Religion, Culture & ‘Unchurched’ Spirituality

Today’s lecture was an interesting one because we were exploring the idea of spirituality, and how it was different from religion. Spirituality is outside of the church, it arose when the idea of secularization began to infiltrate many countries. When I was doing my independent study, I looked deeper into de-Christianisation (where Christian influences are removed from something). I found it interesting to find out that it was first happened during a French Revolution. It was where the people went against the priests and ministers as they were seen to be a part of the new government, and they massacred many of them, others fled to other countries to get away. This saw the closure of many churches within France, many of which never reopened. This caused many French people to abandon their faith, many of whom never got it back, resulting in France becoming a more secular county instead of a predominantly Christian one. I also found it interesting to look at the census during the lecture, as it said that 11% of people considered their religion to be Jedi Knight.

However, I found it confusing when we went to the tutorial, I found it challenging figuring out how to incorporate a theorist into the question we had to answer. I believe once I revise this topic that it will make more sense to me and then I can start to relate the knowledge I have learned to that of a theorist.

It has been interesting learning about religion and unchurched spirituality as they have an impact on our society. Popular religions are decreasing in size whereas spiritual groups are increasing. Spirituality, in our modern society, is seen as a form of religion that exists outside the normal religious institutions. In our society, religion is happening outside of the standard ‘churches’ and instead people are turning to spirituality. This does not mean that religion is disappearing, it’s just branching out into different aspects which suit the needs of our modern people.

Religion and Society

The concepts discussed throughout the day, on first glance, seemed confusing and challenging to understand as this is a brand new topic we were looking at today and I didn’t know what to expect from it. I had previously studied RMPS at the school and it focused on viewing the specific details of one religion, rather than looking at the topic ‘Religion’ as a whole, and then relating ideas to famous works of anthropologists.

Today I learned a lot about religion and how it can be perceived whether a person is looking at it from the inside – so it is a person’s own belief they are looking at from their own view point and from their religion’s teachings (also known as the believer’s approach) – or from the outside – a non-biased view of the religion (also known as the scholarly approach).

I began to comprehend some of the topics covered throughout the course of the day. However, I am still trying understand how to relate the theorist’s ideas to the concepts we are learning. I am sure that once I begin to work through the information, revise the notes from today and look at exam style questions that I will be able to see the connections between the information and theories and apply it to my work.

Today’s lecture and workshop has allowed me to see identify the challenges of religious diversity on society. As I got to look at this topic it allowed me to see how important it is to hold non-biased view to each of them, because, as a primary teacher, I will have to appreciate and respect every child’s religion and needs in my classroom so that they are not left out or feel discriminated against.

Therefore, to continue through this module, I will need to revise all of my notes as much as I can to allow me to look at exam type questions and work on relating what I am saying to answer a question to an anthropologists work to allow me to receive as many marks as possible in my exam.