Vicarious Religion Research Articles

Children Vicariously Bearing the Future of the Faiths

Abstract This article assesses the role of children in perpetuating the chain of memory of the faiths in Europe. Drawing on indepth interviews with parents/guardians and fifty-two children on the religious socialization of Roman Catholic, Muslim, and non-religious children in Malta, it argues that Roman Catholic children are now the bearers of “vicarious religion” of communities that have become “unchurched,” while Muslim children steady the “precarious” memory of Islam in Europe. The article explores how children propel adults’ religious practices, keeping parents and grandparents connected to the faiths, churches, and mosques. Given the moral panic regarding voluntary childlessness as a threat to the perpetuation of the faiths, the vital role children play in the chain of religious memory is acknowledged.

Chabad on Ice

The article examines the Finnish branch of Chabad Lubavitch as a fundamentalist and charismatic movement that differs from other branches of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in its approaches to outreach to non-observant Jews. Whilst introducing the history of Chabad Lubavitch in Finland and drawing on historical and archival sources, the authors locate the movement in a contemporary context and draw on 101 semi-structured qualitative interviews of members of the Finnish Jewish communities, who either directly or indirectly have been in contact with representatives of Chabad Finland. The material is examined through the theoretical concept of ‘vicarious religion’. As the results of the article show, whilst Chabad very much adheres to certain fundamentalist approaches in Jewish religious practice, in Finland they follow a somewhat different approach. They strongly rely on people’s sense of Jewish identification and Jewish identity. Individuals in the community ‘consume’ Chabad’s activities vicariously, ‘belong without believing’ or ‘believe in belonging’ but do not feel the need to apply stricter religious observance. Whilst many of them are critical of Chabad and their activities, they do acknowledge that Chabad fills the ‘gaps’ in and outside the Jewish Community of Helsinki, predominantly by creating new activities for some of its members.

The demand for Christianity: vicarious religion?

ABSTRACT While conservative nationalism and Christianity go hand in hand in the majority of Eastern European countries, in Estonia, a form of vicarious religion has emerged. Christianity is expected to preserve cultural identity, values, norms, and customs while remaining detached from national and individual identity. While Grace Davie defined vicarious religion in terms of a Christian minority, in essence, through the ‘on behalf of’ element, our study focuses on the non-Christian majority in Estonia, which is characterised by the ‘expectations of someone else’. Christianity is thus seen primarily as a public good or even as a service, although many are not aware of who should provide that service. Thus, the social situation of Christianity remains suspended between expectations and benefits.

Growth in a context of decline

Churches all over Europe are experiencing decline within a larger context of religious decline. One under-researched field concerns the consequences this decline has at a local organizational level. This article examines congregations experiencing growth in attendance at their regular Sunday worship services, and asks: What has caused growth in attendance among these congregations? What are the consequences of the attendance growth according to parish leadership, staff, committed volunteers and regular churchgoers? The empirical material for the study is interview and observation material from four congregations in the Church of Norway. These congregations have witnessed an increase in attendance of between 15.5% and 31.6% the last five years (2013–2017) compared to the previous five years (2008–2012). The ecclesial ideal in the Church of Norway, as in other national majority churches, has been to balance between “the core congregation” and “the folk church”. However, the Nordic pattern of “belonging without believing” or “believing in belonging” is not as strong as it used to be, and this has made “vicarious religion” more contested within congregations. A more polarized neither-nor understanding of the Sunday service can explain why the studied congregations have been able to grow within a context of decline.

Religious practice in a post-Catholic Ireland: Towards a concept of ‘extra-institutional religion’

This article develops the concept of ‘extra-institutional religion’ to describe how some religiously committed individuals practise religion in a ‘post-Catholic’ Ireland. Rooted in an island-wide study, it describes extra-institutional religion as the practice of religion outside or in addition to the Catholic Church, Ireland’s historically dominant religious institution. As a new concept, extra-institutional religion provides an alternative to the theoretical emphasis on religious individualisation advocated by sociologists of religion and general theorists like Ulrich Beck. It builds on the concepts of British sociologists of religion Grace Davie (‘believing without belonging’ and ‘vicarious religion’) and Abby Day (‘believing in belonging’ and ‘performative religion’). It argues that extra-institutional religion may have application outside Ireland in the mixed religious markets of Europe. Extra-institutional religion also may contribute to wider change by balancing its two structural strengths: its position on the margins, and its continued links with institutional religion.

