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Friday, February 03, 2012

RELIGION EDUCATION AND MADNESS: A MODERN TRINITY
[An Inaugural Lecture delivered in the School of Education, University of Birmingham on 26th February 1991]

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F .H. Hilliard who did so much to establish the teaching of world religions in schools (Hilliard, 1961, 1963) ... Edwin Cox with his pupil-centred approach and his insistence upon educational religious education (Cox, 1971)
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the sacramentalisation of the commodity, as the transubstantiation of money where the external appearances of the object remain the same but the inner essence has been changed. Just as in the world of religion people bow down before the images produced by their own alienated imaginations, so people in consuming societies bow down before the fetish-like qualities of the commodity, the idols which are the work of their own hands although they do not realise this
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Marx associated religion with deceit, and regarded religion as a key to the understanding of society in the sense that religion was central to deception
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In the work of Freud this becomes a connection between religion and madness. The first important contribution made by Freud to the study of religion was his 1907 paper ‘Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices’. Here Freud draws attention to the parallels between the repetitive, compulsive nature of neurotic behaviour and certain features of religious ritual.
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They are a defence against something worse, and in some ways they make it possible for the patient and the culture to rise above that which is worse, namely, an outbreak of unrestrained human instinct. No more than the neurotic patient does the religious believer realise the true origin of the compulsion and the guilt which drive forward the repetitive ritual practices. They have been transposed or displaced from the area of forbidden instinct into the area of acceptable practice but this displacement is concealed from consciousness.
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Durkheim studied societies which were totalitarian in their religiosity, societies based upon cult and myth rather than upon economic and occupational distinctions. In these primal societies, religion does not playa role on this side or that because there are no sides, only many complex social institutions all based upon the fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane.
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religion is a collective mystification, in Durkheim a collective effervescence and in Freud a collective neurosis
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Schizophrenia, in this tradition, is to be understood phenomenologically (that is, from within the actual experience of the patient) as a distortion of perception of space and time. Time is foreshortened or truncated, while space is extended and made absolute. Time, we could say, is spacialised. The patient suffering from schizophrenia has no memory of how the beliefs which now overwhelm him or her had their origin and development. They have no history, unlike the history of the neurotic behaviour which can, with skill and over time, be traced back to its originating trauma. Schizophrenia takes a cognitive rather than an emotional form and results in a false perception of the world. A reality is created which is absolute. Because this reality has no past with which to contrast it and no alternatives with which to oppose it gains a total hold over the mind. It may be described as a ‘non-dialectical’ form of consciousness.

When this kind of knowledge is found in social groups, we may speak of schizophrenia as having gone public. Consciousness is overwhelmed by a single world-view which can no longer be challenged. Such social groups do not have any history of their own, but reify their past into a golden absolute (the Garden of Eden, the early Christian church) or their future into nonprecarious Utopias (paradise, heaven). In these reifications space takes the places of past and future time, and so we have places such as the Garden, the Holy Land, the City of Gold and so on. The spacialisation of time leads to the denial of change, since history is the principle of renewal.
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Sometimes reproductive models of religion become so dominant that even mission is absorbed into them, and so mission is conceived as the reproduction of the religion on a vast scale. Such reproductive mission would be what the American Christian educator Horace Bushnell called in a quite literal sense ‘the out-populating power of the Christian stock’ (Bushnell, 1967, p. 165). The mission of the religion is conceived in biological terms; to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, dominating all other species. The reproductive mode of a religion draws attention to its characteristic as a species, but its mission draws attention 10 its contribution not to itself as a pseudo-species but to the true species, humanity as a whole.

Rather than contrasting the role of religious education with the role of religious nurture in a straightforward way (Hull, 1975, p. 109), I would thus prefer to say that religious education does have a contribution to make to the transmission of the religious heritage but must be grounded in the emancipatory social sciences so as to prevent that transmission from becoming mere reproduction and to enable it to serve the mission of religion.
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# posted by intcoex : 7:28 AM

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