Afterword: Religion as a Cultural (F)actor

This is a condensed English version of the Dutch Nabeschouwing: Religie als culturele (f)actor. See also Part 3: Freedom and Religion, a Love-Hate Relationship.

These essays approach ‘religion’ as a human phenomenon, an integral and integrating part of human culture. That religion is at least that, nobody will deny – not even committed believers. They too know very well that the real church (I limit myself to my own religious culture, but mutatis mutandis this applies generally) is run by people, while they believe that it is ultimately God who governs the church. Both statements can be made at the same time. To be clear: I am not suggesting that religion was thought up or invented by human beings. That is far too simplistic. You cannot invent a religion. Religion (its practice and its forms) grows along with human beings – with every person born into a religion, but also with humanity as a whole, which became religious on its way through time. At the very least, then, it deserves historical respect.

Culture and religion: tools from the human survival kit

Culture, including its religious emanations, is the way in which humanity managed to survive as a species in a world (a natural environment) that was not necessarily well disposed towards it. Cultural artefacts – from basic tools, primitive weapons, clothing and cooking, through tribe, clan and nation-building, arts, sciences and technology, to entire philosophical, ideological and religious systems of meaning – compensate in a sense for man’s biological vulnerability as a mammal. It is this capacity for cultural adaptation that enabled him to survive. Culture in this broad sense is thus a tool from the survival kit of Homo sapiens – and not just any tool: an essential and indispensable one. Take away all these cultural achievements and humanity is done for.

Like everything in human history, this tool developed gradually, cumulatively, by trial and error. That also holds for its religious component. Just read any book on the history of religion: again and again religious contents and forms adapt to circumstances, to the needs and wants of individuals and societies – usually gradually (evolution), sometimes with great shocks (leaps, reformations, revolutions). It all belongs to it. Religion too, then, is a cumulative tradition, a thoroughly historical phenomenon. Naturally, a certain institutionalisation helps to keep the chain of transmission intact through time. ‘Official religion’ organises that: it frames, sets rules, distributes tasks, ensures transmission, ritualises. Importantly, living religion often has a kind of love-hate relationship with the institution, which channels a dynamic that by itself wants to go in every direction. That creates tension. Removing the tension is the death of any vital cultural expression. Without institutionalisation the energy evaporates; too much institutionalisation petrifies and suffocates. Managing that tension well determines the success of every cultural institution, not just the religious one. The polarity of ‘Dynamics and Form’ is essential (it belongs to being itself), to fish up a term from an almost forgotten theologian-philosopher of the last century, Paul Tillich.¹

Whoever compares the Christianity of 1500, 1000, 500 and 200 years ago with today’s, and looks at ‘how people lived it’, will be struck by the enormous transformations that have taken place beneath a seemingly unchanging outer shell. Devotions come and go, but even things that seem immutable, such as dogma or the institution itself, have taken on different meanings over the centuries, if only because they shifted place in experience and changed colour in interpretation. A religious institution is therefore more like an organism than a building. And at the same time it is typical of this part of the human cultural project that it must offer the suggestion of eternity and stability. One of the core tasks of religion (a functional definition, I am aware) is to provide a counterweight to transience (mortality) and disintegration (the falling apart of society). This function is bound up precisely with the moment man took refuge – had to take refuge – in ‘culture’ in order to hold his own in a world not naturally friendly to him. For this he had to rise above his biological determinacy. NB: the ‘had to’ here does not indicate an external assignment or a decision; it is an observation. This is how man survived as a species, and so this is how he became what he is. He transcends his status as ‘mammal’, ‘primate’, and becomes a cultural phenomenon himself.

The human imagination

From that moment on he is not merely a mammal endowed with reason, but also a spiritual being. Man now designs himself. Still determined, of course, by his physical basis (usually called his biological nature), he develops from it, upon it, ever more and ever more complex survival strategies. This problem-solving capacity results in all kinds of tricks and tips, from tools and weapons to complex forms of organisation and functional divisions of labour. The point is that this no longer has anything to do with biological evolution (far too slow), but with mental evolution: culture. Its core capacity might be called imagination, the power of representation.² Imagination (imaginatio) is a form of thinking, just as much as discursive thought and analytical and synthetic ability. Man can imagine a world, project it onto reality (from working out a little idea to formulating a hypothesis) and test it. Thus he tries to get a grip on reality, to bend it to his will and protect himself against threatening dangers. People can see further than the end of their nose and so prepare for what is not yet. This mental capacity influences real life and itself creates new realities – with, inevitably, new problems. This is how man stands in the world, how he makes his way through unruly life. It marks him and makes him what he is.

