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Sacred Canopy<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n With very few exceptions like the Amish or Haredim, I don\u2019t think Sacred Canopies really exist anymore in the US. I\u2019ve developed my thoughts on the puncturing of the Sacred Canopy in a <\/span>SquareTwo<\/em> article<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019s 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\u2019m not comfortable with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Collective Effervescence<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n Classic concept raised by founding father of sociology Emile Durkheim, <\/span>\u201c<\/span>Collective Effervescence”<\/span><\/a> 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 \u2018electricity\u2019 is created and released, leading participants to a high degree of collective emotional excitement or delirium.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In a way we have this as Latter-day Saints, even though our tradition isn\u2019t really a super emotional one. We don\u2019t 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\u2019m 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Routinization of Charisma<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n 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. <\/span>This largely follows the pattern of other religions, and is one answer to the question of why we don\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Plausibility Structures\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n 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 \u201cmagic rocks\u201d and \u201cmagic underwear\u201d 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\u2019t built into our culture like the two Urim and Thummim rocks were, even though the latter isn\u2019t intrinsically any stranger than the former). In a sense this is the function of testimony meetings. By hearing of other people\u2019s belief it provides psychological permission for us to believe the same.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Disenchantment of the World (Entzauberung):<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> we believe that a healing blessing can actually provide added healing that would not have happened without it. Sometimes it\u2019s hard to hold these two things in our hand at once as we\u2019re constantly shifting between what\u2019s what. We carve out little exceptions for God\u2019s involvement in the natural course of things, but sometimes wonder what\u2019s essentially another faith promoting rumor that went a few steps farther.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019re a mass of atoms.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Sacred vs. The Profane:\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n \u201cProfane\u201d here doesn\u2019t mean something bad necessarily, like profanity. Rather, it simply means not set apart or holy, everyday, quotidian. I don\u2019t have much more to comment on this that I haven\u2019t already discussed <\/span>in a previous post.\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Religious Economy\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n