Religious Pluralism and Anomie: How Tolerance Leads to Social Isolation

Human beings have always been social creatures. Often, religious organizations represent the fundamental level at which a society operates and instills the values of that society in its members. As Girard noted, religious ritual and sacrifice has played an important role in the prevention of violence in all human societies, both prehistoric and contemporary (45).

In the discussion of human culture throughout history, there has always been a marked difference between the social norms that highly religious, rural societies adopt and those of more secular, urban societies. While urban societies are noted for their ability to produce technological progress and advancement, they often isolate their members socially and spiritually in a way that rural societies do not. 

Religious pluralism has long been adopted as a means of allowing the members of urban societies to peacefully coexist with one another, but the approach often backfires by causing an even greater sense of isolation than ever before.

           One of the major elements that separates urban culture from rural or folk culture is the social significance and purpose of religion. According to Strinati, the adoption of a multiculturalism and religious pluralism by a populace that inhabits an urban environment leads to social condition called “anomie”, which is defined as a condition of society that provides little moral guidance to individuals, thus resulting in a lack of social norms (8).

While religious pluralism and the tolerance that it engenders is necessary for the smooth functioning of an urban society, it is wholly absent from rural ones that have historically relied on religious absolutism in order to maintain order and fulfill the lives of its members by providing a clear moral compass and a feeling of belonging to a greater whole. 

As a result, urban culture distances itself from religion’s incipient purpose as conceived within the scope of the rural societies it was made to serve and becomes a point of contention and conflict, leading to the need of a more tolerant attitude from its members.

This, in turn, individualizes its members and creates a cultural and moral vacuum, leading to a lack of a sense of belonging that pervades its members' lives on a fundamental level and gives rise to the sense of social isolation widely seen in modern metropolitan societies. A metropolitan society is more susceptible to amoral behavior than a rural one, due to its members’ feelings of isolation, the lack of readily acceptable social norms, and the replacement of traditional cultural values with those advertised by mass media.

Coming to terms with the place of religion in a modern, urban society requires a nuanced understanding of religion’s purpose in rural societies and in folk culture. Exhaustive research of the social and religious significance of ritual and sacrifice in ancient cultures, as well as those few remaining rural societies that have rejected industrialization has shown that religion’s primary effect in historical societies has been to prevent violence (Girard 35).

This is evidenced by the few examples of tribal societies that have defined themselves culturally without religion and found themselves destroyed by internal conflict, reciprocal violence, and often bloody family feuds that last entire generations (Girard 110). In historical cases when alternative religions have been introduced to these tribal cultures, those that adopted the new religion entirely benefitted from the same prevention of violence that they had with their previous system, as evidenced by Dupuis’ study of early Christian missionary work (38).

This would seem to indicate that religion, when introduced to a large, metropolitan culture, should have the same effect of preventing violence and encouraging moral certitude amongst its members. However, the constant state of religious conflict that most modern societies exhibit easily proves that this is not the case.

         It is at this point that the term anomie enters the discussion. The main difference between people who are part of a rural society and who traditionally live according to values passed down by folk culture and members of an urban, industrial society is in the quality of social norms as exhibited by the culture in question. In a rural society, social norms are concrete and absolute, having been passed down generation by generation, often for centuries at a time.

People who are raised in such a culture tend to have very clear ideas about their values, their purpose in life, and the importance of religion as a fundamental element thereof. These values exist and gain most of their strength due to the fact that every member of the society in question participates in the religious experience together (Chaves 261). 

As soon as multiple religious viewpoints begin to contend for importance within the context of such a society, social order is threatened. The sense of social order that is threatened by this new perspective is exactly that same sense that, once removed from the population’s social consciousness, results in anomie among its members.

         It is well-known that metropolitan societies that exhibit a highly tolerant, multicultural approach also tend to exhibit a high level of anomie among their members. This is part of the reason why inhabitants of large metropolitan centers, like New York City, tend to put so much cultural significance on material possessions, pop culture and an attitude of radical acceptance for all but the very lowest strands of society.

In these kinds of societies, socio-economic influence takes precedence over cultural belonging and people begin to accept material gain as replacing spiritual advancement or understanding. As Carr and Hauser note, social studies made have found that highly religious societies benefit from a decreased importance on socio-economic status among their members (69), from which we can assume that the inverse must be true – as any New Yorker will readily admit. 

