CHAPTER XVI
SCRIPTURAL
FAITHS AND THE SOCIAL PROCESS
JOHN KROMKOWSKI
The Catholic University of America
The
discussion of religious enculturation as it has been framed within the language
of sociological analysis entails an ex-ploration of the social and political
contexts of scriptural mono-theism, both historically and contemporarily. The
nature of ethnicity must be reexamined in light of its persistence and its
ongoing relationships to religious and political development. The central thrust
of modern analysis poses contradictions and issues which are especially relevant
to understanding scriptural faith, ethnicity and politics. If, indeed, the
divine is ineffable, what is to make of organized religiosity? Are the social
dynamics of ethnic and political communities as well as faith communities
adequately addressed by the following modalities of description and discourse:
charisma and routine; religious institutions, be they synagogue, church, mosque,
congregation, sect, cult; religious processes and events such as prophetic
dissent, revival, reform and renewal? What can be discerned from the
relationships of ethnic groups to religions and regimes? What about the variety
of social forms: the indigenous enclaves that merge ethnic-religious-regime into
com-pact units of social existence and the more extensive forms of these type
such as the caliphate, state orthodoxies, and other differ-entiated social forms
such as the rabbinate and canonical con-cordats with political authority as well
as the designation of official status for religions and ethnicities? These
question relate the central problematic of faith and ethnicity to the social
processes within which both are embedded. While analysis in fine detail and
specific instances within the tradition of each religious develop-ment is
important, attention to the ongoing existence of social process cannot be
denied. A more comprehensive understanding of the problematic is required. How
do we appropriately and mean-ingfully include attention to social processes and
patterns of ethnic, religious and political habituation and the singularity of
mystical expereince and the varied intensities of personal and group par-ticipation
in the inspiration and routinzation that are intertwined in social processes?
How, and with what consequences, is a theo-phany symbolized and communicated?
This is the core question.
The
following calculus and taxonomy are not presented as a historical guide to the
interaction of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but rather to array
systematically the combinations of ethnic, religious and regime phenomena. This
schemata frames the con-textual character of the epochal encounter of various
forms of so-ciality and identifies the differing forms of sociality that are dis-covered
in patterns of shared consciousness. This includes the types of exchange and
relationships that are definitive of ethnic, re-ligious and regime institutions
which order the existence of the persons, families, clans, associations and
federations of asso-ciations that are the building blocks of ethnicity,
religiosity and citizenship. The following broad-stroke map of possible contexts
for the interaction of the variables are central aspects of the search for
understanding the realities of ethnicities, religions, and regimes.
A1.
Regime+Ethnicity+Religion
A2.
Regime+Ethnicity
A3.
Regime+Religion
B1.
Regime+Denial of Ethnicity+Denial of Religion
B2.
Regime+Denial of Ethnicity
B3.
Regime+Denial of Religion
C1.
Contention over Regime Power driven by
ethnic
challenges
C2.
Contention over Regime Power driven by
religious
challenges
D1.
Regime via balancing of ethnicities and religions
D2.
Regime via balancing of ethnicity and various religions
D3.
Regime via balancing of ethnicities and religion
D4.
Regime via balancing of denial of ethnicities and
affirmation
of religion
D5.
Regime via balancing of denial of religions and
affirmation
of ethnicity
D6.
Regime via balancing of selective denial of religions and ethnicities
Types
A and D are contexts which display complete and/or partial accommodation to the
primordial bonds of family, clan, ethnic/national, and religious symbolizations
and institutions of order. These types have developed over the centuries in
various geographical locations. The analysis of such contexts have bor-rowed the
discovery of Varro, among the ancients, and the modern creations of Bodin and
Hobbes, viz, theologia civilis, as the regime sustaining rationale and
institution justifying poem, argument, nar-rative, code, or constitution. Civil
theologies in both Types A and B must be consensual and existentially
efficacious. They must maintain peace and tranquillity within complex societies
beyond the gens-scale including role differentiation and division of labor as
well as the defense of their order from external power. The creation,
articulation and development of such an artifice and the rhetorical-linguistic
issues associated with such concerns raises the following vital topics. How is
religion related to ethnicity and minority status? Are the contexts of
pluralistic societies and particularly the issues associated with coalitions and
majority status determinative of social processes? What impact does an
established state religion have on social processes, particularly the impact of
social dif-ferentiation such as modernity and secularity in economic, political
and community relationships? Are the emerging academic and research contexts and
their extensions in speech and teaching within a variety of revues, an
opportunity to advance new ap-proaches, in some modest way, to resolving the
contradictions and conflicts that define current situations throughout the
world, par-ticularly in an immigrant receiving, pluralistic country such as the
United States of America?
Can
faith communities address concerns that are central to the intersection of
religion, economy, ethnicity and regime, par-ticularly the foundational issues
of sociological analysis and the critical issue of methodologies that are
imposed on the religious experience and social phenomena? Can we become engaged
in the existential and essential recovery from reductionistic social scientistic
assumptions and conventions that have anesthetized our research capacities to
understand and to explain the processes of divine-human encounter, however they
are symbolized and practiced within social processes? Can we fashion new
scholarly paradigms that can enable us to understand the persistence and ongoing
presence of a variety of religious and ethnic phenomena?