You can define all animals by their biology (physical, neurological). Man too. In some animals you can suspect a form of consciousness that seems to have grown out of that physical basis; that is intriguing. But there is only one living being that is aware of this state of affairs – ‘consciousness squared’, you might call it – and has made it his trademark: man. He can think back and think ahead. That is how he determines his place in the world, how he makes his way through life, and it stamps him. His being is always in the making. Put grandly: man endlessly transcends himself. The material and immaterial deposit of this is what we called ‘culture’ above. Take it away, and man is lost in this world, literally and figuratively.

Within this whole, the religious component (institutionalised or not, systematised or not) is thus both something quite ordinary and something quite special. Ordinary, because it is part and parcel of culture and therefore human; this part of culture too belongs to the survival kit. I am not being mysterious or lyrical about it. The evolutionary scientist may include it in his survival story (which he has long been doing, with fine results), but this too marks man and belongs to him. As mentioned in Part 1, human imagination and its tendency to make causal connections and see patterns (even where there are none) suffice to make the emergence of religious artefacts – from rituals to doctrines – plausible. The neurological wiring is there. Logical, says the natural scientist, otherwise religion would not have developed (Pascal Boyer: evolutionary biology; Justin Barrett: cognitive science). Even a believer in God can, in my view, still agree with this. That man is hard-wired to run transcending ‘programs’ (software) says nothing about the way in which the external reference in that program (e.g. ‘god’) exists. But this generally human (‘ordinary’) element is at the same time something special, for this imagination makes man who and what he is: an endlessly self-reinventing (and, one hopes, self-transcending) mammal.

These insights can be unfolded in two directions: towards culture, and towards what we call religion. The latter exercise is made fairly often. Sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists investigate the general human basis of particular religious activities, devising experiments to map their physical basis. Very often they focus on prayer – probably because it seems a clearly delimited activity with measurable elements. Which brain areas are activated during prayer, and what are they associated with? Interesting, but the results often say no more than that praying activates parts of the brain – in itself a trivial finding. And if analogous processes are found (or simulated), that too says no more than what it says: that the effect of prayer is comparable to other human activities (which, incidentally, very often have to do with stress reduction). It still says nothing about causation. And the relevance for the ordinary believer is slight, since such experiments usually select religious professionals (Buddhist monks, Christian nuns); monastic office prayer is rather different from the way an average person prays. Experiments that try to measure the effectiveness of religious acts (does intercessory prayer help the sick?) by double-blind statistical research are more fascinating, but almost always degenerate, even before publication, into a war of interpretation between believers and others. Add a talent for cognitive dissonance in some believers and a tendency to reductionism in some atheists, and you soon stop reading. Augustine, by the way, already knew that prayer has more to do with ‘constructing your soul’ than with ‘instructing God’.³

Culture seen through the lens of religion

What is done far less, but seems to me much more interesting, is the opposite movement: looking at what we call ‘ordinary cultural phenomena’ through the lens of religion. I do not mean claiming all sorts of human activities for official religion, as some Christian apologists like to do (‘You see, you are actually religious too, because…’), but an exploratory, constructive attempt to map how ‘eternity’ has fanned out over numerous time-bound phenomena.⁴ Official religion has of course captured and shaped much of man’s transcending activity. It has often attached not only a truth claim to it but also a kind of copyright. It administers the whole, and whatever does not appear in the religious canon of the dominant institution is not religion but ‘superstition’, ‘popular belief’ or ‘false belief’ (formerly: all other religions). This sometimes made it seem as if no serious ‘religion’ occurred outside the religious institution. That is a misconception. In the previous chapters I have referred often enough to ‘lived religion’ or ‘everyday religion’ and argued that these forms have as much right to speak as official religion, so I will not go into that again.

