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Thus, one answer has appeared to our first question: where in ordinary experience does (a) religious language find a common usage, and (b) where does an experience of the sacred and the ultimate make its appearance? The answer would be: religious or mythical speech appears in all contemporary political speech, and when any culture is expressing its most ultimate convictions, norms, and expectations; and the sacred is manifest most commonly to us-as to all cultures-in and through the forms, usages, and requirements of our common life.
There is one other note to make. As these two examples, America and Russia, indicate, a religious substance has not only a constitutive, establishing, conserving role in social history-illustrated in both of these two nations now that they are each firmly established-but also an important radical, upsetting, and reconstituting or transformative role in history. For whatever other factors were at work, and there were many, there was, first of all, at the base and origin of each of these societies when they were new or being formed, a cluster of primary symbols about human being, history, and society, a "not-yet" social vision that each bore, that helped to generate that new society. And, secondly, that "not-yet" symbolic vision in each case also helped to dismantle and ultimately to destroy an older world with different symbols, different structures, a different "religious substance." Thus, the religious base of society can function both conservatively and radically, creatively and destructively. Correspondingly, it is this religious dimension of cultural life that is causative of the infinity of passion and of cruelty, as of commitment, courage, and self-sacrifice, that give to history its meaning and its terror. The religious element in existence is by no means simply "good," mild, or benevolent. It is, as recent events in Iran have shown, terrifying, terrible, and demonic as well. Certainly it is always important.
A final discipline-if we can call it that-with which the philosophy of religion is concerned is the philosophy of history. But that is probably too intellectual or academic a description of what I have in mind. It is more precise to describe it as an understanding of historical process and of our relation to that process, the relation especially of our community to it-our sense of the course of history and our common group destiny or vocation within that course. This question has been of profound importance in modern self-understanding and in every modern society. The religious myths that have structured modern societies-for example, our own and that of Communist Russia-and thus that constitute their religious substance as we have described that substance, have been historical myths, myths about the character of the process of history, its shape and direction, and especially about the relation of that particular society to this ultimate course of history. It is the historical character of their myths-and the fact that they each pretend that these myths are "science"-that distinguishes modern societies from traditional ones, not the illusion that they have no myths while traditional societies did have them.
I do not think I need describe the myth about history and our relation to it that has provided the religious substance of American culture. It has been too basic to our life as a culture to require that and too deeply ingrained in all of us as the way things-history-are. Its usual name is the Myth of Progress, or belief in it. It sees history, beginning way back with Egypt and Greece, as a story of cumulative development leading up to modern times temporally and to Western culture, and especially to America, spatially. Here and now, with us, the goal towards which this story has led, and so the goal in which it culminates, is represented by our culture. Thus, in terms of this story, do we know who we are, what we are to do, and what we can count on? This story has been one of cumulative learning and cumulative techniques, leading up to the scientific and technological world we so clearly represent. One finds it engraved in all our grade-school textbooks in countless graphs of the number of telephones, the miles of railroads, the number of televisions, the number of cars, toilets, and so on, all of which are conceived to represent Civilization and in all of which we are clearly Number One.
This is progress, and more of the same, will, we have believed, more and more "free" the future from its ills. It is also the story of the cumulative freeing of men and women from political, religious, and social authorities and tyrannies, of mankind from older brutalities and cruelty. Again, we, as the prime example of democracy, represent this culminating phase of the historical and moral development of men and women. In neither case has history completed itself: science and technology will grow indefinitely, remaking our ideas of the world and the world itself, generation after generation. Democracy will also increase, entering and transforming those areas of economics, racial, and social existence not yet freed from traditional authorities. But in any case, these developments will be more of the same thing that has found its perfect exhibition so far in our own community.
This myth, I hardly need say, has governed our common existence for some time. It helps us determine what is creative and what is not in the world, and what our own priorities are or should be. It tells us what to defend and why we defend it. It gives meaning to our work, confidence in the midst of failure, and hope in the face of tragedy or of temporary discouragement. It helps us to distinguish good from evil forces in the world around us, and gives us confidence in the ultimate victory of good over evil in history. Above all, it tells us who we are in history and why we are here. It forms the ultimate set of presuppositions for most o("our aims and so our patterns of education. The sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities understand their role and worth-and large parts of their methods-on its basis; it represents the one common creed of our academic life. Like the similar Communist myth in Russia, this myth functions in our social existence "religiously," that is, as the ultimate formative and authoritative symbolic structure of our commonality. It is crucial for our effective living, our credible self-understanding, and our creative action for the future.
Now, what makes this issue of more than academic interest today- and one with which the philosophy of religion and also theology have increasingly therefore concerned themselves-is that this myth, and with it much of the substance of our cultural life, has been disintegrating around us. It is, I would suggest, the disintegration of this secular myth-not that of the traditional Christian mythos-that constitutes the present religious crisis of American society. For now our questions about the meaning of our work and our lives, of the significance and insignificance of what we are and do, of good and evil and the ultimate result of their encounter, that is, of the victory of the good and the conquest of the evil in history, have no framework in which to find an answer. Above all, our confidence in our own history and so ourselves as a community has been badly shaken: that confidence was based on the assurance that our science and technology were building a better world, and our growing freedoms were establishing the grounds for a fuller humanity everywhere. Of this hope in the future we are now much less sure. Science and technology seem to be capable of making the world demonic, inhuman, soulless; and freedom seems ever anew subject to some mode of historical fatedness and possibly in the end, helpless.
What we tend to call the counterculture: religiously, ethically, communally, with its religious cell groups, its "trips," its separation, and its indifference-is, various as it is, a reaction to the dispersal and disintegration of the religious substance of the wider culture, and an attempt to rediscover and reconstruct, on very simple, often esoteric, lines, a new way of being human. The main thrusts of this counterculture have been against the values, the norms, the roles, and the modes of intellectual excellence of our dominant scientific, technological, industrial, commercial, and bourgeois culture. Only secondarily has it attacked organized religion. It has seen that culture not as an area full of the promise of human fulfillment, but either, as in the radical phase, as an arena of destructive evil, or, as in the present religious phase, as neutral, necessary, but radically insufficient-a necessary base, so to speak, for the real life that is lived in meditation or contemplative groups in the ashram, whose world is alongside but not part of the wider society. Here again an answer to our first question has appeared. A use and meaning of religious language appears in ordinary "experience," but outside the wider social world, in the internal world of yogic and meditative experience, an experience which rescues the self and its reality and meaning from the outside commercial, technical, and country-club worlds that seem to make that self unreal, its work worthless, and its community relations barren.
The creative effects of these religious movements in a spiritually disintegrating culture are unquestioned, and witnessed to by countless persons. For the philosopher of religion and the theologian, a perennial question remains: is there any way the religious dimension of our social, political, and historical existence, of our society, can find a relationship and creative interaction with the religious dimension of our inward, personal existence found in these small religious communities? This is also a crucial question for our futures. If the social world is bereft of all genuine, creative, and religious substance, new demons will rush in and take over, trampling under academic, philosopher of religion, and meditator together! For as we have seen, society is religious, its politics are sacral, and left without religious criticism and concern, it can well become demonic.
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• © 2005 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on March 16, 2005
