And the wisdom to know the difference? Freedom, control and the sociology of religion - 2002 Presidential Address

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Eileen Barker

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change those things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference. (Reinhold Niebuhr 1892-1971)

The sociology of religion has long been concerned with issues of freedom and control. At an ontological and somewhat speculative level, there have been numerous treatises on whether it is the lot of individual participants in a society to be active actors ruling their own destinies or merely passive recipients, subject to the vagaries of social forces. More empirically, the concern has been evidenced by work at individual, group and societal levels on, respectively, subjects such as brainwashing, mind control and/or mental manipulation; types of authority wielded by religious leaders and institutions; and/or the regulation and control of religions by states. Some of us have been particularly concerned with recent developments in post-communist countries, and that is the subject on which I chose to concentrate when selecting the contributors for this special edition of the journal.

We have, however, still a long way to go in understanding the processes that broaden and narrow our ability to determine (in both senses) the patterns of our lives. With one or two notable exceptions, our work has tended to focus on static situations and has been restricted to, a series of particular, discrete circumstances. We have, for example, confined our findings to statements such as:

   In situation A (when, say, a small religious group is in a closed
   environment, cut off from the rest of society) freedom and/or
   control has tended to be advanced or curtailed according to
   some unspecified, non-comparative scale.

Or:

   In situation B (when, say, there is a strong relationship between
   the state and one traditional religion) the freedom and/or control
   of co-existing minority religions has tended to be diminished
   according to another unspecified and non-comparative scale.

Such conclusions do, of course, provide us with important and useful information. There does, none the less, seem to be a paucity of empirical studies that embrace a wider frame of reference. That is, there is relatively little work that, systematically,

(a) compares types and degrees of freedoms between, say, the Amish, Roman Catholics, Buddhists and Unificationists--let alone the Amish in nineteenth century Canada; the Catholics in fifteenth century Italy; Buddhists in seventeenth century Thailand, and Unificationists in twenty-first century Japan.

(b) examines the dynamics of a process in which A moves to B and then progresses to C--when, for example, freedom is decreased through an increase in the number and application of regulations, but this results in a reaction that overthrows the regulating authority, thus resulting in (perhaps) greater freedom.

(c) explores the complexities of situations in which one person's or group's liberty depends on curbing the liberty of other persons or groups.

(d) pursues the empirical relationships involved in the philosophically familiar distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to."

THE PARAMETERS OF FREEDOM

Fatalism, Brainwashing and Total Freedom

There are numerous ways in which we can conceive of, and ask questions about, freedom and control. These are, of course, concepts that lie at the very heart of the sociological enterprise. Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and Mead might have started from different assumptions--and they certainly came up with different answers--but they were all concerned with the ways in which individuals and groups are, variously, enabled and restrained by the structures and cultures within which they find themselves, and how they create, conserve, change and negotiate those structures and cultures.

For even longer, the concepts of freedom and determinism have lain at the root of the philosophical enterprise. They have been variously associated with further concepts such as causation and control; chance and choice; chaos and confusion, the first of each pair being usually, but not necessarily, taken to apply to an objective state, while the second refers more to subjective states involving human agency. Sometimes Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is invoked to explain how we can have choice: as not everything is determined, the argument goes, we are free to make decisions. In fact, if there were no regularities beyond the sub-atomic levels of organisation that Heisenberg was talking about, there would be nothing but chance occurrences, (1) leading to chaos. (2) Our ability to control our lives depends on our perceiving causes (that X leads to y); (3) if there were no patterns of behaviour at the social level, there would be confusion rather than choice.

One rather irritating perspective is the unadulterated tautology of fatalism, which, a priori, rules out the possibility of freedom. Everything we do, the argument goes, is determined in one way or another--as is our belief that we are free to make our own choices. (4) This may, of course, be true. But if it is, it is also true that most of us are "determined" to muse on and even to investigate what we consider to be something that it makes some sort of sense to call freedom.