These notes are intended not as a full elaboration of the issues, but to help discussion about the place of ritual in public life and its impact on social identity and social value. They are more in the nature of talking points than of substantive proposals. They start with the fact that we all have some sense of the importance of ritual in human life, that is, of rituals that fit into the categories of the public, religious, familial and personal.

Despite this familiarity, sociologists and anthropologists cannot offer a clear and unquestionable definition of ritual. A working description can say that a ritual is a prescribed or established order of performing, bringing to bear on a given moment, and for a particular person or set of persons, a wider system of symbolic expression. Within this description, there is place for daily rituals, weekly rituals, annual rituals, or rituals befitting some occasion or some confluence of facts and needs. Family rituals, cultural rituals, civic rituals, religious rituals, or even mere personal rituals, all fit the description. Ritualized behaviors, such as one’s customary breakfast time and diet or a family Sunday brunch, can fit, as well as formal rituals practiced in church or on public civic occasions. All have a role in ordering communal and personal life, meaning and values. Because of their wider connection to symbol systems, all these kinds of ritual embody beliefs and values, and can deeply affect social and personal relations. Where the practice of ritual fits, or where particular sorts of ritual enter into the process of social reconstruction, in which this seminar is interested, is the precise question here at issue.

A discussion on this point opens with a negative constitution. Talking about reconstruction of civic society is based on the supposition that we are in a period of social disintegration. It has been suggested that this is affected by the disintegration of the state, of economic bases, of religious bodies and of values. A factor in this social disintegration is the disintegration of ritual, in family, society and religious bodies.

On the other hand, while traditional rituals disintegrate, new ones seem to make their appearance, more reflective as they are of newborn common attitudes or more responsive to feelings of malaise. Examples can be given on a very mundane level. In the U.S. we often quote the disappearance of the family meal with its small rituals, while noting on the other hand the intense maintenance of the annual Thanksgiving reunion, involving considerable travel and expense. We realize in some vague way that the former is harmful to family life, while we wonder as to the reasons for the intensifica-tion of the latter during a period of frequent familial dysfunctionality.

Certain sets of repeated actions are not clearly labelled as such, yet work according to ritual patterns. The often-bemoaned effects of television on common interests and values has much to do with the ritual status of what is not openly named as ritual. Watching the shallow telecasting of the daily evening news with its illusions of depth and participation has for many become a daily ritual, shared with others, exercising perhaps a compensatory role for people who do not have the time to think things out but yet want to lay claim to having humane interests. Philosophers have written books on sport as ritual, and in this vein it can be remarked that the vast audience for baseball and football games on television is as much a kind of ritual observance as it is a response to the thrill of rough encounter or motor dexterity.

Counter-ritual plays its own part in the face of the disinte-gration of common persuasions and values. Examples of this also are easy to observe. At the time of the Vietnam War the burning of the American flag was a successful counter-ritual, responding to the daily ceremonies of raising the flag, or saluting the flag. The presence of the MIA tents and their personnel at the Vietnam memorial is a counter-ritual that can be contrasted with the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the other side of the Potomac.

The more established rituals of public life and religion during periods of deep social and cultural change seem to fail or lose persuasiveness, and are in some respects replaced by others. The diminishing participation in religious rituals in some churches reflects either disaffection for what is ritualized, or the failure of the ritual to persuade. On the other hand, the rituals of the Nation of Islam draw a following because they hold out a promise of solidarity and of strength in solidarity, of brotherhood and of values of common identity and mutual concern. Various forms of Pentecostalism are also on the upsurge, not only in the U.S. but across the world.

Rather than seeing this disintegration and this counter-ritual as purely negative, one can look at the possibilities offered to unity within pluralism in a society whose culture is increasingly affected by media communication and the evolution of cyberspace. While many decry the deleterious impact of watching TV, for example, others have shown how it offers minorities the possibility of an interaction that keeps their own social sense of being and community alive. Those who have access to the programming of TV and radio stations, however poorly budgeted, are offered the possibility of counter-knowledge, of alternate ways to access and give expression to reality.

The effect of culture has been noted, and the chapter of G. McLean has quite clearly invited interest in cultures as vehicles and retainers of values, to be brought into the public forum. In line with this, one needs to note the clear relation between maintaining ritual and upholding the beliefs, meanings and values of cultures. It is a potent factor in conserving feelings of solidarity, common belief and common value. These are affirmed and confirmed in shared ritual, either as something belonging to the fabric of the social, or as something held by a particular body over against what is recognized in the public domain, or as a possible set of beliefs and values that can be given voice in the public forum.

