contributed by Susan Visvanathan, 25 June 2020

Sociologists are famously trained to understand that God/Gods/Goddesses are representations of the societies which acknowledge them. Marcel Mauss believed that when humans forget their Gods, the Gods die. So why is there such intensity of belief?

The existence of God for those who believe is fraught with necessity. The power of God is internalized in the human psyche, as the ideas which embody divinity appear to humans through dreams and revelations. The infant is exposed to them from the moment of birth, and even when born in an atheist family, the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm is understood through the goals which are placed before him/her.

Ideologies can provide the sense of the sacred, human rights can be a charter, moral duties can be presented as transcending good and evil, the right to life, or, as we perceive it, the right to kill are presented as acts arising from consent to a common code.

The very nature of difference is thus presented as oppositional spaces within which the individual has to carve his/her own path. Whether it is food, or marriage, choices of residence, work or friendship, the very nature of agency is presented as the vocabulary of choice. This subjectivity is then mapped into the overt or the covert, depending upon the ability to reveal the groups of which one is a part of.

Surveillance society does not preclude the right to choice, as people know that they are watched, but they still believe they have the freedom of the right to expression and communication. Compulsory military service may be presented as religious goal or secular orientation to citizenship identity.

The world has changed so dramatically since COVID-19 made an appearance that people were able to go into seclusion because it was presented fait accompli. If they did not adhere to the commands of the regulating authority, they could be put to severe punishment, of which ostracism by their own local community was only a minor aspect. It was the cohesiveness brought about by this consent that allowed people to believe that they could edge past the dramatic days of the months of March and April 2020, in several countries worldwide.

Curfew was too strong a word, and people withdrew voluntarily into the inner precincts of their homes, or found that they were interned in spaces which brought them into ultimate danger, as there were no borders or boundaries to keep them in. These then became the internment camps of the migrant workers, who found that they were dependent on state handouts of food and water, which involved standing in long queues. Religious organisations and voluntary organisations began to follow suit.

By the beginning of June 2020, the lockdown began to show its fearsome qualities, as  people realized that the cycles of infection and reinfection were continuing. The pandemic was not going to go away, and like a medieval ogre, it began to stalk populations worldwide, keeping them at home, a Beowulf who would appear only in the signaling systems of defunct health care institutions.

God provides people with a sense of order, of a beginning and an end. When we die, God dies. When we die, the world ends. That was the experience of the world, of the holy, which Sociology was so keen to dismember in the 19^th century.

The very nature of God’s existence depends on a language consistent with a known imagery. The idea of the unknown God is a riddle which is answered through the presence or the manifestation of God. To be present is in some ways a mutual condition, the bestowing of grace.

Joan of Arc is famously known to have said in her testimony that “even if he forgets me, I shall not forget him”. This is the ultimate trope of the believer, that the seeker presents the existence of God as a searching for the Truth.

Poetry, theatre, the novel, art forms, sculpture, architecture, photography and cinematic documentation have all pursued the abstract presence of God. Can we possibly deny the seeker the ultimate form of the mystery realized in words or images? Why should we?

This has surely nothing to do with our own experiential space as seekers of information regarding the religious life of peoples whom we study. It is immaterial whether we believe in God or not. We have to believe that they believe.

This putting oneself in the place of the other requires catapulting out of our limited imaginations, and learning the skills with which those who are of professional interest to us communicate their ideas about the divine. We learn with them how the cosmos is figured, how the balance of nature matches with the balance of good and evil. The terms themselves dance before us in a choreography of ambiguities.

We cannot stop asking questions, and the answers we receive combine dexterity with certainties of which we are not part. They are compelling in their persuasion, they wish us to share their truth in a way that convinces them that we too are believers.

We agree to do so, we persuade them that we have learned the metalanguage of their creeds and philosophies, we no longer argue with them (if we ever dared to, as doors slam shut) and we present their world to the readers who seek knowledge of specific religious practices, with the assurance that what we interpret is in consonance with the practitioners. 

So where is God? Looking for tranquility in a world beset with danger and death,  we are blessed with the consensual power of our persuasion.  When we have a new problem set to solve, we move on. So the Corona Goddess, like the Small Pox Goddess has arrived in India, and we need to      look at the way in which the assimilation of her virtues and malevolences are combined. In the Book of Life will our names be written or must we give in to extinction?

 

Susan Visvanathan is Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the author of The Christians of Kerala (OUP 1993) and The Children of Nature (Roli Lotus 2010).

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the blog editorial team or the Asia Research Institute.

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