The above features constitute a critical specificity of religion with regard to many other domains of cultural human activity. For instance, in politics, science, art, economy, education, and even law, to cite a few interesting examples, changes are proposed, discussed, and implemented most often on the basis of a cost-benefit rationale – which of course may include the adaptation rhetoric, among other things. But there is not necessarily a need to demonstrate or pretend to demonstrate continuity or fidelity with a previously endorsed truth or value. Of course, institutions and organized groups use the argument of fidelity to their fundamental values and principles, or their constitution, but this discourse is usually complemented by cost-benefit rationales. More importantly, non-religious institutions and groups can change and rewrite the chart of their fundamental values, principles, and constitution.

Religious change as adaptation is thus a very specific type of change. For the purpose of this work, I typed the world 'change' into Google Images and observed the diversity with which change is depicted across the many images that appeared. This led to a nice typology of the various representations of change. Change may be represented – and is thus perceived – as a slight or a radical shift of direction, as partial or full replacement, as a timely necessity, as an entire transformation, as an optimistic transition from impossibility to possibility, as progress and advance ahead, as the product of a discursive process, and/or as a reagencement of pre-existing pieces with some creation of new space. Based on what I have developed in this work, religious change most often adheres to the model of change as an adaptation to time and less frequently, not at all, or only occasionally to the other models of change.

An implication of religious change experienced mainly as adaptation is the implicit assumption that time and the changes time introduces denote the mutability and thus imperfection of human nature and human affairs. Only God is immutable and remains the same, since only God is perfect – or alternatively, thus only God is perfect. This model of religious change as a necessary adaptation to societal changes emphasizes an essentialist perception of truth as pre-existing and already established rather than as an objective for the future or a reality that is progressively built. Subsequently, significant large-scale changes are suspected of making substantial alterations of this pre-existing truth.

#### **3.3 Change Under the Guise of Continuity**

A way to implement religious change while still maintaining or pretending to maintain continuity and even sameness is to distinguish between primary and central versus secondary and peripheral aspects of the truth or norm that is about to be changed. Primary elements should be preserved, secondary elements can be changed. Similarly, to implement religious changes, one needs to preserve the spirit of the original text or norm by proposing a so-called symbolic instead of literal interpretation. Whereas there is usually a certain consensus among scholars, religionists, and religious leaders regarding the principle of the above conceptual distinction, typically, there is much less consensus on which specific features can be considered secondary and which elements should be preserved as primary. Similarly, there is criticism as to whether a particular symbolic interpretation may go too far and violate the spirit of the original belief, norm, or practice.

More importantly, the distinction between secondary and primary religious elements, or between a symbolic and a literal interpretation, is never established a priori. It must be negotiated and is subject to future developments. An interpretation perceived as symbolic today in a given religious community (e.g., 'Christians will have a new life in eternity with God'; instead of 'Christians, with a new body, will be resurrected at some point in the future') may end up being perceived as a literal interpretation of the belief in resurrection decades and generations later and be replaced by a new, more symbolic and abstract interpretation such as 'life is stronger than death'.

This process of continuously redefining across centuries what is, and will remain, primary and central while other elements which were previously considered to be primary undergo a process of reconsideration as secondary, allows for the implementation of significant changes under the guise that continuity has prevailed and that the change was only an adaptation. For instance, contemporary Protestants' religious lives differ notably from believers' lives in the early years of Christianity, despite the fact that the many changes that have occurred since then were most often experienced as mere adaptations or as a rediscovery, in a new context, of the original truth.

#### **3.4 Direction of Religious Change: Liberalization or Rigidification and Polarization?**

The direction(s) of religious change throughout history constitutes an interesting matter. This topic is typically addressed by historians, but psychologists, together with other social and behavioral scientists, can examine the direction of religious changes in recent decades, and in particular in the context of increasingly secularized societies, on the basis of modern empirical data. Two scenarios appear intellectually meaningful.

First, religion and religiousness may align with more general cultural and societal changes. Thus, one can expect self-expressive and emancipative values, which have been found to go hand in hand with secularism, to exert their pressure. Religiousness should thus become more autonomous, more individualized, less traditional, and be less characterized by collectivistic values of loyalty to the ingroup and respect for authority.14 Note that there is cross-cultural evidence that societies in general, and not only Western ones, are becoming less collectivistic and are emphasizing autonomy and individuality to an increasing degree.15 As a consequence, faith and religious practice in secularized societies are likely to be more an issue of personal choice than of family education and societal socialization. Similarly, belief and practice are more likely to be intrinsically, rather than extrinsically, motivated: they are based on motivations directly related to faith and spiritual objectives rather than external interests and goals.

Second, it may be that religiousness, in the context of secularism, is prone to defensiveness, thus becoming more rigorous, conservative, and absolutist in beliefs, practice, norms, and group identity. Becoming a minority gradually, religionists may be tempted to radicalize, at least if we adopt the optimal distinctiveness theory.16 This theory implies, among others, that minority groups feel the need

**14** Pippa Norris/Ronald Inglehart, *Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide*. New York: Cambridge University Press 2 2012.

**15** Henri C. Santos/Michael E.W. Varnum/Igor Grossmann, Global Increases in Individualism, in: *Psychological Science 28* (9/2017), 1228–1239.

**16** Geoffrey J. Leonardelli/Cynthia L. Pickett/Marilynn B. Brewer, Optimal Distinctiveness Theory: A Framework for Social Identity, Social Cognition, and Intergroup Relations, in: *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 43* (2010), 63–113.

to accentuate their differences from the majority to preserve their own visibility and identity. As a consequence, such rigidification should imply increasing polarization in secular societies between strong religionists on the one hand, and strong atheists and secularists on the other hand.17

Extensive research from the social and behavioral sciences, having focused on various questions relevant to the above issue, has provided convergent results.18 Rigidification followed by polarization is not to be excluded but constitutes, quantitatively speaking, only a minor phenomenon. It often applies to minority religious groups under tension and experiencing discrimination for ethnoreligious reasons. But it is the first scenario that looks predominant, with religiousness overall following, to some extent, the liberalization and individualization of values and worldviews in secularized societies. In parallel, compared to the past, religiousness is changing, becoming more intrinsic, more spiritual, more prosocial, and more tolerant of various kinds of outgroups.

Nevertheless, an impression of some polarization still exists, in terms of a stronger contrast, compared to the past, between nonbelievers and religious believers, on several moral issues for instance. Interestingly, recent sociological research has demonstrated that the impression of polarization we may have is not due to religious believers becoming more conservative and reactive – if anything, they have become more liberal – but rather to atheists and secularists whose stance has shifted more significantly as they have become increasingly liberal. In traditional religious societies, there is simply more consensus regarding many moral issues and worldviews.

## **4 Sources of Religious Change**

Even under the strong pressure for continuity, if not sameness, and even if often limited in scope, religious changes do occur regularly. What are the sources of such changes? It is reasonable to assume that both (a) factors external to religion, societal and cultural ones, and (b) factors internal to religious life and experience exert their influence, independently or jointly, in generating religious changes.

**17** Egbert Ribberink/Peter Achterberg/Dick Houtman, Religious Polarization: Contesting Religion in Secularized Western European Countries, in: *Journal of Contemporary Religion 33* (2/2018), 209– 227.

**18** Vassilis Saroglou, Religion and Related Morality, 724–785.

#### **4.1 External Sources**

All kinds of societal and cultural developments are of course important external sources of religious change. Obviously, as evoked above, secularization in the recent decades has been a major source of religious changes. Additionally, political developments, democratization, law transformations, economic crises, sociological changes, geographical mobility, demographic changes, changes in the relationships between Churches and the State, moral liberalization, scientific advances – including the development of sciences of religion, intergroup conflicts, wars, diseases, and natural disasters have been found to influence not only the mean level of religiousness and secularism in societies but also the nature of people's religiousness and the way it is expressed.

For instance, scientific advances in the understanding of the origins of homosexuality have helped major religions to reconsider, to some extent, their attitudes toward persons of sexual minorities. The legalization of issues like abortion and euthanasia has pushed many religious Westerners to tolerate the fact that others have the right to behave differently and to not embrace such religious moral prohibitions. Immigration, multiculturalism, and globalization have contributed to the decrease of religious exclusivism and to the increase of interreligious understanding and tolerance. Urbanization has decreased the social pressure in rural environments to practice religion and to be a regular part of the community. Societies with less disease, deaths, and health problems have been found to also be societies where religiousness is less salient on average and does not necessarily have an additional contributing role with regard to well-being – as do many other societal sources.

Thus, most often, religious changes are provoked or encouraged by these external sources of pressure. Religions aim to accommodate themselves to these developments. Otherwise, as history and sociology of religion have emphasized, major religions and communities take the risk of becoming marginal minorities or even being extinguished. (On the contrary, if they become too similar to the environing society, they end up being non-attractive).

#### **4.2 Internal Sources**

Nevertheless, there are also internal sources of change within religion. First, theological and ecclesiastic developments by themselves may generate or enable changes – for good or bad. In the Catholic world, Vatican II has been a golden example and its transformative influence has been long-lasting. In the Christian Orthodox world, the late 20th century rediscovery of Patristic theology and ancient monastic spirituality, in combination with the opening of postgraduate programs in the departments of Orthodox theology (which reduced the departure of young Orthodox theologians in the West) contributed, together with external causes, to the phenomenon of orthodoxism, i.e., no longer self-identifying as Christian, but exclusively as Orthodox.

Second, religious changes occur due to the influence of the so-called prophetic voices and charismatic figures within religious communities, as well as the originality and attractiveness of the message and action of religious figures who have been foundational to a specific religious movement or even a new religion.

Typically, within religious communities, individuals who dispose of the power of charisma (i.e., are admired for their exemplary and authentic spirituality and their prototypicality in incarnating the group's values) are influential and initiate, orient, or circumscribe changes. Their power for change is most often more important than the influence of other persons with power of legitimacy (high rank ministers) or mere expertise (theologians).

In addition, founders of religious movements and new religions are, almost by definition, initiators of more radical changes; most often they instigate change by criticizing the limitations and even the inauthenticity of the religious expressions of a given environment. Founders of new religions and initiators of religious movements and successful schisms are great actors of changes in the world's religious landscape. They do so either by proposing a new, more authentic and faithful, interpretation of the original message of a given religion, or by creating the basis for a new religion and implicitly or explicitly signaling the limitations of the other religions.

#### **4.3 Conservatives and Liberals: Stable Interindividual Differences**

Finally, religious changes or religious continuity and sameness can simply be explained by the fact that religionists, including religious authorities, as humans in general, are characterized by important interindividual variability. A key personality dimension on which people within the same society and the same group show important variability with each other is high versus low openness to experience.19 This personality dimension denotes high or low propensity for novelty, variety, and complexity, instead of routine, sameness, and simplicity, and does so across all

**19** Robert R. McCrae/Angelina R. Sutin, Openness to Experience, in: Mark R. Leary/Rick H. Hoyle (eds.), *Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior*. New York: Guilford 2009, 257–273.

domains of life and human activity. It thus includes high versus low open-mindedness regarding ideas, values, and worldviews, and high versus low flexibility and openness to change regarding practices and behavior.

It is of importance to note that this interindividual variability is partly determined by genetic and biological dispositions. Subsequently, non-negligible longterm stability exists, for years, or even decades, in being high, low, or simply on average on this personality dimension – as for many other individual differences.20 A practical implication of this is that people who are religious conservatives or religious liberals will very likely continue to be so for years, if not decades. If they change, their change on this dimension – as for other personality dimensions – will not be radical but rather modest in size. This accentuates the impression we have of the distance between the two positions, the religious conservatives and the religious liberals, as being crystallized to some extent without considerable possibilities for negotiation and easy compromises.