The Lincoln Letters: A Study in Institutional Change

On Friday 2nd September 2016, The Guardian published an online article entitled ‘Bishop of Grantham first C of E bishop to declare he is in a gay relationship.’ In response, a large quantity of correspondence was sent to the Bishop from members of the public, the vast majority expressing support. In this paper, we set the empirical data contained in the letters themselves within a context of continuing change in both society and the Church of England. We consider the reactions of the Church at the ‘tipping points’ of social change as it seeks to balance its responsibilities as a guardian of ‘truth’ with the need to keep in touch with modern ways of living. A key concept underpinning our analysis will be the notion of ‘vicarious religion’, which deals with the subtle but continuing relationships between the actively faithful and a wider body of more loosely attached adherents.

The Hearing Voices Movement as Postmodern Religion-Making: Meaning, Power, Sacralization, Identity.

Over the past 40 or 50 years, scholars of religion have frequently attempted to use the tools of social science to analyse, describe, and explain the relevance and persistence of religion in the modern world. With the bold predictions of the secularization thesis as their stimuli, many sociologists and anthropologists preferred to focus on the under-explored, marginalized, or otherwise unexpected expressions of religion within those ostensibly secularizing contexts. Such studies have led to an abundance of theories and accompanying terms: "implicit religion," "vernacular religion," "vicarious religion," "lived religion," "popular religion," and "folk religion." Without choosing any one of these, but owing much to their shared-arguably postmodern-themes of commonplace sacrality and personal empowerment, this paper seeks to explore the possibility of the Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) as an example of religion-making. HVM is a growing force of "voice-hearers" from at least 28 countries who have formed user-led networks for activism and mental health recovery. More importantly, it is argued that HVM blends meaning-making, postmodern notions of identity in relation to power structures, and ritual embodiment, resulting in a striking example of sociologist Hans Mol's notion of religion as a sacralizing process.

“Our Community is the Coolest in the World”: Chabad and Jewish Nation-Building in Contemporary Russia

In the early 2000s, the Russian branch of Lubavitch Hasidism embodied in the Federation of Jewish communities of Russia became a self-proclaimed speaker for Russian Jewry. The paper argues that the Federation is a nation-building project which succeeded in constructing a rather limited and imported real religious community as well as a large and amorphous “imagined community” and tries to offer some inclusive agenda for Russian Jewry as a whole. Most importantly, the Federation switched from the traditional lachrymose concept of the Jewish nation, and suffering as a core of Jewish identity, to the idea of Jewish and Russian Jewish success, achievement, and heroism. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the reason for this ideological innovation lies in Lubavitch mentality (part and parcel of which is the concept of miracle and ardent messianism) as well as in surrounding all-Russian trends. The Federation’s success story and development of optimistic memories and narratives has been parallel to Russia’s “rising from its knees.” The cornerstone of the Federation’s victory on the Russian Jewish scene - its effective and continuous alliance with Kremlin - shows the same pattern: on the one side, it follows the traditional Lubavitch path; on the other, it reflects the traditional Russian idea of state-church “symphony” and dependence of the latter on the former. The attitude to Judaism on the part of the Russian Jewry that supports the Federation may be defined as “vicarious religion,” and may be compared to the “light burden” of Orthodoxy undertaken by the majority of Russians.