The
retheorizing and reinterpreting of religious and ethnic pluralism extends to the
reconsideration of contemporary analysis of social processes and the criticism
of traditional explanations of social processes. Conventional explanations seem
to be em-bedded in an over-confident expectation regarding the diminishment of
religiosity and ethnicity in favor of the polity and the market. A more complex
analytical matrix indicates, however, that all four of these coequal focal
relationships of order -- religiosity, ethnicity, polity and economy --
constitute a quatrain structure of social re-alities. This multi-factor matrix
induces finer-grained analysis that makes accessible religious and ethnic
dimensions that have been ignored and neglected, if not completely eclipsed,
because at-tention was focused on the economy and polity. That focus not only
informed analytical discourse, but also shaped popular conventions of rhetoric
used in public affairs.
In
addition to the foundational relationships of religiosity, eth-nicity, economy
and polity within which social processes become social realities, the analyst
discovers events of human agency and the articulation of accounts of sacred
encounters. The Abrahamic event and the account of that event are foundational
for the three traditions of the Book. The ongoing social processes of
tran-smission of that event and account are certain. This much is be-yond doubt.
After all, routinized inter-human religious activity is governed by the
"laws" that determine social life generally.
THE NATURE OF
SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Before
addressing these and other related questions, a few comments on the nature of
social inquiry appear appropriate. The social sciences generally, and sociology
in particular, were modeled on the scientific approaches of the natural or
physical sciences. They assumed that the driving force of science, tech-nology
and instrumental rationality could be applied to human organization and thus
overcome such atavistic social organizational forms as religion and ethnicity.
The processes of indus-trialization and urbanization, it was thought, would
bureaucratize and rationalize human organization. Forms of community life such
as religious and ethnic groups (Gemeinschaft) would give way to forms of
associational life (Gesellschaft).
Sociologists
and anthropologists accordingly tend to view traditional cultures as regressive
aspects of modern culture. Tra-ditional cultures include tribal cultures with
certain levels of inte-gration and folk cultures. Both are remnants of earlier
ethnic organi-zations and ethnic traits surviving as sub-cultures in countries,
states and governments that are organized through rationalization and
standardization into a modern bureaucracy. This modern cul-ture enables
managerial controls and the implementation of au-horitative legal orders. It
enables modern governments and the various policies it directs and thus
maintains the political, legal order as well the economic and social
institutions associated with the modern public order of governments and the
relationships be-tween governments.
A
similar pre-understanding of social reality influenced the development of the
sociology of religion. The sociology of religion was constrained by positivistic
pre-understandings and the claim that traditional religions would wither, while
the Comtean "Religion of Humanity" that linked this discipline to the
French Enlightenment would establish a rational social order. The sociology of
religion did not emerge until the collapse of the claim of the intellectual
origi-nators of the discipline. Their expectations were challenged de-cades
later by more sober scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. These trail
blazers argued that religions of various forms and types were fundamental
features of social reality. But their work, however valuable its insight and its
separation from the "religious" roots of Auguste Comte, did not
advance beyond large scale hypotheses and positivistic generalizations regarding
typo-logies of religion, and macro-level descriptive accounts and quanti-tative
reckonings of religious institutions and public opinion re-garding religious
issues and practices, as well as demographics and social indicators of
memberships.
The
importance of sociological perspectives in historical ac-counting is strikingly
evident in the relations between traditional and literary cultures. The
scriptural faiths, under consideration here, are by definition an aspect of
literary culture. While this dis-tinction addresses different modes of social
articulation it does not illuminate the process of transition from traditional
social order to literary forms that are especially significant for these
religious traditions as they developed a written canon in the Hellenistic era.
These written works extended the oral traditions of the respective cultural
complexes from which the literary cultures emerged.
Whatever
the pre-literary substance of the Abrahamic story, we know it only in its
subsequent literary form, a form that has been woven into the social texture of
many social realities. This latter process of social transmission reveals
another equally important aspect of the distinction between literary and
traditional cultures. The enculturation of textual material entails the
penetration of these literary cultures into other traditional ethnic cultures.
An at-tendant weaving of new social textures derived from such social
ar-ticulation yields a more complex and differentiated form of sociality.
Theories of social development, which periodize linear historical phases and
employ normative or descriptive categories such as primitive, classical,
religious, or modern, have thereby labeled the social processes of interaction.
The dominance of such categories regarding ancient literary sources and the
ethnic cultures that form the tradition of scriptural faiths has flattened the
discussion of traditional cultural remnants that survive in modern societies and
cultures.
Nonetheless,
despite the importance of sociology and its his-torical assumptions,
methodologies and value dispositions for the problematic of faith and ethnicity,
social analysis alone is an incom-plete account. Certain aspects of this
discipline, however, are par-ticularly relevant and essential as corrective
grounding for the study of sacred texts and conventional religious and
theological inquiry. Contemporary and historical social/historical data-bases
are especially informative for framing the conditions from which and within
which these faith traditions and their respective institutions developed.
