Ritual

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Ritual

Since the 1960s, Americans have become more self-conscious about the importance of ritual in their lives. This increased awareness has led to new forms of ritual practice as well as to new appreciation of traditional forms.

Rituals are deliberately performed, repeatable acts that give structure to human life. They organize the flow and interactions of daily life. They also define important events, both for individual lives and for the communities and societies in which individuals live. Thus rituals define the growth of social institutions, changes in public leadership, and social responses to natural catastrophe as well as birth, adulthood, marriage, and death. To a significant extent, people express their humanity and define both their personal and their social identities through ritual.

Religious Ritual

Religious rituals engage people in the life of a religious community and its beliefs. Through religious rituals, people learn about the meaning of religious life and come to experience what is sacred for them, both as individuals and as members of a religious community. Religious rituals are deliberately performed, repeatable acts in which people enact and embody the beliefs of their religious communities. As a result of participating in these religious actions, people often find themselves uplifted, cleansed, and healed. Thus religious rituals lead to powerful experiences in which people find deeper meaning in life and find their ordinary lives enlarged and transformed.

Because of the powerful effects that religious rituals can have, some scholars have seen ritual as the foundational element of religion. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965; original French, 1912), the French founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim, argued that religion originated in group rituals that established social identity and social cohesion among primitive peoples. In Durkheim's view, priests and other religious leaders created myths about God to explain the exhilarating power that people experienced during these rituals. As Durkheim understood it, God was actually an idealization of society, and the power that people attributed to him was actually the power of the group. By virtue of this relationship between God and society, Durkheim believed, the rituals associated with God served as means of inculcating social identity and enforcing social structure.

While Durkheim's work has contributed to awareness of the power that rituals have to coerce social conformity, the writings of Arnold Van Gennep, Victor Turner, and Mircea Eliade have contributed to awareness of the importance of religious ritual for deepening and savoring the meaningfulness of life. These writings have contributed to greater appreciation of ritual in American popular culture since the 1960s, as well as to many scholarly efforts to understand the nature and effect of ritual in other cultures.

A contemporary and compatriot of Durkheim's, Van Gennep studied ceremonial rites practiced in a variety of different cultures. He argued that initiation, defined as a rite of passage from one social group, emotional state, and religious condition to another, was the most important element of religious ritual and that it was present in other types of ritual, including rites of birth, marriage, and death, as well as in more explicitly initiatory rites defining adulthood and religious responsibility. Since the 1960s, when his work first became available in English, Van Gennep's work has contributed to greater understanding of the universal importance of rites of passage, not only within the fields of sociology, anthropology, and religious studies but also in American culture more generally. In its discussion of the ritual dimensions of the life cycle that many Americans go through, Gail Sheehy's Passages (1976) is one example of the popularization of Van Gennep's work.

Building on Van Gennep's analysis of rites of passage, the British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner focused on the state of liminality, or unstructured in-betweenness, that participants in these rites experience as part of their passage to a new state of life. Turner developed his theories through fieldwork study of the Ndembu tribe in Zambia and, after moving to the United States in the 1960s, applied them to many different forms of ritual process, including those associated with American hippie culture. Turner argued that in the liminal state, initiates were lowly, without any real status, and dependent on guides and mentors for basic instruction. At the same time, they were also perceived as being directly in touch with sacred powers of transformation and thus imbued with a kind of holiness, as a result of a temporary existence outside the structures of society. Turner discovered that people in this state of liminality enjoyed an extraordinary kind of egalitarian fellowship with one another, which he called communitas.

Turner's theories of ritual process, liminality, and communitas have attracted considerable attention, not only among scholars of religion but also among organizational leaders interested in strategies of effective socialization. In the 1990s, for example, in at least one American Catholic university, first-year undergraduates were recruited for weekend retreats based on Turner's theories. During these retreats, students were led through a ritual process in which they bonded with one another, depended on spiritual leaders for guidance, and then returned to the normal routine of college life with greater discipline and an increased sense of both personal and social responsibility.

The Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade taught at the University of Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s and, during those years, exerted as much influence on the growing field of religious studies as anyone. Like Turner, Eliade drew from Van Gennep's work on initiation rites and their importance for religious life. But unlike Turner, Van Gennep, and Durkheim, all of whom focused on the relationship between ritual and social structure, Eliade was primarily interested in the patterns of subjective experience in which participants in initiation rites were immersed. In traditional religious cultures around the world, Eliade believed, initiates reenacted the creation myths of their cultures and found themselves, as he put it, "in illo tempore," at the beginning of time. Through initiation rites that recapitulated the process of world creation, Eliade believed, initiates were swallowed up in sacred time and in the cosmic events described in origin myths.

Eliade was harshly critical of modern life, which he regarded as a deliberate, destructive effort to desacralize the world. At the same time, he believed that opportunities for immersion in the sacred still existed in modern society and encouraged inventive efforts to rediscover it. Largely through his extraordinary influence on the field of religious studies, Eliade helped to inspire many practical efforts to refocus and even reinvent religious life. For example, his influence can be seen in Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark (1982), which offers guidelines that readers can use to create their own Neopagan rituals.

Sacramentalism in American Culture

During the same decades that Americans became interested in ideas about ritual based on the work of Van Gennep, Turner, and Eliade, Catholic attitudes toward ritual came to exert unprecedented influence on American culture. Deep investment in the rituals of the Catholic Church, and especially in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, characterized most American Catholics who, in many other respects, were often quite different from one another. Unlike many Protestants who rejected the idea that the Eucharist was itself a means of grace, Catholics believed that Christ was present in the sacrament and united himself with participants through it. While American culture before the 1960s was strongly influenced by Protestant tendencies to regard many forms of religious ritual as superstitious practices or merely formalistic shows of faith, as Catholics joined the middle class in increasing numbers after World War II, Catholic tendencies to appreciate ritual as the centerpiece of religious life became an increasing part of mainstream American culture. Catholic reverence for ritual, along with a more general Catholic readiness to perceive God's presence in the world, has contributed to increased appreciation of ritual in the broader culture of the United States.

Catholic influence in American religious life has also increased as a result of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, during which the Catholic Church officially opened its doors to the modern world. Since Vatican II, many American Catholics have expressed enthusiasm for liturgical vitality and innovation and also for better understanding of the ritual practices of other religious groups. Since the 1960s, Catholics have helped to inspire liturgical reform in several Protestant denominations in the United States. They have also led the way in establishing ecumenical dialogues with Hindus and Buddhists that have promoted respect for eastern meditation practices as potential aids to Christian worship. In combination with feminist interest in rituals that celebrate natural life, and feminist rejection of the patriarchal structures of the Catholic Church, innovative forms of Catholic sacramentalism may also have contributed to enthusiasm for alternative religious rituals associated with the Goddess and Mother Earth.