Nevertheless, there is some empirical indication of changes due to the aging process and/or the confrontation with new and challenging experiences. Several adolescents with conservative religious education may become more liberal, replacing literal interpretations with symbolic ones, as they progressively become young adults and/or enter higher education.21 In parallel, there is some evidence that adults may also become more intense in their religiosity and spirituality as they become older,22 and they may also become more conservative in their political attitudes.23

A final observation of interest to the understanding of the inertia regarding religious change is the fact that, across cultures, a weak but overall positive association exists between religiousness and sociomoral conservatism. In traditional societies, this extends further to a negative association between religiousness and the more basic and global personality dimension of (low) openness to experience.24

**20** Wiebke Bleidorn/Christopher J. Hopwood, Stability and Change in Personality Traits over the Lifespan, in: Dan P. McAdams/Rebecca L. Shiner/Jennifer L. Tackett (eds.), *Handbook of Personality Development*. New York: Guilford 2019, 237–252.

**21** Fritz K. Oser/W. George Scarlett/Anton Bucher, Religious and Spiritual Development Throughout the Life Span, in: William Damon/Richard L. Lerner (eds.), *Handbook of Child Psychology. Volume 1. Theoretical Models of Human Development*. Hoboken (NJ): Wiley 6 2006, 942–998 for review.

**22** Paul Wink/Michele Dillon/Dan Farina, Religion, Spirituality, and the Agential Self, in: Dan P. McAdams/Rebecca L. Shiner/Jennifer L. Tacket (eds.), *Handbook of Personality Development*. New York: Guilford 2019, 364–379.

**23** Jonathan C. Peterson/Kevin B. Smith/John R. Hibbing, Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age?, in: *The Journal of Politics 82* (2/2020), 600–611.

**24** Vassilis Saroglou, Culture, Personality, and Religiosity, in: A. Timothy Church (ed.), *The Praeger Handbook of Personality Across Cultures. Volume 2*. Santa Barbara (CA): Praeger 2017, 153–184.

Thus, in many societies in the world today, especially in traditional societies, conservative religionists are a majority.25 In modern secular societies, low openness to experience is characteristic only of religious fundamentalism, but not necessarily of mere religious belief and practice. In other words, within the latter societies, there is non-negligible variability among religionists regarding their propensity to consider or not consider change in the religious domain.26

# **5 Resistance to (Religious) Change: Underlying Factors**

What are the factors that undermine religious change and favor resistance to change? Psychological research has identified a series of individual and situational factors that do not facilitate or may even prevent change, in general.27 I will revisit these factors here, applying them to the religious context, and I will also describe specific factors that appear particularly salient for religion and religiousness.

#### **5.1 Classic Individual and Situational Factors**

Above, we mentioned the role of personality, mainly low openness to experience and related tendencies, which, associated with religiousness, particularly in traditional societies, inhibit the interest and propensity for religious change. In addition, older age is a factor known to favor resistance to change. And older adults are overrepresented among religious believers and especially among active religionists and members of religious communities.28 Certainly, the fact of entering old age

**25** Kibeom Lee et al., Personality, Religion, and Politics: An Investigation in 33 Countries, in: *European Journal of Personality 32* (2/2018), 100–115.

**26** Jochen E. Gebauer et al., Cross-Cultural Variations in Big Five Relationships With Religiosity: A Sociocultural Motives Perspective, in: *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107* (6/2014), 1064–1091.

**27** See, for introductions and reviews: Eric B. Dent/Susan Galloway Goldberg, Challenging 'Resistance to Change', in: *Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 35* (1/1999), 25–41; John T. Jost, Resistance to Change: A Social Psychological Perspective, in: *Social Research 82* (3/2015), 607–636; Joseph R. Lao/Jason Young, *Resistance to Belief Change: Limits of Learning*. London/New York: Routledge 2020; and Shaul Oreg, Resistance to Change: Developing an Individual Differences Measure, in: *Journal of Applied Psychology 88* (4/2003), 680–693.

**28** Pew Research Center, The Age Gap in Religion Around the World, on: Pew Research Center

is not necessarily accompanied by an increase of faith and practice – in fact, some older adults may even exit religion at that stage of life. Similarly, young adulthood is not necessarily a life period that leads to apostasy.29 Nevertheless, some asymmetry exists in terms of age among religionists, with young adults being underrepresented. Older adults are also overrepresented among the high clergy, a body that can reasonably be perceived as being very vigilant regarding the maintenance of the many features of a given religion. Therefore, not surprisingly, age should not facilitate a propensity for religious change.

Beyond individual characteristics like age and personality, there are several situational factors that enhance humans' natural resistance to change. Organizations with a highly hierarchical and authoritarian structure are also reluctant to change. This is particularly the case when organizations do not make significant space for discursive processes that would allow for self-reflection, criticism, and reconsideration of things. Indeed, many religions, denominations, and religious communities are characterized by a clear, even rigid, hierarchical structure and by the unwillingness to give discursive processes legitimate authority. An example from the Christian Orthodox Churches may be significant. Though explicitly promoting synodality as the Church's system of governance at all levels, from the parish level to the Panorthodox Synod level, these Churches have been heavily criticized by internal actors – typically lay theologians and lower-rank clergy but not bishops – for the considerable dysfunction of the synodal system at various levels.30 In such contexts, authority is concentrated in the hands of one person, i.e., the Primate of a local Church, or the body of bishops. Interestingly, some bishops recently added the term 'and episcopal' (καί ἱεραρχικόν) when referring to the 'synodal' (συνοδικόν) system of the Church's governance. Not surprisingly, the Orthodox Churches are those that have been marked by minimal change, if any, compared to the Catholic and Protestant Churches and communities.

Furthermore, resistance to change is particularly strong in societal contexts where people, especially key actors, are unprepared for change and may even lack the competence to imagine and implement change. To remain with the same religious context of the Christian Orthodox Churches, which I am quite familiar with: the religious authorities seem to have little perception of the need for change,

(13.06.2018), URL: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/06/13/the-age-gap-in-religion-aroundthe-world/ (30.03.2023).

**29** Paul Wink/Michele Dillon/Dan Farina, Religion, Spirituality, and the Agential Self, in: Dan P. McAdams/Rebecca L. Shiner/Jennifer L. Tacket (eds.), *Handbook of Personality Development*. New York: Guilford 2019, 364–379.

**30** Stavros Yangazoglou (ed.), Συνοδικότητα καί ὁμοφωνία [Conciliarity and Consensus] [Special section], in: *Θεολογία 86* (2/2015), 3–194.

not necessarily because of unwillingness, but partly due to lack of knowledge and subsequent incompetence. For instance, their familiarity with human and social sciences in general, and human and social sciences of religion in particular, is particularly weak. In fact, among religions and religious denominations, there is an implicit hierarchy regarding the familiarity with human and social sciences. For instance, mainstream Protestantism and contemporary Catholicism have experienced important openness to these sciences. This, in turn, has had an impact, for instance, on the historical and critical approaches of the sacred texts or the consideration of the ways to assume pastoral responsibilities and understand traditional religious practice and norms. The opposite has been the case for religions and denominations that are unaware of and indifferent with regard to the knowledge accumulated by scientists of religion – this seems to be particularly the case today in Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

Resistance to change is also strong when the key actors are simply unaware of the need for change, are sitting in a zone of comfort, and thus have poor motivation to change. For instance, in countries with a religious monopole, i.e., with one religion or denomination being highly predominant, religious expressions are typically traditional, rather immutable, and not really negotiable.31 Countries with a still vibrant Western Christian tradition like Poland, and especially (all) countries of Eastern Christian tradition, dispose of religious authorities who feel too comfortable within a society where religiousness looks natural and is part of the collective identity. Religionists and religious leaders may thus be hostile against secularism, religious diversity, and the associated need for change. On the contrary, in contexts with high religious and convictional diversity, including those where believers and non-believers coexist as important segments of the society, religious beliefs, rituals, norms, and institutions experience considerable internal developments.32

Low trust of leaders may be another factor that diminishes the propensity for change. Even when leaders propose well-justified, meaningful, and pertinent changes, followers may be reluctant to welcome such changes because of a generalized distrust of these leaders by the members. Within the Christian Orthodox world, an interesting example of this process is, in my opinion, the current opposition that very active religious believers and practitioners show against any change proposed by ecclesiastic authorities, even very secondary changes regarding minor aspects of the ritual and the tradition. Since there is a cleavage in these religionists' minds between power- and career-oriented religious leaders on the one hand,

**31** Vassilis Saroglou/Vanessa Delpierre/Rebecca Dernelle, Values and Religiosity: a Meta-analysis of Studies Using Schwartz's Model, in: *Personality and Individual Differences 37* (4/2004), 721–734. **32** Pippa Norris/Ronald Inglehart, *Sacred and Secular*.

and ascetic excellence and authentic spirituality of famous monastic figures on the other hand, any change proposed by the former is typically confronted with high resistance. This factor partly explains, in my opinion, why decades of formal ecumenical dialogue has had almost zero effect on important segments of the Christian Orthodox world which have remained hostile toward Western Christian Churches. The Orthodox participation in this dialog has been almost exclusively left in the hands of ecclesiastic authorities and their close theologian experts.

Finally, ironically, too many changes may be an obstacle for new change due to exhaustion. Individuals, groups, and organizations are not programmed to change constantly; they also need periods of continuity and calmness. Large organizations in particular need time for all members to assimilate change and develop the experience of continuity beyond the changes they have experienced. For instance, Vatican II has created a series of important and impactful changes within Catholicism – possibly with some costs, even if these costs are minor compared to the greater benefits. Subsequently, new important proposed changes in the Catholic Church, like accentuating synodality in the Church's governance to the highest degree or allowing women to enter priesthood, may be too 'onerous' to be implemented in the period following the many Vatican II-related developments.

#### **5.2 Religion-Specific Factors of Resistance to Change**

As stated earlier in this work, the idea that truth pre-exists as a whole within a given religion, rather than being a reality to be fully discovered in the future, is by itself a major factor undermining the propensity for religious change. In the least, it pushes for religious change that is primarily an adaptation that contributes to a more accurate consideration of that truth. This conception is further consolidated within those religions that claim some kind of infallibility, be it located in a text, a person, or an institution. Of course, infallibility is often complemented by a source of counter-power: for instance, *reception* by the community is considered as important for the acceptance of a specific synod's infallibility. Nevertheless, the mere idea of the existence of some kind and location of infallibility is sufficient to make religious changes particularly difficult.

Furthermore, at least within monotheistic traditions, religious beliefs, ritual, norms, and institutional functioning are typically conceived as a well-integrated whole with a strong internal coherence. Consequently, even a change in one minor aspect of the whole, such as an update to the interpretation of a given belief, the modification of a feature in a particular ritual, or the replacement of an old rule with a new one in the life of the community, needs to be made in a way that will not disturb – or will not be perceived as disturbing – the other parts that constitute the coherent whole. In other words, religions characterized by high integralism may have particular difficulties in implementing changes because of the interconnection between all aspects of belief and practice.