What concerns me now is that, besides this religion-internal dispute about what may be called religion, there is much more in human culture that fulfils the same function as what we call religion, without our recognising and acknowledging it as such. That is because we immediately associate religion with an explicit reference to a separately existing other world (heaven, god or gods and so forth) and with a religious institution (priests, theologians) that controls and interprets the whole. Seen as a cultural phenomenon, religion is above all about experiencing transcendence, something that ‘surpasses’ ordinary human life. That can happen in many ways: by ‘elevating’ people, giving them the feeling of being taken up into something beyond them; or equally by simply giving them ground under their feet, so that they feel they will not go under. What is essential in this cultural-philosophical approach is that the ‘separate existence of an entity or reality’ is not the point here, but the ‘act of transcending’ itself – the ‘act of faith’. And by that I do not mean the rational acceptance of a set of beliefs, but the existential experience that existence in general ‘is right’. Foundational experiences. It is about ‘having Faith’, finding ‘Basic Trust’. I know that in official religion the one cannot exist without the other (fides qua presupposes fides quae), but the distinction is needed to detect, within the cultural evolution of humanity, foundational experiences that do not refer to a religious set of beliefs, although their impact on people is just as great. In other words: outside the church, too, people perform ‘acts of faith’ (experience ‘basic trust’) and feel ‘taken up into a larger whole’. If you want examples, think of what sport (football especially) and music mean to people.

Sport

The European missionaries saw to their amazement how the Amerindians (in Central America and the Caribbean) played with great dedication with a rubber ball on a walled court. I referred to it in Part 1. They did not quite know what to make of it. There were many rituals, all sorts of wondrous signs on the walls around the court, and the game was played with great commitment. The rules were hard for an uninitiated observer to fathom, but the virtuosity of the players showed they were specialists. The involvement of the spectators was intense too: they identified with their team so completely that they seemed to be absorbed into the game. In some regions these matches went together with sacrifices and great ceremony – in other words, they seemed to be part of the religion. Elsewhere they saw children imitating it, and then it seemed harmless. They could not work it out. This dilemma can only be broken by placing religion back within that creative, imaginative human activity called ‘culture’. This game was clearly a product of it. And depending on the context it fulfilled the exalted function we normally ascribe to religion: it gave people the feeling of being temporarily taken up into a higher whole. They lived along, entered into it, and felt part of something that surpassed ordinary human doings – things usually channelled into what we call religion, but belonging to the cultural competence of human beings in general. Of course that depends on context. Children imitate it at home (they do the same with religious rituals), adults can play it ‘for fun’, but within a highly ritualised context, in a specific place, for a strictly delimited time, it acquires that extra charge.

What held for that Amerindian ball game also holds for football today, with one clear difference: football is not part of institutionalised religion but is entrusted to a royal football association. That means attributing meaning to it is not compulsory for every citizen – although you sometimes doubt it when you see the mass hysteria around tournaments between national teams. (Not for nothing has it been suggested that the sacrality of official religion was transferred to the nation-state some time in the nineteenth century, but that aside.) In theory you may say out loud that football means ‘nothing’ to you; some will consider it blasphemy, but you will not be condemned for it. Striking, too, how many people today find this sport far more than a pastime. Kicking a ball is not the point; in itself that amounts to nothing. Here too, only the highly ritualised version, bound to time and place, has ‘it’. Then something is released in people. It surely has to do with the feeling of being part of a group, of belonging. Though you sit in the stands, you are part of the battle being fought; the defeats and victories are yours too. That is strange in itself. You do not fight, you do not win, you do not lose; others do that for you, the players on the field. But you experience it by proxy. In religious language: the footballers perform a priestly office, and you share in what they achieve (communio realis).

Sometimes this goes very deep. Some people are completely absorbed by it and will give a great deal for their club. They ‘live for football’: true supporters, loyal fans, for better or worse. They live towards a match and talk about it with each other. It fills their lives and lifts them above everyday reality. And it does not matter whether the club plays in the fourth provincial division or in the Champions League. There, around that pitch, things happen that make life feel worth living, together with your mates. There are club songs, logos and flags that make the feeling visible; there are chants, and sometimes even ‘community hymn singing’ with a fixed repertoire (Wembley, the Cup Final). People fall on each other’s necks when a goal is scored and comfort each other in defeat. Then the match is over, the players swap shirts, and among the supporters there follows general reconciliation and/or an enormous brawl. Put all this next to descriptions of rituals and festivities in a textbook of religious studies (including the psychomotor and psychosocial mechanisms) and you will have little trouble finding parallels. Sport does indeed have something sacral about it, and yet it is entirely human. And even if the meaning does not hold for everyone, nor always, nor in every context, football certainly can lift people’s lives out of the everyday, give spectators the feeling of being taken up into a world that far surpasses the ordinary, and at the same time give them the sense that all is well, that things are right – even to the point of trance. In short, in terms of function football qualifies as ‘religion’ – mind you, not as a surrogate religion, as haughty theologians sometimes say, but simply on a par with what adorns itself with that name, official religion. And when it comes to intensity of experience, the latter often cuts a sorry figure beside the former.

