The Connection between Religion and Collective Action

Posted by Olly Hudson on March 23rd, 2020

Religion is a profound social and political complex involving not only the way people think about the supernatural or religious consciousness but also the actually existing religious actions and organizations. Religious relations are not only people's attitudes to the idea of God but also a kind of relationship between people. Religious relations form the basis for a bifurcated nature of religious activities. Activities of the believers are aimed at the actual report to meet the real needs (man prays to God or the gods for the harvest, the health, success in business, etc.). The person’s activities may also be directed at the supernatural world to meet the notions of the afterlife and so on. These relationships are formed under the influence of religious ideas in the arrangement of religious systems. Religious relations unfold in real life, but they implement standards and guidelines applied by a religious worldview. Being deeply interconnected, religion and collective actions insensibly reflect each other although religion has a broader spectrum of influence and purpose.

The main means of meeting the religious needs is a religious cult – a complex of religious activities in the form of various rites and ceremonies connected with the individual’s attitude towards the supernatural. The purpose of religious activities is the impact on the other world. A religious cult is the outward form of religion. These are the religious cults that the everyday religious consciousness distinguishes one religion from another. The participation in religious actions gives a person an opportunity to form his/her opinions about the religious rights of another person. The peculiarity of worship is its emotional richness, which means the involvement of different kinds of art, and elements of deeply religious activities. They become a part of everyday life and habits of people who are engaged in the religious way of life. Cult includes all types of activities related to religious and magical beliefs, rites, rituals, sacrifices, sacraments, worship, prayer, mysteries, posts, and material items that are used for the rituals. It also includes temples, shrines, religious items, clothing, etc. The believers follow the religion through cult actions that allow them to constantly renew and reinforce religious attitude. The common worship of religious unity is the basis of a religion. This, being the most conservative element of religion, worship does not change and secures intervening with national traditions. In addition, it creates rack habits that can persist for a long time even when the religious system that spawned them exists no longer. Some of them associate individual religious act solely with the performance of the ritual religion. Their religious life is limited merely by an outward expression and delineated by the walls of the religious community building. This indicates a rather low level of religiosity of these people. Others understand their religious life as an active personal action and associate it primarily with individual religious practice and the religious vocation.

Religious actions of such people are primarily oriented to the reproduction of the principles of God's existence on the background of private life. It is not shelled in the temple service because it aims not just to forward the consciousness of God to the individual level but also to become a full part of it. For this type of believer, it is important to learn to think in the context of divine consciousness and to correlate the actions with the context of religious teachings or commandments system as a regulator of human behaviors and motivations. Religious acts of a person can be represented as a series of actions that are arranged in a system since they are directed at achieving the common goal - to reflect in the plans the individual being of a religious ideal. In turn, this manifests itself in a kind of withdrawal in human behavior inherent to this ideal norms, values, and meanings. Since man is primarily a social being, his/her religious action, despite the fact that it concerns all his/her individual existence, bears social pressure as human’s behavior affects relationships between people in the surrounding social environment.

The communication between the believers occurring on the basis of the unity of religious beliefs and cult gives rise to the formation of religious organizations, the operation of which is constantly renewing world religions. The stabilization of the beliefs and cults takes place within religious organizations. Religious ceremonies were originally collective actions. Therefore, in the process of their implementation, the relationships between people who took part in them were formed. As a result, a particular religious organization appeared.

The community is the primary association of the faithful who belong to a certain religious direction. Religious individuals unite into a community referring to common recognition of the cultivated and distributed by them faith. As a voluntary association of individuals who wish to meet their religious needs, the community is structurally and organizationally formed directly depending on those religious and doctrinal provisions that are mutually professed by the members of the community. In the process of the historical development, religious organizations acquire different forms. Thus, in the primitive society, the notion of the religious organization coincided with that of the tribal community. One of the features that distinguished one tribe from another was the common administration of the religious cults of the clan or tribe members. The unity of the primitive community introduced common religious myths, beliefs and rituals.Even in terms of tribal societies, the social group of people beginning to act more vividly and actively played an important role. As a result, the cult caused the emergence of its professional ministers who gradually monopolized religious action and became an influential social community, which composed the top of the tribal society. Eventually, one can notice the appearance of professional religious officials and the separation of the religious organization from the common tribal life.

Faith advocated by the members of the local community determines the type of organizational structure of the community. In the presence of headquarters of the religious direction, this religious community as a voluntary association of its followers should recognize its supremacy over them. Since its inception, such community is automatically included in the overall system and the structure of a particular denomination, and, therefore, possesses only relatively autonomous status within it because it is ideological, organizational, and financially accountable to and dependent on it. In other words, such community is formally a religious entity or the primary religious institution.

Nevertheless, to explain the relationships between religion and collective actions, it should be noted that religious institutions play the role of the main source and place for people to mobilize their minds. Religious institutions supply society with all resources needed for its purposes (money, buildings, members). Here, it is important to mention an outstanding figure of the African-American Civil Rights movement – Marthin Luther King. In people’s minds, King is associated with collective actions. King’s courage to fight for his beliefs and rights could be explained by nothing else but his unbelievable religious faith. By his example, he showed that strong belief and confidence in what one believes could lead to success even if one does not use power, cruelty, and violence. One can notice that the spirit of Christian beliefs was deeply ingrained in him primarily because of the name his father gave him – Martin Luther. His name symbolizes consciousness, bravery, courage, and Christianity. It symbolizes collective action based on religious principles and beliefs. Being a respectful and respected person, King led others without extensive effort. Civil Rights movements headed by Martin Luther were first movers of the collective action that vividly indicated the connection between politics and religion. As a result, in the 1950s, a new direction in the science called Religious Politics appeared, which later gave rise to the occurrence of Political Religion.