Jacques Lacan and the Theory of the Religious Subject

Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject is put forward in order to correct what the author calls “the naïve theory of the subject,” which sociologists of religion tend to utilize by default in numerous quantitative sociological studies based on mass surveys and oriented towards obtaining exact, scientific, positivistic knowledge. This article applies Lacan’s three registers—Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—to the religious sphere and demonstrates their potential implications for the sociological analysis of religion. An analysis of the empirical research on Russia’s post-Soviet religious situation reinforces the author’s argument that an uncritical theory of the subject attends only to the superficial layers of the subject, which end up being devoid of actual subjectivity, according to Lacanian logic. The more fundamental layers of the subject, capable of making it “the subject” in the full sense of the word, seem to be completely outside of sociologists’ current field of vision. This critique directs the reader’s attention to the shortcomings of sociological surveys, and the author argues that a more robust understanding of the subject could enrich the sociology of religion, particularly by further developing certain conceptions, such as Grace Davie’s “vicarious religion.”

Reflections on the Shop Windows of the Church of England: Anglican Cathedrals and Vicarious Religion

In order to shed light on the role of modern Anglican cathedrals in England, this article refines Grace Davie’s concept of vicarious religion. Building on Peter Rowe’s thesis that cathedrals are well placed to perform the ‘prior work’ of Ann Morisy’s foundational domain of mission, the article constructs a model which predicts that cathedrals, widely known as the ‘shop windows of the Church of England’, are one dimension of the mechanism by which the passive majority becomes acquainted with and approves of the vicarious religion performed by the active minority. The model may facilitate empirical research around vicarious religion, which has presented methodological challenges, and may have resonance not only for cathedrals but also for the cathedral-like ‘Greater Churches’.

Participatory or Vicarious? When Networked Belonging Challenges Networks of Belonging

Networks of belonging are still, for most people, rooted in offline interactions and identifications. However, online activities nurture new forms of networked belonging that may challenge existing patterns of belonging. People’s relations to organized religion in Europe may throw light on the dynamics. There are, of course, participatory forms of religion but also a ‘vicarious religion’ where the majority let the few active keep the network of belonging on their behalf. What happens when relations to religious sites and access to religious resources are made available in new online forms? The online/offline interfaces of vicarious and participatory religion are explored with four cases within the framework set by the Church of Norway: a ‘net church’, a web site with symbolic resources for religious education of children, a regular congregation, and a meeting place for Norwegians abroad. This leads to a proposed general typology on access to symbolic resources from networked sites, as a stepping-stone for further research on networked belonging and networks of belonging that could be applied to other cultural and social fields than the one on religion.

Religion in the Twenty-First-Century World Society

This article presents the main theoretical approaches to the religious phenomenon: functionalism, constructivism, civil religion, invisible religion, diffused religion, rational choice, vicarious religion, and so on. It is difficult to accumulate empirical data that in general are considered too weak. The state of the art of sociology of religion seems promising because of the presence of new generations of sociologists who are deeply involved in their work. For the future a specific theory on migration mobility is necessary. Another necessity is a wider development of qualitative analysis for a better knowledge of religious dynamics.

The Place of Religion in Public Life: School Ethos as a Lens on Society

The place of religion in the English education system has always been an issue of debate, ever since the establishment of universal schooling around the turn of the 20th Century. Such questions have often focused on the extent to which religion should be viewed as a public or private affair, and hence whether or not it should have a role in state schooling. This article presents qualitative research that examines the role of religion in the ethos of two different schooling models and the associated construction of state institutional space and home/civic space in each. Drawing on Davie’s (2007) concept of ‘vicarious religion’, the article highlights the continued presence of certain types of religious and spiritual manifestations in the public sphere. In so doing, it contributes to wider debates about secularization and the role of religion in modern liberal democracies.

Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique

The Christian churches have considerably declined in popularity, power, and prestige over the twentieth century in Britain and Europe. This decline has stimulated many attempts to characterise the attitudes towards religion of people who are neither involved with organised religion nor consciously opposed to it. Grace Davie has founded one such effort on the concept of ‘vicarious religion’. The idea of vicarious religion rests on two principles: that a minority of people are religious on behalf of a silent majority and that those in the majority appreciate their efforts. We agree that examples of the phenomenon can be found, but we question whether popular sympathy for religion provides evidence for this conjecture. We review the various illustrations provided by Davie and offer alternative readings that seem more plausible. We also argue that the trajectory of change in marginal religious involvement seriously weakens its ability to diminish the evidence of secularisation.