In the rituals around the Olympic Games, which we know in their romantic late-modern corruption, the religious component of sport is still visible. It was an integral part of Greek religiosity, as was theatre. That does not mean athletes and spectators were more pious than we are – that is a typical retrojection fallacy. It simply means that in that culture the religious component that is always present in sport (if played in earnest) was made explicit in terms of the ubiquitous official religion – something we no longer do, and the Amerindians perhaps did (or not; it does not matter).

Music

Football, sport, has already taken us to ancient Greece. That is also where our word ‘music’ comes from: what the ‘Muses’ bring forth. According to the ancient Greek sensibility the Muses lie at the origin of all human creativity, science as much as dance. This creativity offers a counterweight to the condition humaine. It helps people to transcend themselves and become ‘human’; it arms them against transience. It goes without saying that music and religion go very well together, and that is noticeable in all religions. How much music of our Western culture does not have its roots in the church? Its uplifting power and its guiding quality naturally made it a protagonist in the church. But that does not condemn music outside the church to lack that uplifting power. It is inherent in everything people create when inspired by the Muses. Phrases like ‘people now seek in art or music what they used to seek in church’, or more disparagingly ‘art as Ersatzreligion’, again miss the point. Art that opens worlds not otherwise available, that invites dreams and stirs the imagination, is equivalent to official ‘religion’ as a giver of meaning. The distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘profane’ music is artificial. That musical man Martin Luther summed it up briefly: all good music comes from God, and where people make music together, the devil has no chance. That music composed within religious institutions retains its transcending and grounding power even after those institutions have faded hardly needs arguing; we need only point to the annual hype around Bach’s St Matthew Passion. But it applies just as much to music unconnected with any explicitly religious institution – to music from classical bourgeois culture as well as from contemporary youth culture, and not only solipsistically (through one’s own earphones) but very much as a group experience. The ‘spiritual’ significance of summer pop festivals can hardly be overestimated. And not only Tomorrowland.

Religion approached from culture

Porting religion into the immanent frame

Even when the ‘sacred canopy’ is torn – in a secular society, that is – people keep building a symbolic universe. They cannot help it, on pain of being less human. People keep giving meaning to what they experience, go through and endure. In this way life is lifted above the merely human, temporary and accidental. As Charles Taylor would put it: even within ‘the immanent frame’ people keep searching for transcendence. They know they are caught between birth and death, but they will not let themselves be boxed in. And they do so by doing all kinds of things that give them the sense that it matters, that they matter, that life is worth living, even when things go badly, even when it hurts – individually and as a group. ‘Acts of transcending’ and ‘acts of faith’. Again: I attach the term ‘religion’ here not to claim these things for a ‘god’ or an ‘official religion’, but simply to underline their significance for being human.

The heading of this section sums it up in programmers’ language. Programmers sometimes try to ‘tune’ an operating system designed for device x so that it can be ported to device y. That never quite succeeds, and on websites you often find a list of working, half-working and not (yet) working functions. Applied to religion: tuning software developed for a system with an upper world in such a way that it becomes usable in an ‘inner-worldly’ system, the immanent frame. Some programs transfer perfectly because they contain no reference to that upper world at all; others still do their job very well even without that reference. Of the first, sport and games (football) were an example; of the second, music. As in the world of computers, there is much more in the world of religions than this. Some things will not be transferable, but the experiment has only just begun. It will be interesting to see whether typically ecclesiastical rituals around birth, marriage and death can also be ‘tuned’ to keep functioning within the immanent frame.

