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.