Why do people worship?

Note: The following is an essay originally written for Professor Michael Pasquier's Reli 3010 (Religion in the Americas) class during the Spring 2010 semester. Date of creation: May 9, 2010. If referring to this essay academically, please remember to make the appropriate citations so as to avoid running afoul of your institution's plagiarism policy. I have misplaced my "works cited" information for this essay, and will edit this post with that data as soon as possible.

Why do people worship? To what aspect of human nature does it appeal? Ideologies and beliefs evolve and change over time; is this the hand of a god at work, or is this simply the manifestation of cultural drift, caught in a reciprocal relationship with the church? Questions arise when one closely studies religion and faith, but sometimes more importantly, it becomes apparent that inquiries such as these are irrelevant. What is relevant is interaction, not between man and his god, but between man and his church, and how this relationship informs his interactions with his church, his state, and his fellow man. "What is god?" is not important; "What does man perceive god to be?" is. Perhaps one of the most important things which religion has to offer is a shared culture. Christianity, in particular, has been praised for its inclusiveness and the manner in which it builds a new community, not based upon ethnicity or bloodline, but upon common ideals and beliefs; even denominationalism allows for smaller, more cohesive groups to form (it should be noted that, in the American South, this inclusiveness rarely extends to homosexuals, political liberals, or those who fail to conform to a social norm, although there is positive social change in this arena). What religion does is allow for communal groups to coalesce, allowing communities in diaspora to retain a unified culture which binds them together, even if their homeland is no longer extant, and new groups to form around new causes, when the old banners fall and humanity's darker natures, warlust and enslavement, come to the fore.

In Rebuilding the Temple: Cambodians in America, the narrator highlights how the temple of Angkor provided more than just spiritual solace and teaching: they were village schools, shelter for travelers and those without homes, a center of social as well as spiritual life. Prior to the late 20th century, the temple contained all that was needed to meet all the needs of the people, not merely a church, but a town hall and a second home. In 1970, the United States began bombing areas of Cambodia as part of its campaign against Korea, allowing for fanatical guerilla movement Khmer Rouge to begin their own seige of terrorism to eradicate all vestiges of Cambodian culture and heritage, leading to the deaths of one out of every seven Cambodians before the end of Pol Pot's monstrous siege. Arn Chorn recounts that there were four nonconsecutive execution incidents daily during the occupation, saying, "I couldn't sleep at night because blood all over everywhere, on the temple wall, too." Dith Pran reveals that their iconoclasm inevitably resulted in the loss of holy sites, as they were embodiments not merely of spiritual belief, but of the Cambodian culture that Pol Pot sought to exterminate: "The Khmer Rouge destroyed all the temples. They killed or disrobed all the monks." Pran's narrative is echoed in Rithipol Yem, who states, "What Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was trying to do is to eliminate everything Cambodian and create a new civilization. They destroyed our religion, they destroyed our philosophy, they destroyed our schooling system, they destroyed our monetary system, they destroyed the market, they destroyed every institution existed in Cambodia. They wiped out everything that we used to have." The Khmer Rouge were highly successful in their monstrous endeavors, and their efforts were made less difficult by the fact that many of these social institutions were bound up in the spiritual center.

Still, Pran indicates that the Cambodians persevered: "The people still believed inside the heart. We believe that no one can change our culture." This attack upon traditional Cambodian ideals is not restricted to the military junta of their homeland, however. Yem goes on to say that "It's hard to be a good Buddhist in [America]," citing a fundamental difference between the Buddhist path of gentility, compassion, and wisdom, and the harsh competitive world that the Cambodians are exposed to by American society, evinced in advertisements and other media. To preserve their heritage, they seek to build a new temple in America, one which can become a center of devotion and cultural unity, and function as a beacon of Cambodian Buddhism. "Buddhism survive then the culture survive [sic]," states Maha Ghosananda. "Cambodian culture is Buddhist culture." Boay Bou elaborates: "We’re afraid that we’re losing our culture, our traditions….our Cambodian identity. If we have a temple it will help us to preserve our traditions and our identity. But if we can’t have a temple, that’s it. Our culture will die out." For many, religion may offer solace in loss, encouraging perseverance despite setbacks and unfortunate incidents; for the 140,000 Cambodian refugees living in America, religious belief is an important and integral part of ensuring cultural distinction and retaining a heritage that could easily dissipate if not properly maintained. Thus the creation of a temple, even if it is temporary and consists of nothing more than an apartment in a larger complex and not a free standing structure, becomes incredibly important and significant: the "rebuilding" of the temple need not necessitate construction or physical labor, it refers to the recreation of a cultural center, in a new form, in a new land.

Often, this need for retention is paired with concerns that the next generation will, in the presence of other, stronger cultures, allow tradition to fade with successive generations. In Rebuilding the Temple, Kassie Neou states "[Embracing the culture of a society which takes in refugees] doesn’t mean that they have abandoned Buddhism. But some do, some do. Our younger generation will do. I think my kids will do." A century earlier in the defeated Confederacy, religion played a role in the reunification of a defeated people. Symbolically, the loss of the Civil War was conflated with the persecution of Christ, and the "heroes" of the war were memorialized via common canonization, complete with their own Passion plays and devotionary statuary. Interestingly, these displays were usually aimed at children (Wilson 229); it would appear that the defeated southerners have a vested interest in ensuring that their offspring do not allow ancestral beliefs to fade. For the Cambodians, this is manifest in the reasonable fear that their children will become fully assimilated and forsake tradition; for the southerners, they perceived the Union as an occupying force, attempting to instill undesirable values into the next generation. It is not merely enough for the culture to survive, it must ensure its ongoing continual survival in the face of whatever oppression presents itself, be it a religion with greater numbers and higher social conformity pressures or apathy in one's progeny. Memorialization plays a substantial role in this. Ancestor worship is not a tenet of Orthodox Buddhism; its presence in Cambodian Buddhism bespeaks to Cambodia's Hindu past, and it is not entirely dissimilar to the reverence for dead heroes exemplified in holidays and celebrations like Confederate Memorial Day. Just as the Cambodian people had been decimated, so too had the south been roundly defeated on multiple levels: politically, they had lost the war; spiritually, their theological conceptions and earnest belief in inevitable victory had been shattered; and as a community, they "feared that the defeat of the Confederacy had jeopardized their continued existence as a distinctively southern people" (232), and their realization that, even though there were terrible losses on both sides of the conflict, they did not have the comfort of having been victorious.

