‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche
‘Nietzsche is dead,’ God
So far we have concentrated, single-mindedly, on understanding the growth of popular Hinduism in India in the era of globalization. But India is not alone: a rising tide of religiosity seems to be sweeping the whole world. Consider the following:
• Traditional Christian beliefs in a personal God, heaven, hell, and the resurrection of the soul are growing even in some of the most secularized countries in Europe. Evangelical churches preaching a more passionate and participatory Christianity are showing a strong growth in such bastions of secularism as Sweden, Holland, Germany, and Britain. American-style tele-evangelicalism and mega-churches are cropping up within the Church of England in Britain and Germany. Continent-wide programmes in Christian education are attracting new members. Even Roman Catholicism, which has been declining most sharply all across Europe, is showing a growth in charismatic movements like the Emmanuel Community which started in France and now operates in 50 countries. Catholic shrines, especially those devoted to Virgin Mary, are attracting huge numbers of pilgrims to the extent that Europe has been described as ‘living in the golden age of pilgrimage’.
• Belief in reincarnation, the new age, and the occult remains high in most of Europe, including France, the home of the Enlightenment.
• Russia is witnessing a growing clericalization of the public sphere. The Russian Orthodox Church, richer and more powerful than at any time in almost a century, has become the spiritual arm of the Russian state. The power of the Church has grown to the point that it has succeeded in introducing Russian Orthodox teachings, complete with Bible reading and liturgy, in public schools. Despite the government’s attempts since 1997 to curb all competitors to the Russian Orthodox, religious movements like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hare Krishna, and Scientology, along with evangelical and Catholic churches are growing.
• The once atheistic China has emerged as ‘one of the most religious countries in the world where all kinds of religions, old and new, conventional or eccentric, are thriving’. Rationalism and a favourable attitude to science give way to a growth of belief in God, spirits/ghosts, ancestors, and fate.
• New transnational religious networks are emerging as globalization disembeds religions from their historic homelands and scatters them around the world. African and East Asian (especially Korean) churches are booming in Europe and North America. Hindu temples and ashrams are becoming increasingly transnational.
• Online religions are growing. Today, anyone with a computer and a credit card can do a virtual darshan, complete with virtual arti and flower offerings, to any of the multitude of gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. (As an experiment, Google ‘online puja’.)
• Religious belief remains widespread among scientists. A recent study of Indian scientists (1100 participants, all Ph.D.s in basic sciences, engineering, and medicine) by the US-based Institute for Study of Secularism in Society and Culture found that 26 per cent of them firmly believed in the existence of a personal God, while another 30 per cent believed in an impersonal spiritual power. Close to 40 per cent of Indian scientists believed that God performs miracles, while 24 per cent believed that men and women with special divine powers can perform miracles. A significant number believe in karma (29 per cent), life after death (26 per cent) and reincarnation (20 per cent). Many scientists who would be counted in the category of ‘eminent scientists’ of the country participate in public prayers and follow miracle-mongering gurus.
• Similar trends are reported from the Western societies as well. In the US, for example, 40 per cent of scientists, but only 7 per cent of ‘eminent scientists’ surveyed proclaimed belief in a personal God. Recent data from the UK shows that about 20 per cent of scientists and about 4 per cent ‘eminent scientists’ believe in God.
• Use of science to affirm the literal truth of holy books is rampant. Campaigns to teach creationism as ‘scientific’ in American schools are well known. ‘Vedic creationism’ is a new trend in the US where the Hare Krishna movement has taken a lead and Deepak Chopra has defended intelligent design from a Hindu perspective. Scientific creationism is spreading in the Islamic world, which has a long tradition of looking for modern science in the verses of the Koran. The belief that astrology, yagnas, and yogic siddhis are somehow scientific continues to be widespread in India.
• The great resurgence of popular Hinduism with nationalistic overtones has already been described in great details in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book.
God is clearly on a winning streak these days.
This resurgence of religion raises one hugely embarrassing question: how could we all be so wrong?
It has been one of the fundamental assumptions of modern social theory that as the world becomes more modern, people will no longer need to believe in supernatural beings, religions will lose their importance, and people will become more secular. All the giants of social philosophy—Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche—agreed that religion’s days were numbered and the future belonged to secularism. India’s own great secularists, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhim Rao Ambedkar, struggled mightily to redefine a new Constitution for India based entirely on a secular morality pertaining to this life, with no reference to religious conceptions like karma and dharma. They exhorted us to cultivate a scientific temper and critical thinking so that we could become more secular. Becoming secular was good, we were told, because it meant the very opposite of narrow-minded communalism and superstitious obscurantism. Secularism was something to cherish and strive for.
What were these secularists celebrating? What is secularism, anyway?
Secularism is basically an attitude of minimalism which, with regard to, one: belief in God; two: social significance of religion; and three: both of them together.
With regard to belief in God, secularists are sceptics. They believe that as modern women and men learn to trust the judgement of their own senses and reason, they will find the idea of a being with supernatural powers rather implausible. God will not completely die, but will lose many of the awesome powers ascribed to Him or Her. Such a God will come closer to what Richard Dawkins calls an ‘Einsteinian God’ who is more like a poetic metaphor for the wonderment and awe. A secular society is one where, in the words of Peter Berger, ‘increasing number of people look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations’. By this standard, a society can be called properly secular when more and more people learn to live good and fulfilled lives without the consolation of belief in supernatural powers which they accept on faith.
