Contemporary sociologists of religion claim that they should develop what they call “real religion” or “informal religion” which discusses the emotions, the situated practices and the personal identities affiliated with religion rather than the liturgies and doctrines concerning religion if they are to get their subject matter right. Susan Nidich argues that the post-Exilic time when Jews returned to Israel and Judah were ripe for development in new religious understandings and literary forms because it was such a time of turmoil, though it seems to me it is difficult to name a time when the history of Israel was without turmoil. Certainly not so was the time of the books of Samuel when Saul and David contested with one another, a time of politics mixed up with dastardly deeds that rival the intrigues and murders of the early Tudors.
Nidich uses in her book “The Responsive Self” the Book of Ruth as the key example of that kind of religion. The book provides a tone of piety to undergird the story of a woman arranging for her daughter as so poor as to be a gleamer of stray shards of wheat to marry a rich man rather than simply become her mistress. In the famous passage where Ruth says to Naomi that “where you go, I go/ and where you lodge I lodge/ and your god is my god”, it also says “thus may Yahwah do to me”, and that infers a religious consciousness but such ordinary references to God of the equivalent of “let God be willing” are just ways to provide emphasis and seems to me weak tea rather than a deep religiosity, just a courtesy injunction that anyone might make, just as an emphasis, just as anyone today can say “God willing” or “God bless you” without it having much bite. Indeed, the reference to taking up her mother in law’s god suggests that religion is a custom acquired in a new place rather than deeply set in her psyche. Rather, the Book of Ruth is about how precarious is the difference whereby people can fall from respectability to shame. That is the way of the world and so its wisdom should be shared with the philosophical “Ecclesiastes” about how the nature of things are ever changing rather than “Ecclesiastes” used to express the conventional view that the way gionthings change from sowing to reaping and from life to death are somehow just rather than just the way they are.
There are very serious matters afoot. Usual religion, in its insistence on dogma and liturgy, is 2000 years old in that the Gospel writers and St. Paul were clearcut in announcing the ceremonies that surrounded the risen Christ and the explanations of why that happened. You cannot separate out Christian religion from its ideas and practices. Similarly, ideas and practices in Judaism go back to the time when Abraham wandered into Canaan and claimed that God was invisible, concerned with moral issues rather than just powerful, and was able to require sacrifices, even of Abraham’s son. Religionists argue about the truths of which they believe. Dogma and ritual are central to religion rather than just the rationalization of some core experience..
Moreover, dogma and ritual are central to the current religious situation, and not just for Catholics or Orthsodox Jews. I am thinking of the Protestant divines who can be heard on Youtube, many of them professors at various religious colleges where people who are in departments of apologetics ask visiting atheists or secularists, often evolutionists, to have a civil debate, ever courtly and even affectionate with their interlocutors, so as to praise their own open-mindedness about religious matters, though the very title of ”apologetics” is to beg the question in that the term means to make arguments that justify faith through the use of reason but is independent in that the believer will continue to have the rock of faith even if a particular explanation becomes dubious while for secularists their arguments are crucial in that the whole edifice of evolution comes falling down if its arguments are shown to be mistaken. The dogmatists can be comfortable that they need not be anxious even though, perhaps in their heart of hearts, they are not just questioning so as to try out their mental muscles, but might really be thinking that their own dogmas are dubious, however hard it might be to own that up.
It is interesting why these Protestant thinkers are so concerned with turning back the arguments of evolutionism in that Catholics have done so for almost a hundred years, able to say that evolution was the process whereby the miracle of creation was accomplished but not the point or purpose of creation. Catholicism is preoccupied with other matters such as social justice or the morality of conception and birth, though the second of these may be on the agenda for revision. But Protestants gnaw on the bone of evolution because that doctrine specifies quite vividly how bereft would be a God which did not do creation and was left to endless ages of mutation and natural selection that allow an unsanctioned and uninspired creation. Life is then dog eat dog while a short creation whereby the world originated six thousand years ago and there were dinosaurs two thousand years ago seems more reasonable and comfortable if it was planned and because it is difficult in a Genesis kind of world to imagine eons of time or life on other planets that are made from octopus like things that breathe methane. My suspicion is that it is scary to think of the universe as being what it is rather than as the Bible as it imagined the matter, having to do with right and wrong and people filled with vices and virtues not very different from our own and therefore comforting.