Similarly
the intersection with the secular, associational world and its ongoing
relationship with the vast majority of the non-clerical, religious memberships
of faith communities are subject to social analysis. Social indicators establish
existential base-lines of information and indices of social processes that
constitute the physicality of social realities. In the course of their
development these have generated, and continued across centuries, the accounts
that are the ongoing texts at the core of scriptural faiths and the faith
communities of various religious traditions.
Thus
a series of central questions emerge: How does scrip-tural faith interface with
the daily life of lay members of faith com-munities and the societies that form
the contexts within which faith communities exist? How do, and how should, faith
communities interface with the contexts of the societies within which they are
embedded? How does the content of faith communities intersect and intertext with
the context and the alternative texts and social forms derived from the European
Enlightenment and skeptical traditions? These intellectual currents and social
movements are particularly inattentive to the historical grounding of the
religious as well as the philosophic tradition which parallels the intellectual
and social processes of enlightenment and skepticism that have shaped
contemporary institutions and advocated "modern" be-haviors. Moreover,
as modern institutional differentiation has taken hold of faith communities they
have become religious institutions and in some cases even religious
bureaucracies. What are the con-sequences of such development for the
originating vision? Perhaps most pointedly for this meeting: how do faith
communities revisit the approaches to knowing that have their origins in the
Hellenistic period within which these faith and learning communities are rooted?
An
inter-faith dialogue within and beyond the sociological tradition should be
attentive to such foundational and metho-dological questions. Moreover, it
should move towards concerns that emerge from contemporary social praxis and
explore the re-covery of interpretative sensibilities and adopt methodological
openness to the real evocative power of texts on social reality. This posture of
inquiry broaches the possibility of reconsidering texts as sources of the
underlying experiences that engendered them. This would reintroduce into the
register of critical capacities the ex-periences of order and change that are
proposed in foundational articulations and the exploration of such experiences
as con-tributory to a paradigm shift in the moral and social sciences.
RELIGION AND ETHNICITY
Until
quite recently ethnicity was an ignored dimension of modern society. It was
neglected because its persistence was in principle seen as untenable. A similar
pre-understanding of social reality influenced the development of the sociology
of religion. Bith the sociology of religion and ethnicity must penetrate to the
his-torical experiences of the social processes from which they emerged. Their
contextuality must be imaginatively explored so as to arrive at the
recapitulation of the problematic. From this per-spective one can begin to
discern from this welter at the ethno-religious source as well as the social
processes that embedded and subsequently fashioned their particular
institutional differentiations.
Not
surprisingly, the etymologies of ethnos indicates that it is derivative
from rural forms of cosmological and familial religiosity and its attendant
social processes and structures. Moreover, this form of religious and social
process is recognizable as it intersected with the development of more complex
social, spatial relationships and social processes of the polis. The
process of social change and discourse about such phenomena is recorded in the
delegitimation and transvaluation of social realities. The pressure of urban and
civic forms of order on the ethnoi that accompanied the processes of
social, spatial, economic and military changes yielded another self-articulation
of meaning. The distinction between urbs and civitas in the Roman
world is important: urbs refers to the place, the physical location of
settlement: civitas refers to the religious associations and fraternal
affinities of the manifold of humans (plethos) that lived in urbs
upon their migration from rural areas and then became attached to municipal
forms of religiosity and the social processes that sustained such deities.
A
dramatic account of this religious and social process can be found in the
conflicted loyalties of persons and their gods that is deeply and interestingly
detailed in the personal and group con-sequences recounted by Sophocles,
especially in Antigone. English translations of other Hellenistic texts
that refer to parallel (perhaps equivalent conflicts and transvaluations)
regarding ethnoi are most revealingly inasmuch as this word is translated
as heat-hen, pagan and gentile. It is precisely such Hellenistic experiences and
texts and the contextual social processes that form the grounding of sacred
texts, the scriptural faiths of Judaism, Christ-ianity and then Islam and their
interactions with ethnicities, that are embedded in the various plethoi
that encountered these powerfully evocative and meaningful accounts of order and
change. The inter-face of these new religious symbolizations and articulations
and the social processes by which they were woven into prior forms of
religiosity, ethnicity and sociality initiated the rooted commonality of these
faiths as well as the contentions and differentiations of the Abrahamic
experience that continue into our time.
In
our time the term ethnicity has been used to describe widely varied and
sometimes ill defined and contradictory sets of experiences and identities. The
apparent confusion arises because ethnicity is contextual and perhaps
fundamentally a form of local identity. Its meaning changes in each place with
time and circum-stances for each group. In the United States, ethnicity is one
of the modern identities developed by the largely peasant migrants who poured
into the United States during the last two centuries. Since 1965 Islamic
immigrants joined a rather small number of earlier Muslim communities.
Christians and Jews have constituted the overwhelming majority of the American
immigrant population.
