The link between faith and ethics or morals – I don't make a
distinction between these words because it's complicated, including questions
like whether religion is essential to or appropriate for ethics, and whether
ethics is one of the necessary features or requirements for defining a group of
activities as "religion." Regarding the first instance, in certain
parts of the world, being outside the majority faith or outside the Abrahamic,
“God-fearing” sects altogether can easily be considered hypocritical or
ethically suspect; declaring yourself an atheist or a practitioner of animism,
for example, can easily lead to skepticism.
The mission of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment intelligentsia in Europe has been to build and legitimize ethics on nontheological grounds; this is unquestionably one of Kant's accomplishments and a continuing project in ethics in the analytic tradition. Concerning the second issue, late-nineteenth-century evolutionists used ethics as a standard to differentiate between so-called "magic" and "religion," and it was one of the accomplishments of later twentieth-century anthropology, through the study of people like Mary Douglas, to explain the ethical in such unusual positions as food taboos and hygienic procedures. One of the most important aspects of this research is that ethics may be implied, as well as overt, in ways of practice.
The entire debate is framed by two major historical cycles.
The first is the curtailment or retrenchment of faith in Europe, especially
Christianity and Judaism, by movements or innovations that may be categorized
as "secularist," particularly in law, research, and philosophy.
Attempts to undermine or abolish faith within communist regimes may be added to
this general image. The second historical phase tends to be a worldwide effort
to defeat animism or polytheism, especially by the two major rival monotheistic
religions, Christianity and Islam, which are thereby put in more conflict with
one another and claim their respective roles in part on moral grounds.
This is a kind of moral rationalization, but it's not the
same as Weber's disenchantment. Many of these past processes include
"counter-reformations," through which purificatory
"fundamentalism," in answer to the first, but also animism, if not
polytheism, and theological pluralism, in response to both, return, resurge, or
merely perdure. While the former response is sometimes identified with an
ethos, if not a politics, of social change that begins with the home, the
latter is often associated with an ethics of personal self-fashioning. Scholars
in religion and ethics, like anthropologists, are not necessarily impartial
participants of all of these vast historical systems, which are partially
constituted by argument. They are authors, whose use of terms and perspective
has consequences. We engage in these systems either explicitly or indirectly.
The analytic ground is complicated, as these remarks indicate, by the lack of
consensus about what constitutes either "religion" or
"ethics," and by the fact that the different meanings proposed for
one sometimes have clear consequences for discerning or describing the other,
leading to circular debates regarding their "relationship."
Furthermore, it is far from obvious that essentially secular
and analytical modes of thought such as philosophy or anthropology will avoid
their philosophical heritage from particular religious practices and instead
function indirectly within their parameters. In what follows, I would not
pretend to have the authority to decide which meanings are valid in any
objectivist context, assuming that some are correct. I'll try to mix a realistic
account built on an anthropological tradition of abstraction, analogy, and
deduction with a practical, inductive, geographical, and ethnographic
understanding of how things turn out in real life, in human history, and over
time. This necessitates approaching cultural difference with rigor and
generosity, as well as coming to terms with the fundamental conflict between
relativism and universalism. Finally, this article will only examine some of
the claims that arise from reasoning about the relationship between religion
and ethics.
MORALITY LIKE RELIGION IS NOT MEASURABLE.
One issue with the answer to Frazer that ethics can be found
in the most surprising ways is that it may leave the relationship between
ethics and faith unquestioned, simply extending the scope of both. However,
faith – in the form of the ideas and, most importantly, the practices that go
by the word – has little more claim of being ethical than all other human endeavors.
Indeed, ethics, defined as the repeated establishment of standards for
assessing practice as good, just, right, etc., as well as subsequent behavior
adopted in light of such criteria, may be argued to be intrinsic to all human
behavior. Even when ethics is clearly described as good conduct or the profession,
explanation, advocacy, or cultivation of such behavior, or the knowledge of its
limits, it is debatable whether it is more widespread in religion than
elsewhere, considering assertions to the contrary by certain religious
authority. Robert Orsi, for example, shows the cruelty as well as the benefit
that faith can incite in his admirable and brave account of
mid-twentieth-century North American Roman Catholicism. Although faith is often
thought to include ethical certainty and self-formation, Orsi's is only one of
the academic accounts that demonstrate how a religious practice can be riven
with internal ethical debate and unequal implications.
