Abstract
While contemporary American discourse tends to frame religion as “beliefs,” a closer examination of religious traditions reveals them to be practices—ways of modifying one’s behavior to achieve spiritual goals. Moreover, the recipe for this practice is fairly consistent across religions. This chapter explores that recipe, starting from my own experiences. It differentiates between universalizing and community religions, reviews the legacy of Western bias against the latter and lays out the trajectory of universalizing religions. Through this exploration, the role of beliefs versus practice is elucidated, as well as the differences between the two types of religions in addressing place-based and environmental issues. The chapter concludes with a look at contemporary Native Hawaiian revitalization of traditional religion to address contemporary environmental concerns.
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Notes
- 1.
It must be admitted, he states, that savage religions are in fact opposite to ours: it is an affair of this world, not of the next; their deities are evil, not good; and so on.
- 2.
The term “Community Religions” is not as widely accepted as the more narrow terms “National Religions,” introduced as early as 1882 by Kuenen, or “Ethnic Religions” (see Park 2005), but relieves both of these terms of their specific particularities. That said, the Community Religions project at Leeds uses the term to denote differences in (predominantly) Christianity across different ethnic communities in Britain, so no single term is foolproof.
- 3.
- 4.
Of course, all religions—even “community” ones—can serve to confer legitimacy on relations of power within the society.
- 5.
Weber is quoted in H. C. Greisman “‘Disenchantment of the World’: Romanticism, Aesthetics and Sociological Theory” The British Journal of Sociology, 27/4 (1976): 496–497.
- 6.
Hinduism and Buddhism are particularly overt about this, embracing wide ranges of techniques to suit the needs of different people.
- 7.
I locate Christian priests (and their counterparts in other universalizing religions) as somewhere in between lay people and true adherents. Their renunciation is partial, and their business is still with the worldly.
- 8.
Ling (1980) argues that economic development in Sri Lanka (a predominantly Buddhist country) would proceed more easily if their form of Buddhism became more “Protestant.
- 9.
At the present time, the majority of food in the state (as much as 90%) is imported, arriving by cargo ship. In pre-contact times, the islands may have self-supported a population equally large as today’s.
- 10.
I write this as the coronavirus pandemic approaches its peak.
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Herman, R.D.K. (2021). By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them: Religion as Practice. In: Silvern, S.E., Davis, E.H. (eds) Religion, Sustainability, and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7646-1_2
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