The
U.S. Census does not gather religious data, but since 1980 the Census has
considerably widened its collection of ancestry and ethnic data. Race has always
been included in the U.S. Census as means of differentiating American
demographics. Race and being foreign-born have been used consistently to
mea-sure the American population. For most immigrants their ethnicity became a
cultural modality that emerged as they became Ame-ricans. This new notion of
peoplehood replaced loyalty to village or region as the reference point around
which they organized their sense of life; it located the place of their family
in the moral and physical universe and shaped a new communities in America. The
following tables array the variety and extent of ethnic ancestry populations
found in the United States.
Ethnicity
in America became for most groups a complex of identifications and loyalties
that included sentimental attachment to home village, region and sometimes
nation, a certain religious affi-liation and the notion of being part of a
distinct religious culture. It also included loyalty to America and an
identification with a par-ticular city, district or neighborhood in which they
settled, mem-bership in local ethnic community and its institutional expressions
and often a sense of belonging to a certain class or distinct occupation.
Ethnicity
and culture are defined by boundaries and symbols some of which are adapted from
the old world, but sometimes they are created in America. For example, the
creation of Kwansa by Ron Karenga at the University of California twenty years
ago is a recent form of emerging African-American ethnic ritual, celebration and
promotion of virtues. Cultural organizations, events, festivals, food, famous
and successful ethnic persons, politics, and religion are the modalities of
response to the American experience and the locale that maintain and sustain
community existence. However wholesome these celebratory and identity-affirming
aspects of ethnic may be at the local level of community, the mainstream and
mass media and the macro level perceptions and analysis of religion and
ethnicity appear to re-report regularly that they are sources and explanations
of conflict.
Elsewhere,
the popular drumbeat and politicizing of ethnic passion by state building-regime
strategies have frequently exa-cerbated relations among segments of multi-ethnic
states. Not amazingly the larger a regime and a market aspires to be the more
ethnic variety it will encounter. Analysts driven by "rational action"
economic and political paradigms may have confused dependent and independent
variables in their ongoing denial of religious and ethnic sociality. Alternative
analysis and attention to human agency as well as the manipulations of ethnic
conflicts have imposed alter-native logics and non-linear pathways toward
assessing economic and political development. In part, they have sustained the
prohi-bition on ethnic/religious variables that has been a tenet of
univer-salistic humanism and social sciences that emerged from the intellectual
and moral foundations of the European Enlightenment.
In
the face of the collapse of empires and the eruption of religiously motivated
critiques of culture, analysts can no longer dismiss the saliency of religious
and ethnic factors. The casual force of these dimensions of social realty may be
as powerful as the economy and polity. However, social analysis and multi-factor
models that are based on the use of these find that all of these factors are far
from simple and surely not monocasual. Ethnicity and religion are strongly
contextual which suggests overwhelming complexity and certainly collinearity
with other indicators. More-over, the breakdown of some mainstream
macro-theories in va-rious disciplines, their stunning inability to withstand
the test of disaggregation and their earlier denial of obviously salient
features of human sociality and their proxies, religion and ethnicity, has had a
surprising effect. It has thrown much social science into whole-sale reliance on
the economy and polity as well as on the pre-rational dispositions -- prejudices
and opinions -- of a self refer-ential academic system of discourse that may be
profoundly dis-connected from social processes.
Thus
the search for new modalities and paradigms that ac-count for more complexity
has taken on crucial significance in the face of political and economic change
and the invocation of eth-nicity and religion as forces of order and change
throughout the world. New versions of conflict theory that perpetuate critiques
of "pre-modern" modalities of understanding and being that are not
anti-rational, but operate within the bounded limits of their funda-mental
grounds of being are emerging in the market places of academic critical theory.
Hermeneutical
and phenomenological approaches, based on process ontologies that extend their
reach over long histories of texts and social processes, have indicated their
contributions to the development of new sciences of order. They are not bound to
a priori searches for cooperative and conflictual behavior. They have disavowed
scientistic claims and claimants of privileged values. The particularities of
social developments that do not sustain ge-neral patterns are simply noted as
evidence of choice, contingency and indeterminacy that the swirl of human agency
has yielded. Thus even chaos is a theory in search of social processes that
explain stability and change in social realities.
In
a parallel development, the sociology of religion initially was constrained by
positivistic pre-understandings, by the claim that traditional religions would
wither, and that the Comtean "Re-ligion of Humanity" that linked this
discipline to the French Enlight-enment would establish instead a rational
social order. Various social sciences have attempted to address religious
phenomena: social psychology, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies,
philo-sophy of religion as well as theology and scriptural studies.
The
plethora of findings circulating in academia and in literate and popular forms
of communication testify to the expansion and diffusion of interest in religious
phenomena. Religion in contem-porary societies is a multiform personal and group
phenomenon. Religious phenomena are experiences of the sacred. Types of
reli-giosity, be they cosmological or transcendent, are expressed in ritual and
worship. Social processes mediate each of these taxa of religious articulation
into social formations that are constitutive of group religious phenomena. The
social processes include the tech-niques and tradition of experiencing the
sacred, articulations of sacred authority, sacred texts, doctrine and dogma that
guide ins-titutions, processes of succession across generations, and
adap-tations to new cultures.