In line with the ideas of pre-existing truth, infallibility, and integralism, religions endorse certain beliefs and use a specific rhetoric that allow contradictions to be minimized and serve the well-known psychological need to resolve cognitive dissonance. The latter is the need to reduce and extinguish the discrepancy in individuals' minds between their ideas that may be divergent and contradictory with each other; the same can be said for the discrepancies between their ideas and acts, and between their acts. For instance, how can the religious community reduce cognitive dissonance when errors and failures become evident? A helpful idea is the belief that the religious community is glorious and eternal. Such a belief implies the minimization, if not denial, of failures and errors, including those within the moral domain: since the Church is invincible and will persist for ever, failures are only accidents and do not potentially threaten the existence of the community. This may be an erroneous estimation if one takes the historical fact into account that religions can die. It is of importance to note that the endorsement of the idea that quality is more important than quantity minimizes the risk the decrease in membership (e.g., due to secularization) may have for the maintenance of the community: despite significant losses, the community will be eternal. Obviously, these perceptions do not produce pressure to consider potential changes.

Another, subtler, rhetorical strategy is the propagation of the idea that the positive things, acts, and accomplishments are produced by the glorious Church, whereas the errors, failures, and sins are committed by the 'sons and the daughters of the Church.' This denotes the psychological defense mechanism of projecting the bad self to the outside. A related defense mechanism is the development of the idea that negative considerations about aspects of a given religion in general, or at specific moments of its life, are due to external sources of unjustified criticism. These sources, such as the media and some politicians, are usually considered immoral or by definition hostile to religion. The fact that several empirical studies, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, have shown that individual religiousness is positively associated with an endorsement of conspiracy beliefs,33 and not only in very traditional

**33** Paweł Łowicki et al., Does Religion Predict Coronavirus Conspiracy Beliefs? Centrality of Religiosity, Religious Fundamentalism, and COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs, in: *Personality and Individual Differences 187* (2022), Article 111413 and Gordon Pennycook et al., On the Belief That Beliefs Should Change According to Evidence: Implications for Conspiratorial, Moral, Paranormal, Political, Religious, and Science Beliefs, in: *Judgment and Decision Making 15* (4/2020), 476–498.

societies but also in secularized Western countries,34 reveals the importance of this mentality: the evil fights the faithful people from inside, but also from outside.

A final factor, inherent to religious communities, that works to discourage change is the risk for schisms. The history of most, possibly all, religions is simultaneously a history of their schisms. Leaders of dynamic and lively religions that want to prevent a significant decrease of their membership and the long-term effects of disunity are very attentive to avoid decisions that may facilitate internal schisms. Undoubtedly, implementing changes constitutes such an important risk. Disunity is a cause of suffering, and schisms raise doubts about the value and validity of the original religion. In addition, a drastic decrease in membership is a subtle reminder that religious beliefs are fragile assertions: their uncertainty and independence from any kind of objective proof need to be compensated by a significant number of coreligionists who attest together that these beliefs, embraced by many, should somehow be true.

Therefore, religious communities most often live under the threat of their most conservative or fundamentalist segments, which may depart from the community if they deem that significant changes have been implemented. One can even consider the fundamentalist tendencies within established religions as being animated essentially by a propensity for competition for the greatest possible purity: the most authentic spiritual father, parish, bishop, movement, etc. will be the one that adopts the strictest standards in their religious expression. (Although less frequent, the direction may be the opposite, with the liberal segments initiating schisms). Religious leaders are thus often obliged to maintain a subtle equilibrium between conservative and liberal voices. They most often choose the equilibrium that will preserve some sort of consensus – not necessarily what they themselves believe as being the best. Undoubtedly, the constant search for consensus is not the best way to encourage change.

### **6 Summary and Conclusion**

In this work, I examined several key issues regarding the interplay between religious continuity and religious change, by focusing mainly on religiousness, i.e., people's experience of religion through beliefs, rituals, norms, and community. Going

**34** Inga Jasinskaja‐Lahti/Jolanda Jetten, Unpacking the Relationship Between Religiosity and Conspiracy Beliefs in Australia, in: *British Journal of Social Psychology 58* (4/2019), 938–954 and Natasha Galliford/Aadrian Furnham, Individual Difference Factors and Beliefs in Medical and Political Conspiracy Theories, in: *Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 58* (5/2017), 422–428.

beyond the simple idea that, similar to all living entities, religion both remains the same and changes, it appears that religious continuity, not to say sameness, is strong, certainly stronger than that of many other domains of human activity. This is of course mainly due to the very nature of religiousness as an attachment and fidelity to a fundamental and foundational past truth and thus is not restricted to conservative and fundamentalist religious expressions.

The substantial impact of continuity limits the possibilities for change and shapes religious change, which, after a close examination of some examples from empirical research, appears to be more limited and discrete than experts adopting a micro approach may think. Here, I used the examples of the relationships of individual religiousness with humor, sexuality, homophobia, and intergroup prejudice. Though some changes have been observed, indicating that religious changes parallel and follow societal changes, the continuation is striking. This poses, among others, the question of how to explain the discrepancy between theological and ecclesiastic developments on the one hand and non-negligible stability in the way people's religiousness functions in everyday life on the other hand. Here, I proposed at least three explanations: delay between theory and practice of change, overestimation of change by experts, and defensive rhetoric to give the illusion of change.

A further examination of the diversity of the representations people have of change, and thus the diversity of the underlying models of change, suggested that religious change is initiated and experienced mainly as an adaptation to societal changes and as acculturation to new cultural contexts. Thus, religious change is much more restrained compared to other models of change such as change of direction, progress, timely necessity, replacement, or full transformation. As a consequence, very often, religion either implies continuity and sameness despite claiming change; or, on the contrary, it implements change under the guise of continuity and slight adaptation. Nevertheless, discrete and restricted religious change within the constraints of heavy continuity implicitly activates the idea that time and mutability denote human imperfection, and thus change may be an alteration.

How do religion and religiousness change – when is this the case? Though it is risky to advance the idea that religious changes have a direction, I argued that both directions are possible, with religiousness potentially becoming more liberal, individualized, autonomous, and thus intrinsic in motivation, or, on the contrary, more traditional, conservative, and conformist in motivation. However, as shown by an impressive number of studies focusing especially on the moderating role that societal developments and secularism play on religiousness, the evidence favors the idea that the big picture does not point to rigidification of believers and polarization between them and secularists. Religiousness, at least within major religions that have adapted to survive, follows societal changes, though with some delay. And the differences between believers and non-believers appear greater in secular compared to traditional societies due to nonbelievers' liberalization, not due to the hypothetical rigidification of believers.

All kinds of societal and cultural changes constitute external sources of religious change. These include changes in the domains of politics, economy, health, education, law, science, ethics, mobility, natural disasters, conflicts, and war, among others. In parallel, or independently, sources internal to religion may cause change – any kind of religious change. Theological and ecclesiastic developments may generate changes, but most importantly charismatic religious figures, prophetic voices, founders of new movements or new religions, often in opposition to the institutional authorities or the dominant traditions, initiate change and bring significant developments to the landscape of world religions. In addition, interindividual variability, among people in general, and thus among religionists and religious leaders in particular, with regard to the personality disposition for either high or low openness to new, diverse, challenging, and complex ideas, values, acts, and experiences, as well as the intra-individual stability of these personality tendencies, guarantee the persistence of the battle between religious conservatives and religious liberals, as well as the continuous interplay between continuity or sameness on one hand and change or adaptation on the other hand.

Finally, there are plethora of well-known factors that enhance humans' natural tendency to resist change. Many of them also apply to the religious context. Beyond individual factors like age (across religious cultures, older adults, less open to change, are typically overrepresented) and personality disposition for low openness to experience (conservatives are overrepresented among religionists, especially in traditional countries), we can note several relevant situational factors. These include an unawareness of the need for change, an unpreparedness for change, a lack of competence, poor motivation to change when living in comfortable societal environments, simple exhaustion from previous changes, a hierarchical and authoritarian structure, and non-valorization of discursive processes, but also a lack of trust of the organization's leaders when the latter try to implement meaningful changes.

In addition to the factors mentioned above, one can describe specific internal features of religion that amplify the natural tendency to resist change. I have presented several that seemed critical: the idea of infallibility, the belief that the group is glorious and eternal, the strong integralism characterizing at least the monotheistic traditions, several rhetorical strategies that facilitate the reduction of cognitive dissonance when facing important failures and errors in the community, and finally the fear of (new) schisms. The latter, among others, is strategically used as a threat by conservative and fundamentalist segments in order to oppose the implementation of change.

At the end of this initial exploration of the understudied topic of religion and change, at least from the perspective of the behavioral sciences of religion, I would like to mention a limitation of the present work. An important area where, within religion, it is believed that significant changes are implemented is that of the ascetic and monastic life, at least for religions that include these forms of religious life. From the believer's perspective, it is assumed that these modes of life contribute to more internal and more gradual personal transformations. Moreover, these internal transformations are perceived as bringing about, albeit indirectly and progressively, external changes and transformation of the world. These assumptions may not be purely idealistic elaborations and pose interesting questions that can be empirically investigated. Nevertheless, relevant empirical research on this issue is lacking and thus it may be premature and risky to make any empirical statement confirming or infirming these interesting assumptions here.

To conclude the present work, I would like to claim that of intellectual intrigue is less the question of how religion succeeds to preserve sameness despite implementing some kind of change, at least as adaptation. Rather, for the scientists of religion, the more challenging and perhaps fascinating question seems to be how religions succeed to cultivate a feeling of uninterrupted continuity and true fidelity while at the same time they introduce gradual and progressive, sometimes even radical, changes within the religious landscape.

# Guy G. Stroumsa **The Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism: Cultural Transformations and Scholarly Shifts**

Like all social institutions, religions constantly change, evolving and transforming themselves. Sometimes, when one can speak of brutal transformations and of religious revolutions, this truism is obvious to all.1 But more often, the conatus of religions entails their more or less 'peaceful' evolution. Now, while all religions have a potential for radical transformation in their DNA, they are instinctively more inclined toward conservatism, and the function of their hermeneutical systems, while permitting change when deemed necessary or unavoidable, consists essentially in slowing down the pace of such change, and making sure, it goes unnoticed, or *almost* unnoticed. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics, has shown that we all function with two parallel systems of thought: 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' as he entitled his book on the topic. Similarly, I propose we identify two alternate patterns of religious change: slow versus fast. Religion and society at large, then, are complementary motors, actors, and objects of change in history. In a permanent dialectical relationship with one another, religion and society are taking turns at initiating change, responding to it, modulating it, and transforming the direction, intensity, and even the very nature of this change.

In a recently published book, The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, I sought to understand some societal dimensions of the idea of Semitic monotheism, an idea coined by Ernest Renan in the mid-19th century and developed in European scholarship in the subsequent decades. This idea was interdependent with both new perceptions of Judaism and Islam and transformed attitudes toward Jews and Muslims. Hence, I tried to highlight various veiled connections between the history of religions, then a growing scholarly discipline, and some deep changes in European societies, related to secularization processes. I shall present a few preliminary reflections on this research here, which, I think, bear directly on the topic of our conference, from a particular but capital angle.

It barely needs mentioning that since the early modern Great Discoveries,

**1** This text was read (on zoom) as a keynote lecture at the Conference of the European Academy of Religion in Münster on September 1, 2021. I wish to thank Professor Hans-Peter Grosshans for his kind invitation to deliver the lecture. The text is adapted from the introduction to my Guy G. Stroumsa, *The Idea of Semitic Monotheism. The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth*. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021.

and especially since the industrial revolution, the pace of change has been faster than ever before. The contemporary entry into the Digital Age has transformed the world, indeed is still transforming it in many ways, into what we have learned to call a 'global village', although a thoroughly polluted one, far from any idyllic or Romantic imagination. With the Enlightenment, in particular, Europe, and then many societies all around the world, have undergone a complex process of heightened secularization – a process jump-started by the Reformation. While secularization is a highly polyvalent term, it always refers to a shrinking of the status of established or organized religion in the public sphere, including personal law, the limitation of its political role, and the enhanced focus of the private and personal sphere as the main or legitimate locus of religion. It is clear, then, that the process of secularization has a deep impact on the nature of religion, involving far-reaching changes first in its practice but also in its doctrine as well as in its self-perception.

