Religion,
residual problems, and functional differentiation: an ambiguous
relationship
Peter
Beyer
Zusammenfassung: Der Artikel untersucht am Beispiel
der modernen Religionen die fast paradoxe Beziehung zwischen Ausdifferenzierung
(Systembildung) und Entdifferenzierung in der funktional differenzierten
Weltgesellschaft. Die Kritik der Religionen an den typischen Folgeproblemen
dieser Gesellschaft ist symptomatisch dafür, daß gerade in diesem
Bereich eine Spannung herrscht zwischen Systembildung und Anti-
oder Nicht-Systembildung. Die Religion besitzt eine Art "Wahlverwandtschaft"
mit den Folgeproblemen der modernen Gesellschaft, und zwar aus
zwei Gründen. Zum einen finden diese Probleme einen Widerhall
in den Schwierigkeiten, Religion als ein funktionales System unter
anderen zu konstruieren, und zum andern wegen der holistischen
Perspektive der differenzierten Religion überhaupt. Die Probleme,
die uns als charakteristische Folgen der Dominanz spezialisierter
Technik erscheinen, verweisen auf die Ambivalenz, die sich aus
der Umstrukturierung der Religion in eine spezialisierte Technik
ergeben, und auf die Schwierigkeit, in der heutigen Gesellschaft
diese Folgeprobleme auf einer anderen Basis als der technisch-funktionalen
zu bewältigen.
I
World society today has, as its dominant structural form, the
functional differentiation of its major subsystems. Most observers
of global social reality would not state the matter in quite such
Luhmannian terms; but notions which speak about the ascendancy
of capitalism, a global state system, or simply technical rationality
implicitly point in the same direction. Current discussions about
globalization in fact show a prevalence of economic and political
conceptions (for example, Shaw 1994;
Thomas et al.
1987; Wallerstein 1995;
cf. Waters 1995), with the addition
of, broadly speaking, cultural perspectives that almost invariably
assume a background of states, economy, and technique (Beck
1986; Featherstone 1995;
Giddens 1990; Robertson
1992). These approaches continue and expand under the titles
of globalization and its cognates what a vast social-scientific
and philosophical tradition has analyzed as geographically more
restricted and often state-centred modern societies.
One of the more striking features of quite a few of both the
current and past efforts at describing modern and now global society
is the degree to which these focus on what they deem to be negative
results of the modernization and the globalization process (cf.
Luhmann 1984; 1987a),
on what I wish to call its residual problems. Such critique varies
a great deal, both in content and severity. Yet among the concerns
expressed in more recent theories, certain ones recur consistently
and stand out as primary: globalization leads to the oppression
of the majority of people by a minority (Holm/Sensen
1995; Wallerstein 1979);
it homogenizes and restricts the possibilities for individual
and collective human action in favour of the technically rational,
the superficial, and even the "inhuman" (Bauman
1989; Ellul 1954; Ritzer 1996;
Saul 1992); it destroys the physical
and biological environment to the general detriment of life on
earth (Rifkin 1991; Gordon/Suzuki
1991); and it addicts us to the futile quest for more and
more control that also yields permanent crisis and constant insecurity
(Beck 1986).
A remarkable feature of these critiques is that they accuse modern
and global society of negating precisely those values that are
actually most typical of it, ideals such as equality, freedom,
tolerance, and progress. Underdevelopment, racism, sexism, the
"iron cage", dependency, alienation, risk, imperialism,
environmental degradation, totalitarianism, among other terms,
all pass moral judgements on the basis of these motive forces,
these characteristic ideals of the largest part of contemporary
society. The critiques, therefore, are largely not those of an
alternative vision let alone a rising class, like a liberal bourgeois
critique of an aristocratic society. Rather, like romanticism,
they correspond to bourgeois or modern society itself: they assume
functionally differentiated society and espouse its characteristic
values, even if they take the form of seemingly anti-systemic
counter-images. What this means is that they do not point beyond
themselves to a different form of dominant differentiation. At
best, like the early Marx, they envision a society without differentiation
or only segmentary differentiation; and these possibilities they
leave in an evocative mist sometimes nostalgically described as
"community" (cf. Morris
1996). To the degree that any solutions are even possible
on the basis of such critiques, either they amount to a straightforward
negation and refusal; or, much more typically, they end up resorting
to those functionally systemic techniques that are at the root
of the problems, especially the legal and the political.