This
horizon of religion and reality includes physicality and sociality that are
nesting ground for the structuring of meaning within the conscience of persons
and the institutions that shapes their consciousness and thus create a social
realty. The pluriformity of religiosity includes enthusiasms of various types
and intensities: emotional and passionate as well as rational in style and
organi-zation, varying from the political to world fleeing, focused on exotic
and mundane interests, cultic affiliations and affinities as well as
identity-defining expressions of short or long-term duration. All such
activities are frequently grouped into the panoply of hiero-phanic and
theophanic and thus included in the field. At bottom, however, the range of
existential and historical foci of religious par-ticipation are matters of
ultimate concern. And these modalities of expressing and ordering human behavior
and practice in large pluralistic societies may stretch conventional scholarly
criteria.
Given
the comprehensive experience of religiosity, the term for cosmological
symbolizations, namely mythos, may be useful as a taxonomic index of
those forms of religiosity that in one way or another discover participation of
the sacred in the array of worldly objects through which the meaning of the
cosmos becomes manifest. Another form of symbolization different from this taxon
is symbolization that may be expressive of access to what precedes the beginning
of the cosmos and beyond the rhythmic order of the cycles of realty -- such
transcendent articulations, for example, are found in Qoheleth and most clearly
in the Abrahamic accounts.
Such
accounts of historical transcendent forms of symbolization articulate a new
sense of time and a different pattern of consciousness of both the beginning and
the beyond. These are invitations to transcendent experiences that initiate
access to a new source and modality of participating and understanding on the
personal and group level. The emergence of historical conscious-ness expressed
in the Abrahamic experience broke out of the pre-viously dominant form of
cosmological symbolizations that sus-tained religious-political institutions
that established the context of the account of Abraham’s action and
experience.
The
persistence of religion and the scholarly attention it ge-nerates are certainly
unexpected developments from the per-spective of the Enlightenment and other
modes of modernity: mate-rialistic economism, advocates of greed and purveyor of
envy, nar-row rationalistic critics, creatively imaginative myth makers, as well
as psychedelic and virtual reality liberators of consciousness. Ironically even
these behaviors have been subsumed into the taxo-nomy of religious phenomena as
worldly religions that manifest a variant of gnosticism, an ancient pattern of
religiosity that seems to be characterized by its espousal of a
pneumo-pathological hatred of existing realities. Thus the wide spread use of
the religious pa-radigm to explain and interpret phenomena has contributed to
the revival of religious discourse.
A
parallel explosion has occurred in ethnic studies, sug-gesting a common
conclusion. Both religion and ethnicity are per-sistent modes of human
symbolization available as the modalities of self-articulation of meaning that
emerge from within the very sociality of human development and interaction.
Religions
and ethnicities are sources of both human sociality and social disorder. The
potency of these symbolizations and their coequal capacity with the economy and
polity as dimensions of sociality and modes of social processes must be
recognized as constitutive of the relational web within which personal and group
articulations occur and from which the logic of social processes and the
sciences of moral order and social harmony may be fashioned. The introduction of
the hermeneutic horizon of openness and critical clarification follows the
processes of social realty as it manifests its changes and continuities.
Writers
on the left whose concern for economic class analysis eclipsed the importance
and autonomy of the polity in the structure of social reality were also driven
by a paradigm that viewed eth-nicity and religion as alternative and competing
loyalties which undermined class unity and class consciousness. Such scholars
showed no interest in local communities. Religion and ethnicity played only a
negative role in history as a disruptive element.
The
later work of E.P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery began to change
the way the history of the working class was written. Thompson saw class and
culture as interrelated to economic formation. The recovery of the process of
community formation and community institutions at the local level that became
patently clear at the level of social history pointedly recalled Max Weber’s
observation that class is not community. Religion and ethnicity provide the core
content of working class cultures and the study of its evolution should be
illuminating and important to a range of disciplines that are beginning to
recognize that macro-explanations, be they economic or political, may be
necessary but no longer sufficient to explain the worlds of meaning derived from
religion and ethnicity. The implications of these shifts in the parameters of
essential relationships that are involved in social processes invites us to
reexamine the relationships between polity, economy, religion and ethnicity.
SOME AMERICAN
PARTICULARITIES
Ethnicity
is primarily a local identity, but its potential for shaping and mobilizing
personal identities and group actions are an ongoing feature of modern America.
For much of American history ethnicity had been viewed merely as a remnant of an
old world peasant village culture. Sociologists for the most part viewed it as
the study of minority relations, as a pathological form of mal-adjustment to
modern life. Some also viewed it as a source of inferior "human stock"
and the cause of the passing of the Anglo-Race in America. It was seen as a
problem that needed to be reme-died by immigration, cultural, language and other
policies that would reform the withering of the American substance that was
as-sociated with industrialization, urbanization and the significant growth of
ethnic diversity in the mainstream and at the margin of American life.