With regard to the scope of religion, secularists are separatists. They believe that modern societies undergo a process of separation (or differentiation, as sociologists call it) by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols. Secularization means that religion ceases to be the ‘sacred canopy’ (to use Peter Berger’s famous description) under whose shade the rest of the society flourishes. Rather than provide overarching meaning for all of life, religion recedes to the private sphere, leaving politics, economics, sciences, arts, and other social endeavours to begin to operate by their own internal logic. Religion is to be protected and even cherished, but strictly within its own sphere of metaphysical speculations, weddings and funerals, and poetic pleasure and consolation. Secularism is a stance of setting limits on what religion can and cannot be allowed to do.
India’s Constitution is a good example of setting limits on religion: while it respects people’s right to believe in their chosen gods, it abolishes, at the stroke of the pen, the authority of the Dharmashastras to lay down rights and duties of the different varnas. The equal rights of Indian citizens regardless of their caste, creed, and gender is a result of secular authority setting limits on what religion can and cannot be allowed to do.
With regard to both of the above, secularists see a link. In the secularist world view, the decline of personal piety is linked to decline in the social significance of religion. In other words, when people begin to understand the world rationally, without invoking divine beings or powers, they no longer see the need to beseech them for fulfilling their wishes, or look to religious authorities to derive their sense of right and wrong, duties, and responsibilities. Religion begins to decline in social significance when more and more people create meaningful lives without God(s).
That, however, does not mean that believers can’t be secularists: they may not be sceptics, but they can be separatists. The traditional liberal position has been that as long as believers can keep their faith safely tucked away in their private lives, they are secular. While this position makes theoretical sense, it is full of contradictions, for it creates a split between the believers’ deepest beliefs and his/her actions: she is basically being asked not to act upon what she holds to be the highest truth. A liberal society like the United States with very high walls separating the state from the Church did succeed for a while in living with this kind of a split consciousness. But even there, it has begun to show serious stresses and strains and religion has been increasingly bleeding into the affairs of the state.
Indian secularism offers its own peculiar twist to the idea of secularism: it does not erect a wall of separation between religion and the state. What makes the Indian state secular, instead, is its commitment to religious neutrality, that is, not having an official religion of the state and treating all religions with equal respect.
This, in broad strokes, is what secularism is all about.
Clearly, we don’t live in a religiously minimalist world: the world is getting more, not less, religious. People all around the world are turning to religion not only in their private lives, but they are bringing their religious interests into the public sphere as well. The evidence from India shows how religious identities are getting politicized and how religious rituals are becoming as much a part of political mobilizations as they are of weddings and funerals. Moreover, as the evidence of a thriving Indian supermarket of gods and god-men shows, modern men and women still find supernatural and miraculous powers to be entirely credible. All over the world, religious maximalism seems to be the order of the day.
In this chapter, we will try to understand the changing and growing religiosity in India by looking at it through the wider lens of social-scientific theories of secularization. This engagement with social theory may seem a bit daunting and even irrelevant to the rest of this book. But it will enable us to develop a deeper understanding of what makes a society more or less secular at any point of time. It will also help to enrich the domestic debates over secularism with fresh insights from the global debates where a new paradigm of market-based, supply-side theory of religious revival is emerging.
For many years now, the Indian debate over secularism has been firmly stuck between the Gandhian pole of sarva dharma samabhav (equal respect for all religions) and the Nehruvian pole of dharma nirpekshta (equal indifference to all religions). New theories regarding the role of competitive free markets in the realm of religion/spirituality are, however, important to understand the kind of blockbuster growth in the demand and supply of religious services that India is experiencing. This chapter will try to introduce the reader to these new ways of thinking about the resurgence of gods in the era of globalization. Since these theories about the return of religion in the modern world have emerged as a result of intellectual debates with the earlier theories that predicted the death of religion, we will necessarily have to look at the various theories in succession. In what follows the older theories of secularization (or decline of religion) and the newer thinking about desecularization (or resurgence of religion) are examined in terms of their relevance to the Indian experience.
The classical theory of secularization flows out of the Enlightenment project which believed that as men and women begin to understand the underlying order of nature without invoking God, they will learn to outgrow their faith in God. Rational control of nature will make supplications to divine powers superfluous, and religion will begin to wither away. It was this understanding of secularism that informed the outlook of the modernist architects of India’s Constitution.
The birth and death of this classical theory of secularization can be telescoped into the exceptionally productive career of Peter Berger, a renowned sociologist of religion at Boston University. He wrote his path-breaking book, The Sacred Canopy, in 1967 in which he showed why the decline of religion was inevitable in modern industrial societies. Almost thirty years later, in 1999, he edited a book titled The De-secularization of the World in which he recanted his belief in secularization and accepted that the world was actually becoming more religious as it was becoming more modern.
In The Sacred Canopy, Berger described secularization as a global process built into the functioning of modern industry: any society that industrializes will end up secularizing as well. Religion, Berger said, ‘stops at the factory gate’ and modern industry is ‘something like a “liberated territory” with respect to religion’ and spreads secularization outward through the rest of the society.
What makes the industrial sector a ‘liberated zone’? The short answer is: rationalization of the work process, that is, making it calculable and predictable, removing all scope of divine intervention or magical action. Modern industrial society requires the presence of a large cadre of scientific and technological personnel whose training and ongoing social organization presupposes a high degree of rationalization, not only on the level of infrastructure, but also on that of consciousness. The upshot of Berger’s argument is that over time, the state itself dissociates itself from religious constraints in order to protect and promote the rationalized core of the economy. Whether this process is accompanied by organized anti-clericalism (as in France) or not (as in America, Britain, India), varies with the national context. But the core of secularization, namely, the emancipation of the state from the sway of religious rationales for economic activity, law, and politics is a universal characteristic of all modernizing states.
