Alleluia by Don Swenson

Author:Don Swenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498546645
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 5

The Dilemma of Delimitation

A Study of Ethics within the Alleluia Community

Orientation

This chapter charts another path into the domain of religion—the study of ethos in general and religious morality in particular. The information for this pathway are the documents, the qualitative and quantitative data of Alleluia used in previous chapters.

The theory and review of the scientific study of religion has led me to argue that the genesis of religion is in social and personal religious experience followed by the construction of a belief system to explain that experience. Believers socially construct rituals to continue that experience through their life courses and to pass it on to succeeding generations. Thereafter, religious organizations emerge for the maintenance, framing, or being carapaces and housing of religious experiences, belief systems, and rituals.

Within these organizations is another numeniferious1 path which Geertz (1973) calls ethos. One may see this as a cluster of behavioral codes including values, norms, morals, and laws. Anthropologists and sociologists have referred to values as providing a general orientation to life while norms outline specific kinds of behavior. Another way in which we may look at norms is to consider them as “the rules or standards that govern interaction.” A particular species of a norm is what Sumner (1906), a founder of American sociology, terms the more that has the authority of facts. Mores, or moral codes, carry more weight and channel human behavior according to effects: rewards for conformity and punishments for disobedience. Laws are specific norms and mores that a state or societal authority codifies.

The cultural analyst Robert Wuthnow (1987) adds another important element to an understanding of morality: the provision for social order in a society. This recalls Durkheim, who also saw morality as a basis of social solidarity. In religious circles, these mores have even more of an impact because they carry with them some sort of sacred approbation and legitimacy. A popular term to describe them is an ethic, and a collection of ethics in an ethical system. For example, as in the case of the ten commandments of Judaism, conformity means long life and prosperity and disobedience connotes suffering, a shortened life and poverty (see Deuteronomy 28).

Like any belief system, ritual, and organization, the purpose of the ethical or moral system is to channel and to keep believers close to the original religious experience, the pristine charismatic moment. This we may call the spirit of the law. To enable a moral code to be operative in people’s lives, a process of delimitation is necessary. Delimitation refers to a provision of limits to a fluid and illusive religious experience that functions to specify human behavior as closely as possible to religious experience. Further, in the process, elaboration frequently results.

O’Dea (1966) explains it in the following way. In the process of applying the religious ideal to “the prosaic and concrete, the content of the message may itself appear to take on a prosaic quality and lose those charismatic elements that originally moved men.” There is a drop off

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