With those changes in religion, another, perhaps subtler but no less significant phenomenon was initiated by the critique of religion at the time of the Enlightenment. The non-theological approach of Christianity, and by extension of Judaism and Islam, the other monotheistic religions best known in Europe, also permitted the growth of the modern study of religion, and modeled anew the approach to religious phenomena. I wish to argue that a major paradigm shift in the very perception of monotheism, and in particular of Judaism and Islam, occurred throughout the 19th century, and that this paradigm shift bears directly on the formation of modern scholarship on religion.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the 'science of religion' stood (unlike in our own days) at the forefront of knowledge, and its claims were so many combative statements, which impacted on society at large. The broader, public significance of a discipline usually perceived today as arcane, is one of the themes I hope to showcase here. The modern study of religion developed throughout the 19th century, up to the establishment, in its last third, of the first academic chairs, journals, and conferences exclusively devoted to the new discipline. To a great extent, it focused then on the religious systems of newly discovered peoples, throughout Asia, in the Americas, and in Africa, as well as on those from Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquity, which were now analyzed thanks to new philological tools and the supporting evidence brought by archaeology. In this context, the understanding of polytheistic (or, as in the case of Buddhism, non-theistic) systems, approached for the first time in a non-polemical fashion, *sine ira et studio*, played a central role.

In medieval Christian societies, both in Byzantium and in the Latin West, there existed a single taxonomy of the world's religions.2 For a full millennium, roughly

**2** On early Christian taxonomies of religions, see Francesco Massa, Nommer et classer les religions

from the 8th to the 18th century, Christian thinkers had perceived the world as divided between four main religious families: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and 'the rest', also known as 'heathenism'. As a rule, this fourfold taxonomy did not entail the existence of a 'Triple Alliance' of sorts between the monotheistic traditions. Rather, polemics remained the usual medium of communication between them. Christianity (or, more precisely, its various orthodox versions) was of course the only true religion (*vera religio* in Augustine's terms), while Judaism and Islam were considered to be erroneous ones (*falsae religiones*), one upstream and one downstream of Christianity, as it were. From Epiphanius of Salamis to John of Damascus, Patristic heresiologists could even present them as heresies of sorts, Judaism being the first heresy and Islam the last – and worst – one.3 In different ways, Jews and Muslims remained the enemies of the true faith. But as monotheists, Jews and Muslims alike were recognized to be akin, in a deep sense, to the Christians, despite the enormous difference between them in Christian perception. While Jews were generally tolerated (and humiliated, as children of the devil [John 8:44]) in traditional Christian societies, Muslims typically remained the enemy without.4

In modern times, the discovery of new societies and their traditional cultures demanded that this classification be abandoned, as the sole category of 'heathenism' was no longer adequate to interpret the great variety of religions in the world. When the old taxonomy was abandoned, the centuries-old family relationship (to use Wittgenstein's metaphor) between the three monotheistic religions became significantly weakened. When William Jones, speaking in 1786 at the recently founded Calcutta Asiatic Society, announced that he had discovered similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, he was launching a new classification of languages and peoples, which would quickly become the main paradigm, beyond linguistics, for a number of disciplines, throughout the 19th century. Semites and Aryans now took the traditional place of the offspring of Shem and Japheth, two of Noah's three sons.5 To a great extent, the Semites were imagined through the

aux IIe –IVe siècles: la taxonomie 'paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme', in: *Revue de l'histoire des religions 234* (2017), 689–715.

**3** The transformation of Judaism into a Christian heresy is of course less intuitive than the Christian perception of the earliest Islam as a heresy. But Epiphanius explicitly called Judaism a heresy, while Justinian's rulings can be said to treat the Jews as heretics. See Guy G. Stroumsa, *The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity*. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015, 175–188.

**4** Judaism and Islam did not always reciprocate the compliment paid to them by Christianity, as Jewish and Muslim medieval thinkers rarely considered Christianity to be monotheistic.

**5** Throughout history, Ham, Noah's third son, traditionally identified with blackness, has remained the incarnation of blacks and slaves. See Benjamin Braude, Cham et Noé. Race, esclavage et exégèse entre islam, judaïsme et christianisme, in: *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57* (2002), 93–125, as

model of the Hebrews (and the Jews; indeed, from the 1880s on, the newly-coined word 'anti-Semitism' never referred to anyone except the Jews), while the Greeks represented the focal model of the Aryans. Monotheism would now often be conceived as a characteristic of a postulated ancient Semitic religion, while polytheism, would usually be identified as pertaining to the nature of the Aryan religion. This new paradigm gave the old taxonomy the *coup de grâce*. New categories had to be forged, and this was one of the major tasks of the new 'science of religion'. A Europe whose identity was perceived as torn between the Semitic roots of its religion and the Aryan nature of its languages and ethnicities saw the emergence of a new and deep ambivalence to monotheism. This ambivalence was echoing and amplifying those trends in the radical Enlightenment that had grown strongly critical of the established churches.

The new European discovery of similarities between Sanskrit and almost all European languages led to the identification of families of languages and also of families of religions, in particular the Aryan and the Semitic religious families.6 Deducing religion (and ethnicity) from linguistics is, of course, a fallacy, a fact underlined toward the end of the 19th century by the French polymath Salomon Reinach in his long article 'Le mirage oriental' – a fallacy which, as we know, would have dramatic consequences.7 A number of significant European intellectuals now started to identify European languages and peoples as belonging to the Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic in German parlance) or Aryan family. They were loath to consider their own religion, Christianity, as related in any significant way to Judaism and Islam, the main extant Semitic religions, and preferred to see in it a religious expression of the Aryan race. To be sure, one should not overstate the global importance of pan-Aryanism and imagine that it represented the leading trend in 19th-century European thought. The majority among their contemporaries did not take the most vociferous heralds of this kind of racialism seriously. To deduct the early nature of racialist thought patterns from its radical, murderous

well as David M. Goldenberg, *The Curse of Ham. Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam*. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2005.

**6** Maurice Olender, *The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century*. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press 1992 [French original: Les langues du paradis. Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel. Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil 1989]. Olender discusses some of the figures we shall encounter in the following chapters, such as Ernest Renan, Max Müller, and Ignaz Goldziher.

**7** Salomon Reinach, Le mirage oriental, in: *L'anthropologie 4* (1893), 539–579 and 699. See Chapter 10 below. For another use of this metaphor: see Louis Bertrand, La réalité et le Mirage oriental, in: *Revue des Deux Mondes 48* [5e période] (1908), 139–172. Bertrand later published a novel entitled *Le mirage oriental* (Paris: Perrin, 1920).

consequences in the 20th century would amount to teleological reasoning. Nevertheless, in the academic study of religion the Aryan-Semite taxonomy did have a major formative role.8

Paradoxically or not, Christianity itself remained relatively peripheral to the development of the new discipline. It is always easier to develop the distance needed for an objective and critical approach toward the religions of others, rather than toward one's own. Indeed, while the traditional reflection on religion had been the object of theology and philosophy, the modern study of religion grew mainly at the interface of philology, oriental studies, and ethnology. The religion of Biblical Israel stayed within the purview of theology, while post-biblical and Rabbinic Judaism were usually considered of little interest, reflecting the religious decadence that in Christian perception had occurred among the Hebrews after the biblical prophets, and certainly since Jesus. Moreover, the historical study of Christianity and the critical, philological approach to the Bible in our period remained largely in the hands of liberal Protestant theologians; Catholics were still forbidden by ecclesiastical authorities to deal with higher biblical criticism.

The study of Islam, on the other hand, continued to be mainly in the hands of Arabists, who, for centuries, had typically displayed a disparaging attitude to Muhammad, dubbed a false prophet, and to his religion. As a result, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam did not form part of the new discipline's core. My primary goal here is to appreciate the consequences of this fact for the study of monotheism, in particular on the scholarly approaches to Judaism and Islam, two religions that eventually came to be perceived as quite alien to Christian Europe. Attitudes to Judaism and to Islam, however, stayed strikingly different from one another, as Judaism was perceived as the more intimate enemy, the enemy within, as it were, while Islam remained essentially foreign, extraneous. Moreover, in most countries of Western Europe, there existed numerous old Jewish communities, which were being emancipated in the 19th century. There were very few Muslims then, and no Muslim communities in those areas. This discrepancy also partly explains the difference in the intensity of attitudes towards Judaism and Islam.

In contradistinction to the old, abstract history of ideas, intellectual history seeks to understand ideas within their full social and political context. When dealing with approaches to religion in the 19th century, accelerated secularization, growing nationalism, and imperial colonialism provide the immediate context. The analysis of scholarly discourse on religion must reflect the new status of religion in societies that were undergoing intensive processes of secularization. On the one

**8** See Stefan Arvidsson, *Aryan Idols. Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science*. Chicago: Chicago University Press 2006.

hand, with the industrial revolution and the growth of cities, the working classes were learning to free themselves from ecclesiastical control, and the traditional or established churches were losing their customary grip on Western European societies. On the other hand, a number of powerful thinkers, pursuing the radical Enlightenment's onslaught on traditional Christianity, were in search of new forms of spirituality. From Hegel's age of the Spirit to Auguste Comte's religion of the future, their proposals seduced many, such as Friedrich David Strauss in Germany or Edgar Quinet in France. The second half of the century saw important decline in the number of church goers, together with the growth of the historical and comparative study of religion.9

Expressions of religion were regressing from the public sphere to the private one. The Christian dimension of European identities, of course, was in no way disappearing. Rather, the semiotic range of Christianity moved, as it was increasingly transformed from the expression of Europe's core *religious* identity to representing a central element of European *cultural* memory. This was perhaps nowhere manifested as clearly as in the case of the Bible in Protestant countries, where, in the 19th century, it became in its vernacular translations, a core element of education and culture, of what the Germans call Bildung.10 Even though Christianity did not always represent actual shared beliefs and practices, it certainly remained at the core of historical consciousness and national identity. This is what Hegel referred to as the transformation, or *Aufhebung* of Christianity in the full-fledged *Geist*.11

Secularization alone, however, does not explain the transformation of the status of Christianity in European consciousness from representing Europe's religious capital to its cultural capital – to use a concept crafted by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Both the rapid growth of nationalism and the expansion of colonial conquests in the age of imperialism must be factored in. The growing feelings of European superiority versus Asian and African peoples and cultures would, in the second half of the century, in the heyday of colonialism, be expressed in a new key, that of 'scientific racism'. The new expression of disparaging attitudes to foreign peoples and their cultures would have an immediate, potent, and lasting impact upon scholarly conceptions. Among others, Martin Bernal, focusing on the

**9** For an analytical description of the period, see Owen Chadwick, *The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975.

**10** See Jonathan Sheehan, *The Enlightenment Bible. Translation, Scholarship, Culture*. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005. Cf. Chapter 3, note 8.

