Posted: December 2, 2024   •   Posted in: Discussions, Essay

Some Categories to Explore Religion

Reaction, Accommodation and Resistance

Whenever we wish to explore, research or evaluate a large or a complex institution, it helps if we are clear as to where we start from. Do we know our ‘research question”? Did we have a hypothesis which we wanted to check or was there simply an intuition? Recently, I remembered a trio of words which I had once borrowed from Charles Elliott* when I was researching aspects of education, they were reaction, accommodation and resistance. Elliott had used them to describe some characteristics of religion and I now borrow them again to use them as tools to make some distinctions within religion.

Religion of Reaction

So, a Religion of Reaction might be seen as one holding to a conservative gospel of personal salvation and individual sanctification through a strict code of life, prohibition of alcohol, modesty of dress and language, strict sexual ethics, hard work, and a view of male headship of family. An intimate knowledge of an inerrant bible which could be relied upon to guide the industrious reader through all life’s critical choices of action. Members might typically fear that political and moral power are on the wane and fear all questioning of authority. Wealth would be seen as a touchstone of success. Once the world is seen as one of unbounded opportunity, lack of success is evidence only of moral inadequacy.

Religion of Accommodation

A Religion of Accommodation would be one which adapts itself to the prevailing secular ethos, often seeking to Christianize those secular fashions it incorporates. … is tolerant of much that upsets the religion of reaction such as sexual permissiveness, abortion, feminism, biblical critics. Liberal in mind, tolerant and inclusive in temperament it wishes to affirm the world in which it finds itself as something essentially good. It is therefore easy with the powers that be, for it is constitutionally incapable of challenging them at a level deep enough to discomfort them. It will tut over their peccadilloes rather than rage against their injustices.

Religion of Resistance

A Religion of Resistance would be concerned with an analysis of power and authority and concerned that people should have self-respect. While one person is oppressed, we all are. Justice is the driving force behind the Gospel, justice for the poor and the marginalized and, closely allied, is the issue of the role of women. It is concerned about literalism in religion and sees a critical view of language as important: “the linguistic undertaking of the religion of resistance is more fundamental, more self-conscious and a great deal harder. For what is at stake is not just the invention of a new vocabulary or a new theological syntax. What is at stake is the uncovering of the role of everyday language in affecting the way power is distributed and used. Associated with that goes an attempt to change the level of consciousness of a whole culture. One part of the agenda, then, of the religion of resistance is exactly to resist the way in which language is used to legitimate abuses of power by those who oppress others.”

“…the single most significant implication of these studies is that religious consciousness comes alive when it
responds to the realities of the people; when…it seeks to meet the needs that no other institution or system is
meeting – or is capable of meeting.”

A Catholic nun running a tool loan shop: “My task is to give these people enough self-respect to start
questioning the structures that oppress them.”

Afterword

I offer these terms not as boxes in which to put religions or sects but as tools – tools which can be used
elsewhere. I have used them to examine aspects of secondary education, but might they well be used, for
example, to evaluate the charities which we support or, of course, even self examination?

David M Lambourn (Beccles Quakers)

*Much in this piece is taken from Charles Elliott (1989) Sword and Spirit: Christianity in a Divided World, BBC