Vicarious Religion: A Response

This is a postprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion © 2010 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Journal of Contemporary Religion is available online at http://www.informaworld.com

Trends in Religious Affiliation: Some Reflections on the Research of Geert Driessen

Reflecting on Driessen's contribution to this volume, the author tries to probe trends in religious affiliation as described by Driessen, and to raise questions for further research. These religious trends are discussed mainly from the perspective of education and the social significance of religion. The former is of interest, the author argues, in view of the fact that all respondents are young parents of primary school children, while the latter perspective helps to explain the increase in the number of Muslims in relation to their socio-economic deprivation. The author tentatively concludes that these trends in religious affiliation probably reflect a religious transformation in the direction of vicarious and ethnic religion.

Is Europe an Exceptional Case?*

A number of factors must be taken into account if we are to understand the place of religion in twenty-first-century Europe. (1) These include the legacies of the past, more particularly the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; an awareness that these churches still have a place at particular moments in the lives of modern Europeans, even though they are no longer able to discipline the beliefs and behavior of the great majority of the population; an observable change in the churchgoing constituencies of the continent, which operate increasingly on a model of choice, rather than a model of obligation or duty; and the arrival in Europe of groups of people from many different parts of the world, notably the global South, with very different religious aspirations from those seen in the host societies. Each of these factors will be taken in turn in order to answer the question set out in the title: is Europe an exceptional case in terms of its patterns of religious life? The answer leads in turn to more questions. If we conclude that Europe is indeed exceptional, why is this so? Or, conversely, why not? And what can we say about the future? Will Europe continue within the trajectory set by its past or will it become more like the patterns found elsewhere ? Or--it must be asked--will the rest of the world become more like Europe? Cultural Heritage Two points are important in relation to the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; the Christian tradition is indeed a crucial element in the evolution of Europe, but it is by no means the only one. O'Connell identifies three formative factors or themes in the creation and re-creation of the unity that we call Europe: Judeo-Christian monotheism, Greek rationalism, and Roman organization. (2) These factors shift and evolve over time, but their combinations can be seen in forming and reforming a way of life that we have come to recognize as European. The religious strand within such combinations is self-evident. One example will suffice: the Christian tradition has had an irreversible effect on the shaping of time and space in this part of the world. Both week and year, for instance, follow the Christian cycle, even if the major festivals are beginning to lose their resonance for large sections of the population. Or to put the same point in a different way, we have had heated debates in parts of Europe about whether or not to shop on Sundays. We do not, for the most part, consider Friday an issue in this respect--though this may change. The same is true of space. Wherever you look in Europe, there is a predominance of Christian churches, some of which retain huge symbolic value. This is not to deny that in some parts of Europe (notably the larger cities) the skyline is becoming an indicator of growing religious diversity. Europe is changing, but the legacies of the past remain deeply embedded in both the physical and cultural environment. Vicarious Religion Physical and cultural presence is one thing; a hands-on role in the everyday lives of European people quite another. Commentators of all kinds agree that the latter is no longer a realistic aspiration for the historic churches of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the churches have entirely lost their significance as markers of religious identity. In my own work, I have explored this continuing ambiguity through the concept of vicarious religion. (3) By vicarious, I mean the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing. The first half of the definition is relatively straightforward and reflects the everyday meaning of the term--that is, to do something on behalf of someone else (hence the word vicar). The second half is more controversial and is best explored by means of examples. …

From Obligation to Consumption: A Framework for Reflection in Northern Europe

The following article is concerned with the changing nature of religion in Northern Europe. It considers first the concepts of "believing without belonging" and "vicarious religion," pointing out the limitations of each and drawing extensively on previously published work. The following section discusses in more detail a shift that is currently taking place—that is from forms of religion that are imposed or inherited to forms of religion that are primarily chosen. Particular attention is paid to the implications of these changes for the rites of passage. The final section reflects on the theological consequences of these changes, first with a more detailed discussion of notion of vicariousness and second by examining the complex relationship between the public and the private in religious life. It argues that forms of religion that are chosen rather than inherited have implications for the public as well as the private sphere. They are ill-served by an over-rigorous application of the concept of privatization.