My purpose in this article, however, is not to critique the critiques;
nor is it to deny the problems attendant upon technically rational
dominance. Rather I look more closely at the almost paradoxical
relation between systemicity and anti-systemicity in global, functionally
differentiated society. More specifically, I examine how contemporary
religion points to and illustrates this ambiguity; how religious
response to the characteristic problems of this society is itself
symptomatic of a more general struggle within the religious sphere
between systemicity and non-systemicity or anti-systemicity.(1)
Religion, more than other domains of functional specialization
(with the possible exception of art), has a kind of "elective
affinity" with the residual problems of modern society because
they resonate with the difficulties attendant upon constructing
religion as a function system in the social context of a dominance
of functional differentiation. The problems that appear to us
to be the result of a dominance of specialized technique point
to the ambivalence attendant upon forming religion as one specialized
technique beside others.
Associating religion with non-technical, non-instrumental, or
at least a different kind of reason is not particularly recent,
especially in the Western cultural spheres of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. From Augustine to al-Ghazali to Maimonides, the question
of the relation between "reason" and "revelation"
has for some centuries been an important moment in the differentiation
of religion in these areas, especially in Western European society.
In recent times, however, the dominance of non-religious (that
is, secularized) instrumental systems has led various religious
observers to insist on a more radical difference between religion
and other social forms. These efforts have often implied the de-differentiation
of religion: religion is said to distinguish itself as that which
cannot be differentiated. I refer, therefore, not to 19th century
critiques of religion as irrational, illusory, or inferior; but
to religious protests that reject the relegation of religion to
one functional domain beside other, autonomous ones. Included
under this heading would be the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius
IX; declarations of such varied people as Swami Vivekananda, Angarika
Dharmapala, and Liang Shu-ming that Hinduism, Buddhism, or Confucianism
offer a necessary "spiritual" corrective to the "one-sided
materialism" (read: technical dominance) of the West; the
opposition of genuine "faith" to degenerated "religion"
by such varied Christian thinkers as Jacques Ellul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
and Wilfrid Cantwell Smith; and the assertions by numerous Muslims,
Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and representatives of aboriginal religions
that theirs is not a religion, but a (holistic) "way of life".
In each of these cases, the basis of the protest is that we cannot
and should not "reduce" religion to one (technical)
domain beside others. What is at issue is the incorporation of
religion into the logic of functional differentiation.
Religion, therefore, from these perspectives, offers an approach
to the world that is much more than one specialized technique
beside others. It represents not just another possibility, but
the foundation of all possibilities. Religion, we are given to
understand, is about the whole, about what makes the possible
possible; and therefore cannot be compartmentalized. As a by now
century long sociological tradition has argued, what we now call
religion does seem to have some such foundational qualities. The
question of religion’s general character, however, can only
make sense in a particular social context in which we try to express
that character. In the case of modern and by now global society,
the dominance of functionally differentiated systems means that
the social reality of religion as an autonomous modality of communication
will depend significantly on how well we can imagine and reconstruct
religion in the form of a function system. And this, in turn,
depends on how well such a system can accommodate the holistic
character of religion – its claim to provide access to the
holistic foundations of reality – in the sort of technical,
specialized, and in this sense partial form that these systems
typically have developed in global society. The protests just
mentioned point to a definite problem in this regard.
If we accept this diagnosis, then those same religious objections
will also provide a fertile perspective from which to criticize
functionally differentiated society as such, especially as manifest
in its historically typical residual problems. As the consequences
of functional differentiation, these can be treated as symptoms
of religious failings. One possible formulation might run like
this: by not giving religion its place, we are seduced to instrumental
hubris and thus, to our peril, lose sight of the insufficiency
of human endeavour and its need to be grounded in something beyond
itself.
We can look at this challenge to religion in a slightly different
way in order to highlight how the problem for religion is at the
same time one for functionally differentiated society as such.
Religiousness is in modern and global circumstances under contextual
pressure to form itself selectively as another instrumental system,
which means as another technically rational system that focuses
on the reproduction and increase of its characteristic communication.
