Our Search for Belonging by Howard J. Ross

Author:Howard J. Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2018-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Religion as Identity

Identity is formed both socially and historically. We learn about ourselves through social comparison (“We are not them”) and through interactions with our family, our friends, and the various organizations and institutions that we are part of. Our social and cultural identities are intricately linked to our interpretations of the experiences we have, the people we engage with, and the things we are exposed to, as well as dynamics of power, ideology, and values. They give us our internal “book of rules” to operate from, and they create expectations among others as to who we are. They include a language that we use, and as Lera Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has found, our language actually creates the way we think.16

How do we sense ourselves? We do so through an internal language that allows us to conceptualize who were are, and also how we are feeling in relationship to others. Because we think in language, we can only conceptualize ourselves in the context of what that language allows. Boroditsky offers this example:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let’s take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.17

The experience of seeing ourselves and the world is entirely different, depending upon the language we are interpreting it through.

If we look at the United States today, we would have to say that for many people, religion, or being anti-religious, has become more of a matter of identity than it is a matter of sacred beliefs and practices. When I tell somebody that I am Jewish, that doesn’t mean I keep kosher like my mother did, or that I go to synagogue. It is more a statement of how I identify myself. It defines to some degree how I fit into the world around me.

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