Studying religion and community: A critical perspective

Abstract

This article is a commentary on a keynote lecture by Kimmo Ketola, Tuomas Martikainen and Hanna Salomäki at the 32nd ISSR Conference in 2013. The author presents three critical questions about ways of defining, measuring and interpreting the changes in the notion of ‘community’ that are occurring in the contemporary world.

Introduction

This article was produced as a comment on a keynote lecture presented by Kimmo Ketola on the basis of a joint manuscript by Kimmo Ketola, Tuomas Martikainen and Hanna Salomäki at the 32nd ISSR Conference in 2013 and subsequently published in the present volume of Social Compass. It is an honourable tradition that participants in the ISSR conference come to learn more about the particular country in which the conference takes place. The presentation thus provided a detailed introduction to the religious landscape of Finland seen through the lens of continuities and mutations among religious organizations and the implications of these for the notion of community. The presentation clearly struggled (as we all do) with what may be called the challenges of religious diversity. It is challenging to find coherent ways to describe religious changes, which in the case of Finland range from ritual alterations and revivalism within the majority Church (the Thomas Mass, the Nokia revival and the Lutheran Foundation, Finland) to immigrant religion and spirituality (Ashtanga yoga).

The authors chose the question of ‘freedom versus community’ as their point of departure. This is a classic Durkheimian dichotomy, which has received renewed attention since the 1990s, scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman, Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor and Robert Putnam attempting to balance community and individualization. The importance of this question is obvious from the attention it is receiving from politicians, policy makers and public intellectuals. The public interest invested in the concept entails investment in the definition and understanding of community, which unsurprisingly is contested.

In his introduction to Key Concepts in Community Studies, Blackshaw (2010: 10) notes how the concept of community now exists ‘independently of sociology, like a renegade, forever on the run, always one jump ahead of any attempt to identify with it any conceptual precision. By now it is hard to know whether community has changed, is still the same or was never what we thought it was in the first place’.

Blackshaw’s concerns align with the three critical points presented in this article. The concerns were raised as critical questions to the presentation but in reality, they are critical questions for all researchers engaged with religion and community: how do we define community, how do we measure community and how are communities changing?

Defining community

The first critical question regards the understanding and definition of community. Research often takes its – implicit, if not explicit – point of departure from Ferdinand Tönnies’ classic distinction of Gemeinschaft, normally translated as community, and Gesellschaft, normally translated as (civil) society (Tönnies, 2001 [1887]). According to Tönnies, the difference is whether the social bonds associated a collectivity ‘may be conceived … as having real organic life, and that is the essence of Community [Gemeinschaft,] or else as a purely mechanical construction, existing in the mind, and that is what we think of as Society [Gesellschaft]’ (2001 [1887]: 17). Tönnies further argues that ‘Community [Gemeinschaft] is old, Society [Gesellschaft] is new, both as an entity and as a term’ (2001 [1887]: 19) and that ‘Community means genuine enduring life together, whereas Society is a transient and superficial thing’ (2001 [1887]: 19). In asking whether Tönnies’ ‘conception has outlived its usefulness’, Ketola, Martikainen and Salomäki refer to a contemporary scholar with an explicit starting point in Tönnies, namely, Zygmunt Bauman. In his book Community (2001) Bauman investigates the connotations of the word community:

To start with, community is a ‘warm’ place, a cosy and comfortable place. It is like a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day. Out there, in the streets, all sorts of dangers lie in ambush; we have to be alert when we go out, watch whom we are talking to and who talks to us, be on the look-out every minute. In here, in the community, we can relax – we are safe, there are no dangers looming in dark corners (to be sure, hardly any ‘corner’ here is ‘dark’). In a community, we all understand each other well, we may trust what we hear, we are safe most of the time and [we are] hardly ever puzzled or taken aback. We are never strangers to each other. (Bauman, 2001: 1–2)

Bauman presents several types of presumed community: the peg communities of, for instance, weight-watching, carnival communities, ethnic communities and gated communities, but none of them display ‘real community’. They are dismissed as ‘bonds without consequences’ (2001: 71), a ‘voluntary ghetto’ or a ‘laboratory of social disintegration, atomization and anomie’ (2001: 122). Bauman’s understanding of community is basically – and intentionally – nostalgic and utopian: it is ‘[p]aradise lost or paradise still hoped to be found’ (2001: 3). He concludes that ‘[i]f there is to be a community in the world of individuals, it can only be (and it needs to be) a community woven together from sharing and mutual care’ (2001: 150).

Émile Durkheim is another scholar from the generation of founding fathers who possessed a profound interest in community. According to his famous definition of religion, religion is a ‘unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community, called a church’ (2001 [1912]: 46).

The distinction between Durkheim and Tönnies is clear. Rather than providing vivid and engaging pictures of different types of social relationship, Durkheim prefers an explicit definition. American sociologist Steven Brint finds the Durkheimian approach more successful than Tönnies’ typological approach in identifying properties of community that enable the formation of a more precise analytical concept (Brint, 2001: 5). Brint finds four structural and two cultural characteristics of the Gemeinschaft type of community to be of particular importance: dense and demanding social ties, social attachment to and involvement in institutions, ritual occasions, small group size, perception of similarity (as a basis for social identification) and common beliefs. On the basis of these, Brint suggests that communities are defined as ‘aggregates of people who share common activities and/or beliefs and who are bound together principally by relations of affect, loyalty, common values, and/or personal concern (i.e. interest in the personalities and life events of one another)’ (Brint, 2001: 8). Brint notes that the interaction need not be frequent or of a totally non-instrumental nature (Brint, 2001: 9) but that the motives for interaction are central, as they were for Tönnies: work-related groups and voluntary interest organizations may therefore feature many of the same qualities but will not be communities in a technical sense.