At
bottom sociologists, as most modern heirs of the Enlight-enment, did not expect
ethnicity and religion to last. It would disappear under the twin impacts of the
urban industrial world and a progressive and superior American culture and
educational system. Because ethnics were seen as essentially rural and hence
backward and transitory what interested scholars was their rates of assimilation
and the rapidity with which they were dissolving. Scho-larly revival began when
it became obvious that something beyond the American Melting Pot, i.e., the
American realty, needed to be addressed. This recognition of ethnicity as a
"neglected dimension" blossomed in American history, anthropology,
politics, economics, literatures, cultural philosophy, as well as religious
studies and theology.
The
need for reflection on the ethnic factor is an ongoing aspect of these
disciplines because the events of the last decades challenged notions of
economic determinism and the credibility of large scale political control that
shaped an elite consensus on the project of modernization. The prestige of the
values and worldview of an America Protestant elite of largely British ancestry
is withering and the attendant reexamination of the relationship between
eth-nicity and scriptural faiths invites attention to fundamental ques-tions of
order and values. The questions that emerged at the inter-section of this
epochal change not only in social and philosophic disciplines, but also in the
praxis of social realties have intensified the need to retheorize and
reinterpret the basic elements of order.
One
of the consequences of the scholarly renewal of interest in ethnicity was the
publication of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. This work
consolidated in one place the significant insights developed during the previous
decade. It now forms the base on which to build another generation of scholarly
work. The components of ethnicity that are central to a definition and
description of ethnicity included familiar items such as geo-graphic origin,
migration, race language and religion.
Yet
it is curious that this painstaking work should have failed, without any
explanation, to contain an entry on neighborhoods in the face of the large body
of existing works on ethnic groups in neighborhoods. The local ethnic community
in a certain sections of the city: the parish, synagogue, mosque; the housing
complex; the bounded enclave of a housing market; a ZIP code; an aldermanic
district or however else one chooses to define neighborhood or urban village,
clearly was vital to the survival of many religious and ethnic groups. The
peasant migrants who formed the bulk of immi-grants came mostly out of small
villages which provided them with a primary reference group drawn from neighbors
and kin around which their social inventions fashioned the central core of their
identity.
George
Homans put it simply and accurately: "The men of the village had upon the
whole more contacts with one another than with any outsiders". They brought
that orientation with them to America. Reinforced by their sense of foreignness,
their desire for the comforts of food, language, custom and religion, the
con-venience of proximity to industries which hired them in large numbers, their
strong localism, all this led them to form small, but often institutionally
quite complete communities in American cities. Their identification with local
institutions -- whose purposes were religious, economic, social, entertainment,
political, and cultural, formed a dense web of affinity and affiliation that
shaped a basic part of their personal and group identities.
Religious
and ethnic modalities for the formation of these identities appear in this
account as a nearly organic process that marks the development of human
settlement and social articulation reflective of the givenness of the
particular. They are indicative as well of the religious and ethnic resources
that were rooted in traditions, practices and access to scriptural faith
legacies that become socialized into, what in hindsight, can now be
acknow-ledged as a variety of new ways of being an American. The multiple layers
of all of these fundamental experience -- sociality, economy, culture, polity,
market, government -- should be factored through the prescriptive and normative
filters of both ethnic and religious traditions.
The
reconsideration of fundamental sociality and foundational religious experiences
that are central to the scriptural faiths can be explored in reference to an
especially important relationship of ethnicity and religion. The relationship of
these two dimensions to the market and polity are particularly important because
they demark the primary questions of cooperation and contention about which and
within which the resolution of conflict and the develop-ment of harmony and
accord will be discovered in the social pro-cesses that these four relationships
establish. The linkages be-tween religion and ethnicity on the one hand and the
bonds be-tween economy and polity on the other are the force field that requires
the balance and wisdom that is grounded in the sciences of moral and social
order. The art of applying such insights to the tasks of ongoing social
reconstruction begins with the first step: the reconstruction of the sciences of
social processes that systema-tically foster the inclusion of religion and
ethnicity as factors along with the economy and polity in the search for the
logic of social process.
These
access points to worlds of meaning must be explored for their potency in the
search for happiness, liberty, dignity and justice for all. This is a research
and action agenda for the renewal of religious traditions and the social praxis
of the post-modern epoch that is deeply part of the American tradition and in
some res-pects has significant similarity to the epochal Hellenistic period from
which these three religious traditions emerged.
If
in creating local religious and ethnic communities -- neigh-borhood enclaves --
immigrants were developing a base for the preservation of religion and
ethnicity, they were also engaging in a decidedly American activity. In the
eighteenth century James Madi-son observed that the "Spirit of
locality" lay at the core of the Ame-rican political culture. For Americans
pushing west the role of churches and voluntary societies was as crucial in the
construction of community as it would be for the new immigrants. Because, as de
Tocqueville noted, the American revolution stopped short of a revolution in
social organization, the local community and its institutions retained an
integrity that was lost in other nationalizing and centralizing states. American
nationalism permitted, as Thomas Bender has pointed out, a fervent belief in
national ideals and national unity with a deep attachment to local communities.