Among the essential symptoms of such systematization would be
convergent centres of religious authority, expressly religious
organizations (many with global extent or at least more than local
range), articulated religious programmes elaborating clear religious
binary codes, and the effective (self-) observation of these institutions
explicitly as religion.(2)
Such systematization is by no means some sort of evolutionary
necessity. Modern and global society could probably manage without
a religious system, although that would not mean the elimination
of religious communication. To the extent that religion does form
as a system, however, it will present no better possibilities
for addressing the typical residual problems of functionally differentiated
society than other systems. For, if the dominance of functional
differentiation is itself at the root of problems like inequality,
insecurity, and environmental degradation; then functionally specialized
religion will be just as susceptible as other, more powerful systems
such as economy and science to being seen as part of the problem,
not just as the source of solutions. And indeed, it is not unusual
to hear religious critics of modern and global society target
not just imperialists, capitalists, and technocrats, but also
"conservative" religion and religious authorities.(3)
To cite just two examples, Latin American liberationists have
thus criticized Roman church authorities and burgeoning Pentecostalism
for reinforcing the status quo; while Ali Shariati and his followers
in pre-revolutionary Iran condemned "Safavid" ulama
for being quiescent and thus aiding and abetting injustice (cf.
Beyer 1994).
This said, the alternative for religion and its carriers is to
avoid functionally specific systemization, to avoid extensive
organization, orthodoxifications, and self-presentation as religion.
We see evidence of such a desideratum in various religious manifestations
like Western neo-paganism, New Age movements, and, ironically
enough, Pentecostalism. All three of these eschew convergent systematization
in principle, if not actually in practice. This direction, however,
risks precisely the "invisibility" of religion which,
as Luckmann (1963) notes, amounts
to fairly radical secularization. A sort of middle ground offers
itself in the form of the social (religious) movement; but this
type of social system, although potentially quite effective for
mobilizing religious resources toward specific problems, suffers
from the disadvantage, like Weber’s charisma, of being inherently
evanescent. Sooner or later, social movements have to transform
into something else, or disappear. In consequence, we are likely
to continue to witness religion expressing itself in all these
possibilities: in a function system, in social movements, and
in non-systemic forms. The latter two, at least, usually with
a strong element of protest, of opposition to the dominant social
structures, albeit very often in the name of the dominant value-orientations
of global society and only sometimes against them.
These rather extended introductory remarks now require further
elaboration. The remainder of this essay thus takes a few steps
back to examine various key questions that the foregoing observations
imply. Specifically, I look at aspects of the history of the functional
differentiation of religion under modernizing and globalizing
conditions. Questions of binary codings and the relation of religion
to other instrumental systems are part of a presentation that
seeks to isolate the specific character and peculiar problems
of religion in modern society. On this basis, I then return to
the question of how religion relates to the typical residual problems
of global society.
II
Niklas Luhmann’s work on religion gives several useful starting
points for a closer analysis of what religion has become in the
modern era, and some of the consequences of these transformations.(4)
Particularly fruitful is the idea of looking at the more recent
history of religion precisely in terms of its functional differentiation;
and, in that context, comparing the structures of the religious
system to those of other function systems. The differentiation
in the context of comparison is, of course, more than a question
of scientific observation; it places the emphasis on religion’s
position as one function system beside others, not merely on the
possibilities for religious differentiation as such.
A discussion of the place of religion in modern and global society
cannot confine itself to a discussion of Christianity; but for
historical reasons, any analysis has to begin here. Following
Luhmann’s analysis, but making various additions and emendations,
the story begins effectively in Western Europe during the Middle
Ages. In the wake of the gradually disappearing Roman world, the
Christian church emerged for some time as the only overarching
institution of the region, representing not only differentiated
religion, but also preserving and carrying forward important portions
of Greco-Roman culture that would later play a role in the emergence
of a functionally differentiated society. The church was a religious
institution with multifunctional characteristics. In the context
of a society in which stratified differentiation dominated and
no overpowering traditional political empire emerged, the church
became the expression of a functional religious system of probably
unparalleled contrast with the surrounding society.
By the High Middle Ages, we can justifiably speak of an "age
of faith", not because Europeans were so exceptionally pious,
but because the religious system through the church and its professional,
often monastic, representatives was so prominent. The medieval
"explosion of sin" in the context of a "scarcity
of salvation" documented by Delumeau (1983;
cf. Luhmann 1989) was the
obverse face of an exceptional increase in the pastoral techniques
and resources whose purpose was to deal with these problems. The
church had other important roles beside the religious, yet at
the core of all these endeavours was the pursuit of faith, the
increase and elaboration of religious communication and religious
consciousness.
