Religion As Magic

[Valin]

Religion & Other Curiosities:

Viewing religion in an unbroken continuum with every variant of magic is a perspective grounded in a widely diffused class of people—part of the culture of an international intelligentsia.

Peter Berger

1/15/14

 

In its issue of December 21, 2013 (as a sort of Christmas present), the German news magazine Der Spiegel carried a story by Manfred Dworschak, under the heading “Between Religion and Magic”. A better title, reflecting the bias of the story, might be “Religion as Magic”. It is the cover story of this issue (though it starts on page 112, which hardly signals an important topic). The picture on the cover indicates the approach: Religion and magic (or if you will, superstition) are treated as one comprehensive phenomenon. That is what I find interesting here.

 

(Snip)

 

Most of the facts cited in this article are well-known and not in dispute. Yes, there is a substratum of quasi-magical beliefs surviving even in supposedly Enlightened populations. And yes, both Catholic and Protestant churches have declined in most of Europe. I don’t know Manfred Dworschak. Thus, for all I know, he may be an overt atheist, whether anxiously sweating or calmly dry; or he may be a committed or potential Christian, belonging to that minority targeted by Rome’s campaign to re-evangelize Europe. Be this as it may, he sees religion in an unbroken continuum with every variant of magic—a rather serious distortion of both phenomena. Yet this perspective is not an individual eccentricity. Rather, it is a perspective grounded in a widely diffused class of people—part of the culture of an international intelligentsia.

 

This class is internally variegated, from an upper stratum of celebrity sages and public figures who function as a cultural elite, to lowly workers in the knowledge industry who take their cues from this elite and aspire to join it. They believe in progress, which they represent. Thus, by definition, they are “on the right side of history”: Given time and the proper educational programs, everyone will be like them. They are the epigones of the European Enlightenment. They share its view of religion—a backward phenomenon, regrettably still surviving among the unwashed lower orders. Not surprisingly, this class has been most successful in Europe in terms of shaping the general culture. Europe is indeed the most secularized continent, giving credence to the belief that the secular elite is riding the wave of the future. In other parts of the world this view of things is grotesquely out of touch with a furiously religious reality. However, there exists an international intelligentsia which has been converted to the secular worldview emanating from Europe. [if you like to use old Marxist concepts, you can see this situation as one of cultural colonialism, with a native comprador class serving the interests of the Western imperialists.] In this worldview, the huge religious explosions in the Global South—Asia, Africa and Latin America—are dismissed as the last gasp of superstitions about to wither away [comprador academics may nod in agreement].

 

(Snip)