In Berger’s account, once a secular state is in place, secularization of the society, culture, and lifeworld follows almost automatically. What happens is this: the state takes over more and more of the civilian sectors and services that used to be previously controlled by religious institutions. Simultaneously, many of life’s misfortunes which used to be seen as a result of divine intervention—diseases, destitution, and natural catastrophes—are brought under rational control.
This slow but steady differentiation of the domains of the state, economy, education, health, scientific research, and technological development from the overarching ‘sacred canopy’ of religion constitutes the very essence of secularization. As institutions break free from the sway of religion, so does the consciousness of the people:
As there is a secularization of society and culture, there is a secularization of consciousness. Put simply, this means that the modern West has produced an increasing number of individuals who look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations. (emphasis added)
Once religions are forced to cede control over enculturation to the state, the sacred canopy they once provided is shattered and religions can no longer take the allegiance of the population for granted. Privatized religions become a choice and not an obligation. Under these circumstances, Berger argues, religious institutions become marketing agencies, and religious traditions become consumer commodities.
Berger sees this pluralistic market in religion as making people less religious. The idea is that when people are faced with so many clashing accounts of God, they can no longer accept their own religious tradition as the only valid tradition. Berger believes that religious relativism breeds doubt.
The Indian Constitution is based upon this classical view of secularization. India’s democratic revolution was premised on the assumption that religion must decline in its influence on the public sphere, and that the state must step in to remedy the religious sources of caste and gender inequities. The Constitution’s promise of equal citizenship regardless of caste, creed, class, or gender meant a clean sweep of Hindu laws, taboos, and customs that had regulated socio-economic relationships for centuries. The Indian Constitution, moreover, is completely nastik: its principles of ‘Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ invoke no divine power, no holy book(s) and no sacred tradition. But ironically, democratizing access to high Hinduism, without simultaneously democratizing access to secular education, has led to the creation of a less secular civil society. Thus while the social dynamic that led India to embrace secular nationalism conforms to Berger’s theory, it has not produced ‘secularization of consciousness’ that Berger predicted.
The Sacred Canopy is justifiably considered a classic and it influenced a whole generation of thinkers. But the classical theories of secularism tend to leave out two important factors: the role of scientific advances in changing the popular intellectual climate; and the historical affinity between secularism and working class movements. Given the importance our secularist founding fathers placed on the cultivation of a scientific temper in creating a culture of secularism in India, it is important to dwell on the reception of science by the working people in Western societies where struggles for secularism started much before they did in India.
The curious thing about the mainstream secularization theory is that it left very little room for culture and ideas to influence the technical and institutional infrastructure. Berger is very clear on this issue. He grants that the biblical tradition played a historical role in starting the process of secularization in the West. But once the process gets going, religion has no direct role to play. Rather, religion becomes purely dependent on political economy and loses the ability to act back on, or influence, the institutional structure of a society. Writing in the heydays of the Cold War, Berger was equally dismissive of ‘scientific atheists’ in the Soviet Bloc and Christian evangelicals in the US in stemming the tide of secularization. Neither rational critique nor apologetics could save religion, whose ultimate fate was oblivion, if not death.
The other curious feature is the lack of importance attached to the growth of modern science and scientific outlook in the larger society. Science makes a difference only as technology which, leads to rationalization of work, which in turn, spills over into other spheres of the society. The cultural influence of science—the rational questioning of the truth of the claims religious dogmas make about the world—hardly plays any role in the mainstream account of secularization. Indeed, in Berger’s account, it is not truth but plausibility, or believability, that is the key: any idea, true or false, can be made to appear plausible by the process of socialization which includes constant repetition through rituals and ceremonies. Secularization, on this account, is not the result of people judging the evidence for and against their gods and adjusting their beliefs in proportion to the evidence. Rather, societies secularize because of the breakdown of religion’s monopoly on the socialization processes that made gods look plausible. This view is widely shared by other supporters of secularization, most notably Steve Bruce who is one of the most outspoken and prolific defenders of secularization.
It is useful to read Berger together with Owen Chadwick’s 1975 classic, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Chadwick reminds us that what was distinctive about the process of secularization in nineteenth century Europe was that the working people took the revolution in ideas brought about by modern science seriously: scientific critique of religion was not confined to the salons of the intellectual elite but rather spread into the working class culture: ‘The free thinkers of the 1840s were different from the free-thinkers of the 1740s. They were lower in the social scale and they associated the religious cause with the social cause.’ Even the word ‘secularism’, Chadwick reminds us, was coined by George Holyoake in 1851 to prevent the British socialists from being tarred by the negative connotations of atheism. European secularist movements of this era were inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin and espoused the materialist philosophy of well-known German scientists, especially Karl Vogt, Ludwig Buchner, and Ernst Haeckel who were fighting a battle against vitalism (i.e., the idea that living organisms need some kind of vital energy—what we in India call ‘prana’ over and above the play of biochemical molecules). These movements had the enthusiastic support of the lower-middle-class artisans, weavers, shopkeepers, and booksellers and the labouring classes who were either indifferent to the official churches or identified religion with opposition to the aspirations of the worker.
Similar developments took place across the Atlantic in the US as well. During the heyday of progressivism (1875–1914), American freethinkers joined forces with the working classes for issues that appealed to broad cross-sections of people including freedom of speech, separation of church and state, eight-hour workday, and free secular public schools which appealed to a broad constituency among the working classes. The American evidence confirms the idea that secular movements succeed only in so far as they are able to offer practical, this-worldly, and rational solutions to everyday problems that affect the lives of ordinary people.