The biggest handicap here seems to be not the acts themselves, but the interpretation, the explanatory language around them. The experience that ritual acts are meaningful precedes understanding them. I have said it often in these essays: every articulation of religion is secondary, perhaps even more than we realise. It turns out to be of only secondary importance in the process of giving meaning, too. For even when we discover that the story we were told with it has large gaps – to say nothing of the indigestible parts – the meaning-giving acts go on working. Not all of them (I think the Eucharist, for instance, is having a hard time), not always, but still: around birth, coming of age, marriage and death. And that applies not only to the acts themselves, the gestures (physical ones!), but also to some of the words handed down with them. Even the word ‘god’ remains meaningful for many people, though they do not believe in his existence as the official catechism prescribes. Infant baptism remains attractive even when there is hardly any commitment left to the institution and its teaching. Apparently it offers a form to express one’s ‘joy and wonder’ at the birth of a child: new life! Feelings of deep gratitude and responsibility are overwhelmingly present too. And to be able to say ‘thank you’, it is handy to have an address. And there is ‘god’ again. Many people living within the immanent frame have, at that moment, surprisingly little difficulty imagining that ‘giver of life’ – so much so that they feel addressed by him and take him as witness at this crucial moment of their existence. The same goes for weddings, and in another way for funerals, where words like ‘eternal life’, ‘resurrection’ and ‘heaven’ do seem to mean something to people who live secular lives. This means that words which have lost their direct reference, and as such no longer say anything, can still remain meaningful. It is not the great dogmatic narratives that do it, but certain words, turns of phrase, stories, acts and images. The Leiden-Brussels philosopher Ger Groot wrote an essay about it and called the phenomenon ‘the credit of the creed’.⁵

That brings me naturally to my very last point. The explicit ‘set of beliefs’ can act as a jammer when it comes to transmitting meaning. Words that once conveyed meaning can apparently become an obstacle to that same meaning. What is needed, you then read, are new rituals, including a new language – and there are experiments (Alain de Botton). I have nothing against them, but I do not really believe in them. You cannot invent rituals, only receive them. In the world of meaning, social engineering has nothing to say; you need a very sensitive mind indeed to accomplish anything here. And in my view it is not necessary either. Instead of a new language, a good hermeneutics may already be enough. The point is above all to say the same thing differently. To clarify this a little, I return once more to the Muses and to the creative power of language (ποίησις, poiesis). Contrary to what we think, this evocative language is still very much present in the Christian tradition. It is merely hidden from view by two things at once: on the one hand the crushing preponderance of doctrinal language in that tradition (which makes the religion seem to consist of a ‘set of beliefs’ that must be accepted), and on the other the fact that the church’s source book is approached too much as ‘Holy Scripture’, so that people forget simply to read it. If we did – just read it, as we read a literary text from our cultural tradition – the creative power of that language would become palpable again, and at the same time (automatically, because it is implied and intended in the stories of that book) more attention would go to the importance of ‘Faith’ instead of the fixation on ‘Beliefs’.

The language of the story and the suspension of disbelief

Language that gives meaning does not argue; it creates the reality it evokes. It is musical language, poiesis, creative, evocative language. Such language gives meaning, accompanies rituals and interprets them without killing the act itself. Religious language belongs to this category. It gives food for thought, stirs the imagination, opens perspectives, opens windows on the world. Many professionals who try to capture ‘revealed religions’ (based on a book) in language hardly seem aware of this. They posit and pontificate, make pronouncements about everything and reason away. They speak about God and man as if these were the most ordinary things in the world, simply available. Well, they are not – neither of them. That is precisely their strength; that is what makes them special, both of them. People have searched for words to say something about ‘god’ and ‘man’. That is no simple matter. God is by definition ineffable, and man endlessly transcends himself; his being is in the making. In the biblical stories (and even in the dogmas, but that would take us too far) people are much more aware of this than many a theologian.

The art, however, is to approach such texts open-mindedly, that is, to receive them as what they are: a collection of texts that take us back to the time when our culture began to take shape. We should not stare blindly at the factual truth claims contained in those stories. They are secondary, and in many stories completely irrelevant. I know many believing readers see it differently, but I maintain my position and only ask you to read along with me for a moment. A piece of the story of the beginning as the Bible tells it – not the first story, but the second (Genesis 2:4 ff.), about Adam in paradise. Actually I have already started wrong. ‘Adam’ sounds like a personal name and ‘Paradise’ like a particular place. Both are incorrect. Ha-adam in Hebrew is not a name but means ‘the human being’, and in this story he finds himself in a beautiful garden, the garden of Eden – a paradisal place indeed, and for readers of that time too a mythical place, not to be found on any map. Of this human being we are then told that he felt he was missing something. Though the sun shone, though he was surrounded by all kinds of animals and could eat whatever he liked, he did not feel at ease. Tell me honestly: do you have the impression that this is a ‘history story’? I do not. The style, the words, everything suggests that this is a story about ‘the human being’ in general. It probes the human predicament, la condition humaine: how he is put together, what moves him, where he gets stuck.