Religion and ethnicity provided a new and more intense cement for community in
the 19th century, at a tine when increasing centrali-zation of the American
state attacked the basis of native local communities.
Ethnic Neighborhoods
Ethnic
neighborhoods are one expression of American local community and their impact on
American local, social and civic cultures has not been adequately explored and
acknowledged as a well-spring of personal and group virtues. The major approach
to the study of ethnic neighborhoods was pioneered by Robert Park and the
Chicago School of Sociology which viewed neighborhoods in terms of their place
and function in the process of assimilation and Americanization. This focused
interest on pathological and dysfunctional aspects of immigrant neighborhoods.
The later work of Herbert Gans and Robert Laumann emphasizes the study of social
networks. More recently James Cunningham and Roger Ahlbrandt have introduced the
analysis of the social fabric of urban ethnic neighborhoods.
This
latter concept combines network observations with more traditional sociological
and politico economic analysis of the quality of public life, employment, crime,
and business climate of a district. Cultural geographers following David Ward
have added the social use of urban space as another dimension of the physical
and human texture of communities. Historians Kathleen Conzen, Harold Chudacoff
and Oliver Zunz have employed the social geo-graphic and quantitative history
and added the findings of the new social history so as to view development from
the lived experiences of the family, association, and informal spheres of
sociality which top-down analysis of hegemonic institutions had ignored and
neglected.
Thus
it seems that the most fruitful way of exploring the rela-tionship of these
three faith communities and ethnicity is to focus on small scale fine-grained
analysis of the American synagogue, mosque, parish and congregation. This level
of analysis will enable us to view the specific interaction of peoplehood and
the faith community. From their location the fundamental liturgical
con-stitution of the faith community becomes transparent as to the means and
modality of its relationship to the social order toward which the following
options are available:
1.
integration;
2.
isolation;
3.
challenge, as alternative, as reformative, as revolutionary strategies;
4.
pragmatic and Selective, including integration and isolation, integration and
alternative, integration and reform strategies.
This
array of strategic and tactical options of social choice generically define the
arena of human agency open to religious and ethnic communities engaged in the
practice of extending in our time and in America the experience of Abraham as
well as the pledge and promise that accompanies faithfulness.
The
variety of ethnic populations and the intersection of these populations with
monotheistic religious traditions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are
historical and sociological events of epochal significance. The subsequent
splintering of these religious traditions into institutional forms expresses
varying manifestations of the divine and divergent understandings of what is
essential and incidental to participation and inclusion. They reveal what is
de-finitive, dogmatic, and consequently characteristic of each of these
religious traditions and their appropriation of the articulation that is
acknowledged as the Abrahamic experience in their respective foundations. These
are the ongoing aspects of a problematic that requires the attention of many
scholarly disciplines and applied research that links experience with the
scientific distance required for analytical excellence.
THE ABRAHAMIC PILGRIMAGE
AS PARADIGMATIC?
The
sciences of order most broadly designed are those that assist in the peaceful
resolution of conflict at the most complex and largest form of human
association. Thus the examination of the architectonics of human associations
which comprise a variety of currently separated disciplines needs to be applied
to a particularly troubling aspect of a special problem. This is the social fact
and the widely shared social perception that on the pragmatic level of social
exchange these three traditions are associated with considerable contention,
conflict, violence. To this is adjoined the scandalous hatred that can be
expressed only among and between those who share a profound commonality.
The
Abrahamic experience is an infinitely divisible object that makes itself
available in the imaginative move of personal and group consciousness into a
serious yet playful engagement and open-ended hermeneutics of the Abrahamic
narratives. These narratives rearticulate the foundation of the faith
communities in various times and places. Thus they recapitulate again and again
both the transcendent aspect of human experience and the social aspects of
experience and relationships of polity, ethnicity, and economy. Finally, the
express the mystery that this account of ultimate concern and confidence
proclaims in its profound mes-sage: Be Not Afraid!
Genesis
14 and 15 is the portion of the narrative that has par-ticular saliency for the
science of order because it expresses this experience of human-divine praxis
that is paradigmatic of respect for the twin poles of reality. This account of
Abraham invites us to encounter the register within which we find our special
nature as partners in participation -- the in-between or tensional existence
between cosmological being and the unlimited origin of all -- that becomes
present to Abraham and accessible to us in the account of that experience. This
account positions our being as uniquely in-between the totally transcendent
being and the limited being of mundane relationships that are political,
economic and ethnic.
What
this narrative affirms is that the two levels of existence are intertwined, one
that is the profoundly personal and the other a plethora of social
differentiation: persons that participate in ethnic sociality, multi-ethnic
covenants, kingly conquests and the domina-tions of ethnically diverse cities
and countryside that contextualizes the Abrahamic praxis. We witness here the
eruption into cosmo-logical variety of a new spirituality that is formative and
inter-pretative in its discoveries because the experiences of a unique
representative -- Abraham -- became normative as a fresh mode and vista for
personal and social order. These experiences have been authenticated by
long-term continuity within lived communities, an authentication that the
Abrahamic message of profound explanation and assurance is a most worthy legacy
to bequeath as a truth of the human condition and the divine presence in it.