Thus, the Muslim piety movement, for example, will be unable
to substantiate the arguments that its followers are inherently superior to
other Muslims or that they often behave ethically. Furthermore, being ethical
or behaving ethically, as well as the related rewards and punishments, as well
as the risks and delusions, are not to be equated with acting ethically. Ethics
must inevitably involve self-questioning, not only about one's own arguments or
actions, but also about the boundaries of what is possible in areas like human
well-being, understanding pain, and delivering justice. Indeed, a central
argument in Geertz's popular essay on faith is that it does not only have a
theodicy, but also take responsibility for recognizing its limitations. To
this, one might add the conflict that exists in all religious hierarchies
between ethical people, practice, or insight and the authority or influence to
render or enact ethical judgments or lay claim to the ethical high ground. This
isn't to say that religion doesn't provoke or motivate people to do good things
at times, and often religious leaders, such as "saints," can be used
as ethical role models, as can everyday people who use "religious"
tools to expand their ethical scope.
Religion, on the other hand, will seek and execute demons,
heretics, and immodest people in ways that outsiders might find hypocritical,
and it often honors ethically ambiguous characters such as roaming ascetics,
holy fools, trickster figures, and the like. Indeed, myth has been criticized
for its ethical complexity, and this ambiguity can be seen in different aspects
of mythopraxis, particularly in the variety of traditions and figures
synonymous with "liminality," carnival, and other similar events.
Finally, common people's ethical actions and insights may be
"religiously" told while remaining beyond and sometimes contradicting
the precepts of "official" faith, as in popular attempts in Vietnam
to satisfy and liberate the dead's ghosts. Anthropological definitions of
“religion” have shifted over time, from relatively narrow objectivist accounts
in which belief in God or other “supernatural” beings was simply asserted as a
definition, to broader accounts characteristic of symbolic and structural
anthropology, and more recently, to narrower genealogical and skeptical ones
based on the emergence into public discourse of the word “religion.”
One of the reasons why some anthropologists painted the
field so widely was to demonstrate that rituals outside of Abrahamic beliefs or
"axial sects" were not outside the ethical pale, and thus deserved
the same academic and functional respect as those within them. Such rituals may
be interpreted as substantive and ethically aware as those within Abrahamic
traditions thanks to the structural–symbolic convergence of the s and s.
Indeed, the popularity of this work provided anthropologists with the resources
and confidence to take on the Abrahamic rituals themselves, which had
previously been left to scholars beyond those traditions.
Not just that, but the Abrahamic sects were distinguished by
systems, relationships, and stereotypes that could be seen in popular culture
as well as within their respective gatekeepers' established boundaries.
“Sacrifice” in all of its forms, from headhunting to Hindu temple offerings,
rules for butchering and consuming animals, alms and charity, or Faustian
bargains made with innocent victims, is a prime example of an analytical, not
“natural” category that allows for fruitful comparison across cultural,
religious, and institutional lines and encourages anthropological work within
the Old Testament. Sacrifice connects to the philosophical side of the gift
literature, raising and debating different concerns regarding the relative and
absolute principles and virtues of sharing and receiving, reciprocity, and
altruism. The notion of "grace" can underpin claims concerning the
"pure blessing" in philosophical responses to Mauss, which are often
marked by a Christian bias. In the work and lives of missionaries and religious
martyrs, as well as activists in philanthropy, international development, and
humanitarian aid, similar ideals of ostensibly selfless giving recur, repeating
Weber's formulation of the calling.
However, we know that one-sided ethical formulations of pure
donation or entirely disinterested actions can be viewed with caution, at the
very least tempered by Mauss' sense of balance, which he derived from both
Aristotle on virtuous conduct and Kant and Durkheim on duty. The combination of
desire and disinterest, independence and duty in the gift has been well
explained by Parry, who draws the appeal of the pure gift from a kind of idealized
dialectical contrast to the notion of the capitalist pure product, rather than
from the Christian idea of grace. Furthermore, according to Mauss and
Lévi-Strauss, circulation, like reciprocity, is generally regarded as a social
good in and of itself; moreover, these are known as the forms in which
precapitalist communities "naturally" operate, rather than as heroic
actions or explicit religious values difficult to attain in this universe by
ordinary mortals. Finally, Mauss regarded acts of generosity and sacrifice as
"absolute social facts," rather than abstracting them as
"religion" or "ethics," far less addressing them in terms
of the "relationship" between those reified abstractions. This
implies, in fact, that the topic of this essay is historically specific, only
possible to formulate and discuss in this way in a secular modern epoch. Human
sacrifice has provided a major theological source for ethical contemplation in
a particular kind of abstraction. For centuries of scholars, the Akedah, the
account of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, has done so, not just for religious
believers but also for historians and anthropologists interested sacrifice. The
interpretation of this religious occurrence or story can ultimately lead to a
distinction between religious and ethical considerations.