Though they were not dispersed in a foreign land, southerners were no less in need of a great unifier which would allow them to make sense of their broken worldviews, and the civil religion of the south emerged to meet that need. A new religious narrative took form, and even though the participants did not worship the Confederacy, pulpits quickly became places where one could expect to hear Lost Cause tenets: "southern religious journals, books, and even pulpits were the sources of Lost Cause sentiments" (234-235), and "southern churches proved to be important institutions for the dissemination of the Lost Cause" (235). Here, one can see another similarity to the Cambodian refugees: the spiritual center functioning as more than a springboard for theological learning, but as an important and vital part of community life, once again showing that religion can play a crucial role in the continued unity of a community, especially when it is allowed to combine with aspects of the culture which fall outside of the realm of those things which are commonly considered "religious."

All too frequently, students make reference to an "African culture," as if the entire continent were one homogenous body. This is patently false; European slave traders may have overlooked distinct differences between numerous tribes, clans, and nations, but these distinctions were present. One of the more peculiar aspects of the civil religion of the Lost Cause is that it transcended denominational boundaries (234), as the deification of Jefferson Davis and "Stonewall" Jackson was embraced by virtually all Christians, regardless of sectarian alliance. Similarly, tribal and cultural boundaries were cast aside in the genesis of the folk religion of southern slave descendants. Historian John Butler called the violent uprooting and transplantation of Africans to the Americas for use as sentient beasts of burden a "spiritual holocaust," a statement not without strong base. Nearly omnipresent in any narrative of an escaped or freed slave is the horrifying practice of dividing families at the auction block, as children are taken from their parents and siblings so his or her skills can be utilized by another slave holder. No attempts were made to keep slave families together, and even less importance was placed on tribal ties. All but the smallest of vestiges of tribal culture were burned away, to be replaced with folk tales and fables built on a backbone of distinctly non-African Christianity.

Like both the Cambodians and the defeated postbellum south, the slaves sought a unifying concept which would allow them agency in some culture and community, even if they were helpless against the more pervasive culture. Like the Cambodians, the slaves were in diaspora, but while the Khmer Rouge had overtly destroyed the temples of Angkor and polarized the refugees such that they strove even harder to retain their heritage, the loss of tribal custom and tradition that resulted from slave trading does not seem to be considered at all, a collateral effect which, unforeseen, resulted in an even more disruptive kind of iconoclasm. Their folk religion's origins are actually more similar to those of the Lost Cause theology, as both are newly created cultures with links to the past. The south, having been defeated in what it saw as a holy war, re-oriented its mythology and culture to venerate the Confederate dead and veterans in an attempt to create a new legacy in the face of northern "oppression" by co-opting more overt religious symbology (most notably the aforementioned statuary, as well as stained glass windows depicting scenes both religious and contemporaneous to the war). In the same vein, the descendants of slaves had created a narrative which praised cleverness over hard work, told of folk heroes who directly interacted with both god and the devil, and romanticized the relationship between master and slave, as seen in the interactions between Ole Massa and trickster archetype John.

This reinterpretation of the past is a part of what makes religion such a powerful unifier. Whereas the southerners' historical revisionism deified those who had fought for the Cause, so too do the folk tales of African Americans alter perception of the past so as to allow for future healing. The topics of their fables range broadly, but the most intriguing thing about them is that they incorporate aspects of the religion presented to them upon their arrival in the New World as well as half-remembered pieces of ancestral lore, which still helps to unify them as a people. Distinctions between different tribes and traditions serve only to be torn down in their own kind of iconoclasm, as an entirely new tribe emerged: not Kenyan or Sudanese, but African American, a broad term which at once indicates a loss of the cultural identity that varied tribally, as well as creating a new homeland and a new people. The manner in which the new and the old coalesce can perhaps best be seen in the story of "How the Lion Met the King of the World," in which John wrestles with a bear, a mammal species all but unknown in Africa, then with a lion, an animal completely unknown in the New World outside of zoos (Hurston 132). A narrative with aspects of the homeland, and aspects of the new home, unifying.

Why do people worship? Obviously, religious devotion allows one to experience a greater unity with others of the same culture (even if that culture is an entirely new creation), and bolsters community survival. In the case of the Cambodians, this means the necessity for rebuilding the temple, to provide a link to a much older culture in danger of disappearing. For the defeated postbellum South, this meant the creation of a new set of beliefs and practices to combat the sense of loss, not just of sovereignty, but of the comfort of believing one had the moral high ground. For the "liars" interviewed by Zora Neale Hurston, their narrative fell somewhere in between, combining faint shadows of cultural memory with newly fabricated fables, resulting in a new culture which is not homogenous (see how the different interviewees argue about the supposed canon and truth of the stories, retelling them with slight changes), but which does provide for a greater show of unity than hundreds of diffuse traditions would.