Private beliefs, public beliefs

My relentless curiosity about the human nature has led me often enough to consider, as an essential part of everyday life, religious practices in every part of the world. As an amateur anthropologist, the relationship of people with the invisible powers, both as individuals and as groups, reveals a lot of their inner and social workings. Sadly, most of my observations and reflections have been anecdotal and haphazard: centered on individual occurrences and lacking any kind of system I have never been able to extract any generalization from them, let alone provide a useful extrapolation with any predictive value. However, psychologist Azim Shariff, from the University of British Columbia, has been much more diligent, and his interview in the podcast Hidden Brain three years ago really made an impact on me.

His main (and somewhat controversial) thesis is that human cultures created god, especially the almighty, omnipresent god of most monotheist religions, to watch over us once the groups grew large enough that blood ties and mutual confidence could not guarantee good behavior. If you can misbehave under the hood of a crowd without fearing legal consequences or a reprimand from your family, you do not have a strong incentive to follow the rules all the time. You might be inclined to cross the line depending on the risk-benefit analysis of how likely it is that you are uncovered versus the benefit that you can obtain from the misdemeanor. A secular society could raise the stakes by increasing the policing, but that can be costly to the society (since police officers on patrol are not weaving cloth, toiling the fields or forging tools), so the alternative is to conjure an omnipresent god that will punish you for your sins even if nobody else witness them.

Photo: Luca Mascaro

The flip side of this invisible watcher is that the degree of compliance of a believer was not apparent to the rest of society, as nobody could see in their heart other than god. This gave rise (still following Shariff's thesis) to expensive social religious rites where the commitment of the individuals was in open display. The more costly a certain practice was, the more it should the faith (i.e. the willingness to comply) of the believer. Pausing your work five times every day, as the Muslims do, to pray in plain sight is a very obvious display of faith: you are seen praying at the same time that you see everyone else praying. The same goes for the weekly Mass or Divine Service among Christians: people of faith (and therefore trustworthy) would attend the rites rigorously and with full fervor, whereas anyone repeatedly missing the services would be regarded as outcast or a troublemaker. In fact, one could argue that, in these societies, religion precedes the community: a newcomer starts praying alongside strangers and then by repeatedly running into one another, they eventually become part of the community.

These attitudes, however, are in a very strong contrast with both the Buddhist and Shinto practices in Japan. Their places of cult (shrines in Shintoism, temples in Buddhism) are generally much smaller structure, as they are not intended to contain a community. The believers come to the temple or the shrine, offer their prayers or conduct their rites individually with the assistance of the monks or priest and then go home. For practices that revolve around a group of people, the group exists prior to the ceremony, much in the way we understand weddings: every attendee is linked in one way or another to the main participant of the ceremony. Even on special occasions (like in the New Year) when many people are expected to conduct rites in a small period of time, the believers gravitate towards the temples to perform the activity one by one or in small groups of related people. This custom of conducting religious practices in private (or in public but individually) is so strong that many homes have their own places of prayer in the form of cabinets or dedicated corners where small altar-like structures are held, butsudan for the Buddhists, kamidama for the Shintoists.

Surprisingly, this custom does not exclude public displays of faith, it just makes them rarer. But when communities get to celebrate together they do not so in their temples, but instead they take it to the streets in the form of festivals called matsuri, where believers get a chance to make a show of their commitment to the community by constructing or carrying a decorated float or performing physical feats of strength or endurance or other costly rites. They bear a strong resemblance with the (probably unrelated) ancient Roman festivals, which were also conducted for the benefit of one deity or the other but then took place on the streets with ample participation of the population.

Last week I saw a documentary about a family who ran a small Buddhist temple in Japan. While many temples are monasteries in a strict sense, hosting groups of monks, this one only hosted the priest and his family. Notably, the wife of the priest had also been ordained so that she could help providing spiritual services: on occasion, the priest would pay a house call to pray with someone at their private butsudan, and then the wife would stay at the temple to tend to any visitors that my come by in the meantime. Eventually their children grew up and the oldest son (third after two daughters) was getting ready to take over the temple from the father. The documentary featured a heated discussion about the rightfulness of having passed over the daughters (particularly the oldest one) to the benefit of the first son, but one way or another they were all committed to the success of the temple, because they were solely financed by the donations they received from the believers for the services rendered: in one scene the daughter-in-law, who had also been ordained as priestess, calls on an elderly man who cannot visit the temple anymore and prays and sings with him, thus tending to his spiritual needs.

At the end of the day, what shocked was how deeply faithful one can be even beyond their ability to display such faith. I guess that, after practicing your whole life, it becomes a strong habit that even gets to define you, it is an integral part of your own self and does not require justification anymore. The need to feel as part of something bigger than oneself is a very widespread one, and we all try to fulfill that need the best way we can. I hope you have found your own way. Have a nice evening.