**11** See for instance Jean-Claude Monod, *La querelle de la sécularisation de Hegel à Blumenberg*. Paris: Vrin 2002. On the relationship between philosophical and theological perceptions of secularization, see Hans Blumenberg, *Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung*. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1974.

study of Greek antiquity, has shown how the categories forged in 19th century scholarship reflected racist ideas.12

One paradoxical and insidious consequence of this distantiation from Judaism and Islam led to a major fracture in European identity and to a new crisis of European consciousness, following that of the Enlightenment, so masterly analyzed by Paul Hazard.13 The depth of this fracture, as well as its effect on the status of Judaism and Islam in the European mind, has yet to be fully measured.14

Before the Enlightenment, the Near East (then usually referred to as simply 'the East'), was considered to be the soil of all human religious origins. All religions had come from the Ancient Near East, from Egypt to Babylonia, through the lands of the Bible.15 As Christianity was perceived, essentially, as the European religion par excellence, Judaism and Islam were, for the European mind, the two surviving religions from the Ancient Near East. Now, however, they became perceived only as coming from the East of the West, or as the West of the deep and true East, that of India and China. Judaism and Islam thus fell between Europe and India, between the two poles of Indo-European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, scholars recognized that the geographical spread of Islam throughout the world was impressive, and that both Jews and Muslims believed in one God. Yet, all in all, racial prejudice against the Jews (distinct from traditional religious anti-Semitism) and condescending attitudes to Islam and Islamic societies entailed a strong devaluation of both Judaism and Islam and a clear preference for Indo-European religious systems and cultural traditions over Semitic religions and cultures. European Christians were thus contriving to escape the Jewish, Near-Eastern origins of their religion. The close relationship of Christianity with European culture, it was argued, did not deny its universal nature, and it was therefore Europe's duty to promote Christianity throughout Asia and Africa, along the model of its earlier conquests in the Americas.

**12** Martin Bernal, *Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985*. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press 1987; Bernal has insisted on the major role played by the intensification of racism and the central importance of 'ethnicity' as a principle of historical explanation. He was able to show the crucial part they played in the formation of new taxonomies opposing 'Aryans' to 'Semites'.

**13** Paul Hazard, *The Crisis of the European Mind. 1680–1715*. New York: New York Review of Books 2013 [French original: La crise de la conscience européenne. 1680–1715. Paris: Fayard 1961 [1935]].

**14** Markus Messling, *Gebeugter Geist. Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie*. Göttingen: Wallerstein 2016.

**15** See for instance Guy G. Stroumsa, John Selden et les origines de l'orientalisme, in: Quentin Epron (ed.), *John Selden: juriste européen, Annuaire de l'Institut Michel Villey* (2012), 1–11.

Intellectual perceptions of Judaism and Islam, moreover, are directly related to social attitudes toward Jews and Muslims in European societies – a point which there is surely no need to belabor. In the early stages of Jewish emancipation (a process that had started with the French Revolution), Jewish communities in Western European societies were being transformed very fast. Together with emancipation and less exclusion from society at large came new tensions. The traditional forms of Christian anti-Judaism, which, of course, had not disappeared, were reactivated, as it were, in a new, racial key, and fresh forms of prejudice were formulated. In various ways, the Jews were now felt to be more alien than at any previous time. Their identity was perceived as an Asian one. In other words, the Jews did not really belong to Europe. Thus Herder, and so many after him.

At the same time, Islam was identified as the religion of Europe's immediate and scorned neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, and that of colonized peoples, from the Maghreb to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As a consequence, Muslims were often despised and hated. For generations, there had existed, of course, significant Muslim communities on European soil, mainly in the Balkans. In southern European imagery, they were often pictured as peaceful traders. More often than not, however, they remained marginalized in Western European perception. Imperialism and colonialism, in Africa, the Near East, and South East Asia, could only strengthen negative attitudes toward Islam and Muslims and reactivate existing prejudices. Orientalist trends in art and literature, as we know, highlighted such negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in the 19th century.

In the mid-19th century, the French historian and philosopher Edgar Quinet coined the phrase 'la Renaissance orientale', by which he meant the new European scholarly interest in, and cultural sensitivity for, the civilizations of Asia.16 Since Quinet's days, European perceptions of the Orient have remained a highly loaded topic, as demonstrated by the fate of Edward Said's *Orientalism*, a book published more than a generation ago, which soon became a cult book.17 Over the years since its publication, polemics around it, at times in stringent tones, seem to remain endemic. There is no need to rehash either the important points it was making, or the detailed criticism of its various shortcomings here.18 One of the deplorable

**16** Edgar Quinet, *Du génie des religions*. Paris: Charpentier 1842, 65–77. A century later, the literary scholar Raymond Schwab would use the expression as the title of his masterpiece, *La Renaissance orientale*. Paris: Payot 2014 [English translation: The Oriental Renaissance. Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. New York: Columbia University Press 1984].

**17** Edward Said, *Orientalism*. New York: Random House 1978.

**18** Cf. Robert Irwin, *For Lust of Knowing. The Orientalists and their Enemies*. London: Penguin 2006, 3–5. On the vitriolic polemics to which the book gave birth, see for instance the exchange between Said and two distinguished Arabists and Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar and Bernard Lewis,

consequences of Said's book, however, is of direct import to our topic, as it derided the colossal effort made by many bright, studious, and courageous scholars. They succeeded in opening new vistas to whole civilizations far beyond the borders of Europe. Intellectual curiosity, among these scholars, seems to have been boundless. A number of excellent monographs on aspects of 19th-century Orientalism have done much to highlight its rich and complex history, as well as the many links, both obvious (starting with linguistic demands) and implicit, between Orientalism and the study of religion.

While the study of Islam and that of Judaism form part of the Orientalist enterprise (and I use this word without its usual pejorative connotations), they obviously also belong to the study of religion. Like Orientalism, the latter grew throughout the 19th century, eventually becoming a full-fledged scholarly discipline. How and when was the modern, critical study of religion born? Among the branches of humanistic scholarship, the study of religion seems to have particularly suffered from a lack of reflexivity upon its own history.19 In the last generation, however, sophisticated histories of the history of religion have done much to remedy this sore state of affairs, shedding new light on the history of the modern study of religion. It is but natural that these books usually focus on the second half of the 19th century, the period when the first university chairs and scholarly journals were established in a number of European countries. In countries of Protestant culture in particular, the study of religion became established in theological faculties. One of the major consequences of this situation is that the study of religion long remained deeply embedded in theological conceptions, as Jonathan Z. Smith was able to show regarding the religions of late antiquity and the world of Early Christianity.20

What is needed is a critical genealogy of scholarly discourse. In a way, such a genealogy would attempt to unveil the unconscious of the discipline.21 By 'unconscious', I refer to implicit, hidden principles that dictate research and the development of the field. It is no accident that such principles usually remain unex-

in *The New York Review of Books* (issue of August 12, 1982). Quite oddly, the polemics continues unabated, more than forty years after the publication of *Orientalism*. See for instance Adam Shatz, 'Orientalism,' Then and Now, in: The New York Review (20.05.2019), URL: https://www.nybooks. com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/ (21.07.2022).

**19** Robert Orsi, The 'So-Called History' of the Study of Religion, in: *Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20* (2008), 134–138: 'The past of religious studies has been until recently largely invisible…' (134).

**20** Jonathan Z. Smith, *Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990.

**21** This is to be distinguished from the point made by Philippe Borgeaud, *Aux origines de l'histoire des religions*. Paris: Seuil 2004, 18, on religions representing the unconscious of civilizations.

pressed, in the field of religion, perhaps, more than anywhere else. If Freud is right in arguing that religion is particularly fraught with repression (*Verdrängung*), the same may also be true of its study.

Focusing on the history of scholarship, then, I seek to epitomize the study of an absence. Why is it that 19th-century religious scholarship neglected the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – a form of study that it had inherited from a long tradition? It is true that 19th-century historicism sought to see phenomena as rooted in their cultural and historical context and to give each nation its due, as Ranke noted. Still, comparative scholarship blossomed, in various fields, in the last decades of the century, at the acme of British imperial power. In a number of ways, the colonial enterprise fostered a comparative approach – with the avowed view of claiming the supremacy of European culture over that of other civilizations. The inquiry also stands at the confluence of different disciplines blooming in our period, in particular the study of Islam on the one hand (together with Arabic, Turkic, and Iranian philology) and Jewish Studies (or rather the Wissenschaft des Judentums) on the other hand.22

Jewish scholars played a specific role in the emergence of the history of religion, at the crossroads with Orientalism, in the second half of the 19th century. This role reflects their peculiar status and self-perception, as well as a unique aspect of the discipline. By and large, among European scholars of religion, only the Jews did not identify as Christians, at least culturally. Jewish scholars sought at once, in different ways, to achieve various goals, not always compatible with one another. They sought to apply philological and historical methods to Jewish texts and documents which they considered unduly ignored or misunderstood by Christian scholars. Moreover, moved as they were at once by a sense of belonging to their own traditional Jewish culture and by their intense desire to become full-fledged members of society at large, they believed that, as Orientals living in the West, they could offer a bridge of sorts between the cultures and languages of Asia and Europe.

The rise of Romanticism and of national movements contributed to the break-up of the integrative reflection on the three great monotheist traditions we now call the Abrahamic religions. This break-up was finalized by the combined impact of a traditional contempt for Islam and a patronizing (or worse) attitude to contemporary Muslim societies.23

**22** See for instance Christian Wiese, *Challenging Colonial Discourse. Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany*. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2005.

**23** A similar phenomenon can also be observed about religions and societies of black Africa, as demonstrated by David Chidester, *Empire of Religion. Imperialism and Comparative Religion*. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press 2014.

Side by side with this aversion to Islam, the new racial anti-Semitism was growing. At the time, the Jews of Europe were starting to leave the ghettos and enter Western European societies – a dramatic change of the old patterns of relationship between Christians and Jews during many centuries. With their new economic integration in society at large, however, the Jews soon discovered, painfully, that this was not enough to earn them what Heine called an 'entrance ticket' to European society – a ticket which only baptism could really provide. The Jews, as already mentioned, were perceived as stemming from the Orient and often considered as still belonging to it. It should be noted that Jews often embraced these oriental roots with pride. This self-identification is reflected in the Orientalizing architecture of many 19th century synagogues, a style meant to allude to the mythical symbiosis, or *convivencia*, between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in al-Andalus, medieval Islamic Spain.24

The scholarly study of Christianity (in particular early and late antique Christianity) which slowly sought to disengage itself from theology (without ever fully succeeding in achieving this goal) represents a special case in the emerging comparative and historical study of religions. The appearance, in the last three decades of the 19th century, of the new concept of 'world religions' broke the traditional family relationship of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as it insisted in seeing Christianity to be a full-fledged universalist religion, while Islam was granted this status only grudgingly, and Judaism rejected into the category of racially and ethnically determined religions.25

The history of scholarship represents more than the list of the achievements of individual scholars; it is also made of scholarly institutions, in the framework of which free research and intellectual breakthroughs can happen. Such scholarly institutions include universities but also theological seminaries, scientific academies, scholarly journals, conferences, and publishing venues, and companies. In contradistinction to early modernity, when scholarship remained essentially the personal adventure of highly gifted and idiosyncratic individuals, from the 19th century on, research has mainly been carried on within universities. It is, indeed, the dialectical interaction between individual thinking and institutionalized systems of knowledge that transforms disciplines. One cannot really understand intellectual discourse and scholarly practices without constant reference to their cultural, religious, and ideological background.

**24** See for instance the discussion of this theme in John Efron, *German Jewry and the Allure of the Sefardic*. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2016. This embrace of the Orient would be echoed in the Zionist urge to return to the East, to Palestine. At the turn of the century, art in Jewish Palestine, too, would embrace the Orientalizing trend.