Chadwick describes how Marx himself came to embrace this practice-oriented conception of secularism. In his younger days, Marx engaged with the intellectual content of religion: he saw it as an error which could be corrected by reasoned argument. But in his more mature writings, Marx began to see that no amount of sceptical demystification could promote real secularization under the conditions of capitalism. If we want to change men’s ideas, Chadwick writes summarizing Marx’s views in German Ideology, ‘we shall not do it in preaching atheism, or in undermining their beliefs by philosophizing. To make religion vanish, we need not science but social revolution.’ But even though rational critique by itself was not sufficient, Marx and Marxists always considered it a necessary element of working class struggles.
The lasting impact of these revolutionary movements was not political revolutions per se, but rather a slow and steady intellectual transformation of the popular culture in the West. These movements brought before the working people and the middle classes the idea that there was an alternative explanation to the world, different from what they had inherited. They succeeded in sowing seeds of doubt regarding the picture of the universe that the Bible assumed.
These debates regarding rationalism and social struggles for justice are as relevant to India as they are for the West. The political left in India has long been preoccupied by the question of what comes first—demystifying religion or social revolution? This was the main bone of contention between the Dalit and Shudra thinkers-activists and the Marxists. For Dalit intellectuals like B.R. Ambedkar, any radical change in social relations first required the demolition of the Hindu legitimation for innate human inequality. Ambedkar asked: how can a new base (democratic socialism) be put in place before the existing superstructure (Hindu justifications of caste) is knocked down? Indian Marxists, on the other hand, while being philosophically committed to materialism and atheism, have generally followed Marx’s lead: they have given priority to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution. It is not that they are opposed to the project of sceptical demystification of religious beliefs: Marxist thinkers like M.N. Roy, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, and D.D. Kosambi have taken the lead in drawing attention to the long-denigrated rationalist and materialist elements in Hinduism. While sympathetic to rationalism, Indian Marxists tend to subordinate a critique of religion to political calculations which can sometimes ally them with populist anti-modernist movements. As a result, a distinct politics of rationalism, frontally aimed at religion’s many mystifications, has not been a prominent feature of the Indian left. Even the Dalit movement today is putting the Ambedkarite project of ideology-critique on the back burner in order to make opportunistic alliances with upper castes that have never renounced their support of the fundamentals of varna dharma, nor revised the metaphysics that justifies hierarchy. But, as this chapter will argue, struggles for truth and justice are deeply intertwined, and one is incomplete without the other.
Another question that has puzzled those who think about such things is whether secularization is a universal phenomenon. Do all societies undergo a separation of different spheres of society from the sacred canopy of religion as they industrialize?
Jose Casanova, a sociologist at the New School for Social Research in New York, provided a useful way to look at this question in his widely acclaimed 1994 book Public Religion in the Modern World. His insights are relevant to the debates that have been going on in India over what kind of secularism is appropriate for India.
Casanova defended the fundamental core of secularization, namely, the increasing autonomy (or differentiation) of the state, the economy, and scientific research and development from religious injunctions: what distinguishes modern state bureaucracies and markets is the fact that they function as if God did not exist. This process of the growing autonomy of different aspects of social life from religious sanctions and taboos is what makes any society modern.
While this process of differentiation is universal, Casanova argues, that does not mean that religions in all societies will experience the same extent of privatization and decline. His thesis is that all modernizing societies go through a similar process of differentiation, but whether or not differentiation will bring about similar consequences of decline in popular religiosity and/ or a decline in the cultural authority of temples, churches, or mosques depends upon the cultural and political preconditions which differ in different societies. He correctly points out that the original secularization theory was flawed in ‘confusing the historical processes of secularization proper with the alleged and anticipated consequences of these processes’.
Why does the same process of modernization/institutional differentiation lead to different consequences in different societies? Why is it that in some societies, especially in Western Europe, religions began to lose their social influence with modernization? And why does religion continue to flourish in other societies like the US and India even after formal separation from the state?
Casanova tries to explain such differences by looking at four cultural ‘carriers’ of secularization: the Protestant Reformation, the rise of modern nation-states, the rise of modern capitalism, and the rise of modern science. Since each of these carriers developed different dynamics in different places and at different times, the patterns and outcomes of the historical process of secularization should be different in different societies.
Casanova outlines how Protestantism helped set in motion other carriers of secularization in the West, namely, capitalism and modern science. But over time, the connection with Protestantism was broken and science and capitalism became independent forces in the birth of secular nation-states. All modernizing societies, Christian or not, with or without cultural analogues of Protestantism, participate in global capitalist markets managed by their nation-states and all want to promote scientific education and technical training. Today, no modernizing nation-state can afford to shut itself off either from capitalism or from science, both of which tend to insulate the secular aspects of state and economy from religious injunctions.
The kind of nuance Casanova provides is relevant for the Indian situation. Some Indian critics of secularism have condemned the very idea of confining the sacred in the private sphere as a Christian idea which is unsuited for the holistic Indic religions which claim ‘all of a follower’s life, so that religion is constitutive of society’. Those who make a case for Hindu exceptionalism forget that throughout the Middle Ages, Christianity was no less ‘totalizing’ than Hinduism. Before the forces of modernization and secularization broke the sacred canopy, all religions were totalizing in the sense that they regulated all aspects of life. It is true that Hindu metaphysical doctrines complicate matters because they do not allow a differentiation of matter and spirit, or between creatures and the creator, as clearly as monotheisms do. But following Casanova, it is clear that the nature of religious doctrine is only one among the four major carriers of secularization. For the last three centuries, India has been drawn into the other three global forces of secularization, namely, global spread of science, global capitalism, and the global emergence of modern nation-states. These global carriers of secularization are no longer tied to Protestant Christianity, even though their emergence in history was encouraged by Protestantism. This being the case, the claims of Hindu exceptionalism do not apply. Secularism understood as separation between religion and the public sphere is as valid for India as for any other society.
