The previous section could use the strategy of historical narrative to look at both semantic and socio-structural formations which are important for understanding the emergence of a global religious system. Such a story is useful for introductory purposes, but it is less effective for the next step of observing the singularity or systemicity of this system. On what basis can one claim that all these events amount to the social construction of a system and what advantage is there to observing religion as a system? How does this system operate today empirically? Answers to these ques- tions have to maintain a sensitivity for the historicity, for the contingency of this re-imagining of religion. We have to keep in mind that what we are describing is not some transhistorical universal called religion, but a very particular, very selective and in many senses quite arbitrary development. What follows then is the application of a number of theoretical concepts to this historical and contemporary data. It is a way of seeing them which profiles the degree of singularity of modern religion under the idea of system.
If there is a global religious system, then the first order of business is to discern what this system is about, what identifies it in social practice. This would usually be the point at which to insert a discussion about definition. Yet both in the introduction and at the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that one of the reasons that current controversies surrounding the definition of the category of religion are so persistent is that they do not clearly acknowledge the conditioning effect of operatively
differentiated religion in their social environment. The Luhmannian frame that I am using here allows one to do just that: focus on differentiation as the logically prior issue and then move to the concept of religion only on that basis. From this Luhmannian point of departure, the first question to ask is not about what defines religion but rather about the basic code of religion, what particular way religion interprets or selectively processes the world and thereby differentiates itself. Moreover, implicit in that question is a comparison with how other systems do that ordering. Identifying the systemically religious depends to some degree on how the non-religious identifies itself.
The search can begin with several possibilities. Durkheim, Eliade and many others focused on the difference between sacred and profane; Luhmann suggests the dichotomy of transcendent and immanent; and very often one hears that religion is about the spiritual as distinguished from the material. Various definitions of religion avail themselves of these as well as others like supra-empirical vs empirical, ultimate vs non-ultimate, absolute vs conditioned, cosmic vs nomic, infinite vs finite, and so forth. Each of these seeks to mark a domain that is the typical concern of reli- gion, thereby defining or delimiting it. In the form that I have stated them, however, none of them goes far enough for the present purposes because they only mark a boundary between the ostensibly religious and non- religious without also indicating how that boundary comes to be estab- lished and maintained through recursive, self-referential communications. A closer inspection of how the scholars using them elaborate on these dichotomies usually gives some indication in this regard. Durkheim, for instance, further explains that things are rendered sacred by being set apart and forbidden; and his lengthy volume on the elementary forms of the reli- gious life goes into great detail about how he understood Australian Aboriginal religion to accomplish this separation (Durkheim 1965). Analogously, Eliade translates the question of the sacred into one of, in his terms, hierophanies; Berger explains how a sacred cosmos is established in the process of world construction; and Geertz details how the symbols of which he speaks formulate conceptions of a general order of existence and establish a particular reality (Berger 1967; Eliade 1963; Geertz 1966). Although these thereby all present possibilities for observing religion today, they are also designed far too transhistorically to be directly useful for the question at hand. In fact, following the critiques of various scholars, for example, Talal Asad’s detailed analysis of Geertz’s definition (Asad 1993: 27ff.), this universalizing aim is precisely what is problematic in these efforts. They indicate how religion might construct itself; but in seeking to be so encompassing, they risk projecting too much on to other societies and, critical for my purposes here, missing precisely what is pecu- liar about religion in our own. The search for the code of a contemporary religious system can therefore use these definitional efforts as a beginning
reference, but not really as a guide. To find that code, if it exists, requires a different strategy, one with an empirical focus on the contemporary situa- tion and its historical antecedents.