Through ritual, beliefs, values and human ordering are invested with the aura of the sacred, at least in the sense of asserting a foundation beyond ourselves for inalienable rights and common horizons. While, however, some philosophical approaches look for a common transcendent across rituals, the contribution of a study of ritual today, having gone through a period when it was given a surface unity through the influence of structuralism, now draws more attention to plurality. This attention to plurality is not simply a folkloric fascination with the variety of body postures, musical intonations and ritual substances, but detects a remarkable variety in world-views, belief-systems, and value-based communalities brought to light in ritual. As a result, in the interpretation of ritual studies, as in some theories of general hermeneutics, there is much attention to the sense of the "other" necessary to any kind of human interface in the structuring of society and the espousal of public norms and values. It is therefore a difficult question to ask what part the practice of ritual, the inclination to ritual, and even the at times rather fractious or even subconscious adherence to ritual obser-vances, play in fostering unity and in the reconstruction of social life.

In a pluralistic society, such as the U.S., there are few, though some highly significant, common, formally recognized, public rituals in which all participate. There are others that take hold for a while, but pass with time. There are also those that recur from time to time, in moments that seem to call for some public manifestation and are called together quite often by some charismatic leader who seems to have insight into the mood of the moment. There are likewise those, such as TV watching or sports events, whose reality as ritual tends to be masked, and for that reason are all the more effective since they masquerade as something else, such as an interest in current events, legitimate relaxation or pleasure in sports.

In democratic societies, especially with the growth of cultural and religious pluralism, the extent of sacred authority given to public officials is attenuated, but nonetheless remains present, even for those who profess atheism. They serve to affirm and confirm the authority of public actors and their action, such as legislators, judges, etc. Within a pluralism, rituals can affirm some common traditions and perspectives that carry a sacred authority. Even these rites, however, and their significance are challenged from time to time by counter-ritual, such as the burning of effigies, or the spilling of blood on weapons of destruction. They are also brought into some kind of relation with alternative rituals, such as the March of a Million Men or the cultural festivals that mark the annual urban calendar.

While ritual affirms authority, the democratic states of Europe and the United States allow the authority of the executive and the legislature to be open to the scrutiny of the legislature. This is to submit the sacred authority of office to the authority of reason and trial, where everything can potentially be subjected to scrutiny. There is nothing so sacred in society, be it Presidency, Constitution, common law, or legislation, that is free form the possible submission to scrutiny, trial, and alternative interpretation. The authority of the judiciary is more sacrosanct; courts of law, and the Supreme Court in particular, are invested with a notable aura of the sacred. Yet there is nothing decided by this high court that cannot in time be reversed, within the very terms of its points of reference.

Ritual is one of the primary ways whereby a social group distinguishes between its members, distinguishes its members from others, and classifies persons and patterns of life. Religious ritual in a medieval town or village included all persons, but classified them according to hierarchy, both ecclesiastical and civic, so that each group and person learned patterns of general behaviour and value through ritual behaviour. Of Catholic ritual it could be said, "here comes everybody", but not all are classified in the same social grouping. Some of the recent liturgical changes in Catholic ritual have in fact been intended to change and rectify ecclesiastical and civic classifications that had become embedded in ritual practice, but now appear to us as distinctly unevangelical. Women are not to be kept, heads covered and silent, in some darkened corner of the church.

Role and social classifications are given weight in civic ritual as well. What is necessary to social order in this classification, and what is expressive of ideology or discrimination, is open to dispute. In a courtroom, the play of juridical language is intended both for the sake of judicial clarity, and for the setting of the boundaries of clerisy in the field of law or forensic evidence. Nowadays, religious ritual risks falling prey to social classifications that are not inherent to it of its own nature. In the inner city parish or mosque or synagogue, there may still be a confluence of people from many walks of life and financial backgrounds. In the suburbs, this is not so, but the codification of neighborhoods is a subplot of the explicitly formulated and performed ritual. What kind of counter-ritual, then, can serve to break these social codes?

It is typical of religious ritual to affirm a source of authority beyond human experience, and to tie the authority of leaders, beliefs and values to this grounding. If the symbols used by these authorities give them absolute value, it is hard not to want to impose them upon others. Thus the two swords of authority attributed to medieval Popes, the religious, moral and political authority given to the Koran, the moral authority afforded the Bible in the Christian Coalition, are given a ritual affirmation that allows them great power and force among the members of the pertinent religious groups. Inevitably believers are anxious to have their views and persuasions accepted as core elements of public life and polity.