By the close of the 20th century, theories of secularization lost steam. Predictions of the decline of religion became impossible to sustain in the face of the resurgence of religion in public and private spheres all over the world. The phenomenon that needed explanation was not decline of religion, but rather the stubborn persistence of full-blooded religions complete with supernatural beings that listen to prayers and perform miracles.
The death of secularization theory was first announced by none other than Peter Berger himself, the great theorist of secularization. Writing in 1999 in a book of essays titled The Desecularization of the World, Berger admitted that he was proven wrong:
the key idea [was] that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals. It is precisely this idea that has turned out to be wrong.
The world today, Berger correctly points out, is not a secular world rather, it is ‘as furiously religious as it ever was’. Berger went on to say what was becoming pretty obvious to many sociologists: not only is our world religious, it is religious in the old-fashioned supernaturalistic way. In fact, those religions that have tried to rationalize their beliefs by underplaying the miracles and other supernatural elements have lost members, while ‘religious movements dripping with reactionary supernaturalism have widely succeeded’.
Berger’s point about the growth of religions ‘dripping with reactionary supernaturalism’ is the crux of the problem. Even the staunchest secularists can accept that religions do not simply give up and wither away in modern industrial societies. Take for example the work of Steve Bruce, the best-known defender of secularization theory today. Bruce is perfectly willing to grant that religions innovate, adapt, and find newer, more secular, or this-worldly things to do, for example, legitimize the nation, bless new business enterprises, legitimize the acquisition of riches, mobilize in defence of ‘traditional family values’, etc. But he believes that religions end up paying a price for their new profiles by diluting, or ignoring, the supernatural aspects of their teachings which are no longer plausible to the moderns. Religions survive the secular world by becoming more secular themselves, by giving up or minimizing beliefs in the supernatural, the miraculous, and the other-worldly. They become gentle prosperity religions, analogues of ‘karma capitalism’ described in earlier chapters, whose role is ‘not to question the modern world’s riches but to bring them within the reach of everyone’, as Alan Wolfe, a well-known sociologist of religion put it recently. But this is exactly what Berger is denying.
This then is the crucial claim of the new theory of desecularization: the supernatural has not lost its plausibility in the modern world. Religions continue to find new work to do in secular societies, without giving up, or even diluting, the essential religious impulse which seeks help and solace from beings with extraordinary powers who are supposed to exist beyond the confines of time and space. The current upsurge in religious fundamentalism, in Berger’s view, is not some secularized, politicized ‘corruption’ of true religions, but actual ‘restoration’ of a full-blooded, strongly felt belief in the supernatural revelation of the faith. Islam is not alone in this fundamentalist impulse, of course. Berger finds the evangelical upsurge across the world, including wide swathes of East Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa to be equally a sign of serious religious quest by masses of ordinary people.
The ‘rush hour of the gods’ in India that we examined in Chapter 2 is a pretty good example of Berger’s argument. The earlier attempts of neo-Hindu reformers to moderate or rationalize the supernatural by emphasizing the impersonal world-soul, or Brahman, over personal, wish-fulfilling gods, have failed to gain popular support: it is the saguna gods, the human-like manifestations of the divine that the masses of Hindus line up to pray to. The supernatural has not lost its plausibility in modern India.
This naturally raises the question: why now? Berger’s explanation is based upon economics. Modernity undermines life’s certainties, more so under the current phase of globalization. The new global class of super-rich—the ‘Davos set’, as Berger calls them—have the economic and cultural resources to deal with and even profit from these uncertainties. The non-elites, on the other hand, resent the secular elite for looking down on their religiosity and that is the reason, Berger says, they are drawn to religious movements with a strongly anti-secularist or even a fundamentalist bent.
While it makes intuitive sense, this explanation fails to persuade. It is not clear if religiosity so closely coincides with class. In India, it is clearly the rising middle classes who are becoming more religious. It is not clear, moreover, that the ‘Davos set’ is such a bastion of secularism as Berger makes them out to be, for then it would be hard to explain the growing popularity of karma capitalism taught by saffron-clad swamis quoting from the Vedanta and Bhagvat Gita to CEOs of business conglomerates all around the world. The evidence from India should also disabuse us of the idea that class resentment is a significant motivator of mass religiosity. Far from resenting them, it looks like the masses aspire towards the consumption habits of the elites and the new rich. Both the elites and the masses are turning to gurus and pujaris who are more than willing to find religious justifications for getting rich.
Perhaps as a sign of the dominance of neo-liberalism in the US, laissez-faire thinking has spilled over into debates over secularization as well. A new paradigm is emerging which argues that those societies which allow a competitive free market of religious service providers will be least secularized; and conversely, societies which distort the free market of religions by creating monopolies will appear to be most secularized. In other words, the same forces that drive the success of market capitalism—competition and choice-drive the surge of religion.
The chief architect of this supply-side theory is Rodney Stark, who teaches sociology at the Baylor University in Texas. Starting with a provocative essay titled ‘Secularizatisn, R.I.P.—Rest In Peace’ that appeared in 1999 and has been reprinted many times since then, Stark and his colleagues (including Roger Finke, Williams Brainbridge, Stephen Warner, and Andrew Greeley) have succeeded in bringing about a paradigm shift in the sociology of religion. The new ideas offer insights which are relevant for understanding the religious supermarket that is thriving in India.
