CUCKOO IN THE NEST

Elements of Religion in Secular Society

Dara Molloy 18/12/93

This article was published in The AISLING Magazine, Issue 12.

THE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION

Since the beginning of history, religion has been part of people’s lives in every corner of the world. In every age and in every culture there have been gods and goddesses, myths and rituals, blessings and curses, prayers and sacrifices. These beliefs and activities provided spiritual nourishment, gave people meaning and purpose, were sources of healing and forgiveness, and brought cohesion to communities, creating a common vision and a common understanding.

What is it today that satisfies people’s spiritual hunger? Salvation may not mean much to many people now, but still these people long to be fulfilled, to make a success of their lives, to be happy and contented, and at their death to feel that they have completed their task in life. This longing for wholeness, holiness, salvation — whatever you wish to call it — is a quintessential hunger that is unavoidably present in each of us.

Where do people today find meaning and hope, if they don’t find it in religion? Where do they go for healing or to cleanse themselves of guilt? How do people today cope with the fear of death, with the fear of failure? Where do they look to find happiness, fulfilment, contentment? If the old traditional religion no longer acts as a container for these longings, what does?

It cannot be that people no longer experience these longings. They are an intrinsic part of being human. In every culture and in every age, these longings have found a container in some form of belief system. Mythical stories, sacred objects, mysterious rituals and regular celebrations have provided channels for this energy to flow.

Where are the containers for people’s spiritual energies now. Along what channels do they flow? Looking for the answers to these questions in today’s secular society reminds me of the picture games in my comics as a child, where we had to look for things hidden in the picture, and only by looking hard would we find them.

Here is a list of items that we should be able to find hidden in the picture ‘secular society’:

a god
a founding myth
an eschatalogical vision
a method of evangelisation
magic and mystery
priests
sacrifices
temples
prayers
dogmatic beliefs
sacred rituals
— of initiation
— of passage
— of cleansing
— of healing
sacred objects
sacred images

ELEMENTS OF RELIGION IN SECULAR SOCIETY

God: It seems clear to me that the god of secular society is Mammon. It comes across in the media that the belief in this god is absolute and the power imputed to this god is infinite. Implicit in the way most western democracies are run is the belief that money can solve all the problems facing countries today. Economics gets top priority and the finance minister is the most powerful minister in the cabinet next to the Prime Minister.

Founding Myth: The founding myth of modern secular society is the myth of ‘development’. This is a belief that human society is evolving on a linear scale through history and that present day society is more developed than previous ages. Using this model, it is easy to point out that some nations are more developed than others. Nations are then placed on a linear scale from ‘miserably underdeveloped’ to ‘magnificently developed’.

The measures for scoring on this scale are material measures, again to do with money, such as Gross National Product, Per Capita Income, and so on.

The myth is a unifying view of the world which gives those who are ‘developed’ a sense of superiority. It also gives the ‘developed’ nations a reason to become involved in the affairs of other nations — so that they too can become ‘developed’. The myth of Development has now spread to most of the countries of the world and many countries who are materially poor have internalised this image of themselves and see themselves as ‘underdeveloped’. Even in Ireland, a debate has raged over where the country fits on a ‘development’ scale.

Daily Practice: For the ordinary person, the religion of Development is practised in a day to day way by producing and consuming. People go to work. There is pressure on them to be as productive as possible. Their unions often make productivity agreements with their employers. Increased productivity is agreed in return for increased wages. Increased wages means they can consume more and so they move up a notch on the scale of development holiness.

Saints: It follows then than the saints of this religion are those who are producing the most, and making the most, money. Tony O’Reilly of Heinz is a classic Irish example of a ‘development saint’.

Eschatalogical Vision: As with all religions, there is an eschatalogical vision associated with the religion of Development. The eschatalogical vision of Christianity is the coming of the Kingdom of God. The United States had a vision they called the American Dream. An eschatalogical vision is an anticipation of what things will be like when all we want to do and to happen is fulfilled, at the end of time.

The eschatalogical vision of the Development Religion is of a fully developed world along the Western model with wealth and prosperity for all. The material things that the West at present has will be available for everybody — cars, TVs, videos, telephones, washing machines, fridges, microwaves, computers, etc. — and the structures will be in place to make it possible to use them — roads, electricity, airports, factories, markets, banks.

Evangelisation: This vision is preached incessantly and powerfully through advertising — the modern method of evangelisation. Advertisements hammer home the message that success equals acquiring certain material items, that anything one really longs for — happiness, beauty, contentment, status — can be bought and is available in the market. A person can become beautiful simply by buying a skin-cream. The pervasive message is ‘Buy and be happy’, ‘Spend and become whoever you want to be’.

The Development Religion puts everybody on a one-dimensional scale. We are placed on a ladder according to our producing and consuming power and categorised accordingly. Through the process of advertising we are then lured into climbing the ladder. The promise of what lies at the top of the ladder is epitomised in the game — the Irish National Lottery. This game gives you the opportunity of becoming a millionaire overnight. In this way you are offered a short-circuit to sainthood.

Salvation: Salvation then is the attainment of a high placing on the Development ladder — the ladder of production and consumption. The materially poor are the new pagans who need to be evangelised. A way must be found to bring them into the market economy and make them productive. This is at present happening at a rapid pace in Eastern Europe.

Liturgical Centres: The liturgical centres of the Development Religion are of course the markets. The massive shopping centres now being built in many countries are the new cathedrals. People fulfil their religious obligation by doing their weekend shopping. This is a weekly ritual that has replaced for many Sunday worship.

Priests: The high priests of this religion are the bankers. Offerings are paid to these banker-priests in the form of interest. They set the rates which control the flow of money, which in turn controls the market, which in turn controls the people who participate.

