Sacred Canopy

Coined by sociologist of religion Peter Berger, a Sacred Canopy is a religiously-driven common worldview in a community. Where the very literal protective interdiction of St. Christopher on your daily drive, the daily calls to prayer, or a testimony of the Book of Mormon, are all part of a taken-for-granted worldview that seems as natural as the social norm of queuing for a line at the grocery store. 

With very few exceptions like the Amish or Haredim, I don’t think Sacred Canopies really exist anymore in the US. I’ve developed my thoughts on the puncturing of the Sacred Canopy in a SquareTwo article I wrote a few years ago. While behind-the-Zion-curtain, 1990s Utah was one of the last Sacred Canopies in the US, the Internet has pretty thoroughly ripped it, which has its downsides and upsides, but it’s clear that to maintain that kind of taken-for-granted overarching communal sense of the metaphysical requires severely limiting modern media to a degree I’m not comfortable with. 

Collective Effervescence

Classic concept raised by founding father of sociology Emile Durkheim, “Collective Effervescence” refers to moments in societal life when a group of individuals come together in order to perform a religious ritual, communicates in the same thoughts and participates in the same action, which serves to unify the group. “When individuals come into close contact with one another and when they are assembled in such a fashion, a certain ‘electricity’ is created and released, leading participants to a high degree of collective emotional excitement or delirium.” 

In a way we have this as Latter-day Saints, even though our tradition isn’t really a super emotional one. We don’t speak in tongues, clap and praise, call and respond, or shout hallelujah. The rituals we do have that could get in this category: prayer circles, hymns, the Hosannah shouts, and the such, are typically done lackadaisically and formulaically, a far cry from early Endowment participants really getting into their roles and slithering on the ground like the Edenic snake. The ideal sacrament portion of the meeting should be something like this, but again, we tend to be more low-energy in our religious devotions. While some of that might be warranted (I’m not sure how much I could get into shouting hallelujah), we could stand to imbue our sacred rituals with a little more concerted attention and emotion. 

Routinization of Charisma

This is a big one for us. The routinization of charisma is a stage in the formation of religion when the basis of legitimacy shifts from the religious charisma of the founding individual to the legalistic doctrine of the faith. After Buddha died his followers put together the Tripitaka. After Mohammad died, the Quran. We went through this with Joseph Smith as we consolidated our scriptures and moves from a revelation-every-month from a larger-than-life prophet to a religion with structure and systematized rules. This largely follows the pattern of other religions, and is one answer to the question of why we don’t see canonized revelations or radical new doctrines at nearly the same cadence we did back in the day, even though modern-day prophets have the same prophetic office as Smith. 

Plausibility Structures 

Another big one for us. Plausibility structures are when a religious belief seems more plausible because a society and culture supports it. As Latter-day Saints we run into this in a number of ways. We often get jeers about “magic rocks” and “magic underwear” from people who believe in talking donkeys or that God will condemn you to an eternity of unspeakable torture because you marked the wrong box on an esoteric question about the metaphysics of the trinity. (One reason why the rock in a hat thing was hard for some people was that for whatever reason it wasn’t built into our culture like the two Urim and Thummim rocks were, even though the latter isn’t intrinsically any stranger than the former). In a sense this is the function of testimony meetings. By hearing of other people’s belief it provides psychological permission for us to believe the same. 

Disenchantment of the World (Entzauberung):

Disenchantment in this context means that we have replaced magic and supernatural with bureaucracy, science, and legal-rational explanations. For some things this is fine. I like having a weather app on my phone instead of having to importune the Gods every morning for good weather. 

However, in the modern-day Church we refuse to completely take our foot off the other pedal. We can accept the scientific and the enchantment. We go to the doctor and we believe that a healing blessing can actually provide added healing that would not have happened without it. Sometimes it’s hard to hold these two things in our hand at once as we’re constantly shifting between what’s what. We carve out little exceptions for God’s involvement in the natural course of things, but sometimes wonder what’s essentially another faith promoting rumor that went a few steps farther. 

However, while it might be tempting to completely disenchant the world, maybe see it as the logical conclusion of the path that started when we started mapping disease outbreaks, the end of that road is a cold and sterile scientism. My main complaint about people who claim to have taken disenchantment to its ultimate conclusion is that they haven’t really. They still get angry at people who supposedly have no free will, and I still see a little glimmer of enchanted light in their step and eye even if they only claim to believe we’re a mass of atoms.    

The Sacred vs. The Profane: 

“Profane” here doesn’t mean something bad necessarily, like profanity. Rather, it simply means not set apart or holy, everyday, quotidian. I don’t have much more to comment on this that I haven’t already discussed in a previous post. 

Religious Economy 

Founded and developed by Rodney Stark (my T&S obituary for him here), this is the sociology of religion perspective that assumes that religious demand is more or less constant, but sees the religious landscape essentially as a matter of religious supply provided by competing firms. I’m not sure about the former premise; I do think disenchantment does substantively shift the demand curve, but there is still a lot of predictive gain to be had from analyzing religion from a supply-side, economic perspective. 

So on that note, what is our niche, our comparative advantage that nobody else serves in the market? The scriptures stated various times that the Lord has a very particular, peculiar people who hear his voice and whose numbers are few. I doubt we’ll ever be the NVIDIA or Amazon of religion, where we fill in a much needed gap that the whole world craves, and we’re in a position to completely dominate the global market. (If God wanted us to dominate the world market I can think of a thing or twenty in our history that He would have had go differently.) We’ll always be the niche software supplier servicing a peculiar clientele.