Tillich’s definition is more comprehensive than many others, in that through it, he can view as “religious” a wide range of phenomena, even some not normally considered religious, which have the element of intense devotion involved with them; he does not exclude the religious significance of apparently secular phenomena, such as politics or the arts. But one may still ask whether he has isolated the actual feature shared by all religions or whether he has imported a Western bias into his definition. He considers it axiomatic that everyone must have some ultimate concern to which all other concerns are subordinate, but this may not be the case. In practice, we all have many shifting areas of concern. Although one or another of these may take precedence at a particular moment, this does not mean that it is that which we take with “ultimate seriousness,” that which promises “total fulfillment” or demands our complete obedience. These terms are relevant to biblical monotheism, as Tillich shows, but they may not illustrate the religious character of polytheists, who turn to different gods for different purposes, or, for that matter, religions like Confucianism or Taoism, which rarely speak of subjecting all principles to one. Taoists go so far as to say that there is no right or wrong, good or bad, but that each thing has value when its proper use is found. It’s questionable whether there is one “ultimate concern” in this sort of system.
Of course, Tillich might regard this sort of relativism as itself a kind of ultimate concern, which subjugates absolutist systems of value to its own relativizing framework. The relativist who says there is no ultimate has made relativism his ultimate. The skeptic who says there is no truth has made skepticism his truth. The nihilist who rejects the task of finding a concern has made the lack of concern into his concern. But one has to suspect a linguistic sleight of hand here on Tillich’s part. If we are to say that anything one might believe—even a failure to take the question of the meaning of life seriously—has been taken with “ultimate seriousness” simply because there is nothing one takes more seriously, we may be misdefining “ultimate concern” by effectively reducing it to whatever the content of consciousness is, even if it seems to lack any concern or direction toward ultimacy. If any belief at all is an “ultimate concern” because there is nothing higher believed in, this usage would seem to distort the normal sense of the term and the meaning implied by it. It effectively negates the difference between the person who is truly devoted to something as an ultimate and the person who has no such devotion so that it appears they are equally religious when in fact they are not.
In addition, in distinguishing between types of ultimate concerns, Tillich sneaks value judgments on some ultimate concerns into an apparently value-free definition. He claims that one who is devoted to the nonultimate as if it were an ultimate has committed idolatry by giving ultimate status to that which he should not. In this way, a judgment is implied upon those religions that do not focus on a single ultimate concern, as they commit idolatry in their failure to properly conceptualize their ultimate. The insistence upon a transcendent is still present here, albeit in veiled form.
In spite of the Christian biases present in his definition, Tillich made it clear toward the end of his life that Christianity is not to be viewed as the “absolute” religion that effectively discredits the validity of others. No religion can fully express the ultimate, as all must use symbols, and there is always a gap between the symbol and that which it symbolizes. The best symbols are those that point beyond themselves, such as the cross—but this is not the only valid symbol of the ultimate, even though it provides the criterion for Christians.13 Still, his view defines religion in such a way as to make it seem that all valid religions must have a relationship with a unitary transcendent principle, defined according to the norms of the biblical understanding of covenant (“demand and promise”). Those that lack this focus on the transcendent (or its unity) are viewed as less adequate forms of religion.
Just as such theological definitions have narrowed the understanding of religion by their use of Christian categories, so also the ideological definitions of social-scientific approaches have tended to reduce religion to its psychological or sociological function. Most famously, Karl Marx reduced religion to a by-product of social oppression, the “opium of the people,” which they use to cope with intolerable economic conditions; Freud, on the other hand, reduced religion to a by-product of our neurotic attempts to deal with the absence of an omnipotent father. In both cases, religion is viewed as harmful and unnecessary, as well as explicable wholly through the categories of either sociological or psychological analysis based on an examination of its empirical nature. Although the pejorative and simplifying definitions of Marx and Freud are not used as widely as they once were, many social scientists still believe that in their efforts to “explain” the causes of religion in observable social forces, they effectively preclude the truth of religion. Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, for example, write that religion is “a purely human phenomenon, the causes of which are to be found entirely in the natural world. Such an approach is obviously incompatible with faith in revelation and miracles.”14 The transcendent or otherworldly referents of religion cannot be real in such a view, as religion is merely a product of this-worldly forces that can be examined and understood by social science. Such reductionism commits the so-called genetic fallacy of believing that a this-worldly explanation for the cause of religion discredits any otherworldly explanation—and hence, transcendent referent—for religion. In opposition to this view, I would claim that it is possible to believe that religion(s) might be true, even when we believe that we have adequately explained their “causes” naturalistically. After all, a believer can hold that God works through natural processes such as evolution, so why can’t one also allow that God creates faith and religion through sociopsychological processes? Even if people can be said to believe in God “because” of such processes, that does not negate the possibility that God “exists.” Nonetheless, it has been widely held that religion must have either a theological (i.e., belief-based) or a psychosocial “explanation,” as these two approaches are held to be incompatible.15
In contrast, I would argue that social-scientific approaches do not need to accept the reductionist view that religion can be fully explained naturalistically or that such an explanation necessarily discredits the beliefs of religious people. Similarly, religion need not be viewed solely as an ideological construct that supports cultural hegemonies, as the social-scientific study of religion has sometimes held.16 Although religion is this, it is not only this, just as cultural products (such as films) may support hegemony but are not reducible to only that function. We need to be able to understand the workings of religion in ways that transcend the purely ideological. Luckily, many social scientists working in fields like anthropology and sociology have recognized that their analysis of religion does not require them to adopt reductionist views of religious behavior that suggest it can be fully understood solely as a product of societal or cultural forces. Religion can then be seen as not merely a by-product of society—a sort of cultural dross thrown off by social forces—but as a cultural force in its own right that contributes to and shapes society.
Clifford Geertz’s Definition of Religion and Its Application to Film
Given the limitations of theological definitions of religion as well as reductionistic social-scientific definitions, I have turned to Clifford Geertz’s anthropological definition as the most helpful and comprehensive one for analyzing religious phenomena.17 Geertz defines religion by its function in human society rather than by theological content (e.g., belief in a transcendent being), but he also avoids the reductionism of many social-scientific definitions. Part of the reason for this is that he views anthropology as essentially an interpretive science rather than an explanatory one. Geertz believes that we should attempt to “describe” rather than “explain” religion, as one cannot fully analyze the causes of human cultural activities in the same way that the natural sciences examine physical phenomena. One cannot assert “scientifically tested and approved” hypotheses about religion in general; the diversity and particularity of human experience and culture make it impossible to come to general conclusions about the nature of religion in the same way that one might about chemistry or physics.18 Although his views are firmly based