Some thoughts on religion & ritual in ritual-dense times from my religious studies/crypto-animist/Greek religion nervous system. One reason I don’t like to get involved in criticizing rituals, religions, etc based on what people believe is that religion and especially recurring rituals within it are generally not engaged in because of belief or ideas alone. They are engaged in because of affect & attachment. And trying to argue or disprove the way a flesh & blood person’s nervous system has grown and adapted  is like trying to swim upstream against strong current (and our nervous systems are actually a lot like rivers). It’s not an ideal target for what could otherwise be, at best, a more useful conversation if it was framed differently. And also, it’s okay to share about our trauma with certain traditions and religions. We have to foster an environment where that is ok, especially given that affect & attachment is centrally implicated 

 in how we experience religion or really any form of organized and socialized spirituality. As a European descended “subject” of Christianities, (and all the crypto-animisms they harbor especially in our Balkan homelands) I feel my only option is to track critique, trauma, and enchantment altogether as they are all animals in the same forest here. 

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However, commentary on how effective ritual is for directing attention and acting on peoples feelings is a different take, and one I’m happy to sign on to because it doesn’t position human beings as “stupid” or “brainwashed.” (The book Cultish by Amanda Montell has a great section on why the term brainwashed itself is a kind of “thought-terminating cliche” that creates a sort of oversimplified fiction of an emotional (and cognitive) process). It’s interesting how we can be cultish in our dismissal of other cultishness ;)

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Beliefs are beholden to affect because we often calibrate our beliefs to what “feels good,” and certain thoughts can feel good. Rituals that we come back to repeatedly are usually engaged in because we are animals on earth who get attached to, and navigate/wayfind through landscapes and through their inner lives based on cycles and ritualized forms of movement or gathering. 

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Rituals are technologies for moving energy, and if we didn’t know that we wouldn’t be experiencing a resurgence of people trying to recreate ritual in their lives based ancestral ways or “nature.” We often do this because we are trying to build secure attachment to not-always visible ecosystems , not (just) cause we think it’s a good idea. BUT if your attachment systems are *centered* around kinship/animism with ideas like mine are as an autism-spectrum (or just idea loving person with certain life histories, —cause it’s not just about identity equaling intellectual authority here) it gets more complicated…I might actually do things that are healing because I feel like they are a good idea. So I also tend not to contribute to the demonizing of MIND. Language and ideas get used for abuse. That’s all the reason for me to spend time thinking about them.

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One reason I got into religious studies was because I, though aghast at what some people believed in the name of their religion, knew that a more compassionate way of looking at religion was possible since I had the (obvious) privilege of not experiencing religious trauma. I feel that to help mitigate this trauma in the future (in my personal life and connections) I could do more to understand religion in the level of animality, a perspective that has become more popular in the time since then (books: Enter the Animal, Religious Affects). And since we are animals *our pathologies will always be fundamentally ecological.*

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To me, a lot of mainstream critiques of religion ignore critiques of ecocide, downgrading of ecosystems, extinction, and the fragmentation of place-attachment. Therefore it’s not that they don’t have value, they are a highly emotionally charged (for good reason!) conversation taking our focus away from what’s fundamentally wrong (IMO), and in the process weakening BOTH conversations. 

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I’m not saying people can’t or shouldn’t be critical of the beliefs of others, but criticizing belief as the basis of why someone should or shouldn’t observe or engage in a ritual is just following in the footsteps of western philosophy’s favoring of the intellectual and the rational as standards for how the world should be experienced. Well, that’s not how the world is experienced, so we should be wary of upholding it by forming perspectives from that basis. It’s experienced also via a paradigm of animality, which is about how things feel and appear to our body-minds in space and place. 

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One of the mentors of my my spouse and thought-partner @queerquechua , Marcia Warren Edelman (a QTBIPOC somatic therapist) whose work has also influenced me a lot, talks about “adaptation” instead of “assimilation” because adaptation places the agency back where it belongs, with the person who (is often forced) to adapt. Assimilation focuses on the agency and power of the supremacy system. (which we shouldn’t ignore, but reframing and language can also help shift our awareness in useful ways). This doesn’t mean the system being adapted to is optimal. It’s often not, it can be shitty and ecocidal. Adaptation happens to radiation , just look at the wildlife in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone. But I think it’s important to often shift the way we talk about agency in social movements so we can again, get away from the very world views and ideologies we are trying to critique, not use the masters tools etc. Agency as a distributed ecological phenomenon is vitally important to consider or else again, we will be more prey to idea wars and coercive cultishness. Nor should agency , affect, and cognition being distributed throughout systems be an excuse for harmful behavior either—definitely not saying that. I don’t have the answers, but I like finding waymarkers.