The scheme similar to subordination within a particular religious organization usually does not exist outside the institution of professional priests. Within the specific general religious institution, the latter involves installation of a clear hierarchy, the presence of which implements the division of the community members by professional clergy and ordinary believers. In turn, taking the start at the individual local community from a particular priest as its leader, such a hierarchical structure is justified to some extent. First, it provides locally clear subordination of every member of the community to a leader, pastor or supervisor. Secondly, at the level of the whole confession, it provides subordination of every individual community to a central governing body, thereby establishing a complete control of the center over individual communities. Typically, communities of the hierarchical type also advocate the idea of one community’s subordination to another. It can be noticed very clearly in the organizational scheme of traditional Christian confessions. It also should be mentioned that hierarchical type of communities being directed primarily at the subordination and control of local religious center sometimes determines that the number of the members of such communities is significantly different.

Thus, the distance between the believers and the leader determined by the above-mentioned hierarchical division at the local level sometimes leads to the fact that the leader ceases to be open to each member. The leader essentially isolates from the execution of his/her direct responsibilities to be a "shepherd", a preacher of religious teaching to every member of the community. In some confessions, the leader is not able to ensure the most significant thing - ideological religious and spiritual needs of the individual. In turn, implying instability, that is an excessive fluidity of the community membership, this encourages a religious individual to stop identifying himself/herself with the community because the community in his/her imagination is associated with individual priests and their actions.

The second type of religious community is fundamentally opposed to the first one. Organizational scheme of this type of community has its own specifics. First of all, they are self-governed and completely autonomous since management is established at the level of local communities. This eliminates affiliation or subordination of the latter to some senior center. The communities of this type are not as homogeneous as hierarchical type. They can be headed by a specific board, which is elected by the general meeting of the community. These communities can not have a single leader. The right to perform worship, preach to the community, and conduct prayer meetings sometimes moves from one board member to another according to the established schedule. Typically, such structure is inherent in a number of neo-Christian and neo orientational communities.

Religious communities, no matter to what type of organization they belong - hierarchical or democratic, can be split up into subcommunities (numbering only a few people). Thus, the local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses consists of several "clubs" of liturgical literature and study of the Scriptures. The division of the community into separate groups concentrates on the successful fulfillment of the main task - to establish direct contact with each member of the community. Therefore, constantly defining the state of his/her personal religious preparation for the out-of-church' life, one can sustainably control his/her consciousness.

The type of community determines the nature, level, and quality of communication between individual and religious organizations. The confessional affiliation of the community has a considerable impact on this determination. For instance, the link in the communities of Orthodox or Catholics is much weaker than in Protestant or neo-Christian. One way or another, it is the local community as the body cells of a particular religious organization that create the atmosphere, which influences not only overall religious but also a public opinion about the confession and faith advocated by it.

With the emergence of the socially differentiated society, the position of the religious organizations and institutions considerably changes. This is accounted for the advent of state religions. In the early class, societies appeared as temple communities while in more developed social systems, religious communities were combined into a single centralized organization - the church. The church not only possesses a monopoly on religious doctrine but also fulfills certain legal, political and ethical functions. With the flow of time, the church separated from the state and lost its legal functions. This created a situation of "religious pluralism", which provides the existence of legally equal religious organizations that compete with each other.

The direct connection between the religion and collective action can be observed through the example of religion’s main institution – the church. Church is a centralized religious organization, the appearance of which is caused by the centralization of public life. With the emergence of the state, the independent temple organizations remain unchanged. However, the centralized state needs a centralized religious organization; therefore, early class societies show the continuing intense competition between public authorities and the clergy. The efforts of the state to centralize and subjugate religious life cause the resistance on the priest’s behalf. State religion and accordingly, state churches appear. In contrast to the temple organizations, the church is a centralized systematic structure. Monasteries, monastic orders, religious and political parties, educational institutions appear inside of its system and structure.

In addition, religion is a universal ideology. Political and legal interests and views are inherent in everyone, but not every stratum of society is able to understand and express them appropriately as a political theory. On the other hand, religious ideas are known and equally common to all. Accordingly, the social movement in the past acquired a religious form, appeared in the form of religious wars, heretical movement, sectarianism and so on. Religion covered all aspects of human life, and social ideas were generally clear when they acquired religious interpretation.

In conclusion, religion in society does not exist only in the form of ideas, theories and feelings (the religious consciousness) but also as a part of the real relations between people and social institutions. Religion is a strong and effective weapon in any argument. Its rules, principles, and beliefs create an “army” that can be easily controlled by the leader. Accordingly, simple religious meetings primarily aimed at preaching to God transform into collective actions for civil rights, against gender and skin color discrimination, etc. The only problem with such close relations between religion and collective actions is that this weapon can be used for common “good” as well as for common “evil”. Integrally, religion cannot exist without collective action while every gathering for religious purposes is already the collective action. On the contrary, a collective action does not necessarily have to deal with religion and is not dependent on a single aspect only.

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