Organized religion
For many years Agnieszka Halemba has been conducting research on how the management and organization of religious life influence the role of religion in social life and religious experiences.
If you take a few books on the subject of religion from the shelf in a scientific library, it may initially seem that they use the same word to refer to drastically different phenomena. What could a book on the relationship between the nation and the Church in Poland have in common with a work on personal conversion experiences in Papua New Guinea? Or a book on inter-species communication in the Amazon with a study on the work of chaplains in GDR’s prisons? The study of religion offers many paths: one can ask questions about experience, perception, and knowledge, but also about social cohesion, processes of exclusion and integration, as well as power, hierarchies, ideologies, and economic interests.
Analytical precision is therefore useful here, especially in distinguishing between experiences perceived as religious, religious institutions, and religious organizations as three interrelated and interdependent levels for studying the presence of religion in the world.
The first level consists of creativity, the body, imagination, and personal experience. This is the understanding of religion that we find, for example, in the works of William James and Rudolf Otto. This level also encompasses a whole series of recent studies in the field of anthropology of religion, which focus on mediation, materiality, as well as the acquisition or learning of religion and the realization of transcendence in one’s own life. Many cognitive studies of religion also remain at this level. All of these approaches focus on religion as a place of human experience felt by individual bodies and minds and expressed in narratives that are always attributed to specific individuals.
However, even though bodies, emotions, and imaginations play a crucial role in religious life, strictly speaking, one can only discuss about religious experiences at the social level – here referred to as institutionalized. This institutionalization not only represents a social process in which certain experiences, phenomena, things, and individuals are recognized as special, but also processes of establishing ways of connecting with non-human entities, certain bodily movements, words and states of mind. The religious institution is therefore an analytical term that can be used to describe socially accepted ways of establishing relationships with transcendence and truth claims.
The most fruitful analytical distinction is between institutions and organizations. These terms are often used interchangeably, but much could be gained by making a clear distinction at the analytical level. Organizations are socially perceived as if they were actors – they are spoken of as if they have opinions, issue decrees, hire and fire, interfere in public affairs, etc. Both institutions and organizations encompass complex patterns of human behaviour and are arenas where negotiations and redefinitions of roles and goals take place, but organizations are clearly objectified both internally and externally. Furthermore, organizations can develop (or take over) institutions and influence experiences through them.
Not all religious life is organized – sometimes even individuals or entire communities resist organizing religious life. However, organizing religious life has consequences that should be within the scope of researchers’ interests, especially when dealing with issues such as religious experience, the communal role of religion, rituals, or the transmission of practices and beliefs. Religion should not be limited to its organizational aspect, but it also cannot be reduced to matters of beliefs, meanings, or experiences. We should ask the following questions: What are the decision-making processes in religious organizations and how are they enforced? What is the status of religious specialists and where do they come from? What are the perceptions of the relationship between organizational structures and holiness? Is the persistence of organizational structures considered a value? How are specific activities funded? And above all – how does a particular way of organizing religious life change everyday religion?