The supply-side theory of religion assumes that religion is an innate human trait which is never going to go away or even decline. Because human beings will always want to make bargains with gods for protection against unforeseeable dangers, the demand for religion is a human constant and stays pretty much unchanged across time and place. The supply of religious services, however, varies in different societies. In those societies where there are religious monopolies due to sponsorship by the state, the supply will be of poor quality. In such societies, religious demand will remain unmet, people will stop going to churches or temples, and societies will look as if they have become more secular. But in those societies where there is free competition between different religious ‘firms’, there will be ample supply of religious services and the level of religiosity will be higher. In other words, the societies we think as secular are only suffering from a lack of supply of religious services.
The implications of this market view of religion are quite striking and unsettling.
To begin with, this turns the traditional understanding of secularism on its head. As we saw above, the classical theories of secularization argued that the demand for religion will decline as societies modernize because increased emphasis on scientific explanations will lead people away from supernaturalism. But the new paradigm starts with the assumption that the urge to establish ‘exchange relations’ with supernatural powers is a perfectly rational human need built into the human condition. The idea is simple and quite familiar: Stark and his colleagues argue that human life is so uncertain, fragile, and full of tragedies that human beings will always and everywhere seek compensation and consolation from supernatural powers which exist above and beyond this world. No amount of rational and empirical knowledge can dislodge the idea and the need for God. Religion is eternal.
If we assume that all people are naturally religious, then it follows that there are no secular societies and the very idea of secularism—understood as the decline of religiosity— is doomed.
On the face of it, this thesis seems to contradict overwhelming evidence of widespread indifference towards religion and decline of religiosity in Europe. While huge, mall-like mega-churches that can accommodate tens of thousands of worshippers at a time are the rage in the US, most churches and cathedrals in countries like Sweden, Holland, France, Germany, Great Britain, and even Canada are going empty. Western Europe certainly looks far more secularized than the US. Defenders of secularization theory have long held up the high degree of secularization achieved by Europeans as representing the universal end point for all modernizing societies, with the religious US as an exception.
But supply-side theorists argue that the decline in church attendance only means that Europeans don’t like their state-run churches, not that they have become less religious in their hearts and minds. Stark offers telling data from Iceland: only 2 per cent of Icelanders attend church weekly, making it the world’s least religious country. And yet 82 per cent of those asked said they prayed, 81 per cent believed in life-after-death, 88 per cent said that the human soul is eternal, and 40 per cent believed in reincarnation. Measured by subjective religiosity, Europeans are no less religious than the highly religious Americans or for that matter, Indians. Europeans ‘believe without belonging’ is the conclusion expressed succinctly by Grace Davie, a British sociologist.
But the question arises: Why don’t Europeans care to belong if they continue to believe? The problem is with the quality of the supply, supply-siders argue. If Europeans are not going to church, it is because until very recently, traditional churches in much of Europe have been state churches, as for example the Lutheran Church of Sweden, or the Anglican Church of England, where the king or the queen is also the head of the church. Like any other state-protected monopoly, state churches have become complacent and lazy. Because they take their survival for granted, they simply do not care to make a serious effort to sustain the interest of their congregations. Their status as official churches, moreover, dampens competition from other Christian denominations and other religions, creating a shortage of attractive alternatives. As a result, the religious needs of ordinary people are going unmet.
Although the supply-side theory has many critics, it has acquired the status of a new paradigm in the sociology of religion. For all the unresolved issues, this theory does a good job of explaining why the official policy of secularism has actually been very good for religion in India. The key word is competition: The Indian brand of secularism has not been the kind that dampens competition within and between the many religions that exist in the country. By not officially adopting Hinduism as the state religion and imposing it upon everyone else, and by protecting (within limits) the freedom of all religions, the Indian state prepared the conditions for a great flowering of all kinds of old and new religious movements/institutions. The net effect is that India today has perhaps the largest supermarket of religions anywhere in the world.
Indeed, even when the Indian state directly intervened in the affairs of Hinduism, it managed to remove the traditional rigidities of caste and gender from it, thereby enabling it to compete better against other religions. To begin with, the Constitution in effect deregulated Hinduism: it threw open the temples that were closed to Shudras and untouchables, increasing the demand enormously. Secondly, even when the state intervened to control the secular affairs (cash donations, properties, and religious endowments) of Hindu temples, the net effect has been to make the temples less corrupt and more responsive to the needs of the worshippers and pilgrims. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the joint state-temple management committees have vastly improved the fortunes of many of India’s important pilgrimage spots. Thirdly, while reformist in intent, the Indian brand of soft secularism is not hostile to religious expression even in state-funded public forums. Hinduism being the religion of the majority often ends up as the de facto religion of the state. Fourthly, whatever formal constraints there were on the government regarding open sponsorship of religion have weakened under the current neo-liberal economic regime. The public–private partnerships that have replaced public sector agencies in education, tourism, and infrastructure development have developed an active partnership with temples and religious endowments. This state–temple–corporate complex whose workings we have tried to lay bare in this book is providing a huge boost to the supply of all varieties of Hinduism, from temple worship to new age spirituality.
Apart from the state, there are other features of India’s religious landscape that are religion friendly. The long coexistence of Islam and Christianity with India’s native religions has created conditions of competition and syncretism. The central ideas of neo-Hinduism, for example, are deeply influenced by Protestant Christianity, while Christians and Muslims have adopted some Hindu practices of caste, style of worship, and yoga. On top of it all, Hinduism itself has enormous internal pluralism when it comes to beliefs, rituals, and styles of worship. In traditional Hinduism, this pluralism was frozen within caste boundaries, which were unfrozen by the secular Constitution. All of these factors have contributed to making India a veritable supermarket which can cater to all religious tastes and inclinations.