**25** See Guy G. Stroumsa, *The Idea of Semitic Monotheism*, Chapter 9.

Since their birth in the 17th century, the modern humanistic disciplines, like the natural sciences, have been fascinated by comparison. The comparison between languages, cultures, legal systems, scientific traditions, mythologies, and societies, however, has always reflected an effort in detecting differences as much as in seeking similarities between them. These early modern humanistic disciplines were the offspring of the puzzlement generated by the new cultures and societies revealed by the great discoveries. The comparative element gathered momentum in the 19th century, starting with linguistics, under the impact of Franz Bopp's seminal studies on the grammar of the Indo-European languages, and reached its zenith toward the end of that century.26

Comparison lies at the center of the non-theological study of religions since the 18th century. Ever present, and indispensable, comparison is always highly problematic as a method. It is rarely innocent.27 It is also a constant exercise, one that is at the core of experimental investigation. What do we do when we compare? The answer depends, of course, upon one's goals, viewpoint, and culture. Anthropologists, in particular, have reflected much on the question of comparison between societies, both those broadly similar and those highly different from one another.28

**26** See further, Stroumsa, *Semitic Monotheism*, Chapter 9.

**27** Bruce Lincoln, Theses on Comparison, in: Bruce Lincoln, *Apples and Oranges. Explorations In, On, and With Comparison*. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press 2018, 25–33, esp. 25. See also, in the same volume, *The Future of History of Religions*, 14–24 (written together with Cristiano Grottanelli). David Chidester, *Empire of Religion. Imperialism and Comparative Religion*. Chicago/ London: Chicago University Press 2014. Chidester shows how British Imperialism in the second half of the 19th century used taxonomies of religions in order to support its colonial conquests in South Africa. See already David Chidester, *Savage Systems. Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa*. Charlottesville/London: University Press of Virginia 1996. On comparison in the study of ancient religions, see Claude Calame/Bruce Lincoln (eds.), *Comparer en histoire des religions antiques*. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège 2012. For the wise remarks of a Western Medievalist puzzled by what she sees in India, see Caroline Bynum, Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or, Why Compare?, in: *History of Religions 53* (2014), 341–368. For an attempt to negotiate a path between too much and too little comparison in the study of religion, see Wendy Doniger, *The Implied Spider. Politics and Theology in Myth*. New York: Columbia University Press 1998, 64–71. **28** About comparison as experimental method, see Philippe Borgeaud, *L'histoire des religions*. Gollion: Infolio 2013, 182–185. For a rich volume of studies on comparatism by historians and anthropologists alike, see Renaud Gagné/Simon Goldhill/Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (eds.), *Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology* (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24). Leiden/Boston: Brill 2018. For an analysis of the different kinds of comparatism in anthropology, see in particular in the volume, Philippe Descola, Anthropological Comparatisms: Generalisation, Symmetrisation, Bifurcation, 402–417. In 2019, Descola dedicated his last year of teaching at the Collège de France to the question of comparatism in anthropology. In the footsteps of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, he insists on the fact that comparison is the very essence of an-

Contemporary historiography of our discipline typically focuses on Protestant countries in the second half of the 19th century. Philippe Borgeaud, for instance, puts his finger on a climate of secularization in Protestant countries in the 1870s, while Hans Kippenberg follows the traditional emphasis on Protestant scholarship.29 Until the early 20th century, the Catholic hierarchy was still fiercely fighting the critical methods in the study of the Scriptures, and Catholic theological faculties remained, by and large, unwilling to study religious phenomena and history in a modern, non-traditional way. Despite various daring attempts, such as those of the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem since the days of Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P., Catholic scholars were prohibited from practicing higher criticism until Vatican II.

More precisely, it was within Protestant theological faculties in Germany that the new critical approach to the Scriptures was born, and that the progressive theological liberalization was most conspicuous, permitting the study of non-Christian religions, past and present. Fresh scholarly biblical hermeneutics eventually opened the way to the comparative study of religious texts from both the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman Mediterranean – a trend famously illustrated by the Göttingen *Religionsgeschichtliche Schule* in the last decade of the 19th century.30 These ancient texts were now understood as reflecting the background, or *Sitz im Leben*, of the religious ideas expressed in the books of the Old and New Testament.

The obvious and massive cleft between Protestant and Catholic biblical scholarship, however, is also responsible for a common error of perception, when it is too often assumed that the 19th-century study of religion is essentially a Protestant affair. The combined evidence, showing the major importance of the transmission of knowledge between different European countries, and the crucial significance

thropology and seeks to distinguish between different kinds of comparatism. In this context, it is significant that, like the study of religion, modern anthropology dates from the last decades of the 19th century. In his 'Marett Lecture' (1950), Evans-Prichard had already argued that anthropology should be perceived as a kind of history, and that it belonged to the Humanities. See Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology. Past and Present, in: Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, *Social Anthropology and Other Essays*. New York: The Free Press 1962, 139–154, esp. 152–154.

**29** Philippe Borgeaud, *L'histoire des religions*, 134. Kippenberg's *Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age,* and is also true for those works calling attention to the high price paid by those reading religious history through confessional glasses. On this issue, Jonathan Z. Smith has shown in his seminal *Drudgery Divine* how much Protestant beliefs had impacted the study of early Christianity in its Hellenistic background. *Mutatis mutandis*, a similar argument could be made about ancient Israel and Near Eastern religions.

**30** On the *Religionsgeschichtliche Schule*, see Gerd Lüdemann (ed.), *Die 'Religionsgeschichtliche Schule'. Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs*. Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang 1996. See Chapter Eight below.

for the science of religion of ethnological studies, coming at the time mainly from Catholic missionaries, clearly discards such a misperception. It is as a complex combination of elements coming from different cultural and intellectual traditions that the modern study of religion emerged.31

In the trajectory of modern scholarship on religion, a number of significant shifts in systems of knowledge brought to the reconstruction of central cognitive structures. The formation and re-structuring of concepts and methods modifies fields of study, sometimes profoundly transforming them. Such fields are ultimately related to the construction of the self, in particular when they deal directly with religious identities. In a time of profound and extensive secularization of European societies, the historical and comparative study of religions, which is a particularly delicate and interdisciplinary field of scholarship, has had a significant impact on both the transmission of knowledge and the transformation of European identities.

What was true in the 19th century remains true today. We witness, throughout Europe, bursts of Islamophobia and an animated, enduring, often strident, and sometimes violent public discussion about the ethnic, cultural, and religious implications of the massive immigration from Muslim countries, coming together with a worrisome renewal, under various garbs, of a Judaeophobia we naively thought was on the waning.32

Even the largely post-Christian Europe of the 21st century, indeed, does not seem to be quite done with its old obsessions about Muslims and Jews.

**31** I reached a similar conclusion about the early modern study of religion, in the 17th century, in *A New Science*.

**32** For a number of reasons, the use of 'Semite' and 'Semitic' has continued to be deeply ambivalent, and to this day, is often problematic. 'Anti-Semitism', as we know, is a term coined in the early 1880s, by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, naming the political movement opposing the integration of Jews into society. Although this misnomer has retained its original connotations to this day, it is often argued that Arabs cannot be accused of Antisemitism in the sense of Judeophobia, since they too are Semites. This is of course a very weak syllogism, as has been demonstrated many times. Another claim, more relevant to our present inquiry, was levelled by Edward Said, when he argued that the popular anti-Semitic animus was transferred from a Jewish to an Arab target, and that this transference was made smoothly since the figure was essentially the same (i.e., the Arabs too are Semites, and therefore the same word can be used against them too). This is a specious argument, as cogently argued by Bernard Lewis in his *Semites and Anti-Semites*. New York/London: Norton 1986. The word itself, anti-Semitism, dates from the late 19th century, while according to Said, Orientalist anti-Arab animus is a much earlier phenomenon. Moreover, anti-Jewish animus never weakened, let alone disappeared, even with the growth of what is now called Islamophobia. Neither the word 'anti-Semitism' nor the hatred it refers to can be said to have been transferred from Jew to Arab. On this, see Gil Anidjar, *Semites. Race, Religion, Literature*. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008, 13–38.

# Azza Karam **Complimenting the Divine: The Multireligious as the Poetics of Resilience**

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man; to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. – St. Thomas Aquinas

Man is made by his belief as he believes, so he is. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#### **1 Introduction**

One of the basic principles of the charter of the United Nations – an institution I served for nearly two decades – and I very strongly believe in, is that of the the dignity and equality of all human beings. All members of the United Nations – the governments – have pledged themselves to take joint and separate action with cooperation to maintain and encourage universal respect for and the observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinctions of race, sex, language, religion, ethnicity, nothing.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Human Rights proclaim the principles of nondiscrimination and equality before the law and include the right to freedom of thought, conscience, or belief. Furthermore, the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, notes, among other things, and I quote:

the disregard and infringement of human rights and fundamental freedoms in particular to the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or whatever belief, have brought directly or indirectly wars and great suffering to humankind, especially where they serve as a means of foreign interference in the internal affairs of other states and amount to kindling hatred between peoples and nations.1

**1** Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, on: UN Human Rights Office (25.11.1981), URL: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/declaration-elimination-all-forms-intolerance-and-discrimination (03.2.2023).

We are living in very odd times indeed, and I do not just mean Covid times, as well as the climate changes that we are all experiencing in every single corner of the world. Both of these are already effectively changing us slowly but surely in ways, we may yet to appreciate. In the introduction, we heard about how this way of congregating virtually and of conversing has already become our the normal. Surely, this way of being together – and yet not really *being* together – will impact our perception of one another – at the minimum, it will even impact how we feel about the way that we present ourselves, to whom we present, to whom we talk.

It is difficult not to take into consideration whether I am talking to myself or if I am talking to others and to ask myself who these people are that I am talking to but which I can only see through this screen. The fact is, that even asking myself these questions, in and of itself, will have an impact on what I choose to say, and how I choose to say it. This, in turn, also relates to how we see ourselves and how we appreciate those 'with us' – or those not with us. This brings out in very stark ways some good things, but also perhaps some not very good things. I refer to it as the poverty of goodness and the goodness of poverty.

We live in times of what many describe as a democratic recession. A world, in which uttering words of hatred to those who are unlike us, is increasingly normalized, and in some cases, speaking ill of the other is even seen as 'a good thing'. This absence of what some of us would think of as common decency, belongs to what I consider what I consider part of a democratic deficit. And if this deficit is to be reversed, it will take a very deliberate effort by each and everyone of us – individuals, communities, and institutions. I argue that this is very much needed, because we need to expand the shrinking space for dissent and for pluralism, but we must also make sure, we do so in a way that makes the dissent civil, not warlike.

All the more ironic then, that, when it comes to promoting human rights, the foreign policies of some governments (particularly Western ones) tend to single out specific aspects of religious realities – if they speak to religion at all. The acknowledgement of religion comes through the lens of religious freedom or freedom of expression – perhaps initially inspired by the concerns for Christian minorities elsewhere in the world. Many foreign policy makers in Europe in particular but also the United States, are in the process of creating several bodies which are attempting to have a role in promoting freedom of religion on the global stage. They do this in many ways, including shining a light on the persecution of religious minorities and prisoners of conscience, calling for and aiding efforts to abolish blasphemy bans, and sometimes also selective naming and shaming of countries in violation of freedom of religion. This is important, but remains very much a Western Hemisphere-led effort (largely European and North American).