When religious bodies subscribe to a legitimate plurality in belief, religion, morality and social structure, the role of their rituals becomes more ambiguous and indeed undergoes change. There was a time when the reverence shown the Pope fitted a theory of church/state relations that professed the Catholic state the ideal state, or when it meant full assent to his moral teachings, ranging rather loosely over wide areas of human practice and behaviour. Of the present state of affairs, the large public papal ceremonies on the occasion of his visits are a good example of the power of religious ritual, even amid a measure of disagreement among practitioners. Those who attend in faith, and not out of curiosity, ritually expressed their faith in God and God’s ways with humankind. They publicly professed, with the Pope, that this has to be a force in public life. As Catholics, they affirmed a strength and a oneness that goes beyond state boundaries and takes in a mass of humanity across the world. They did not, however, express a common front on how this is to be worked out in practice. Among themselves they were not one on how Christian faith affects all issues of moral value in life. At least some were ready to accept that some of these values have to be debated and shaped by debate, not only among Catholics or among Christians, but in other forums as well.

The tendency of strongly centralized and sacral bodies is to reinforce a particular religious perspective, giving rise to fundamen-talist states, or to bodies within a state, such as the Christian Coalition, that want to give divine authority to certain options in a way that excludes the legitimacy of others. This is to allow such sacred symbols as the Koran, the Bible, or the Magisterium to have a prominent place in the ordering of society and the determination of its values. The tendency of the secularist state is to banish the religious from the public forum, even while it retains rites and symbols that invest some ideology and power structure with sacred authority.

For believers or disciples of a particular religious faith, it is questioned whether they can among themselves ritualize their beliefs and values and invest them with authority, yet allow them to become part of public discourse, certainly in order to be heard, but leaving these beliefs open to public debate.

In this regard, public witness and trial complement the role of ritual, both for the state and for the believer who opts to live in a multicultural and pluralistic society. Thus, Christians who take part in liturgy profess Christ as Divine Revelation and his Pasch as the sign of the advent of God’s rule. Their sacraments confirm this belief and their sense of sharing in divine life and truth. They wish what they profess to have an influence on the ways of the world, yet they know that it is counter to this truth itself to impose it on others.

What happens in this situation is threefold. First, their ritual performance, if its persuasiveness remains intact, demands a word of interpretation among believers themselves to determine the relevance of what they enact to public life. Second, this becomes a prophetic word when it is spoken openly as a challenge to all members of society to the values which believers reckon pertinent to the common good, even in a pluralistic society, e.g. for some Christians a word on the use of nuclear armament, for others a word on the values of being pro-life on issues of abortion. Third, they must needs allow this word be put to trial in the public forum of civil debate, in public campaigns for office and within courts of law.

In this process, believers do not attenuate the strength of their fundamental conviction, which they continue to affirm in liturgical rites. These convictions, however, are affected in two ways. First, it is recognized that others have legitimate convictions and values, and it can be only by public argument and democratic decision that one’s own values can be reckoned within the sphere of the normative. Second, it is recognized that what is affirmed in rite as fundamental is open to change and interpretation in its consequences and applications. Hence, believers are themselves open to challenge, argument and persuasion in discussing how their beliefs are to operate in the public forum and for the good of human life.

Religious ritual when practiced continues to carry the conviction of a higher power and authority, that remains at work even among bedeviled humanities. Believers carry the force of their convictions into public life, as well as their sense of the other and the claims of the other. Pope John Paul II has had much to say on Gospel and Culture, and on the power that the Gospel should be able to exercise at the heart of a culture. On the other hand, neither he nor many another religious leaders wish to see Christians take over the fabric of state or civic society in countries where human and religious liberties are respected.

Even while norms and values inherent to the religious tradition are left open to public debate and trial, religious bodies tend to generate forces of resistance. By reason of their own beliefs and values, they are often alert to what is arrogance and to what belittles the claims of the holy, the full claims of life or the claims to life of the excluded. Since an imposition of values is out of the question, the choice is that of being a prophetic voice and resorting to prophetic action. In police states, or in face of overt persecution, this requires courage, but it is readily enough worked out when is being resisted. The forms of resistance may also stand out when confronted by coercive forces.

In democratic societies, the prophetic is just as necessary, if less apparent or tangible in its forms. One cannot simply demon-strate, but to carry force it is necessary to submit to the rigors of public debate, and even to uphold the authority of a legislature or a judiciary whose decisions one resists. The religious voice does not fall silent, but it enters the forum of public debate and trial in order to have its effect.

The disintegration of ritual forms and participation is typical of a period of social and cultural change. Formal rituals tend to be replaced by distinctive patterns of behaviour that carry in a less formal way the power and the authority of the common or normative.

