The problem of religious traditionalists
by Joseph Shaw, Artillery Row:
In religious groups, as in cultural groups of all kinds, one finds a range of attitudes towards the group’s traditions, its cultural inheritance. At one end of the range are those who want to preserve and even to recover the group’s heritage of cultural practices as much as possible — let us call them “traditionalists” — and at the other end there are those who travel more lightly. There are the Orthodox Jews who devote their whole lives to the study of the Torah and the ancient commentaries upon it, and on the other hand there are the Ukrainian housewives who have never learnt to make authentic borscht.
There is a danger, for those at the non-traditionalist end of the spectrum, of losing their cultural identity. The motivation for moving in that direction is nevertheless easy to see, if the cultural practices at issue are demanding or perhaps embarrassing in some way. An individual’s choice between a more and less intense identification with a cultural group — his or her maintenance of its characteristic practices in a more or less demanding way — can in general be left to the individual. Nonetheless, there is value in the preservation of the cultural identity of a group, not just for itself, but for the wider community.
There are exceptions: some cultural practices and some cultural groups are simply bad. No one wants to preserve the culture of the Mafia. It is a matter of regret, on the other hand, that many central European cities have lost their historic Jewish communities. UNESCO has recently declared Ukrainian borscht an item of “intangible cultural heritage”, thus worthy of respect and preservation, perhaps even by state intervention. The world would be a poorer place with fewer cultural practices, in somewhat the same way that it is impoverished by the loss of animal species.
This, I hope, is uncontroversial. Yet there is one area of life where this uncontroversial principle has become very contentious indeed: religious traditionalism. I am most familiar with the Catholic kind, but there is an analogy with debates within Anglicanism. In Unlocking the Church, William Whyte quotes an Anglican cleric with responsibility for church conservation: “The three great banes which hold back more effective use of church buildings as an instrument of mission and growth are the following: blocked gutters, bats and the Victorian society.”
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