Two aspects of this medieval European story are of particular
importance for our purposes here. First is that reflexivity and
closure of this religious system centred around the two binary
codes of salvation/damnation and the moral good/bad (Luhmann
1987b; 1989). People
engaged in religious activity for the sake of salvation, a scarce
quality which it was impossible to attain without the help of
the church’s resources because of the severity of sin, that
is, human moral weakness. An elaborated and, from the perspective
of the religious system, unified moral code connected virtually
all human social activity to the quest for salvation and the real
possibility of damnation. In a society where stratified differentiation
dominated and so much of the most important communication happened
in face-to-face interactions, moral coding could and did provide
a solid connection between differentiated religious concerns and
the rest of social life. Second, with the addition of its, strictly
speaking, non-religious functions, the church, as the institutional
incarnation of the religious system, was not only a very salient
and powerful presence in this society. As far as functionally
specialized institutions were concerned, it had for a time no
real competitors. Other functional institutions, notably the political,
were comparatively weak. In retrospect, we can see that the almost
hyper-development of the religious system in the absence of the
serious political counterweight that characterized most other
civilizations with differentiated religion was one of the prime
conditions for the eventual shift to a dominance of functional
differentiation in Western society. That transformation, once
it was seriously under way in the later medieval period, led to
the further differentiation of the religious system, but now increasingly
in a context of competition from other rising function systems,
above all the political/legal, the economic, and the scientific;
and also eventually, perhaps even more critically, the health,
the educational, the artistic, and that for mass information media.
In these circumstances, religion fared reasonably well for quite
some time. The comparative weaknesses that it showed after the
18th century have to be seen against the background of its previous
exceptional prominence and of the greater capacity for instrumental
specialization of at least some of its systemic competitors. To
a certain extent, religion weakened in the West because it had
once been so strong; but only to a certain extent.
The Reformation and its aftermath illustrate some of the key
dynamics involved. The root impulse of most reformers was to purify
religion, which would seem to mean to enhance its differentiation.
Yet what they reacted against was the instrumentality of the church,
its elaborate technicization as a specialized institution centred
around the salvation/ damnation code. Less directly at issue,
but also of importance, was the multifunctionality of the church,
its wealth, its political power especially. At least for the dominant
Lutheran, Calvinist, and Zwinglian movements, the solution, as
Luhmann points out (1989),
was to insert grace as a code in between salvation/damnation and
good/bad. This emphasis on "faith" rather than "works"
tended to differentiate religion even more from other domains
of human activity. It aimed at increasing the recursiveness of
religious communication, so that only "religious" criteria
would be relevant. The resulting devaluation of any technical
means to gain salvation, however, points to the tendency of highly
differentiated religion to disconnect from "worldly"
or "profane" social life. Unlike the today more dominant
functional domains such as law, politics, economy, science, and
health; but like art, religion, it would seem, becomes less instrumental
at high levels of differentiation. This difference is borne out
in other religions as well, such as in the Zen notion of "sudden"
enlightenment and the Daoist idea of non-action. In general, it
seems that pure religion tends toward "other-worldliness"
at the level of its more primary codings, making secondary codings
such as a moral code all the more important if religion is to
have direct social relevance.
In the Protestant case, the "faith only" or radical
predestinarian directions were never successfully pursued: they
would have subjectivized the code too much or simply put it beyond
human disposition. Instead, we see a rather rapid return to some
form of ecclesiastical and ritual instrumentalization and to a
continuing emphasis on morality for connecting the possibility
of salvation or damnation to life "in the world". Justification
by faith, no less than Catholic sacramental mediation of grace,
needed to find a way of reconnecting to other social systems of
meaning. The moral code was and remains even today the dominant
way of doing this, at least in Christianity. That dependency,
however, also points to certain important disadvantages for this
religion in the modernizing context.
As long as morality occupied a relatively central and unifying
role within European society, respecifying the religious code
through a moral code could be and was quite effective. With the
rise of other function systems and the decline of the more morally
dependent stratified systems, however, morality gradually lost
that centrality. The different rising systems generated their
own independent, different, and not infrequently, from the perspective
of the prevailing religio-moral code, immoral criteria for action.