Yet, and this is an important qualification, many scholars as well as peacemakers and development practitioners, argue that there are limits to what can be accomplished by a narrow focus on religious freedom. Having the right to worship according to the dictates of one's conscience actually does not automatically translate into contexts of political pluralism and support for civic engagement and freedom of expression. The focus on freedom of religion may, in fact, either exclude or marginalize an equally necessary focus on the freedoms of those championing democracy, human rights, anti-corruption, and environmental concerns. Creating separate governmental commissions or intergovernmental entities focusing on diverse parts of human rights means, we may not connect the dots and thus end up with neither a 'whole of government' approach nor a 'whole of society' understanding.

So, as we increase the focus on religious freedom, we must ask ourselves whether we also potentially diminish the focus on the role of faith in motivating and inspiring and playing both a leading key and instigative role to champion democracy and human rights. If these features – i.e. intersecting and interconnected human rights, anti-corruption, environmental concerns among other dynamics – are not simultaneously also actively struggled for, are we potentially 'allowing' political regimes, whose environmental policies are problematic, and who repress opposition and dissent on other matters of human rights, to still be patted on the back because they pass legislations which protects certain religious minorities, even if some of these minorities are themselves oppressing their own members (e.g. women or LGBTIQ groups)?

The fact is, it is actually possible for some authoritarian states to embrace religious freedom, while the freedom to express dissent constitutes an existential threat to them. This prompts an important inquiry based on where we sit in Religions for Peace2. This is where all faith communities – all religious institutions – are governing members, committed to upholding the values common to all faiths (including love, compassion, mercy), and serving the common good – together. Imagine: What would happen if these very same religious leaders and institutions commit to working together, in all parts of the world where they coexist, to secure freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and belief – for one another's communities and institutions?

**2** Religions for Peace is often seen as the 'United Nations of religions', in the same way that the United Nations is composed of government, or political institutions, as members, *Religions for Peace* is composed of religious institutions and representatives of faith communities around the world, as its members.

# **2 Freedom**

But wait, before we seek to imagine these changes, let us first arrive at some kind of a common understanding of what 'freedom' could mean. What are the poetics of freedom, as I understand them, especially, where they intersect with thought, conscience, and belief?

Nelson Mandela noted in his work The Long Walk to Freedom that,

[T]here is no easy walk to freedom anywhere and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. Again, and again before we reach the mountain top of our desires.3

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is quoted to have said:

[W]hen we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing the words of the old negro spiritual, 'free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last'.4

Rather than explore the entire gambit of what freedom entails to so many and every individual, allow me to settle for a very quick look at how the notion of freedom is sometimes understood and practiced in terms of sustainable development or the sustainable development goals – referred to as Agenda 2030. But why do I choose to look at freedom through the sustainable development goals? Because whether we realize it or not, the Sustainable Development Goals were actually arrived at and signed by 193 governments, the members of the United Nations. For those of you who know the challenges of international human rights and international humanitarian law, for those of you very familiar with the challenges of having even one government agree to one policy direction, there is little doubt that you should be able to appreciate what it means to have 193 governments agree to a set of global priorities for human development. It is a very significant undertaking. All the more so in the context of a very divided and divisive set of realities around us today.

**3** The words of Nelson Mandela echo through the decades, in: Los Angeles Times (06.12.2013), URL: https://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-nelson-mandela-dies-famous-quotes-story. html (03.02.2023).

**4** Beyond black-and-white: Essential moments from MLK's historic 'I have a dream speech', on: NBC News (28.08.2013), URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/beyond-black-white-essentialmoments-mlks-historic-i-have-dream-flna8c11024425 (03.02.2023).

So, let us visit – briefly – freedom as development, or development itself as freedom. Unsurprisingly, I will refer to Professor Amartya Sen – an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize in economic sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interests in the problems of societies poorest members. Professor Sen himself, in his exegesis of *Development As Freedom*, quotes an 18th century poet, William Cowper, on freedom:

Freedom has a thousand charms to show […] that slaves, however contented, never know.5

Sen explains how, in a world of unprecedented increases and overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remained imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny, or cultural authoritarianism.

It is rather sad, that Sen was actually talking about the 1990s. Now consider what it is like in a Covid-riddled and climate aggrieved world, where some governments have found an excuse in stopping the transmission of the disease, to exercise even more authoritarian controls. A Covid-riddled world which has shone a very harsh light on the enormous inequalities of access to basic needs in our society, let alone access to necessary vaccines. The main purpose of development, Sen argued, was to 'spread freedom and its thousand charms to the unfree'. The unfree we know to be in today's figures, the millions who live not only in poverty, not only without access to affordable quality education, decent levels of food, basic nutrition, basic sanitation, a safe and secure environment but also without access to decent employment opportunities. In fact, the unfree are those whose lives are impacted simultaneously by the intersecting calamities of all of this plus an environment which is endangering each and every life of this planet.

Freedom, as Sen argues, is both a means and an end. He spoke of social institutions like markets, political parties, legislature, the judiciary, and the media as contributing to development by enhancing individual freedom. These institutions themselves are sustained by social values. Thus Sen links values, institutions, development, and freedom.

Using Sen's understanding then, and juxtaposing that understanding against today's environmental realities, we can say that freedom is the holistic work of ensuring that we have a sustainable environment which comes together with and enables the essentials of a dignified life. A life where access to the basic needs such

**5** Amartya Sen, *Development As Freedom*. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999, 298.

as quality education, nutrition and healthcare, and decent employment are enabled by the absence of all forms of violence and the prevalence of security; that is, a life of dignity. This underlines why it is important for institutions such as Religions for Peace to convene and enable religious institutions to work together to realise that freedom.

# **3 Freedom as Mercy**

I choose to focus on the poetics of freedom from the prism of the values common to all faiths: mercy, love, and compassion.

So where is the link to freedom as mercy? In the Bhagavad Gita it says:

you are what you believe in, you become that which you believe you can become.6

So, if we believe in mercy, we shall become merciful. And in doing so make the world less cold and more just.

Let me ask a few rhetorical questions: Can we live without experiencing mercy ourselves? A sense of mercy towards ourselves? What about the sense of mercy towards and from one another? What kind of a life is it in which we do not experience that sense of mercy from one another and towards ourselves? If we cannot live without some form of mercy, should we not understand then, that within each of our faith traditions there is a call, a demand, an obligation, an imperative to be merciful towards others?

But how can we be merciful towards others if we deny them their right to exercise their freedom of religion or belief? How can we claim to be people of some faith if we do not actively struggle for that freedom, not only for ourselves, but for each and every fellow human being? As the Bhagavad Gita again enlightens, there is mercy in showing mercy, so it is merciful to demand this, as I claim the freedom to believe in the Divine in whatever form I believe that Divine takes. I will actively affirm your freedom to believe and to exercise that belief.

**6** Neha Borkar, 11 Bhagavad Gita Quotes By Lord Krishna on Life and Success That You Need To Know, on: Indiatimes (05.06.2020), URL: https://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/11-simplelessons-from-the-bhagavad-gita-that-are-all-you-need-to-know-about-life-244390.html (03.02.2023).

#### **4 Freedom as Love**

Now let me pivot to freedom as love of the Divine – and thus the love of one and all. There is an African proverb which says: 'tell me who you love, and I will tell you who you are.'

A Turkish-Muslim scholar, Dr. Adnan Oktar, elaborates on one of the verses of the Quran in which it is explicitly stated that God points to the existence of people from different faiths and opinions as His creations. I will not quote the Surah (verse) in full, but it is number 5 verse 84. The Surah basically says (and here I am paraphrasing the translation of Youssef Ali)7 that the Quran is meant to confirm earlier scriptures, and is intended to guard the Truths in these earlier Scriptures. So we should refrain from judging between people, especially as each of us has 'been prescribed a law, and a way'. I am reminded here of the point Pope Francis' once raised and often (mis)quoted: 'who am I to judge?'. The Surah then goes on to make a point I find equally beautiful: That if God had so willed, he would have made us all a single people. Instead, he has given us choice, so we must strive to be more virtuous (also understood as honour God's commandments). What this means to me, as a Muslim, is a clear injunction to have inner love/compassion/mercy for people of all faiths, races, and nations, because these are all the creations of the Divine.

This is echoed in every single faith tradition. Of course, we can search to find the mean, nasty, horrid things. Or we can dwell on that which is calling for love. Let us move away from scripture for a second and let us look at Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. I quote him when he says:

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.8

The Igbo put it concretely in their own proverb:

He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.

But we cannot stay in the mud. As people of faith, whatever, we are called upon, in the words of St. Teresa Avila, not only to love the Divine, to accustom ourselves to make many acts of love for they kindle, but also to melt the soul.

**7** Cf. The Holy Qur'an online, Translation by A. Yusuf Ali, on: quranyusufali.com, URL: https:// quranyusufali.com/ (03.02.2023).

**8** Introduction on Chinua Achebe, on: goodreads.com, URL: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/ 261567-we-cannot-trample-upon-the-humanity-of-others-without-devaluing#:~:text=%E2%80%9C We%20cannot%20trample%20upon%20the%20humanity%20of%20others%20without%20devalu ing,mud%20to%20keep%20him%20down.%E2%80%9D (03.02.2023).

So, taking into account holy scriptures, poetry, and sayings, we can detect a very humble reflection on the poetics of freedom: The freedom to love the Divine as reflected in each and every living thing – not just humans – is not a choice that we make, it is an obsession that we must have.

The love of the Divine is at once strengthened and tempered by the freedom to see the reflection of the Divine in each and every human being and living thing, including those who may not even believe in the Divine. Freedom is also compassion. In the Kopan Monastary in Nepal, Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche speaking in the 33rd Kopan course says, I quote:

If our mind is devoid of compassion, if our heart is devoid of compassion, inner peace, and contentment, then no matter what extensive things or external practices we perform is not real, is not spiritual. Our heart is empty of spiritual practice.9

I repeat, in my words, without compassion, our heart is empty of spiritual practice. Here is an outlook that is encapsulated by a poet, a novelist, a singer, a memoirist, Maya Angelou, who passed away in 2019. Her quote is:

My mission in life is not merely to survive but to thrive, and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.10

About time, we come to paying God a compliment. St. Theresa of Avila said: 'you pay God a compliment by asking great things of him.'11 This is the vision of service in *Religions for Peace* – we aim to pay God one compliment after another, making one great demand after another. We ask God to help us realise the freedoms of all religions to make peace, to enable the realization with a humility based on an obsession with love, with mercy and with compassion. An obsession with the Divine in all of its manifestations and forms.

I want to quote the Buddha where he says:

**9** Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Compassion is the Essence of Religion, on: Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, URL: https://www.lamayeshe.com/article/compassion-essence-religion (03.02.2023).

**10** Maya Angelou, on: Twitter (28.03.2021), URL: https://twitter.com/drmayaangelou/status/1376258<PHONE_NUMBER>31?lang=en (03.02.2023).

**11** St. Teresa of Ávila, You pay God a compliment by asking great things of him, on: catholicdigest. com, URL: https://www.catholicdigest.com/from-the-magazine/quiet-moment/st-teresa-of-avila-youpay-god-a-compliment-by-asking-great-things-of-him/ (03.02.2023).

Little though he recites the sacred texts, but puts the Teaching into practice, forsaking lust, hatred, and delusion, with true wisdom and emancipated mind, clinging to nothing of this or any other world — he indeed partakes of the blessings of a holy life.12

And this brings me to resilience. The meanings of resilience written in ecology, sociology and the studies of social ecological systems is effectively, and I am trying to cobble together from all these different disciplines, the focus on change in complex systems interacting, to define resilient as a desirable thing. But let us try to see resilience as connectivity to systems or communities. Resilience is rooted in and within complex interactions. It is about movement, change and transformation, so, resilience, therefore, is not about surviving as an individual, although, of course, it can include that. But in a world linked by Covid where no one is safe until everyone is, we are required to be resilient, by handling the collective 'we' faced with the multiple challenges.

