The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.
A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah’s Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry.
The word “religion” does a a lot of heavy lifting. But actually finding a way to define it in a way that is useful turns out to be surprisingly tricky.
The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) had meticulously detailed the belated emergence of the ‘religion’ concept in Europe, long maintained that talk of ‘religion’ conflated too many things not to cause mischief, and urged that we give up such talk altogether; we should, instead, speak of faith and ‘cumulative tradition’. The anthropologist and historian Daniel Dubuisson, who anathematised ‘religion’ as a 19th-century Western imposition on non-Western worlds, urged that it be replaced with ‘cosmographic formation’. These evasive manoeuvres, in turn, have met with scepticism. As the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, neologisms like Dubuisson’s could doubtless be shown to ‘have also been “constructed” through historically specific discourses’ and revealed as ‘instruments in the linguistic battle between classes or cultures.’ Besides, he pointed out, those who would eliminate the term ‘religion’ seldom manage long without it.
So how has ‘religion’, as a concept and category, endured in the absence of a stable definition? To answer that question, it may help to think about how referring expressions do their referring. Some terms keep their grip on the world even as our understanding of what they denote changes radically; others, once central to serious thought, fall away when their supposed referents are deemed illusions. What distinguishes the survivors from the casualties?
The interesting question here is seeing it as a space of meaning making, and therefore as a kind of container. From that perspective we might look at the constraints that give rise to the idea…the attractors, boundaries, connections and exchanges that create the unique identity that defines the emergent phenomenon of a religion.
If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it. Sociologists can enquire into its relation to charity or suicide; psychologists can study its connection to prejudice or wellbeing. In the United States, legislators and judges must have a sufficient grasp of the category that they can balance the [American] Constitutional dos and don’ts of ‘accommodation’ and ‘non-establishment’. For the religionist, meanwhile, it continues to name a space where meaning is made, defended or denied. Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.
This is such an interesting article, because I think emergent containers are very important in human experience and, as noted above, those we call “religions” play a more important role than others such as, like allegiances to a sports team, professional associations or, in some cases, citizenship. Like all dialogic containers. I think religions are emergent phenomena, which is why “no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.” They are evolving spaces of meaning-making, and they are dynamic. The kinds of exchange for example, the rituals and liturgies of practice, are always changing. What happens in my little rural church on Bowen Island is very different to what happened in the volcanic tuft caves in Cappadocia, but there is a line of continuity between the two. Complex systems have path dependency, that is, they evolve and develop based on what has come before, which limits the ways in which they will likely change in the future.
Understanding containers of meaning through the constraints that give them rise helps us to understand how they change and why. Religions change, both in the object of their focus and in the ways in which they practice. Simply saying things like “religion is the problem” actually doesn’t bring useful tools to the conversation about the role of religion in civic life. Religions that are deeply exclusionary in practice, and place rigid boundaries about what is right and what is wrong, may nevertheless internally be places of deep community practice. Indeed, public social services, health care and education systems emerged out of religious institutions and in secular societies, the state took over these roles partly as a program of secularization.
I think there is a place for the containers that we call religions in our world. I think they can be places inside of which people polish their goodness and practice the full range of capacities that are needed to build a world of peace. And I think they can also be harmful cults, which do untold damage through violence, abuse, coercion and exclusion. Like all containers. Religion is nothing special, except that it is accorded a special place in our civic life, even in self-described “secular” states.
If the problem is that civic life in a place is dominated by the separations promoted by some religions, the answer may involve looking elsewhere within the container for the kinds of practices that help to build a civil society. A society that is evolving, growing and changing is doing so in complex ways. Those of us that are helping to make change (and helping to stabilize continuity) need to be careful not to take entire containers of human experience and throw them out. That is a form of colonization and erases and negates some of the ways in which human beings draw sustenance.
We can instead talk about what it means to create and build a society based on principles and practices of human dignity and peace and care and seek multiple sources of inspiration and expertise in designing these while at the same time collectively addressing places where people are dehumanized, killed, hated and excluded. Thinking about the ways we make meaning together from a constraints-based perspective helps me to see that the resources for doing so can be everywhere.
The wind and rain has swung east again and it’s stormy and very dark out, and so I’m out of the house and spending the day at the library which is such a nice bright and warm place to be. As I walked in I see that my friends Erica Olson and Marysia McGilvray have announced a S?wx?wú7mesh History Book Club for 2026 and I’m excited by that. It picks up on an initiative my friend Pauline Le Bel and I are doing to raise money for a Welcome Figure on Bowen.
Back in the day on the blogs we used to issue hat tips to other bloggers who steered us onto some good stuff. Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for this hefty article by John Lanchester on financialization published in the London Review of Books. And a hat tip to Patti Digh for this truly great list of book recommendations.
Happy 25th anniversary to Coastal First Nations, an incredible organization that has worked hard to protect the central and north coast of BC including Haida Gwaii and northern Vancouver Island. When people ask me what reconciliation really looks like I point to that organization, rooted in First Nations jurisdiction and governance, working in partnership with community, western and Indigenous scientists, knowledge keepers and experts. It’s a remarkable organization and long may it continue to represent the best of what can be in this country.
Managing tankers in the central coast is a key challenge for Coastal First Nations and everyone else who lives in the region. In Strong Coast yesterday, Kashmir Falconbridge, the deputy mayor of the community of Port Clemence on Haida Gwaii, writes about why diluted bitumen tankers should never be allowed on the north coast, specifically the Hecate Strait:
The strait is shallow, which makes the waves steep and violent. Winter storms regularly produce seas of eight to ten metres. Historical accounts describe waves reaching ten to twenty metres during exceptional storms. Short interval waves slam vessels from unpredictable angles. Currents tear through channels at speeds that can overpower even modern ships. Even our seasoned mariners will tell you that the strait demands respect at all times.
The Wall Street Journal installed a vending machine powered by AI and it ran a business for a while until it sunk it into the ground. Which, if you read the Wall Street Journal, is what much of their core market does every day. Even the way it signs off is so typical of how CEOs wrap up operations with their staff.
What would the world look like if participatory practices became the way we governed ourselves and structured our world? Rosa Zubizaretta has been doing some thinking about that and some of her friends have written a utopian screenplay to imagine that future.
Rosa’s work in this field sits alongside many others who are continually thinking about how to bring more large scale participation into governance. Participedia is a website that collects information about all of these ways of working and is worth a long linger.
Later editing to add a collection of stories of radical democracy from around the world published at the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which is a really interesting site full of research and documentation of committed local alternative governance work.
My local MP Patrick Weiler on the Canada-Alberta MOU. I have a lot of respect for Patrick,, even though I find myself increasingly disagreeing with him on substance of issues. But it’s very good to get in-depth interviews with local members of Parliament so we can get some insight into how they are thinking about and positioning themselves on these issues. I wish we could be more deliberative on these issues.
The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.