A religious education of the senses?

What is religion? This is not just an intellectually fascinating question, but one that bears heavily on religious education. For how should we define what we study? And how does that definition impact on how we should learn about it?

Ninian Smart, perhaps the most influential scholar of religions of the last century for religious educators, identified seven dimensions of religions: ritual, mythical, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal and material. This framework represented a departure from the methods of theology for the study of religion, and was intended to help comparison between religions and to demarcate religions from non-religions. It has been used to design curricula in schools and universities worldwide.

There is undoubtedly logic to Smart’s dimensions, but they have been substantially critiqued, particularly when applied to religious education. For example, Smart’s dimensions obscure the nuances of religious identities, replacing them with a rigid and fixed notion of religion that does not capture the complexities of contemporary religious practices that quite often ignore the institutional, ethical or doctrinal.

Another problem with Smart’s dimensions is that they have led some to presume similarities across all religions. For example, according to these dimensions ritual washing in Hinduism or Islam could be treated as expressions of the same anthropological universals and therefore as near-equivalents. While there are interesting parallels between religions, this approach actually glosses over the radical differences between faiths. It also represents a particular theological perspective that can be traced to the liberal theology that developed out of the European enlightenment.

In this blog, I focus on an aspect of religion that cuts across Smart’s ritual, experiential, material and institutional dimensions: the role of the senses.

Writer S. Brent Plate argues in his excellent book, A History of Religon in 5½ Objects that we should think of religions as opportunities for apprehending ourselves and the universe with our senses, not as abstract belief-systems. His argument is compelling. Religious practices in different religions often comprise similar sensory experiences: the touch of stone, the smell of incense, the sound of music, the sight of symbols, the taste of food. Recent research about the formation of children’s religious identities supports this view. For example, Sissel Ostberg demonstrates how primary socialization of Muslim children in Norway includes the unique sensory experiences of attending Mosques.

The senses are often thought to be those of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. But we can add awareness of temperature, movement and pain to these. Religions practices use, and are founded upon, all of these sensations. These practices give meaning to sensory experiences and in turn, vitality is given to religious practices through them. The spiritual power of this two-way relationship, Plate argues, is connected with the existential condition of being an embodied person.

I give the example of the popular pilgrimage to Lourdes as an illustration. For even the most dedicated believer, a visit to present-day Lourdes may seem like a visit to a Catholic- themed amusement park. On first-sight, the distinction between pilgrimage and tourism may appear to be blurred. The streets, lined with kitsch neon-lit souvenir shops, resemble those from an abandoned English sea-side town. You can buy a St Bernadette bottle-opener from a shop called ‘Mysteres-Marie’, or any number of Lourdes-themed knick-knacks.

But the commercial outward features of the infrastructure needed to host many visitors belie the intimate and collective sensory experiences that the pilgrimage offers. The rock of the grotto where the Apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette is smooth from the thousands of hands that have reached out to touch something more transcendental than the elemental stone. The slow movement and sounds of the rosary in the processions bring the body into sync with hundreds of strangers by the light of candles.

But perhaps the most powerful sensory experience is taking a bath in the miraculous spring waters that the Apparition of the Virgin Mary told St Bernadette to drink. Next to the grotto, volunteers assist in this efficiently-organised operation in a specially constructed bath-house. One first enters a cubicle where all but the underwear is removed. Next you go into the bath area where, removing everything, a wet towel is wrapped around you. Prayers are then said by the attendants before you are lowered backwards into the shock of the cold water while looking up at a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes.

One of the problems of philosophy is the epistemic status of sensory experiences. For you could know everything about this cold bath – the history, the atomic structure of water at that temperature, the cult of Lourdes etc. – but you would not know what it is like to be dipped in it unless you tried it. It is the totality of circumstance and existence that give religious rituals enduring force.

Here we also find a problem in the religious education of the senses, however. If we wish to enter into the sensory experiences of believers we must assume at least something of their position as practitioners of that religion.

Smart and Plate’s approach do not help us here very much as religious educators. For while ritual bathing exists across many religions; its practice is located in different revelatory claims. Smart himself believed that as religions represented the same yearnings of humankind, belief in one could be supplemented with the beliefs of another. But as I have argued before, this kind of thinking can lead to a paradox of inclusivity when used as a basis for religious education, because not everyone shares this universalism.

Religious practice is undoubtedly connected with sensory experiences, but sensory experiences only have religious meaning when combined with religious devotion. (It is for this reason in part, some have argued that to know other religions; one must first understand a religion from the inside.) However, it is not ethical, legal nor reasonable to impose or recommend such experiences and practices to students in non-confessional religious education.

The problem remains then, without the novelty and reality of the unusual sensory experiences offered by religious devotions, in religious education classes, students and teachers may be left with the more ordinary experiences of the everyday. If we take the religious education of the senses seriously, this neutrality could perhaps hide the real meaning of religions from any student of them.