The process of social reconstruction after the disintegration of monolithic state and religious systems requires formal ritual, but this can be more varied, more suggestive of a plurality within unity. Ritual in this situation is necessarily complemented by considerable public debate and the readiness to have valued positions put on trial.

Religious rituals, however pluralistic they become, continue to have power in the social arena. It is no paradise for peoples to be devoid of religious belief and keen moral persuasion. Religious rituals express a specific sense of the transcendent or of the imminent, according to particular religious traditions. They are capable of generating persons of conviction, though they stand in need of development for this to be the case. Those who believe in the sacredness of these rituals, however, cannot impose their values on society. They have to be prophets in new ways, according to modalities that allow for public debate. There must be a readiness to accept that positions proposed, because rooted in the authority of faith, be set on trial to stand or fall by the judgment of others as to their public and common usefulness in integrating the social fabric.

Carey, James W., Communication Culture. Essays on Media and Society. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Fenn, Richard K., Liturgies and Trials: The Secularization of Religious Language. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982.

Grimes, Ronald, Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Kertzer, David J., Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

 

At first sight, freedom of participation in a pluralistic civil society seems clearly to imply that all elements of content and procedure should be subject to public debate, and that people are bound only to what emerges as a majority agreement from such debate. It is necessary then to put on trial and subject to debate dearly and deeply held convictions if one wishes them to be part of public life in a pluralistic society.

This can be good with regard to the truths and convictions themselves, which otherwise might not be attended to. Indeed, the very fact of public debate exposes them to many who otherwise would not have heard of them. The example of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ letter on nuclear arms exemplifies how presenting a draft for public comment and debate introduced the moral dimension to what previously had been discussed only in terms of military and political power.

This has the advantage also of opening the public to new, and at times unexpected, dimensions of meaning and of opening a way for those concerned with human welfare to expose their concerns and to have the opportunity to try to convince others. This is against a forced privatization of certain realms such as the religious.

At the same time there are reasons to think the formula of open debate too simple. Some values have an absolute character, such as the oath of office. This is not a matter of debate which some can accept as binding and others not.

Beyond this there are the fundamental epistimological, meta-physical and religious issues. Contemporary skeptics would question the very possibility of truth and of the relation of the human mind thereto. This is radically to undermine the foundation of any meaningful debate. The same is true of the character of human will and hence of personal commitments.

Finally there is a distinctive absolute character to the religious foundations of being, truth and commitment. As absolute, this is necessary; indeed it is this absolute character which grounds the definitive force of oaths of office, law and the like upon which public trust is built.

Yet, respect for the freedom of the person extends as well to the religious sphere, so that Vatican II felt it important to state religious freedom as an essential human right not to be transgressed.

Ritual can be taken as a pattern of private or public behavior which sets a stable pattern of action and meaning for life. As human action it entails human knowledge and will, but as it does not formulate its rational content it is able to symbolize a breadth of content. It is not merely a matter of mind or heart but engages the whole person in conjunction with one’s surroundings. The aesthetic dimension of ritual integrates all of these and allows for a richness of meaning which extends beyond rational analysis and expression.

This is true of civil rituals such as the honoring of unknown soldiers, and especially religious rituals which enable us to relate to that which, as absolute, transcends our ability to conceptualize this or express it in formal terms. This is essential for keeping open the transcendent character of the sacred depth of meaning—of life.

This points to a delicate area when juxtaposed to the requirement in a pluralist society of placing all under debate. What is a matter of debate is something which might or might not be, but such clearly is not absolute in character. Hence, there is a question of how societies which are pluralist in character—which relates particularly to how they regard the ultimate foundations of human life—can conceive religious freedom and open debate in this regard, and its expression in ritual. Some would proceed to say that any public expression of a religious motif is a prejudgment of the religious issue. This implies a ban on all religious expression, but that is actively to suppress religion and to impose a secular state.

Thus, in opening the religious dimension of belief and ritual to debate it is important to avoid any suggestion that what is being discussed is anything but absolute. Further it is necessary to set a pluralistic context in which multiple cultural expressions of belief and religion are possible.

But it would seem that for civil society much more is needed and possible. Different nations have faced this issue in such a way as creatively to engage the various religious and voluntary solidarities in the work of hospitals and schools to the immerse benefit of their communities. This expresses a positive relation between the political and the civil society orders. It is a positive alternative to approaches which would insist on a least common demoninator which in fact promotes a secular attitude and leaves people unable openly to express their religious convictions and their social implication, and leave the social order bereft of its indispensable religious foundations.