In the 1950s, George Hillary collected as many as 94 distinct definitions of community, covering 16 distinct aspects (1955: 117). Bauman’s understanding of community as a craving rather than a social reality may be seen to add a new dimension to this list. ¹ It is also difficult to fit Brint’s definition into Hillary’s classification. ² Its emphasis not only on shared values, affect and loyalty but also on an interest in personalities and life stories suggests an entirely new aspect. Hillary noted that many of the definitions were contradictory. The same may be said of Bauman’s understanding of community as community past and Brint’s insistence that communities and communal relations continue to exist (Brint, 2001: 8). Brint and Bauman are unlikely to differ substantially in relation to the ‘facts’, i.e. that people engage in collective activities, but they disagree as to whether this engagement constitutes community. That is why we always need to know what definitions are being used when discussing community.

How to measure community

The second question is methodological: how do we study community? How do we measure freedom? When participants mention freedom as the most attractive feature of the Thomas Mass, what exactly do they mean? According to sociologist Peter Wagner (1994), liberation is a key element in the project of modernity, and modern or late modern subjects may therefore be ideologically compelled to express a feeling of freedom. The same could be said of community. What, then, is the status of informants’ claims that they experience a sense of community? When Ketola, Martikainen and Salomäki remark that fewer people ‘find their spiritual home in the local church’, how was this conclusion reached? On the basis of the number of people who have withdrawn their membership in the local church, empty pews or what people have expressed in surveys or interviews? And when it is said that immigrant associations provide a ‘comfort zone in the at times hostile and alien new social environment’, is this how immigrants regard them? On the basis of what data is that conclusion drawn? Similarly, the authors state that Ashtanga yoga does not provide community, in terms of ‘a safe haven in a hostile world’. Pressed by his contemporary critics, Tönnies replied that he had taken an ‘objective’ ³ approach to the study of community, but regardless of his intentions, he has been criticized for promoting a romanticizing of community through the very language that he uses (Harris, 2001: xxix). ‘Communities are not very community-like’, as Brint puts it (2001: 6). Close-knit, integrated, small-scale communities involve coercion as well as cohesion. Bauman could not agree more: there is a price to be paid for being in a community, namely, loss of freedom (2001: 4), but unlike Brint, Bauman finds that this loss means that presumed community is not community after all. The lack of community in contemporary societies does not put scholars out of work. It is quite in line with Bauman’s position to argue, as Jeremy Brent, a scholar as well as a social worker himself, has done, that

[i]llusion and rhetoric are indeed an important part of social reality, which is not based only on a rational instrumentality, but has strong aesthetic and narrative components – human cultural activity, with all its creative energy – and is a major part of social construction. Rather than rejecting community for being an illusion, I would argue that the workings of community opens [sic] the way for recognizing how much illusion is part of social and political life. (Brent, 2004: 216)

For scholars within the Baumanian tradition, the research topic tends to have shifted from community itself (which is probably nowhere to be found) to the idea of community (nostalgic or utopian). For scholars like Brint, however, the participants’ expressions of feeling community may be genuine, but subjective accounts of feelings of community should be complemented with other types of data, like the existence of dense and demanding social ties, social attachment to and involvement in institutions, ritual occasions, small group size, perception of similarity (as a basis for social identification) and common beliefs.

New types of community?

The third critical question regards the claim that there is something new about community in late modernity. For Tönnies, as well as for Durkheim, modernity posed new challenges to social life, and these challenges are certainly not smaller in the 21st century. Theories of individualization (like, for instance, Bauman’s) suggest that all collectivities must take up the challenge of balancing individual and collective aims and needs. Theories of secularization have more specifically questioned the ability of religious collectivities to rise to the challenge. While religious organizations around the world appear to be doing quite well, the question of what is happening to Europe’s national Churches continues to be raised: how are they faring as their historical position of near monopoly changes?

The Churches of Europe may be experiencing a crisis, but is it really true, as stated by Ketola et al., that in Finland ‘[t]he boundaries of communities are no longer spatially drawn, and membership in them is less and less defined by virtue of birth and family relatedness’? In fact, 76.4 per cent of Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and, though inclusion does not happen automatically at birth, the predominance of infant baptisms makes it a close call. And though a growing number of its members may live outside the borders of Finland, the vast majority still live within the territorial boundaries. The emphasis on individualization, choice and new religious phenomena is relevant to our understanding of parts of the diverse religious landscape of today but it does tend to miss ‘its other major component: the millions of people around the globe who were “born into” some religious group rather than religiously “born again”’ (Jakelic, 2010: 1).

Revivals are also in no way a new phenomenon. But the question of how a charismatic revival, with its well known aspects of healing, prophesy and speaking in tongues, is influenced and changed by taking place in sports stadiums is fascinating and inspiring. Religious diversity is also not a new phenomenon in Finland, as evidenced by the existence of the ancient Muslim community in the Nordic countries, the tartars. A comparison between the old and the new Muslim diversity in Finland with due attention to the differences in relation to transnationalism, evoked not least by new media technology, would help us to understand continuities and mutations better.

Community and communities of our time

Religion and community have traditionally been seen as strongly associated. The question of whether religion continues to foster community is an important one not only for scholars of religion, but also for politicians and policy makers, who are tempted to turn to religion to support the production of community in late modern societies. We need more in-depth studies of different religious phenomena in order to understand what is going on, but we also need attempts to provide overviews of cities, regions, countries and continents similar to what Ketola, Martikainen and Salomäki provide for Finland. Then we will know more about religious continuities and mutations in late modernity.