Sacrifice: There are sacrifices too, because the god of money has to be appeased. So factories close because they are not economically viable; people have their homes taken from them by banks because the mortgage is not being paid (often due to high interest rates); and, of course, large sections of the world’s population are squeezed and manipulated beyond endurance so that national debts can be paid with enormous interest to these same banks. Nature too has to be sacrificed because the daily practice of production and consumption requires raw materials, so forests get cut, mountains get mined, rivers get dammed, and fossil fuels get burned at an ever accelerating rate.

Rituals: The Development Religion has put in place numerous rituals that mark various aspects of the belief system. I have mentioned one of them already in the weekly shopping trip.

The great ritual of initiation into this religion is of course education. Wherever the idea of development has taken root, the impetus to provide education has come immediately in its wake. On the model of a factory, schools are constructed to process young people, fitting them out to be producers and consumers. The medium is the message. Children learn to consume educational products and to measure their success, and hence their status, in terms of quality of product (i.e. exam results), measured on a linear scale. Those who have no schooling or who fail in their schooling represent the sinners. As adults, these sinners become the unemployed. The great ritual of passage is graduation, when a young adult is formally accepted into the producing-consuming community.

Other rites of this religion are to do with the transfer of graces and blessings. So someone who receives weekly or monthly pay cheques is a regular communicant with the god Mammon and therefore in good standing. Lodgements of money in one’s bank account represents an accumulation of graces. Writing cheques to others distributes these graces. Using a banker’s card to withdraw money or to make purchases is a sacramental ritual which utilises a sacred object and performs a ritual act to put one on an inside track to the divine.

Regular repayment of mortgage and other loans is a way of avoiding sin. Visits to the bank manager to settle an overdraft or renegotiate repayments on a loan are a form of cleansing and confession. The bank manager is the local priest who may have required from you intimate details of your life before giving you a loan. He/she may also be aware of some of the monetary sins you are committing but you will be protected from being caught by the taxman by what amounts to the ‘confidentiality of the confessional’.

Dogma: The salvific dogmas of the Development Religion include the following key concepts:

Development Growth Technology Progress Education Professions

These dogmas cannot be questioned. They are articles of faith and without them the eschatalogical dream cannot be realised. Together, these words represent ‘the good’. Each of these words is full of promise, and together they there to bring hope to all men and women, a hope for the future.

THE DEVELOPMENT RELIGION

Participants in the Development Religion are on a journey together. The destination is Material Prosperity. We travel on the dual carriageway of Economic Growth and Industrial Development. Our means of transport are Enterprise and Technology. Key junctions along the way are: Productivity, Efficiency, Resources, Management, Executives, Accountability, Structures, Quality Control, Assessment and Planning.

Inadvertently, many Irish people have switched to this new religion of Development. In the home, the flickering light of the television has replaced the flickering light of the Sacred Heart lamp. The people have stopped listening to the priest, but listen to and watch advertisements morning, noon and night. The Bank Holiday has replaced the Church Holy Day. And in the pocket, loose change and the wallet of notes and banker’s cards has replaced the rosary beads and prayer book.

Mystery: As with any successful religion, magic and mystery permeates the religion of Development. Technology is used as the medium for this. Modern technology leaves people in awe. There is the modern miracle of the computer — an electronic brain at our fingertips. There are the latest in cars, motorbikes, boats and planes which spellbind children — and adults too. There are machines and gadgets, tools and instruments, time-savers, space-savers and money-savers that leave us enchanted and hooked. And there is always something new, so our excitement never wanes.

The magic is evident when you press your foot lightly on the accelerator and the car surges forward, or press a button on the front panel inside your car and the window winds down. The mystery is palpable when you look at the screen of a computer and see what it can do in the twinkling of an eye and then look inside and find it is mostly air. Technology is the spell that binds people cohesively into serving Mammon.

This is the god of money at work. This god is making it easier for people every day to have technology in their homes and at their fingertips. No other god can compete. If people avoid serving this god and participating in these rituals they risk becoming miserable outcasts. They will join the great hordes of ‘the lost’.

Is it any wonder the priest has lost his magic or the Mass has lost its meaning? The Development Religion is a cuckoo in the nest that, in the name of secular society and pluralism, is pushing out all other gods, eschatalogical visions, belief systems and churches. Religion, as such, is being relegated to the margins, and to people’s private lives. Meanwhile public life is taken over by the cuckoo in the nest — the Religion of Development.

THE DEVELOPMENT RELIGION
of modern secular society

God	=	Mammon
Founding Myth	=	Development
Eschatological Vision	=	Material Prosperity
Dogmas	=	Development Growth Education Professionalism Progress
Method of Evangelisation	=	Advertising
Liturgical Centres	=	Markets
Cathedrals	=	Shopping Centres
High Priests	=	Bankers
Tithes	=	Interest Rates
Sacrifices	=	Unemployed Two-Thirds World Nature
Daily Religious Practice	=	Production / Consumption
Weekly Obligation	=	Weekend Shopping
Regular Communicant	=	Weekly/Monthly Pay Cheque
Confession	=	Bank Manager gets intimate details of life
Confidentiality of Confessional	=	Bank guarantees this
Sinners	=	Unemployed at home Poor in Two-Thirds World
Saints	=	Millionaires
Salvation	=	A high place on the ladder of production/consumption
Rite of Initiation	=	Education
Rite of Passage	=	Graduation Retirement
Sacred Objects	=	Banker's Card Cheque Book Keys
Sacramental Rituals	=	Writing Cheques Making Withdrawals Using Banker's Card
Church Holy Day	=	Bank Holiday

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