A short talk I gave a while back on the relationship between cults and culture:
Although the title of this talk is “Cults and Culture,” I will not so much be talking about cults, or really culture for that matter, at least as the terms are commonly understood, if they are understood at all. That is to say, I won’t be talking about the People’s Temple and Jonestown or the Branch Davidians and Waco, or about Heaven’s Gate and the proverbial Kool-Aid, or about Scientology or any other new religious movements, as they’re often referred to these days. That said, I would like to talk about cults in a wider sense, in a sense that has more to do with our more or less modern concept of religion than it does with cults per se (even if, as the debate as to whether it is appropriate to refer to new religious movements as cults demonstrates, it is often difficult to distinguish between a cult and a religion. Indeed, the move to do away with the term “cult” in favor of the term “new religious movements” or NRM’s, may be be regarded as a tacit admission, on the part of scholars of religion, that the old adage that, “a religion = cult + time, is mostly true). In any case, the cults my title refers to has more to do with the Latin cultus—a noun which means “worship, act of worship, form of worship, religious observance,” but also, in its wider sense, “cultivation, tilling, training or education, personal care and maintenance, style of dress or ornament, adornment, stylistic elegance, mode of standard of living, state of being refined, devotion, loyalty, respect;”1 although, these meanings are most often reserved for the derivative of cultus, cultura, from which the modern concept of culture most proximally derives. Both words, cultus and cultura derive from the Latin verb colere, which means—as Raymond Williams points out—to “inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship,” among other things (Williams, Keywords 49). Looking at the various different and differing meanings of colere and its related terms, it is easy to see how this term could be related to culture. But the question I want to entertain today is, “how much cult or cultus (or religion) still resides in our culture or in our concept of culture”?
“In the contemporary use of the terms,” writes theorist of religion, Tomoko Masuzawa, “the relation between “culture” and “religion” appears to be multiple, complex and contradictory to some extent” (Masuzawa, “Culture” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 70). Today, it has become perhaps most common to conceive of the relationship between religion and culture as one of a part to a whole, where religion represents just one of culture’s many possible forms as— for example—Ernst Cassirer suggested. Myth, religion, language, art, science: taken together, these five cultural or symbolic forms—as Cassirer refers to them, since we make sense of the world through them—make up the whole of culture. For Cassirer, these forms are also “modes of expression,” through which we disclose who we are, and who we are is, quite simply, our culture. Our culture is what differentiates us from Nature. In this Cassirer is not far from the eminent anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who also argued that the essence of humanity is not to be found in any one thing that we do or make, but in the fact that we all have culture (although there are indeed many important differences between Geertz and Cassirer).
Of course, Cassirer was not the first philosopher to think of culture in this way, that is as, as a composite of various cultural or symbolic forms. This honor probably goes to Giambattista Vico, who, in his major work, the New Science from 1725, sought to determine what kind of “science” might be appropriate to that being which, it would appear, does not belong to Nature, at least not entirely. Vico begins his New Science by attempting to secure “universal and eternal principles,” upon which to construct this science—a “science” which, today, we might rather term a history. He comes up with three things which, he claims, all peoples have in common: religion, marriage, and burial. From these three things, Vico maintains, it should be possible to construct a history of what he variously calls the world of nations or the civil world. Yet, it is important to note that this history does not begin with religion, marriage, and burial, even if it takes these three things as its starting point; rather, this history begins at the moment that human beings begin to think humanly, which, for Vico, means to think abstractly. Although religion first appears in Vico’s philosophy as a form of culture among others, it is religion—in this case natural religion—which founds the civil world insofar as, by its means, we break free of the sensible, natural world and learn to tame our sensible, animal natures. “In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial freedom,” writes Vico, “there was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the frightful thought of some divinity, the fear of whom [...] is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a liberty gone wild” (Vico, New Science, I.¶338). Vico hypothesizes that human beings first stumbled upon this thought when “they had fallen into despair of all the succors of nature and desire[d] something superior to save them” (Vico, New Science, I.¶338).
Vico’s account may remind us of another philosopher who, while not normally included in anthologies devoted to the philosophy of culture, nonetheless stands out as one of the great cultural critics in the history of philosophy: namely, Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s Genealogy, religion too has a central role to play in civilizing the human being. At the beginning, the human being is an animal which, like all other animals, suffers without reason. But eventually, she comes up with the question, “Why do I suffer?,” and turns to the ascetic priest for answers. She learns from the ascetic priest how to tame herself, how to reign herself in, but in the process she becomes what Nietzsche calls the sickliest animal. For Nietzsche, civilization is the opposite of culture; culture promotes human flourishing, civilization its decline.
In some cases, we tend to equate religion and culture, especially when we speak of societies, whose cultures were, or are, so completely religious that it is impossible to tell where religion ends and culture begins. Early anthropologists and sociologists, such as Durkheim and Mauss, argued that, as societies become more civilized, religion plays less and less a role in those societies. In so-called “primitive” societies, religion determines almost every aspect of culture. In so-called “modern” societies, religion continues to play a decisive role in culture, but the role that it plays becomes more difficult to determine, which is to say, that it becomes less determinate, more fluid—paradoxically, like all fluids, it gets into almost everything. “In the quintessentially “modern” societies of Western Europe and North America,” Masuzawa writes, “culture is envisaged as a vehicle, at its best, for the most profound and essential thoughts and attitudes underlying religion” (Masuzawa, 71). When Max Weber claims that “we” owe “our” work ethic to John Calvin, or Hegel claims that “we” owe “our” very notion of who we, as moderns, to Luther, or when a certain, German, politician claims that crosses are not religious symbols, but cultural ones, culture becomes a vehicle for religion. The assumption, underlying positions such as these, is that, again as Masuzawa writes, “in a society such as “ours,” something like the general essence of religion, which is perforce less tangible and more universal than any particular religion (and is nowadays referred to as spirituality), used to be embodied in religious institutions but now has been partially liberated from those traditional institutional confinements and can find more personal, “freer” expressions through a variety of cultural venues. This deinstitutionalization takes place, supposedly, as society becomes “modernized” and “secular” (Masuzawa, 71). In a paradoxical fashion, as we have become more secular, we have become more religious or, at least, spiritual. Or at least, this is the thought that I’d like to leave you with today.
1 "cult, n.". OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed- com.ezproxy.bu.edu/view/Entry/45709?rskey=bwfSL6&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed January 12, 2020).