As these became more dominant, morality became one regulator of
social action beside other more and more prevalent considerations
of functional or technical efficacy. Moreover, given that religion
was itself a highly developed function system with its own "raison
d’église", it could also become the subject of moral
evaluation and critique (cf. Luhmann
1989, 307). Here we have at least one of the reasons that
contemporary religious criticism of functional differentiation
and its consequences will tend to include criticism of religion
to the extent that it presents itself as just another functionally
specialized institution. The decentralization or deprivileging
of morality because of the rise of other function systems not
dependent on moral regulation did not, however, mean that moral
questions were no longer important. Far from it. What it did mean
was that religion, as one function system beside others, could
no longer as self-evidently claim moral questions as its own;
and that moral considerations were, from the perspective of society
as a whole, less determinative.
Another critical aspect of these transformations for which the
Reformation and its aftermath provide good illustration concerns
the pluralization of religion into religions. Here the rapidly
rising prominence of the political system of states played a key
role. The confessional splits that resulted from the Reformation
expressed religious differences, but these would in all likelihood
not have broken the organizational and theological unity of the
Western Christian church if rising political powers had not used
the opportunity to free themselves more effectively from ecclesiastical
tutelage. The Westphalian formula tended to identify states with
either the Catholic or one of the Protestant churches. But far
from being simply a reformulation along national lines of what
had existed before across state boundaries before, it expressed
rather the superiority of political over religious power. The
English Reformation is the clearest example, but the situation
was not that much different even in Catholic countries.
It is in this context of rough and temporary coordination of political
and religious boundaries that we see arise conceptualizations
of religion and religions that parallel the distinctions between
the state and states or, eventually, nations. Much as the state
became a common political form which could only exist concretely
as a plurality of states, so European observers, beginning in
the 17th century, began to treat religion as a generic form for
which there were a plurality of concrete manifestations: not simply
Protestantism and Catholicism, for these were versions of Christianity;
but, in the light of the beginning parallel expansion of European
power to all corners of the world, also other religions, initially
Islam, Judaism, and "paganism"; and then in the 18th
and 19th centuries, the other "world religions" (see
Almond 1988; Harrison
1990; Marshall 1970; Smith
1964). It must be stressed, however, that what we do not have
here is a sort of ecumenic discovery and tolerance of religious
diversity; that would in all likelihood have discouraged the new
notions because it would encourage a blurring of boundaries. Rather
European religious conflict, predicated on an intolerant exclusivism
and on political and economic competition between states, was
a condition for the possibility of seeing religions as discrete
and more or less mutually exclusive systems of belief and practice.
This pluralization did not remain at the level of (European)
observers’ suggestions. The modelling of religions that emerged
was approximately parallel to that of the emerging nations in
the sense that there has been a tendency to see and organize religions
as aspects of national cultures. And we can see that the global
imagining and reconstruction of these religions has very often
been closely associated with the emergence of nationalisms. Yet
religion in the West was not just an undifferentiated aspect of
culture or society. It was also, and more importantly, a differentiated
function system. As Westerners effectively spread the other function
systems to the rest of the world, they tried to do this with religion
as well; not only in the sense of spreading Christianity, but
also in the sense of encouraging other people to reimagine and
reconstruct their religious traditions as religions. Both efforts
achieved a modest amount of success. Nonetheless, the spread and
appropriation by non-Westerners of the model of the nation and
the political system of the modern state has been far less problematic
than has been the spread and appropriation of the model of religion.
The reasons for this difference bring us back to the internal
recursive structures of functionally specialized religion more
generally, and once again to the context of a dominance of functionally
differentiation. The particular pattern that the West followed
turns out to have more general application.
When discussing the binary code of religion more generally, Luhmann
consistently favours the distinction between transcendent and
immanent (e.g. Luhmann 1986,
183-192; 1989; 1991). As
an overall observation about religion, this is a defensible description,
even if no religions actually operate with this code directly.
Its usefulness in the present context is that it points to the
holism of religion. Various sociological definitions of religion
try to focus on the same feature with words like supra-empirical
and ultimate. Luhmann himself puts it in terms of the meaning
of meaning (1996). What
is at issue is the aim of religion to structure its communication
in terms of some sort of final ground for the possibility of anything:
how is the possible possible?