In the narrative presentation of the last section, I noted several late medieval and Reformation concerns about the distinctiveness of the Christian church with respect to ‘the world’ and about the purity of reli- gion. The medieval church, for instance, sought to distinguish itself as a societas perfectas beside the state and civil society, to assert the difference and superiority of faith to reason, and to increase awareness of sin along with the church’s methods, notably the sacraments, for dealing with it (Délumeau 1983; Gössman 1971). The Reformers underscored their conviction that religious goals, namely salvation, were to be attained or determined uniquely by religious means such as faith and the providence of God. What religion was about was thus precisely those factors: salva- tion, sin, faith, sacraments, providence and other such religious determinants. The conditions or prospects of salvation were to be deter- mined by other religious categories like sin, faith or sacraments; not by ‘worldly’ categories like ‘principalities and powers’ or ‘works’. Providence foresaw sin which pointed to the possibilities of damnation or salvation, which in turn were settled on the basis of faith, sacraments or providence again. The religious determinants were to refer ultimately only to them- selves. Given that my purpose in discussing those matters was to show how religion was at that time in the process of becoming increasingly differentiated, it is these semantic items, along with the communications in which they occur, that are likely to be pointing to the code that is recur- sively operating here. That code, however, cannot be another name for the religious domain; it has to be a binary set with a positive and a negative pole. The code does not express the difference between the system and its environment, between religion and non-religion. Instead it ensures the self- referential or recursive quality of religious communication. It is that recursiveness which enacts the boundary between system and environment. The code therefore has to have two poles which are complementary, thereby totalizing, and both religious classifications. Only then can reli- gious communication refer only to itself because even the contradiction of positive religious signification can again receive religious signification. All else has no religious meaning and may not even be visible to the system. Accordingly, looking at what Christian elites of that late medieval, Reformation and post-Reformation time were arguing about, what mattered to them, it becomes fairly clear that the main issues centred around the difference between salvation and damnation. More exactly, the central arguments were about the sort of communication (or, if one wishes, social action) that was productive of salvation and the sort that indicated damnation. The code over which they sought control was something close to blessed/damned, not in any direct sense sacred/profane, spiritual/material,
ultimate/relative or similar distinction. Salvation and damnation are both sacred, both spiritual and both ultimate (eternal) states. They are not directly about the other side of those dichotomies. Through this code, all human action had the potential of being sacralized, of being translated into religious terms analogous to the way the economic distinction between owning and not-owning allows anything to be translated into economic terms, which is to say commodified. Moreover, the code oper- ated recursively: the purpose of religion conceived in this way was itself. Salvation and damnation contained their own purpose; they were ad maiorem gloriam Dei.
At this point, at least two problems with the argument may seem to be evident. First, although Christians of these centuries were certainly concerned about salvation, that is not at all a new development and is in one form or another as old as the Christian tradition itself. How, then, can it be construed as a version of the code for a new global religious system? Second, even if this is what concerned Christians and thus defined the Christian religion during that period, it pertains only to Christianity and cannot be understood as the code for a new global religious system. With respect to the first objection, it is not my claim that this system constituted the invention of something radically new. We are dealing at least as much with the re-ordering, literally the re-formation, of received cultural resources as we are with innovation. Luther, Calvin and the Jesuits helped to intensify the importance of various received features which were instru- mental in asserting the independent power of religion. They did not advocate an entirely new way of doing religion. Indeed, the early organiza- tion, dogmatization, orthodoxification and thus to some degree differentiation of Christian institutions already during the time of the Roman Empire undoubtedly provided critical antecedents for these late medieval and early modern re-formations to take place. In addition, observers of the last few centuries have stressed precisely those aspects of early Christianity that make sense of subsequent developments. The ‘histo- ries’ of Christianity and the church are correspondingly selective; they stress those features which contributed to the eventual differentiation and thereby have contributed to that process. As regards the second problem, the developments I have just described were only one aspect both in the differentiation of Christianity as a religion among religions and in the formation of a global system for religion. As with all the function systems, the formation and the globalization of Christianity and of the religious system cannot be understood separately; they are of a piece. The search for a religious code perhaps can begin with Reformation Christianity, but it cannot end there.
Just as the question of religious code is best addressed to Christianity as it is already in the process of reformation as a religion among religions, so must we proceed in similar fashion with the other religions. I take the
examples of Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. In each case, one can observe an analogous combination of continuity and discontinuity; reconstruction as religion re-imagines, it does not create out of nothing.
At first glance, Islam may seem to operate much as Christian religion has: they are both ‘Abrahamic’ in their core belief structures and tradi- tions. And, indeed, salvation/damnation in the context of afterlife and eschatology are important determinants in both traditions. To a significant extent, therefore, the code blessed/damned has operated to structure Islam just as it has Christianity. If one focuses on many of the Islamic reform movements of especially the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, a somewhat altered picture emerges. Taking more extreme figures like Mawlana Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini as representa- tive examples that show the trend with particular clarity, what we see is a partial (but only partial) backgrounding of questions of salvation and damnation and a corresponding valorization of the legalistic aspects of Islamic tradition in the form of Shari’a and its central operating code halal/ haram, or permitted and forbidden. Here again, we have a recursively reli- gious dichotomy that allows the transformation or incorporation of everything and anything that happens in the world into specific and selec- tive religious terms. It is around this, formally speaking, secondary code and far less clearly around salvation/damnation or any other possibility that at least a certain portion of the modern and worldwide orthodoxifica- tion of Islam has taken place. And the contemporary so-called resurgence of Islam largely centres on this code, thereby contributing significantly to the (further) differentiation of Islam as a distinct religion and thus to the clearer differentiation of religion as a societal system.
