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What Do Religion, Politics, and Science Each Contribute to the Creation of a Good Society?
| Article
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10751 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
8,221 Words |
| Author
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Herbert Richardson
Herbert Richardson is Professor of Theology at St. Michaels
College at the University of Toronto. This paper first
appeared in The Good Life and Its Pursuit edited by Jude P.
Dougherty and published by Paragon House. The paper is
reprinted by permission. |
This article deals with the question of what religion, politics, and science contribute to the creation, maintenance and improvement of society. It will argue that they play different, though concurrently essential, functions. Religion creates the unity of society; politics creates the justice of society, and science creates the truth of society.
I
Religion creates the unity of society. Every society is the creation of many institutions, individuals, and symbolic patterns. This unity is experienced as a common bond, which allows members of the society to identify with one another. This identification is not, in principle, the immediate knowledge and love of the members of a society for one another. It is, rather, their common recognition that they identify with something that transcends them all. By virtue of their acknowledgement, or love, for this higher reality with whom they all identify, members of society affirm their unity with one another.
Because the identification of members of a society with one another is mediated through the shared acknowledgment of a higher unity and good, a society can exist which is larger than the range of immediate personal knowledge and communion. The range of immediate love and knowledge is limited to those people one can know directly. Such immediate face-to-face relationships, valuable as they may be, are not the form of the larger society (although modern contractual/nominalist thinking uses precisely such immediate relationships as a model for society as a whole). Society is, rather, a mediated unity that comes into being when persons and groups which do not have face-to-face relationships identify with one another on the basis of their shared identification with something greater, or higher, than them all.
This acknowledgment that society is a mediated unity, as ritualized in social behavior and articulated through symbols, is a society's "civil religion." That every society has such a religion (i.e., something that binds its people together) is a commonplace of contemporary sociology. The idea has been popularized recently by Robert Bellah; previously it was espoused by Parsons, Durkheim, and Comte.
From the social-functional point of view, even atheistic societies have a civil religion, for this term refers simply to the values, rituals, and symbols that mediate to people in any society the sense of unity. From this functional point of view, the symbol of a society's unity is its
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