The Akedah reveals for Kierkegaard that religion is a
teleological suspension of the ethical. Having divine beliefs and demonstrating
it goes far above the ethical – a father willing to sacrifice his son – or, at
the very least, beyond ordinary ethics. This desire to destroy his children, to
make a human sacrifice, is not selfish or ethically utilitarian, as the Greek
sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, as portrayed by Euripides, may
be, but it is supra-ethical; it serves no calculable ends. And it's true that
much of what falls under the banner of religion pushes people to violent
extremes that aren't ethical in the ordinary sense: headhunting in Southeast
Asia, slicing off the foreskins of Muslim and Jewish babies or children,
penitential flagellation in Roman Catholicism and Shi'ism, the Hindu widow who
jumps onto the funeral pyre, the Buddhist protester who throws herself on the
ground.
Religion, in the very least, provides an idea of a hero or
martyr who sacrifices the mundane for something greater or above. Victor Turner
argued, more generally and less dramatically, that the liminal period of ritual
is a moment where social norms and distinctions are dismantled, making
everything and anything possible, and thereby beyond ethics in any respects but
the existential one of pure liberation. To summarize, religion may also contextualize
or circumscribe ethics, but religion may often be contextualized or
circumscribed by ethical considerations, whether by a silent "descent into
the usual" Das or a drastic overturning. To summarize, religion and ethics
are not completely isomorphic and cannot be fully associated with one another
from an anthropological standpoint. Yet, to ostensibly liberate the spiritual
from the supernatural, an account of faith and ethics must consider the
historical repercussions of abstracting them from the rest of social and
cultural life as distinct contemporary regimes.
And of the most intriguing steps here will undoubtedly be to
replace a plain binary pair with the triangulation that is common in today's
culture of faith, ethics, and law. For example, the statute should be
formulated as legal as it comes to delivering justice; but what happens when it
is seen as breaching fundamental ethical values from a moral standpoint, such
as admitting or banning capital punishment, abortion, blood transfusion, or
same-sex marriage? What does it mean to transform a secular legal language of
freedom into a religious language of duty, loyalty, respect, obedience, and so
on, and vice versa? Where does “ethics” fit into this discussion, and how does
or does it help to mediate or intensify conflict? An ethnocentric account of
ostensibly dis-embedded institutions, on the other hand, must be wary of the
ethnocentric assumption that our context, whether we call it “modernity” or
“postmodernity” or the neoliberal state, is a special case, unique in its
radical difference from all the other cultural and historical differences that
preceded it and that continue to be found more or less hidden alongside it or
that the neoliberal state is a special case, unique in
Aren't there conflicts between faith, ethics, and the law
all over the place? Isn't it true that Igbo mothers of polluting twins who were
doomed for imminent death were among the first to convert to Christianity
because of ethical concerns in the face of divine injunction? Tensions between
Rujia Confucian ethical ritualism and Legalism have existed in China since
ancient times. Finally, rather than take the institutionalization of faith and
ethics in a historical sense literally in a way that assumes their mutual
incommensurability, it would be more interesting to think of
"religion" and "ethics" as separate, incommensurable
approaches to analyze the social whole or the human experience. In
anthropological accounts of the relationship between faith and ethics, there
are roughly two main streams or themes that can bypass any of the aporias I've
mentioned. I refer to these streams as Durkheimian and Weberian, after their
respective metaphysical forefathers Kant and Aristotle, while noting that there
is a lot of overlap and diversity between them in practice. The Durkheimian
stream stresses submission to a particular social or liturgical order, while
the Weberian stream is concerned with the realistic juxtaposition of alternate
living styles.