The theory of secularism is at an impasse. Can we still assume that modern men and women can live without the consolation of God(s), as the classical social theory told us? Or is the demand for God really an unchanging constant that no amount of modernity can dislodge or even moderate? Should we declare secularization theory dead and murmur ‘rest in peace’ as we bury it in the graveyard of failed theories, as Stark and his colleagues recommend?
Obituaries for secularization are premature. The core of secularization theory—namely, the need or demand for belief in supernatural beings will decline with modernity—can be saved if we do not see it as an iron law, but as a tendency. Religiosity is not guaranteed to decline, or to rise: religiosity, like other cultural trends, is most likely to wax and wane in intensity.
One such nuanced defence of secularization is offered by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their 2004 book, Sacred and Secular. Among many of their findings, two observations stand out: one, even though belief in God, heaven, and hell are still significant even in the supposedly ‘post-Christian’ Europe, they have been falling over time; and two, whether you continue to believe or not bears a strong correlation with the ‘existential insecurity’ you experience, which has to do with the kind of society you live in and the economic class you happen to fall into. Both of these points warrant a closer look.
Norris and Inglehart do not dispute the claims of Stark (and co.) that large proportions of Europeans continue to express belief in God and life-after-death, even after they have stopped being practising Christians. But they argue that if we look at these beliefs not at any given time, but in a wider time span of about 50 years—from 1947 to 2001—we will find that the number of people holding these beliefs has declined.
Their long-term analysis is based upon data for 19 countries (covering most of Europe also including Great Britain, US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and India) obtained from Gallup polls (for the period 1947–75) and World Values Survey (for the period 1981–2001). Their analysis shows that in 1947, eight out of ten people in the countries sampled believed in God, with the highest level of belief in Australia, Canada, the US, and Brazil. Their regression models show a decline in faith in God in all but two nations (the US and Brazil), with the sharpest decline in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. (Data for India is inconclusive because pre-1990 data does not exist. Available data show that 93 per cent of Indians reportedly believed in God in 1995.) Similar patterns are also reported for belief in life-after-death, where again an erosion of subjective religiosity takes place in 13 out of 19 countries (Indian data are not available). Even today, the number of believers exceeds 50 per cent in all European countries. But the trend shows a decline.
This finding is important as it shows that the fall in church participation is not entirely due to supply-side factors (lazy state churches and all that). Rather, there has been an actual decline in the belief itself. The demand for religion is not as constant and steady as the supply-siders make it out to be.
This brings us to the second important finding, namely, the influence of socio-economic factors on levels of religiosity. Norris and Inglehart argue that since one of the most important functions of all religions is to provide reassurance of help from a higher power, it follows that some socio-economic contexts increase the need for this reassurance, and others minimize it. They predict that:
All things being equal, the experience of growing up in less secure societies will heighten the importance of religious values, while conversely, experience of more secure conditions will lessen it… The process of human development has significant consequences for religiosity. (emphasis in the original)
Norris and Inglehart test this hypothesis using data from a cross-section of industrially advanced countries. They summarize their conclusions as follows:
The level of economic inequality proves strongly and significantly related to religious behaviour. The United States is exceptionally high in religiosity in large part, we believe, because it is also the most unequal post-industrial society under comparison… Americans face greater anxieties than citizens of other advanced industrialized countries about whether they will be covered by medical insurance, whether they will be fired arbitrarily, or whether they will be forced to choose between losing their job and devoting themselves to their new born child.
The correlation between income inequality and religiosity also shows up among the rich and the poor in aggregate numbers within each post-industrial society. Norris and Inglehart found that higher the income level, lower the religiosity as measured by frequency of prayer. In aggregate terms, the poor turn out to be twice as religious as the rich. When they narrowed the analysis to the US alone, a similar pattern emerged: two-thirds (66 per cent) of the least well-off prayed, compared to 47 per cent of the highest income group.
There is another component of life in post-industrial societies that breeds despair and encourages religiosity. In an extensive survey involving in-depth interviews with thousands of working people from a wide variety of workplaces in America, Michael Lerner, the editor of progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun and the author of the recent Spirit Matters, reported that workers found their work, even if well paying, meaningless because:
They wanted more than ‘making it in the rat-race.’ Spiritual meaning, not money or power, was the thing they were missing and they made no bones about how painful it felt to be wasting their lives for no purpose except ‘the almighty paycheck’.
American workers looking for meaning turn to the churches and not to their unions, because ‘there was no meaning to be found there, except during negotiations, when they could fight for more money’. Workers are hungry for community which unions have failed to provide, except in purely economic matters like wages (and there, too, unions are failing). Lerner fears that this lack of meaning is part of the reason why the message of the religious right resonates with the average worker in America.
Existential insecurity and meaninglessness are no doubt important motivators for turning to religion. But religiosity is too complex to be explained by any one factor. The poor may be more religious than the rich, but the rich do not give up on God just because they have creative jobs with health insurances. As this book has shown, the middle classes are becoming more religious as their income levels are going up and existential insecurities coming down. Even in Norris and Inglehart’s careful analysis, close to half of those in the highest income group in America continue to pray. It is also clear that the newly emerging middle classes in fast growing economies like India, China, Brazil, or Russia are displaying more religiosity, not less.
In other words, if poverty makes people pray, so does prosperity. The so-called ‘prosperity religions’ which put the sacred teachings to use in order to obtain and sanctify wealth have a long history. No religion has shown any great compunction when it comes to making their holy books available for legitimating naked self-interest and enjoyment of the materialistic life. India leads them all in this department: It is after all the homeland of Deepak Chopra, Mahesh Yogi, and Bhagvan Rajneesh! A new crop of Vedanta and Gita-toting management gurus is emerging who are bringing spirituality to the moneyed classes the world over. Their clientele comes from the rich who want to get richer, while balancing their prosperity with spiritualism which can be packaged, sold, and bought like any other consumer product.
