(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)
Religions can provide a comprehensive basis for belief about the world and how to live in it, and they have organisational structures to promulgate their teaching and to support (and control) their adherents. Although many thinkers have assumed that religious adherence would inevitably decline as a result of discoveries in science and post-Enlightenment thinking, the opposite is actually the case in most of the world – except in Western Europe.[1] Religion plays a major role in society.
Each religion has a sacred narrative, which is documented in religious texts which illustrate and explain its doctrines: mythos and logos.[2] Each prescribes rituals which symbolise important parts of its narrative and uses them in collective worship as an act of obedience which strongly binds the group together. The narratives, doctrines and rituals are visible signs of differences between religious groups, but these groups also have a lot in common: notably in their objective of providing moral leadership to instruct people how to behave towards others.
The monotheistic Abrahamic religions divided into the three main streams of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.[3] Each of these has then further divided into sects. And there are other, non-Abrahamic, religions: Buddhism, Hinduism and others. It is not relevant in this book to analyse why there are so many religions and sects, only to take account of the fact that they exist, that many of their followers are sincere, and that some are passionate. They all believe that they are right and it is clearly unrealistic for any of them to expect to convert the whole world to their way of thinking. They are an illustration of people’s inherent diversity (2.2).
There is a history of confrontation, both between the main streams and between the sects in each of them, even though the teachings of all of them promote peace and neighbourliness. But religion is not a ‘zero-sum game’, where there can be only one ‘winner’. For a Southern Baptist to be right, it is not necessary for a Sunni Muslim to be wrong in terms of their beliefs: they both believe in (the same) God, but express their beliefs in different words; they have different religious practices and quote different religious texts; they might both have faith and a strong sense of morality. One could say that different religious groups believe many of the same things but, through circumstances of time, place and upbringing, they are using different language to legitimise their beliefs. They all take their religious beliefs as authority for the behaviour that they preach.
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] John Micklethwait gave examples, of rapid growth of religion in China and strong religious adherence in America, in a lecture on this subject at the LSE on 1 June 2009, entitled Religion and the Market, which was available as a video or on MP3 in April 2014 at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/PublicEvents/events/2009/20090311t1952z001.aspx. He was quoting his book God is Back.
Further data were quoted by Eric Kaufmann, Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and author of Shall the religious inherit the earth?, in a lecture at the RSA on 15 April 2010, entitled Religion, Demography and Politics in the 21st Century. His thesis was that “far from declining, religious populations are actually multiplying” and that this was due to the fecundity of fundamentalist religious groups. That assertion has been robustly challenged – but his demographic data on recent growth in religion was not challenged. An event recording is available by contacting the British Library’s Drama and Literature Recordings section (Email: drama@bl.uk, telephone: +44(0)20 74127629).
[2] The term mythos should not be confused with a popular use of the word "myth" to mean something that is widely believed but false. Mythos is used here in the scholarly sense of the word: to refer to a collection of sacred stories that represent the truth of existence, as perceived and experienced by the people who believe in them. A mythos is a narrative which is axiomatically true to those who have faith in it. The term logos is used to describe doctrinal instruction and reasoning.
Karen Armstrong describes the role of religious texts, and the concepts of mythos and logos, in the introduction to her book The Battle for God.
[3] Karen Armstrong describes the separation of the Abrahamic religions in The Great Transformation, pp. 379-390.