Are you following your religion in the right way? How can you tell and how to remedy if you aren’t? Stay tuned to learn the answers or rather the questions.

Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. I’m a Religious Studies scholar and a university lecturer hoping to create a community interested in the academic study of Magick and Magick practising religions and traditions.

My last video was an interview with Jennifer Uzzell on the overlaps between Christianity and Paganism. I was pleasantly surprised by the interest and debates that conversation sparked, especially on the ideas of being a “true Christian” or a “true Pagan” and what such labels may entail and thank you Nocternia Obscura for bringing the issue up in the live conversation.

So I thought I’d chip in with my two cents on the matter. To answer the question on, whether you’re following your religion right, we should first address the definition of religion and which perspective are we employing to analyse this concept. The academic inquiry around religion and religion can be tackled from many different perspectives. You can investigate them from sociological, psychological, philosophical and many other points of view, depending on the discipline of choice. Here we will be focusing on the two and possibly the most popular fields that study religions, Theology and Religious Studies. While Theology investigates matters pertaining to the institutional and dogmatic stances of a given religion, Religious Studies focuses more on how practitioners live and perceive a certain religion. So, for instance, a theologian would answer the question, of what or who is god in Roman Catholicism. Looking at the sacred text, the history, and the statements by the Vatican. While a Religious Study scholar would investigate how people, who profess themselves as Catholics, conceptualize God and which cultural or experiential frameworks have played a role in the construction of their beliefs and related practices. This means that what the individual Catholic believes may completely contradict what the Catholic Church officially states and it is not the role of a Religious Studies scholar to say what they should believe but rather to understand how come that person or community relates a certain belief to a chosen religion.

You see this all comes down to the difference between institutionalised religions and lived religions because lived religions belong to people and people are quite often in contrast with the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction. In fact, there are philosophies and traditions which advocate for a rejection of this linear thought. As we saw in previous videos on Chaos Magic and Nietzsche. There are also thinkers who offer an understanding of our reality as a social construct as opposed to the product of a given set of logical rules, as with Foucault and post-structuralism. Even in Buddhism, we find the idea that the rules of grammar may not and in fact do not, according to them, correspond to how reality works and hence how we interpret and experience it. Following a Foucaultian theoretical approach, Teemu Taira argues for a socially constructed understanding of religion by employing a methodology called discourse analysis. To put it in simple terms, religion needs to be understood as an empty signifier as its meaning is continually negotiated historically, socially and culturally. Here religion becomes what people make of it rather than what they should make of it according to a given dogma. Mallory Nye highlights that our expectations when it comes to religion would be completely different if we were to acknowledge religion as a lived phenomenon which he calls ‘religioning.’ Allow me to quote this beautifully written passage;

“Religioning is not a thing, with an essence to be defined and explained. Religioning is a form of practice, like other cultural practices, that is done and performed by actors with their own agency (rather than being subsumed by their religions), who have their own particular ways and experiences of making their religiosities manifest. A discourse of religioning also moves away from looking at ‘religion in terms’ of ‘religions,’ but instead looks at religious influences and religious creativities, and the political dynamics through which certain conceptualization of religious authenticity are produced and maintained.”

Nye, 2000 p. 467

To paraphrase what Meredith McGuire writes in her fantastic book on lived religions when we focus on religion as lived, we discover that religion is not a single entity but a conglomerate of diverse, complex, and ever-changing mixtures of beliefs and practices as well as relationships, experiences, and commitments. Thus lived religions are not fixed, unitary or even particularly coherent. Rather than conceptualize individual religions as little versions of some institutional model, she continues, we might need to rethink the notions we have of the institutional model of religions.

Historian Robert Orsi adds to this, to highlight that a lived religion can be seen as an expression of individual creativity and a result of personal experiences. To quote Orsi, also reported in Maguire;

“The religious person is the one acting on his or her world in the inherited, improvised, found, constructed idioms of his or her religious culture.”

Robert Orsi

To conclude their, point Maguire argues that, in rethinking the institutional model of religions, a good starting point might be a better appreciation of the many and complex ways those religions appear to be the product of our human creativity, cultural improvisation, cultural influences, and a creative combination of diverse different elements which are linked to the person, to the individual with only some of them being inherited from the same tradition. When we, as human beings, approach religion or a religious belief or practice we struggle to just follow a given institutionalised model. Because religion is such an individual and personal practice that it must mirror and reflect, to a certain degree, our experience and our way of perceiving the world. Which can hardly reflect a standardized way of perceiving things created by one religion or another.

So, to answer the first question, are you following your religion right, are you a true Christian or a true Muslim or a true Pagan? Well, my answer will be; you’re following your religion in the right way if it is your way. If it’s giving purpose and enriching your life in some way – this, however, goes for others too. So next time someone introduces themselves as a Christo-Pagan or a Jewish Wiccan or even as a transgender, homosexual Catholic, my personal invitation would be; please don’t judge, listen. I’d rather assume that others have the same reasoning mind to the same degree I have. And I like to think that I will be learning something new by venturing through the diverse pathways of beliefs their personal experiences have led them.

So this is it for today’s topic. Please allow me to welcome you to the Inner Symposium, to my Patreon community, my new Patrons. Thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon you are the reason why I keep doing this work on the channel. So I’m really grateful for those of you who have just pledged and for those of you who stay pledged, and also I’m really happy to be having a series of lectures, university-level lectures on esoteric topics for my Magus level Patrons. So if you’re interested in attending those courses and those lectures I’d invite you to check in the infobox the link to my Patreon community.

Also, let me know in the comments, what you think about being true to one’s religion and doing your religion right, and what you think about what I just said. I’m really really intrigued by what you may think about it and as you know, I always reply to comments. So, yeah, just drop your thoughts down and I will be replying to you.

And if you like this video SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, and activate the notification bell so that you won’t miss any new videos, and please do share my videos around it really helps me out and if we reach 10,000 subscribers by Samhain or Halloween we will have a special celebration. Let’s put it that way I don’t want to spoil anything but it’s going to be fun, well it’s going to be academic fun, isn’t it?

Bye for now.

REFERENCES

McGuire, M. B. (2008) Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press.

Nye, M. (2000) ‘Religion, Post-Religionism, And Religioning: Religious Studies and Contemporary Cultural Debates’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Brill, vol. 12, no. 1/4, pp. 447–476.

Orsi, R. A. (2003) ‘Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live in? Special Presidential Plenary Address, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Salt Lake City, November 2, 2002’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, [Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Wiley], vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 169–174.

Taira, T. (2013) ‘Making space for discursive study in religious studies’, Religion, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 26–45 [Online]. DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2013.74274

(Video first uploaded 20 July 2020)