The (re)formation of Buddhism over the last century to century and a half shows a similar combination of continuity and discontinuity as just pointed out for Christianity and Islam. A variety of movements have contributed to this reform, for example those associated with Angarika Dharmapala in Sri Lanka, with Tai Hsu in China, the Japanese Soka Gakkai, and Fo Guang Shan in Taiwan. Some of these, such as that of Tai Hsu, have been based in Buddhist monasticism, the Buddhist institution that has undoubtedly been the greatest source of continuity and singularity of the Buddhist tradition and therefore a key factor in the relatively straightforward re-imagining of Buddhism as one of the religions. The monastic code has centred around the distinction between nirvana and samsara, all actions being capable of translation into terms of whether they contribute to enlightenment and the attainment of nirvana, or increase the burden of karma and ignorance and thus bind further into samsara. The programmatic practices and regimes associated with monastic Buddhism have, however, not generally been the same as those informing lay Buddhist movements and practice, and one could suggest that a secondary code of merit/demerit also operates in the case of the
latter. Nonetheless, the overall aim and order of things is much the same: actions either contribute to eventual enlightenment, hinder such progress, or are religiously irrelevant. There is a clear code operating which ulti- mately refers only to itself. The purpose or value of enlightenment or the attainment of nirvana, the aim of meritorious action such as chanting, feeding monks, building temples or reciting sutras is in the final analysis only itself. It may be evaluated as bliss, but this is simply a way of indi- cating its intrinsic and ultimate value. It is for its own sake.
The Hindu case presents a rather different trajectory, above all because imagining the singularity of a religion called Hinduism has not been aided either by a long history of such understandings as in Islam and Christianity, or by a dominant and continuous institution like the Christian churches or the Buddhist monasteries. Nonetheless, among that sizeable group of adherents for whom Hinduism is or has become an incontrovertible reality, a reasonably uniform understanding of the religion has emerged. This centres on a more or less neo-Vedantic image which stresses the centrality of the Vedas, the multiplicity of paths to the ultimate religious goal, and the reality of many gods and goddesses, above all Vishnu, Shiva and Devi along with their specific manifestations such as Krishna, Rama, Nataraja, Kali and Durga. Quite a number of movements have contributed to this result, not the least of which are the Ramakrishna movement, the various Sampradaya movements, Sanatana Dharma move- ments, the Arya Samaj, the Swaminarayan movement and even the Vishva Hindu Parishad. In spite of the diversity that is itself part of the imagined singularity, this Hinduism nonetheless exhibits a central code, one that is quite close to the Buddhist code. What Hinduism is about is moksha (seen as anything from union with Brahman to blissful existence in the presence of the one deity), a notion similar to nirvana and whose binary opposite is the same, namely samsara. Although programmatically – that is, as concerns the programme of the religion – Hinduism is quite different from Buddhism, the two religions share a similar root binary code, much as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam share versions of the salvation/damnation code. In either case, all actions can be religiously incorporated according to whether they contribute to the ulti- mate goal of enlightenment or bliss, or further block that road. That said, most Hindus, like most Buddhists, do not expect or even seek the attain- ment of the ultimate religious goal in their lifetime, and a great deal of Hindu religious communication is structured more by secondary codes such as auspicious/inauspicious, pure/impure or dharmic/adharmic than it is immediately through moksha/samsara. To the degree that contemporary Hinduism converges as a single religion, however, the secondary codes refer programmatically to the primary one.
These brief considerations of what code or codes operate in different religions could continue for other religions such as Judaism or Sikhism.
Examination of the above four, however, already indicates a pattern and therefore at least a certain uniformity in this question. The specific codes and certainly the detailed programmes are quite different from religion to religion; but there is also a recognizable continuity in the structure and purpose of all these codes. Since there is no global religion any more than there is a global state or (thus far) even a single global currency, that consistency has to be abstracted from the concrete religions. There are no central and unifying agencies defining and guaranteeing it; nor is there currently a ‘unity of all religions’ movement strong enough to institution- alize it. Thus, on these empirical and inductive grounds, one defensible suggestion for the name of the code of religion is in that light the differ- ence between blessed and cursed,4even though these particular words may
still sound too ‘Abrahamic’, perhaps. This or something close to it, I suggest, subsumes the structural intent of all the codes thus far examined and others, including redeemed/unredeemed, enlightened/ignorant, immortal/mortal, harmonious/disharmonious, merit/demerit, pure/impure, auspicious/inauspicious, clean/unclean, and so forth. Luhmann’s sugges- tion of transcendent/immanent, much like the sacred/profane distinction championed by Eliade and Durkheim, while designating reasonably accu- rately the same commonality, seems to underdetermine the negative religious pole too much and thus misses a good portion of what more fundamentally structures actual religious communications in today’s world, namely the avoidance of or struggle against religiously determined evil (as opposed to just the moral pole, ‘bad’). More critically, perhaps, it is too close to the this-worldly/other-worldly distinction which is more germane to some religions or subsections of religions than others. In subse- quent chapters, therefore, I will try to show how the blessed/cursed code, in spite of seeming perhaps too linguistically particular, applies to all important social formations that operate practically as religion in our contemporary world. For the moment, however, further clarification can proceed through consideration of three further issues regarding religious codes. The first concerns the relation of the religious code to the codes of other function systems. The second touches on code problems: that is,