These
arrays of social realities are accessible to attentive readers of the account
and attentive observers of the pluriformity of social variety that exist in our
time. These ethnic and religious phe-nomena are woven inextricably into the
political/military/economic texture of the power fields of human associations.
The narrative confirms the apparently ageless human yen for domination, linked
to large scale ambitions that require imperial force and the exercise of skills
and talents that are available only through the social invention that fulfills
human aspirations for excellence -- the metropolis.
If
one brackets the development of traditions and the institu-tional trajectories
they have taken and simply revisits the Abra-hamic experience and its insight
into the truth of historical exist-ence, the experiences of participation in
patterns of shared con-sciousness establishes a common ground. Religious
traditions are not simply experiences: they are institutions that must negotiate
the types of exchange and relationships that are definitive of ethnic,
re-ligious, economic and regime organizations that order the existence of the
persons, families, clans, associations and federa-tions of associations. These
building blocks of social reality may fruitfully be collapsed into four
modalities: ethnicity, religiosity, market relationships of production and
exchange and citizenship within polities.
Agreement
about these four spheres of the social process must be consensual and
existentially efficacious to assure social order and tranquillity. Moreover
regimes must be established, with rightful uses of coercion derived from such
consent, so as to maintain peace and tranquillity within societies that are
articulated in their complexity beyond the gens-scale that include role
differentiation and division of labor as well as capacity for the defense of
their order from external power. The creation, articula-tion and development of
such an artifice includes the absorption and transvaluation of various
ethno-religious symbols and rituals.
The
construction of such artifices is an imaginative intel-lectual production and a
social process that transvalues and com-municates cultural rationales. Such
artifices infuse and commingle the cultural endowments of language, story,
learning and sociali-zation, the legitimation and illegitimation of behavior and
practices. They establish narrative structures with which the development of
ritual, music, song, dance, food, calendar, festival-play, heroic vision and
cult are understandable and real. In sum -- a meaningful complex of expression
-- that includes the special refining of consciousness that occurs within
complex polis cultures, when the experience of noetic consciousness and
the development of critical sciences yield a culture of social observers -- theoros
-- and their potential for elaborating interpretative discourse and social
analysis.
In
sum, such theoros may turn their gaze to four general fields of realty: the gods
(Theos), nature (Cosmos), the manifold of human types, (Plethos
and Sociality) and the various forms of social orderings, both in speech and
text (the symbolizations of order in action and power, and the implementations
of order in the regimes). Such theoros craft essential questions and answers
about the experience and practices of the societies -- the gods, nature, society
and action. Their texts give voice to the societies within which they are
participants and from which they first under-stood themselves as being both of
and in tension with the cosmos, sociality, and the theos and perhaps the holders
of power and domination that tolerate or banish their reflective gaze onto
reality. Their narratives, poems, and arguments reveal how societies nur-tured
them and warranted the bonds that convinced them they we were not some fragile
accident in a silent universe. But they also constrain them from claims that
they are masters of all, but surely partners in the community of being that is
mysterious at its be-ginning and in the processes of social change. They discern
a moving toward a beyond that is mysterious as well. Nonetheless, Yahweh is with
us and counsels us to be not afraid. To find ways and means that credibly
transmit the message of these truths is the task these faith traditions must
embrace in the concretions of social realities that, like Abraham, they discover
on their journey.
Table 1
Measurement of Ethnicity in America*
U.S.Census 1990, 1980, 1970
Group
1990
1980
1970
(1,000)
English
32,652
49,598,035 2,465,050
German
57,947
49,224,146 3,622,035
Irish
38,736
40,165,702 1,450,220
French
10,321
12,892,246 343,367
Italian
14,665
12,183,246 4,240,779
Scottish
5,943
10,048,816
N.A.
Polish
9,366
8,228,037
2,374,244
Mexican
11,586
7,692,619 N.A.
Native
Am. 7,227
6,715,819
763,594
Dutch
6,227
6,304,499
N.A.
Swedish
4,681
4,345,392
806,138
Norwegian
3,869
3,453,839
614,649
Czech
1,296
1,892,456
759,527
Hungarian
1,582
1,776,902
603,668
Welsh
2,033
1,664,598
N.A.
Portuguese
1,153
1,024,351
N.A.
Greek
1,110
959,856
434,571
French-Can.
2,167
780,488
N.A.
Slovak
1,883
776,806
N.A.
Lithuanian
812
742,776
330,977
Ukrainian
741
730,056
N.A.
Finnish
659
615,872
N.A.
Canadian
550
456,212
3,034,556
Yugoslavian
260
360,174
447,271
Croatian
544
252,970
N.A.
Armenian
308
212,621
N.A
Sloven
124
126,463
N.A.
Serbian
117
100,941
N.A.
Asian
7,226
3,726,440
Black
29,930
26,482,349
White
199,827 189,035,349
Hispanic
21,900