a religion, the more the lowly masses will fail to comprehend or implement it, and the bigger the divide will be between the cultural and scholarly versions of the religion. A religion is always a contradictory mix of both what the leaders say the religion is, plus what the mass of the actual followers believe.