The point of bringing class and economics into the discussion of religiosity is not to reduce religion to a sideshow of economic imperatives. The point is to challenge all attempts to eternalize religion, to turn it into a primordial impulse which supposedly stays constant and unchanging in a changing world. Granted that because of its long evolutionary history, and its many-millennia-long intertwinement with all aspects of social and intellectual life, belief in the supernatural is extraordinarily well adapted to the human psyche. But however well adapted it may be, the religious impulse is by no means isolated from the rest of the social, political, and intellectual world.
Our exercise of viewing Indian experience through the prism of secularization theory has proven to be quite fruitful.
It is remarkable how the experience of secularism in India can be mapped on the rise and fall of the mainstream of secularization theory. Expectations of creating a secular society have waxed and waned in India, pretty much as they have in the rest of the world. And as with the rest of the world, it is the new paradigm of de-secularization that explains India better than the older paradigm of secularization.
The classical theory of secularization was the founding assumption on which India’s model of secularism rested. The modernists among the founding fathers, most notably Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar and their many progressive allies among communists, socialists, radical humanists, and neo-Buddhists, were secularists in the strong, or the classical, sense of the word. That is to say, they welcomed the idea that modernity will erode the sacred canopy of religion and drive out the gods from the natural and the social world. Accordingly, they sought to minimize the jurisdiction of religion on as many personal and political aspects of life as they possibly could. (Unfortunately, due to the political circumstances right after Partition, they did not fight for reform of Muslim and Christian personal law with the same passion that they had for reforming Hinduism. This has created a perception of ‘pandering’ to the minorities. They favoured a sceptical approach to the metaphysical basis of religion and clearly encouraged the cultivation of critical thought in the public sphere. To their great credit, they tried to balance a critical outlook towards religions with freedom of belief and practice of all the many religions of India.
But despite the strong influence of principled rationalists and secularists in the founding of the Republic and the writing of the Constitution, rationalism failed to link up with other social movements. ‘Scientific temper’ remained more of a slogan and never really became an operating principle of institutions of the government and civil society.
In the aftermath of the Emergency, starting around 1980 or so, many Indian intellectuals began to lose confidence in the Nehruvian model of modernization, including its commitment to secularism. The very idea of separation of spheres from the sacred canopy of religion was considered inappropriate for Indic religions. Along with secularism, science and rationalism also came under critical scrutiny, often verging on outright hostility. This phase of traditionalism in India coincided with the flourishing of postmodernism in social theory which questioned the entire trajectory of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
However, developments on the ground jolted the critics of secularism out of their romantic reveries. In India, as in many other parts of the world, religious nationalists and conservatives began to gain political power. The rise of the BJP showed that the religious idiom resonated well with the electorate.
These concerns were reflected in the radical rethinking of secularization that started happening in academic circles in the West around the turn of the millennium. The pendulum has now swung to the other side: it is not the decline, but the persistence of religion that sociologists are now trying to explain. The new idea is that the demand for religion is never going to go away or decline, while the supply of religion will vary in different societies at different times. The new supply-side theory claims, as we have seen, that deregulation and free markets are not only good for improving the choice of cars and toothbrushes and such, but also for improving the choice of religions and gods.
The material provided in this book bears out this market theory of why religions are growing in a globalizing world. This book has shown that in India, neo-liberal economic policies have worked to the advantage of the God market. Economic reforms and rising wealth of the middle classes have increased both the demand for, and the supply of, religious services. The new market economy did not create the religious market—India always had plenty of choices when it came to gods, faiths, and modes of worship. But the new economy has opened up more spaces in the public sphere for religion to penetrate. In theory, of course, it should work in favour of all of India’s religions. But in practice, it is the majority religion that is poised to make best use of the new opportunities as all the other leading institutions of society are aligned in its favour. Moreover, the increasingly triumphalist tone of mainstream Hinduism and the physical violence against Christian and Muslim minorities has created an atmosphere of fear and insecurity among these communities which is hardly conducive to the kind of vigorous growth that Hinduism is experiencing.
Where do we go from here?
If the booming and often bewildering God market that this book has described was just about people seeking spiritual solace in a manner of their choice, this market would be as welcome as, say, the growing market for books, or music. But the God market is special, because religion is special: it confers the quality of sacredness and holiness on ordinary, mundane, and profane ideas and actions.
The danger in India today, as this book has tried to describe, is that the sacredness reserved for gods is getting transferred to secular entities like the nation. A Hindu majoritarian mindset is emerging which ascribes all of India’s achievements, past or present, to the Great Hindu Mind. Moreover, with the penetration of Hindu rituals, symbols, and vocabulary in the public sphere, the secular space where people can interact simply as citizens, unmarked by their religious identities, is declining. Everything—from where you live, the schools and other public services that you have access to, the kind of jobs you can get, what political parties you vote for, etc.—is getting more and more dependent upon religious identities.
There is no bigger challenge for India today than to create meaningful secular spaces and a secular public culture. We have to create more spaces where Hindus and Muslims and everyone else can live as co-workers, neighbours, and friends. We have to create secular and inclusive explanations for India’s achievements and flaws. We have to provide greater existential security to the poor and struggling masses so that they are not left at the mercy of gods and god-men alone.
This book has only described the workings of the God market in India. The bigger challenge is to bring it within the limits of public reason and collective good.