Persons and God

The reason we consider persons in a chapter on social institutions is because the institutional order pivots on them and they are in part the constructs of that order. In other words ‘the person’ is an institution. In the modern legal order responsibility is imputed to individual persons of sane mind and then a host of behavioural expectations are built into the law, from driving with due care and attention to using only reasonable force in self-defence, quite apart from all those explicit prohibitions of murder, rape, theft.

Further than that there are rights like voting, free movement, free speech, enjoying public facilities which are held to imply civic virtues, responsibilities and duties such as reporting crime, sitting on juries, sending children to school, notifying certain diseases and paying taxes. It is then easy to see that the state, in particular law, not only prohibits certain kinds of behaviour but helps to create the assumptions about what people can expect of each other. But as with all institutions this only crystallises what society creates in the first place, all the way down to a sense of responsibility.

The way society creates persons is a topic in which psychology and sociology join forces. In the public mind Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexual repression, guilt and neurosis is probably the most famous.

This has as its premise the interaction of members of the family. But for sociology G.H. Mead was most renowned for his account of the development of the self, the ability to say ‘I’ about ‘me’ as a result of interaction with significant others, who then become generalised as the conscience.

Since then the most important contributions have been those which have stressed the political side of the formation of the self. In his account of the development of the Western state, Elias attributed the historical change in patterns of interpersonal behaviour to its acquisition of the monopoly of violence. ⁴⁰ Foucault argued that sexuality is actually created through what power and discipline forbid and in the refusal to allow the free exploration of bodily pleasure.

It is, then, not only the person which becomes an institution; the body as site of health, fitness, physique, and style is shaped to the requirements of power. The sociology of the body is one of the most keenly researched areas of sociology today, stimulated in large part by Foucault’s work. At the same time experiences of the body, in particular the life events of birth, marriage and death in every society have been the focus of institutions which in the West are known as religion. It finds a meaning for life events and at the same time renders some kinds of social relations sacred.

Sociological study no more explains religion away than the sociology of medicine explains away hepatitis. But the sociology of religion does have much to say about incidence; why people join or leave religious groups; about processes of change in the formation of churches, sects and denominations and how they are organised; how religious leaders, priests and prophets exercise control over their believers; and how religion works through society on other spheres of life. Core beliefs have their own logic, again as in any institutional area, borne by social relations but with a degree of autonomy from them and other beliefs. Belief in God is the most free-floating of all beliefs. It can be combined with any or no particular constellation of social relations, and can infuse any institutional sphere.

Decline in belief in God was for a long time considered a key indicator for the onward march of modernisation. Belief in science, parliamentary democracy, urbanisation, industrialisation and everything else in a supposedly relentless process had to involve secularisation too. But probably the highpoint of this thinking was as long ago as 1882 at the height of the controversy on evolution, when the German Friedrich Nietzsche shocked a whole generation by declaring God was dead.

Since the 1970s God has refused to retreat. In the most modern of all nations, the United States, a large majority believe in God and a majority go to church. Moreover, in a time which has been called post-materialist, appeals to abstract values in the fight against disease, hunger and poverty time and again find the strongest support from religious sources. The flashpoint issue of abortion in relation to the world’s population is the major point of conflict between religious and secular values, and even here compromise is found possible. The government of Bangladesh enlists the support of its religious leaders, the imams, for population campaigns.

Sociologists have no more need from their own disciplinary standpoint to declare a belief in the existence or non-existence of God than they have in quasars or mad cou disease. It is the way society carries belief which is their concern. On the other hand, where groups diverge on doctrine sociologists may well have to identify the points on which they differ in order to undertake sociological analysis and assess the importance of a particular belief for schism.

The study of dogma, schism and heresy in religion shows how belief can become the focus for group formation for any life-sphere, including politics and science. The fervour and feuds of animal rights activists, Trotskyite groups and the mujahedin may or may not be associated with the idea of God, but they give a good indication of how reality for and of a group can itself turn on faith in the rightness of a cause. Simply because sociologists then have to explore with equal sympathy the positions of ‘true’ and ‘false’ believers they are almost bound to come to a view on the logic of their positions. These are conflicts within cultures that they adjudicate from a common-sense standpoint outside them.

In the time when the great schism of the West was between religion and science and sociology declared itself for science it appeared that its task was the discovery of the social sources of error. It is an aspect of the transformation which is called postmodern that science and religion have moved from opposition to collusion in acknowledging their inability to solve great mysteries, of the infinitely large or small, of eternity or the origin of the universe, and also in their acceptance of faith in ‘something’ as a fact of life.

If in daily life this translates into God the sociologist is the last person to be able to dismiss this as unfounded, given the fact that in contemporary sociological theory the move has been to see society as ungrounded, and ontological security to be based in trust and faith. In the serious study of mystic experience the sociologist is as likely as anyone to end up experiencing the mystic.

It is for this reason that I include God within the life-sphere of Persons rather than State, Work, Environment or Culture. The affinities between the experience of the body as self which reveals the person and the experience of the world as reality revealing God are close enough to suggest why world-wide vastly differing cultural experiences culminate in the idea of God.

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