This root form of religion has consequences, especially in functionally
differentiated society. The more "pure" religious determinations
are, the less they will be connected to "phenomenal"
reality: the Protestant Reformers could not insist on "faith
alone". The high gods of many small-scale societies are too
remote to concern themselves much with human affairs, but they
are responsible for the fact that anything exists at all. Ultimately,
even nirvana has no own-being and therefore one can say neither
that it is nor that it is not, nor both, and so forth. Put in
terms of the transcendent/immanent code, religion can and at times
does strive toward the singularity of the transcendent (the sacred
as Otto (1936) and Eliade (1959)
put it) to escape the limitations of the polarity.(5)
In light of this feature, highly differentiated religion, not
just in the modern West, will constantly have to face the problem
of respecifying itself into more "compromising" terms.
Religion may be that which deals with the whole, but that, to
use a typically Luhmannian formulation, is an identity that must
become a difference in order to make a difference. Yet such compromise,
such distinction is not restricted by anything inherently religious;
it can happen in an almost infinite variety of ways. As Durkheim
(1937) pointed out, any thing
can be sacred because the sacred cannot be anything in particular.
Religion, especially in its differentiated forms, is therefore
susceptible at least as much to pluralization as to convergence,
and this not just accidentally. In a Hindu formulation, Brahman
is singular, but then again there are also 330 million deities.
There are, of course, ways of controlling this pluralization,
but these all involve reconnection to and involvement in, functionally
speaking, non-religious social structures. The consequences of
holism will accordingly depend on the socio-structural context
of religion. In societal situations where functional differentiation
does not dominate, the flexibility that the holistic penchant
of religion implies can and has been an advantage: religion and
religious specialists, as an expression of their concern with
religious questions, could fulfil all sorts of non-religious functions
in the name of religion. We saw a very clear example of this in
the above discussion of the European Middle Ages. When various
other function systems rise to prominence, however, the challenge
for religion is that most of the more powerful ways of reconnecting
will become the specializations of the other systems. Technical
specialization leads to the elaboration of highly improbable but
empirically very effective means. Religious specialists, with
their focus on the transcendent as ground of the immanent, are
thereby not specialists in immanent, empirically effective means.
At best, their efforts in this direction will appear supplemental,
to be used in addition or when all else fails: If I am sick, I
will go to a doctor; I may also pray. If threatened, I may call
upon the gods to destroy my enemy; but the police or the army
would be so much more effective.
From a slightly different perspective, one can use the Parsonian
concept of "real assets" (Parsons
1963) or its Luhmannian version, "symbiotic mechanisms"
(Luhmann 1974), to make
the same point. As long as other function systems have not claimed
the most universal biological factors of human social existence
– perception, physical force, sexuality, nourishment, illness,
child-rearing, shelter – religion can respecify itself through
all of these, directly or indirectly. But once systems for science,
politics, law, family, economy, health, and education have crystallized
around these, holistic religion, while certainly not irrelevant,
will have to compete with or otherwise influence systemic partners
that refer primarily to one asset or another, but not all of them.
Religion, in such a situation, may well be left with whatever
remains, above all individual and communal integration –
which points again to moral codings – and "ecstatic"
(that is, unusual) perception; and even in these realms, other
systems, such as the political (above all through the idea of
the nation), the legal, the familial, the medical, and most especially
the artistic, offer a certain amount of competition. In this context,
religion becomes a broadly present type of communication, but
one that at the level of society as a whole has difficulty becoming
a clearly convergent function system like the others because other
systems have limited the possibilities for the technical instrumentalization
of religion, that is, its demonstrable capacity to have immanent
effect. The result is at best a pluralized or multi-centred system:
if it were not for the modern reconstruction of the various religions,
there would be no religious system at all (see Beyer
1997).
This profound ambiguity in the situation of religion in modern
and global society is at the root of why religion and religions
have established a special resonance with the typical problems
generated by a dominance of functional differentiation. It also
helps to explain why the religiously-based responses to those
problems are themselves so ambiguous. It remains in a final section
to take a closer look at the nature of those responses and what
they tell us about functionally differentiated global society
more generally.