So the apologetics people bring Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hutchins to debunk religion so as to out debunk them, neither of them especially appreciate one of the insights and emotions and visions of those in the opposing camp, however often they may joust with one another, eating dinner together at the hotels in which they reside, or chatty and charming as they all hear elaborate introductions of praise to the speakers who will offer their goods on display. Christopher Hutchins, most notably, condemns all religion for its immorality, claiming that a God directed universe is like the North Korean totalitarian state, where you are obliged to forever thank the powerful one who makes people miserable, and I certainly agree that devotion to God inevitably means obedience to an unjust authority. But Hutchins is weak in explaining why people might develop that idea. He thinks that religion arises out of ignorance, people turning to religion because science had not yet developed to provide scientific explanations. That seems dubious. Greek science was a very special invention and so it might well have not moved religion aside were there deeper appeals for religion. The Old Testament, some 3000 years of it, never developed science however sophisticated was its morality and politics and social dynamics. Hutchins doesn’t consider that religion is itself a meditation on authority itself as having its own dynamics, its coming out of the experience of life rather than in the life of amoebas.
Nor do these Youtube Protestant divines seem to have also moved through the route that is alternative to science vs. non science by going to a more Kierkegaardian view, certainly vouch saved by Protestantism, which is that dealing with authority is more primitive than are the truths of nature. These Protestant religion specialists are so concerned with the personal and theological significance of the relationship between the believer and Jesus that everything else gets crowded out, even to just wonderment at other things like the universe itself. The Jesus lovers therefore find only cursory arguments to use to counteract evolutionism rather than the well founded puzzlements of evolution that trouble biologists, such as how the giraffe managed to develop its hydraulic system so as to raise blood up to the brain either all at once or in incremental incidents. Instead, they just wonder why bunnies do not have offspring that are elephants. These Protestants are terrified at long periods of time perhaps because the relation of a person with Jesus is all that he wants to do, which is to analyze and decide on matters of doctrine. That is a way to further religious thought. It is as if it is familiar even if very special: you know what a father and son are like, just wondering how Jesus could be both. Moreover, authority is a prior question to even the question of choice in that Adam and Eve chose wrong even before they had eaten from the tree of knowledge and were still responsible because disobedience is more primitive than matters of free will or speculation about what to do otherwise. This is a narrow mandate but a very influential one, this obedience to authority. And yet Protestantism gave rise to both science and capitalism. It is indeed a puzzlement.
Another set of Protestant figures on Youtube concern divines who are preoccupied with straightforward dogmatics. One particularly worthy of attention is a minister in Moscow, Idaho, one Doug Wilson, who is a gifted polemicist in that he always seems to be reasonable, just trying to clarify doctrinal issues, using reason to find answers for dogmatic questions so that a person can decide why the dogma and sect he belongs to is the right one. He says, for example, that a church is an “ecclesia”, which means a group rejoicing together, and so you need to have a church rather than just meditate on your own in the woods, even if not having a church does not mean you will not go to heaven. More controversially, he does not think of Catholics as brethren in Christ because Christianity means that justification is only by faith. That doctrine separates Protestants from Catholics. The assertion of his doctrine is what we might say what undergirds the experience he sees as central to Christianity but feeling and doctrine are congruent rather than separate experiences and so there is no reduction of religion to being a religious experience, which is what William James would try to do.That is all Wilson is trying to do: set things correct by being reasonable, making necessary distinctions and relevant insights. Never mind that he is out of his depth when he intrudes into secular matters, as when he became an anti-vaxxer. He has read the Bible carefully and offers thoughtful opinions about it. That is what he is up to.
It is as if Wilson had forgotten or never knew the history of religious thought for more than the past hundred years whereby myth and religion are understood as an experience and questions of literary form shape the Biblical texts,and so so he seems very dated and yet refreshing for sticking to an old fashioned religion where it is possible to get positive and clear answers to your dogmatic dilemmas. That is a kind of fundamentalism: not biblical literalism, but a sense that the truth is what it says and you can argue about what it means, while Nidich seems to have abandoned that with her higher level of sophistication about God. I am reminded of a Hasidic rabbi I once encountered who wasn’t into being subtle or into sophistry. Either you believed in God or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you weren't a Jew even if you claimed to be one by neglecting those passages in the prayer book that were troublesome. Either buy it whole or not at all. I suspect that Wilson’s sense of religion is closer to most believers than are the evasions in Nidich.