But let us go on: ‘And God said: it is not good that the human being should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ The human being falls into a deep sleep; God takes a rib from his side and models from it a second human being, a woman. And when the human being wakes from his coma and sees that fellow human for the first time, he exclaims: ‘At last, someone like me, my flesh and blood!’ At this point the writer drops the word ha-adam and switches to ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (ish, isha). It is clear: this is about sexuality and relationships. And indeed, in the rest of the story he sketches in a few well-chosen sentences how a human being, though bound by birth to his parents, breaks free from them and ventures on a new adventure with a new partner: ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.’ It seems clear to me that the first intention of this story is not to report an event that took place some 6,000 years ago. Whoever says so cannot read. The story wants to pass on wisdom and insight that is useful to us as human beings, especially in the relations between the sexes. That is its primary intention. Of course you step into the story as if it happens like this; that is simply how stories work. Crusade in Jeans, Harry Potter, Madame Bovary: reading any story presupposes a ‘suspension of disbelief’ for its duration. Otherwise it does not work. Biblical stories are no different.

Apparently this story about ‘the human being’ was considered so good that it kept being retold. So it was handed down from generation to generation, and probably polished along the way. It became part of Jewish culture, acquired high status there and became a sacred text. And when, around the collapse of the kingdom of Judah, the principal texts were collected, it was decided to include it in the book describing the primeval history of humanity (Genesis 1–11), right after a kind of liturgical text with refrains, in which the creation of all things is sung with an eye for detail and a sense of order, while time is given rhythm by a seven-day cycle. Notice, by the way: the first series of stories in the Bible all have a high condition humaine content – the fratricide, the flood, the building of the tower of Babel. They still speak to us, that is, if you read them as they were written: not as mysterious texts conveying secret knowledge from God, but as mirror stories against which to lay your own life story (which everyone constructs) and test it. The great story of the Exodus, too, keeps opening new perspectives on life; in Part 3 it was the thread running along the road to religious freedom. And I could go on. The Old Testament in particular is a treasure trove of ‘strong stories’; it would take a separate book to unfold this. And that the story of the passion of Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament has life-shaping power needs no argument – provided it is told well.

In short, the stories in the Bible contain impulses that help you to find your place in the world and to order your life, individually and as a society. Narratively, that is: freely and invitingly. My advice to the church is to strip the texts radically of all knowledge claims about ‘states of affairs’ (to take them out of the cognitive register) and instead to read them as literature, focusing on their narrative power. The power of a story is that it gives listeners the chance to feed their own imagination. They can picture possible lives, lay their own life beside them, place it within them. It opens perspectives; it lets light in. A good story sets people thinking – thinking through, thinking back, thinking ahead: exactly the things we put forward as characteristics of human culture, exactly what gave religion its transcending and grounding power. In my view this way of reading also does justice to the texts, and they lose nothing in meaning – on the contrary. Read like this, it becomes clear of itself why that book has been read again and again, and why those stories still inspire. ‘Ces textes nous racontent’, says Philippe Lechermeier in the preface to his retelling of parts of the Bible, Une Bible – a réécriture aimed at the cultural transmission of the texts, in which the founding power of these stories is to come into its own again. In the Dutch-speaking world Guus Kuijer made an impressive attempt as well with his ‘Bible for unbelievers’, an eye-opener for believers too. Telling each other stories is a powerful conveyor of meaning, certainly when they are stories with a long tradition – and exponentially so if, in passing them on, you appeal to the same creative imagination from which they were born.

The benefit for society is that by retelling the religious stories from their musical source, they lose the divisiveness they have as the foundation of a ‘set of beliefs’, and reveal their grounding, meaning-giving power within the immanent frame. Read like this, they lay the foundation for a shared culture, in which identities are built narratively rather than confessionally.

© Dick Wursten – fair use policy: all use permitted, provided the source is acknowledged.