III
The arguments that I have presented thus far may make it seem
that we are living in an inevitably secularizing society, and
that the ability of religion to respond to the residual problems
of functional differentiation is quite limited. In a sense, that
is what I am suggesting, except that nothing is inevitable, and
secularization does not mean the powerlessness, let alone the
disappearance, of religion. In fact, given religion’s penchant
for claiming to render access to the meaning of the whole, and
that moral codings still constitute one of the most important
secondary codings for most religions; it would seem to be a very
suitable perspective from which to criticize global society as
a whole, and therefore, as a whole, a society that features a
dominance of functional differentiation. The ambiguity of religion,
to use theological language, its tendency to be "in the world,
but not of it", suits this type of social communication to
articulating the problems that seem to be attendant upon functional
differentiation itself. In consequence, we might expect the representatives
of religion to be a prime source for such criticism. Perhaps just
as importantly, we should expect those critical descriptions that
see the problems in the nature of functional differentiation or
technical rationality itself to take on religious colouring. Because
religion takes the paradoxical perspective of the whole, holistic
perspectives will tend to have a religious look about them.
On the basis of this diagnosis, what is perhaps surprising is
that religious protest of this nature is only somewhat present
in contemporary global society, and not more so. By far the largest
part of what religious institutions and religious people do today
is straightforward religious communication: the recursive reproduction
of religion, more often than not within the functionally systemic
framework of a particular religion. There are, to be sure, emanating
from different religions, various protest movements of the sort
the above analysis suggests. One thinks, for instance, of Christian
liberation theology and militant neo-traditionalist Islam with
their characteristic vilification of capitalism and Western imperialism
under such moral headings as social justice and global arrogance.
Catholic bishops and the pope regularly issue statements lamenting
injustice, insecurity, and environmental degradation as essentially
the consequences of religious and moral failing in global society.
The World Council of Churches has its Justice, Peace, and Integrity
of Creation programme which does something similar (see Beyer
1994 for a more complete analysis). And the list could go
on to include the Dalai Lama, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Soka
Gakkai International, the Unification Church, to name but a few.
Taken together, however, all these manifestations come to very
little when one considers how much protest comes from non-religious
sources.
In this regard, beside the critiques emanating from traditional
religious sources, some but only some, of the more "secular"
movements dedicated to addressing the residual problems of global
society also exhibit religious qualities in that they seek a solution
to the problems in dedifferentiation in favour of a "communal"
or "natural" whole. Examples include socialist and communist
movements which have envisioned a classless society usually projected
onto an eschatological future; and ecological movements such as
deep ecology and eco-feminism that seek to retreat to the local
and face-to-face in an effort to escape the deleterious effects
of social differentiation.
With both sorts of protest manifestation, the most important
issues in the present context are not just their presence and
even their frequency. At least as significant, and probably more
so, are their social form and their social effect. The form that
they take and which of them have had the greatest influence in
contemporary society tell us something about religion and about
the power of functional differentiation within global society.
It should surprise no one that the dominant form for these protests
is and has been the social movement. Here we have a social system
that centres precisely around mobilization toward specific goals
(see Ahlemeyer 1989). Social
movements are well suited to protest against the dominant societal
systems because they can to a large extent escape the limitations
of the recursive communication within these systems, and in so
doing highlight and construct the problems that the dominant systems
generate but do not solve. They are well-suited to thematizing
that which the structures of these systems exclude through the
selectivity of their own operations. By comparison to those systems,
the possibilities for social movements are less limited because
they can move in anti-structural ways; and this applies to all
societies, not just one dominated by functional differentiation.
Accordingly, the history of new religious and new political movements
is replete with those that appear "new" by reversing
what seems to be taken for granted in the dominant structures:
we have egalitarian movements in stratified societies, unifying
movements in tribal societies, communalizing movements in functionally
differentiated societies, and so forth. Yet, in all cases, the
social movement form also has at least one serious disadvantage,
and that is its instability or even evanescence: a system characterized
by mobilization must either continue to mobilize or cease to exist
as that form of system; much like an interaction system cannot
tolerate too long an interruption of interaction. For social movements,
that means disappearance or the translation of the movement’s
impulse into the idioms of the dominant systems: the millenarian
and anti-imperial religious movement becomes the imperial religion;
the anti-caste movement becomes another caste; the radical religious
brotherhood founds the next imperial dynasty. Occasionally, however,
social movements are the harbingers of a more radical shift in
societal structures, in dominant forms of societal differentiation;
but this, historically speaking, is rare. We can, of course, ask
whether perhaps contemporary protest movements, especially religious
or quasi-religious ones, contain the seeds of such rare transformation.