For many, faith is where the resilience is to be found, not only because of what we believe individually, but perhaps also because of what our faith teaches us about understanding and living freedom as connecting with and connected to one another. I like to think that the freedom we viewed in the context of mercy, compassion, and love is both the means and the end of resilience. So, what does all this mean?  An existence, in which we have given only to our immediate community, family, whichever close relation, is an existence, in which we have effectively asked very little indeed of God, actually. It does not sound to me that this would be the exercise of compassion, mercy or love. In fact, such an existence, in which we focus on the immediate or our own, that, which is like us, that kind of existence limits our freedom and may actually well curb our resilience. All of us, even if all of us were vaccinated in any given country, are still by no means safe. Covid has gone nowhere; it is still very much with us.

Therefore, confronted with Covid and its myriad impacts, Religions for Peace, learning from over 50 years of convening religious communities to work together, understands that our faiths together are the means of building an interconnected

**12** Yamakavagga: Pairs. translated from the Pali by Acharya Buddharakkhita, on: accesstoinsight. org, URL: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.budd.html#dhp-19 (03.02.2023). **13** Kahlil Gibran, On Giving, on: poets.org, URL: https://poets.org/poem/giving-0 (03.02.2023).

web of resilience for our humanity and our planet. We learned that, to focus on or only with one religious community, is actually to unravel the connectivity, which the virus itself was showing us. The virus does not distinguish between anyone or limits itself to any one nation, ethnicity, social status, gender, or any boundary. Rather the virus and its impacts are breaking through our walls of othering and disconnecting us further. The virus is a negative loop in our lives.

The positive loop is to build the resilience to realize our freedom as mercy, compassion, and love; to serve all faiths as an act of one's own faith. The positive loop is to secure the web of human and planetary connectivity, so that the multireligious – the multifaith – is the means to resilience and resilience is faced and built together, is the multifaith web of connectivity. In other words, asking God to help us realize that cohesion especially in these times, is paying God a compliment because it is asking great things of God. We ask great things of God, as we ask great things of one another; as we serve one another, regardless of our differences. Because we will never be safe within the parameters and boundaries that we think we have. If Covid and climate change have shown us anything, they have shown us that, in order for us to survive and to thrive, we are absolutely compelled to look after one another. It is not a choice, it is an imperative.

That is why Religions for Peace, the organization I am privileged to serve, within the first two weeks in March after the global lockdowns were starting, set up the Multireligious Humanitarian Fund. Why? It was not because religious organizations are not already working at warp speed delivering a thousand and one percent. In fact, every single religious community is working non-stop. Because we know that religious organizations actually are at the forefront of humanitarian efforts.  But what we noticed, very soon, was, that every single religious institution, every single first responder, was responding to serve everybody, but primarily through their own organizations – and for them. So, as the religious organisations are serving, but they serve pretty much on their own.

Religions for Peace's business is to seek that cycle of freedom, that requires – in fact, demands – mercy, compassion, and love towards others, through giving. And that is why we created a fund that is meant to support those efforts – and it is just starting on a small scale. We realise, that in different parts of the world, all are responding to the same needs, but we support those who are prepared to work together, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever the religious composition in any place, they are actually making a difference by working together, determined to serve together.

This is paying God a huge compliment. Because it is in the determination to give of our resources to the 'other'. That is what we are trying to build as resilience. If we succeed in enabling religious communities of whatever type to be working together in this moment of extended crisis, then, we are succeeding in building a framework of social cohesion. But if each religious institution continues to go alone, then no matter how many they serve, no matter how many countries they serve, we will still be talking about siloed forms of existence. Can we afford not to work together to build that mutual resilience that the virus and everything else around us is telling us what we absolutely need, because the survival of all depends on the survival of one?

We are at that moment in time, where we have to make a choice, not to be faithful only, not to decide to give to our own community only, but to decide to actively work together to give and share the resources that we have to serve one another. That is the ultimate test, of whether we have actually imbibed freedom for one and all, whether we have actually delivered on the basic tenants of our faith, whether we are actually building a resilience or simply coping for the time being, and whether we are going to build social cohesion or live fractured for the rest of the time that we have on this earth.

# **Contributors**

**Hans-Peter Grosshans** holds the Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Münster and is director of the Institute of Ecumenical Theology of the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Münster university (Germany). From 2020 – 2021 he was President and since 2022 he is Vice-President of the European Academy of Religion.

**Azza Karam** serves as the Secretary General of Religions for Peace (New York, US). She holds a Professorship of Religion and Development at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Dr. Karam currently is a member of the United Nations Secretary General's 'High Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism'.

**Vassilis Saroglou** is Professor of Psychology at the UCL-University of Louvain (Belgium). His research areas include the psychology of religion, personality, social, and cross-cultural psychology, moral psychology, and psychology of positive emotions. He has developed long-term empirical research on theoretically and socially critical issues regarding religion, spirituality, fundamentalism, and atheism.

**Guy G. Stroumsa** is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) and Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2008.

**Rowan Williams** was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, the 35th Master of Magdalene College from 2013–2020, and is Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought at the University of Cambridge (UK). He is the author of numerous theological and spiritual books and scholarly articles.

**Judith Wolfe** is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews**'** School of Divinity (UK), where she researches and teaches in systematic and philosophical theology, as well as in theology and the arts. She serves internationally on grant-funded projects, advisory and editorial boards in these areas, and is also a senior research fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and a professorial fellow of Australian Catholic University.

# **Index of Persons**

Achebe, Chinua 83 Achterberg, Peter 50 Ali, Youssef 83 Angelou, Maya 84 Anidjar, Gil 76 Aquinas, Thomas 34, 77 Arnold, Matthew 27, 28 Arvidsson, Stefan 67 Augustine 7, 65 Avila, Theresa 83, 84 Batson, C. Daniel 43, 46 Benedict XVI 7 Bernal, Martin 68, 69 Berthold-Bond, Daniel 33 Bertrand, Louis 66 Bleidorn, Wiebke 53 Blumenberg, Hans 68 Bopp, Franz 74 Borgeaud, Philippe 71, 74, 75 Borkar, Neha 82 Bourdieu, Pierre 68 Braude, Benjamin 65 Brewer, Marilynn B. 49 Bucher, Anton 53 Buddha 84 Buddharakkhita, Acharya 85 Bynum, Caroline 74 Calame, Claude 74 Carpenter, Tom 43 Chadwick, Owen 68 Chidester, David 72, 74 Collier, Paul 16 Collins, Haper 20 Comte, Auguste 68 Cowper, William 81 Dawkins, Richard 28 Deconchy, Jean-Pierre 41 Delpierre, Vanessa 56 Dent, Eric B. 54 Dernelle, Rebecca 56 Descola, Philippe 74 Dillon, Michele 40, 53, 55 Doebler, Stefanie 44 Doniger, Wendy 74

Efron, John 73 Ekici, Tufan 44 Eliot, Thomas S. 6 Epiphanius of Salamis 65 Esses, Victoria M. 46 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 74, 75 Farina, Dan 40, 53, 55 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 25 Freud, Sigmund 72 Furnham, Aadrian 59 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 6, 7, 8, 14 Gagné, Renaud 74 Gallie, Walter B. 14 Galliford, Natasha 59 Galloway, Susan 54 Gatrell, Peter 16 Gebauer, Jochen E. 54 Gibran, Kahlil 85 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 77 Goldenberg, David M. 66 Goldhill, Simon 74 Goldziher, Ignaz 66 Gorringe, Timothy 20 Grabar, Oleg 70 Grosshans, Hans-Peter 63, 89 Grossmann, Igor 49 Grottanelli, Cristiano 74 Guardini, Romano 26 Habermas, Jürgen 8, 9, 10, 12, 18 Haggard, Megan 43 Haldane, John 5, 6, 22 Hall, Deborah 43 Hazard, Paul 69 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 25, 31, 32, 33, 68 Heidegger, Martin 26, 29, 30, 31, 32 Herder, Johann Gottfried 70 Hibbing, John R. 53 Hodson, Gordon 46 Hoffarth, Mark Romeo 46 Hopwood, Christopher J. 53 Houtman, Dick 50 How, Alan 8 Inglehart, Ronald 49, 56 Irwin, Robert 70

 Open Access. © 2023 Hans-Peter Grosshans, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111241463-006

Jackson, Joshua C. 39 Jackson, Lynne M. 46 Jasinskaja-Lahti, Inga 59 Jetten, Jolanda 59 John of Damascus 65 Jones, William 65 Jost, John T. 54 Kahneman, Daniel 63 Kant, Immanuel 31, 32, 33 King, Martin Luther (Jr.) 80 Kippenberg, Hans 75 Kojeve, Alexandre 33 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph 75 Lao, Joseph R. 54 Lee, Kibeom 54 Leonardelli, Geoffrey J. 49 Lewis, Bernard 70, 76 Lewis, Clive S. 20, 21, 26 Lincoln, Bruce 74 Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. 74 Łowicki, Paweł 58 Löwith, Karl 30 Lüdemann, Gerd 75 MacIntyre, Alasdair 7, 10, 11, 14, 23 Mandela, Nelson 80 Marr, Wilhelm 76 Marx, Karl 31 Massa, Francesco 64 Matz, David 43 McCrae, Robert R. 52 Mendelson, Jack 8 Messling, Markus 69 Molnar, Danielle S. 46 Monod, Jean-Claude 68 Müller, Max 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 31 Norris, Pippa 49, 56 Oktar, Adnan 83 Olender, Maurice 66 Oreg, Shaul 54 Orsi, Robert 71 Oser, Fritz K. 53 Pabst, Adrian 19 Pennycook, Gordon 58 Peterson, Erik 32 Peterson, Jonathan C. 53 Pickett, Cynthia L. 49

Quinet, Edgar 68, 70 Ranke, Leopold von 25, 72 Reinach, Salomon 66 Renan, Ernest 63, 66 Ribberink, Egbert 50 Ricœur, Paul 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22 Rinpoche, Kyabje Lama Zopa 84 Rose, Gillian 10 Rosen, Stanley 33 Rowatt, Wade C. 43 Said, Edward 70, 71, 76 Sandel, Michael 12, 19 Santos, Henri C. 49 Saroglou, Vassilis 3, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 53, 56, 89 Scarlett, W. George 53 Schall, James V. 7 Schlag, Martin 20 Schoenrade, Patricia 43 Schwab, Raymond 70 Selden, John 69 Sen, Amartya 81 Shatz, Adam 71 Sheehan, Jonathan 68 Siedentop, Larry 19 Smith, Jonathan Z. 71, 75 Smith, Kevin B. 53 St. Athanasius 34 Strauss, Friedrich David 68 Stroumsa, Guy G. 3, 63, 65, 69, 73, 74, 89 Sutin, Angelina R. 52 Taubes, Jacob 30 Tolkien, John R.R. 26 Tunzelmann, Alex von 17 Varnum, Michael E.W. 49 Ventis, W. Larry 43 Vincent, Ben 14 Ward, Michael 20 Wiese, Christian 72 Wink, Paul 40, 53, 55 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5, 65 Wolfe, Judith 3, 32, 89 Wood, Wendy 43 Yangazoglou, Stavros 55 Young, Jason 54 Yucel, Deniz 44 Zimmermann, Jens 20, 22