The Crisis of Religion
The three challenges that religion needs to overcome.
The New Mindscape 12–1
In The New Mindscape #11–2, I discussed how through the centuries, the religious traditions and institutions associated with the axial figures, such as Jesus, Mohammad and the Buddha, gradually became completely embedded into the socio-political structures of their societies, and into the social divisions of different societies.
Thus, by the 17th century, the world’s Axial religions had lost the “revolutionary”, innovative and critical edge that had characterised them at their origins. As Karl Marx commented, “Religion is the opium of the masses” [1] — by the 19th century, it only offered spiritual solace to the poor and suffering. And, as many movements of social reform and revolution have argued, religion had become part of the structures of domination by the feudal and capitalist classes that are against freedom and the emancipation of people.
Is it possible for religion to play a constructive role in social justice? Is religion on the side of justice, or with oppression? Nowadays, many religious movements are advocates of social justice, but in the 19th century, generally speaking, religious institutions in Europe and Asia were firmly on the side of preserving an unjust social order.
At the same time, a host of new developments, that began in Europe but soon spread to the rest of the world, led the very existence of religion to be challenged to its core. Here, I will mention three of these challenges.
The first challenge: freedom
The first great challenge to religion is how religion can reconcile itself to individual spiritual freedom and agency. Nowadays, with universal education and the scientific outlook, people don’t blindly follow and believe what their families or societies believe. Over the centuries, many religious traditions have become systems of dogma and customs, in which people are expected to blindly accept what their priests are teaching them. In a sense, these religious traditions have moved away from the early spirit of reflexivity and the critical viewpoints that their founders had, and become ossified systems of dogma. How can religion deal with the fact that people are sceptical of their teachings?
The second challenge: science and religion
The second challenge is the relationship between religion and science. Can religion reconcile itself with science? When, in the 16th century, Galileo Galilei discovered that the Earth rotates around the sun rather than the other way around, he was condemned by the Catholic Church. The Church positioned itself as being the enemy of science, thus starting a great conflict between science and religion. Could this conflict ever be solved?
The third challenge: sectarian conflict
Increasingly, in modern times, global interconnectedness reaches ever higher levels of intensity. In the past, as religion merged with the socio-political configuration of different regions and countries, much of the world ended up in a situation where there was a single dominant religion or sect in most countries and states.
So, the French were Catholic, the British were Protestant, the Russians were Orthodox, the Sri Lankans were Buddhist, the Iranians were Muslim, and so on. The overlap between religion and national or ethnic identity became so strong that people came to consider that if you are a member of a certain ethnic group, by definition, you also believe in a certain type of religion.
For instance, if you are Tibetan, people assume you are Buddhist; if you are Arab, people assume you are Muslim; if you are French, they assume you are Catholic. Many people think this way; but in fact, it’s not entirely true. My French ancestors were Protestants. There are Muslim Tibetans. There are Christian Arabs. And with globalisation and increased transnational links, barriers as such have been subjected to challenge. Transnational migration and circulations are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Now, there are growing Muslim populations in the traditional Christian countries, such as Britain and France. The idea that European countries are primarily Christian is being challenged. Also, there are growing numbers of Christians in China. Some scholars project that in a dozen years, China will have more Christians than any other country in the world. Even if 10% of the Chinese population becomes Christian, which is a possibility given current rates of growth, China will have 120 million Christians, which is higher than the entire population of most other Christian countries.
The definition of a country or ethnic group as being identified with one religion has been deeply challenged. Even within one country or region, such as Hong Kong, we can find all types of religion, in the city or on the Internet. It’s easy to be exposed to many religious practices and ideas. The barriers and boundaries between them are becoming less distinct. How do people respond to that? What will be the outcome of this global mixing? Under such conditions, can religions reconcile themselves with each other?
Violence in the name of religion started with the Crusades in the Middle Ages. After Muslim armies conquered Jerusalem and Palestine — which are the Holy Land to the Christians — the European kings sent armies to fight the Muslims. They wanted to recover the Holy Land for the Christians. But a lot of the Crusaders simply wanted to become rich through looting and plundering. Thousands of Muslims were slaughtered and massacred by the Christian crusaders, who were even divided by sect and often killed each other too! The Crusades were one of the first incidences of massive violence in the name of religion.
Later, many religious wars occurred in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries. One of the most notorious incidents is the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, during which thousands of (Christian) Protestants were killed by (Christian) Catholics. Even as we see today, in the Middle East, there is increasing violence between different Muslim sects, the Shiites and the Sunni; and terrorism in the name of Islam has hit China, Europe, Africa and America. In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, some Buddhists have fanned the violent suppression of Muslim and Hindu minorities. In India, some Hindu movements have fanned riots against Muslim and Christian minorities.
While terrorists and radicals follow extremist sects and organisations, the vast majority of the world’s Christians, Muslims and Buddhists are firmly opposed to violence and hatred in the name of their religion. Nonetheless, inter-religious strife is increasing in many parts of the world. Why is this happening? Now, we’re living in a world where there is more and more communication between different parts of the world, where different religious communities have increasing communication and contact with each other. Can’t they reconcile with each other? Can they avoid conflicts between each other? That is the second great challenge facing religion today.
Secularization
These are the challenges that have been repeatedly posed to religion in the past few centuries. The gradual result of these challenges has been that although religion has not disappeared, its power and influence have drastically declined, compared to what it was prior to the Enlightenment in the 17th century. The dominant “operating system” of most societies has been increasingly secularised and disenchanted [2]; most societies have adopted the ideologies of secularism and materialism. Secularism considers that the individual can have private religious belief, but society should not be influenced by religion in any way — religion is only a private matter, it should be kept out of social affairs. Materialism considers that only matter exists in the universe. Both secularism and materialism have become the dominant ideologies of most modern societies today.
[1] Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 2015.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