That, indirectly, is to ask the question of efficacy. Which of
the protesting movements, including the expressly religious, has
had the most effect; and how have they had that effect?
Even a cursory glance at the anti-systemic movements of the last
century shows that the most effective and powerful ones have been
those that translated their impulses into the idioms of certain
of the dominant function systems, above all the political, which
is to say the modern state. Socialist movements, for instance,
translated into the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic
of China; Islamist movements have more recently brought us the
Islamic Republic of Iran; non-Western anti-imperial indigenous
movements have produced a host of new nation-states; environmental,
labour, and equal rights movements have seen their concerns translated
into a host of laws and political decisions. Other systems have
also been involved to a lesser degree, notably in the ecological
case, the science and health systems. In many cases, movements
have left behind, often international, non-governmental organizations,
many of which address the residual problems on a regular basis,
but have lost most of their anti-systemicity and their holism
in the process.
The result of almost all of the protest movements has been to
reproduce and perhaps even strengthen the dominant function systems.
Protest has produced above all more political, legal, educational,
scientific, health, artistic, and news media communication. Even
the capitalist economic system, often the prime systemic symbol
of what is wrong with modern society, has benefitted through the
new range of commodifiable products and services that protest
has engendered. Like the anti-structural ritual that Victor Turner
(1969) analyzed in his famous
work, modern anti-systemic movements, in order to have an effect,
have, if anything, enhanced the systems that they target. Visions
of a better, a utopian world, need to find the means, the worldly
instruments, to realize themselves. In the current societal context,
the most powerful such means take the form of at least certain
of the dominant function systems. That observation brings back
the question of the role of religion.
In a sense, the religious system is the odd one out in this circumstance.
One would be hard-pressed to show that global society has become
a more religious place in the last number of decades. One could
in fact, just as easily argue the reverse. With one or two notable
exceptions, growth in religious communication has happened away
from the movements of protest, in spite of them rather than because
of them. The growth areas in Christianity are among the Pentecostals
and the Evangelical churches, and liberation theology or new Christian
rightism in the United States have had no noticeable effect on
that trend at all. Rather these latter movements have attracted
so much attention precisely because of their politicized character,
because they have taken the form of social movements whose goals
have led them into the political arena. Their relation with the
religious institutions themselves has always been ambiguous (cf.
Beyer 1994). Similar observations
apply to the growth of Orthodox Judaism and to politicizing developments
in Hinduism and Buddhism. The possible exceptions appear in Islam,
where politicization as a consequence of protest does seem to
have enhanced the power and presence of the religious institution
and its characteristic communication. Here, however, what is most
likely at work is the advantage that this religion gains through
its tradition of using a legal code, rather than just a moral
code, as its main secondary coding (see Beyer
1998b).
The upshot of the foregoing is that the fate of religion in modern
global society has at least as much, and probably more, to do
with its ability to reproduce itself as a series of religions,
subsystems of a global religious system, as it does with its "prophetic"
capacities. To be sure, the critiques, the protests, the religio-political
movements are a notable feature of our world; and I have argued
elsewhere that they will likely continue precisely because they
offer religion and its representatives a way of having noticeable
public influence (Beyer 1994).
Yet, given the prevalence of function as an organizing principle,
the "application" of religion to residual problems depends
on the continued reproduction and growth of religious institutions
as religious institutions: "applied" religion presumes
"pure" religion at least as much, if not more, than
the reverse. The continued development of a global function system
for religion, in large measure for reasons such as I have analyzed
in this article, is, however, an open question for the future.
The formation and reproduction of religions, self-identified and
observed as such, will probably continue and serve as the resource
base for protest movements against the residual problems of a
functionally differentiated society. Some sort of secularization
in the radical sense of that word seems unlikely, even in Western
Europe. Nonetheless, from a sociological perspective, a global
function system for religion is not necessary; and religion, like
morality, could eventually lose its presence as an observable
societal system.
Prof. Peter Beyer, Department of Classics and
Religious Studies
University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier Street East
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
pbeyer@aix1.uottawa.ca