In an urban society with a very high population density, the idea that religious absolutism gives way to overtly accepting religious pluralism in an attempt to reduce the violence that religion was originally intended to prevent from happening in the first place.

          It is evident that a metropolitan area that is home to multiple religious cultures with strong, evangelical beliefs will give rise to conflict. This has been the case in nearly every situation of this kind throughout history, and, in each case, the adoption of a pluralist viewpoint by the majority of the populace has been the sole precursor to peace.

Pluralism can take a number of forms: it should come to no surprise that New York City is home to the highest number of followers of the radically pluralist Baha’i faith. That example only shows a single face of the societal solution practiced in these cases; that of the social norm of tolerance widely practiced in the United States and in other multicultural societies. 

This tolerance allows people to believe that their own religious beliefs can be equally valid with those of others, even despite making mutually exclusive claims to religious truth. This, in turn, leads people to focus less on developing their own sense of spirituality, and more on developing a social identity that fits well with the society they are a part of, while allowing them to express themselves liberally enough to counteract the crippling effects of anomie.

       If an individual chooses to develop themselves spiritually in a highly industrialized, metropolitan society, they often find themselves categorized or even denigrated by the rest of their surrounding peers. The lack of norms of such a society leads each individual to have to expend time and energy to make sense of the differing cultural, spiritual and religious views of those around them. This has a two-fold effect on their sense of isolation: it increases their isolation relative to the society as a whole, but decreases it within their personal network of other like-minded individuals.

While this has the powerful effect of giving the individual a sense of belonging, as well as a clearly defined set of social norms to adhere to, it also distances them from those who are not a part of that organization, who do not agree with its values, and who feel offended by the elitism that it seems to entail from their perspective. 

This provides the perfect groundwork for violent conflict, as has been seen in a multitude of societies throughout history and in contemporary culture whenever it is present. The establishment of hate groups and religious intolerance is bred by the lack of total societal participation in the values, rituals and belief systems of a select few.

          When these organizations manage to peacefully coexist with one another, they only do so through the disestablishment of social norms. In a society in which social norms are either absent or very nearly so, individualism reigns supreme, and anomie runs rampant. The people who find themselves spiritually unsatisfied by this condition are generally left to look in other places for their much-needed cultural support.

When this happens, they are left with the lowest common denominator available to each and every member of the metropolitan society in question: mass media. Mainstream television, film, and radio become the only viable sources of cultural belonging, and actually attempt to take the place of religious thought by offering all of the things that, in a rural society, religion would be able to provide.

These include a sense of cultural belonging, a moral compass by which the individual is encouraged to live their life, and a set of values that represent the culture in question. In an entirely individualist society, mass media and the pop culture that it represents turns into the most powerful factors in the spiritual development of an individual. This leads to the adoption of dangerously unbalanced values, since the mass media is created with the intent of creating consumers, not individuals (Strinati 148).

            The dangerously unbalanced system of values propagated by mass media in the place of a system informed by a traditional culture leads to increasing secularization. Individuals who once adopted pluralist ideals in an effort to be a functional member of a multicultural society are encouraged further down the road to atheism, until they no longer associate themselves with any religion at all.

Those that do are largely going through the motions in order to compensate for their inescapable feelings of anomie rather than for the cultivation of a spiritual self or the discovery of a religious truth that can benefit their lives. This creates a precedent that devalues religion in the face of other, more distracting daily affairs.

Once this system of values has been adopted by an entire populace, it begins to establish itself in much the same way that early religions did in the tribal societies that they were born in, but without providing the social benefits that those religions offered their followers. To the contrary, instead of engendering peace by affirming the place of the individual in society and their responsibility to it, mass media encourages the individual to rise above society and use it for their own benefit.

Instead of promoting the feeling of spiritual contentment that having a family gives an individual, mass media exclusively portrays family in one of two ways: a highly dysfunctional network of relationships from which every member wishes to separate, or the foundation of a comedy at which everyone else can laugh.

            Unfortunately, returning to the religious absolutism of early historical societies is out of the question. Once religious pluralism has taken hold, it needs to be upheld for as long as its peacekeeping values remain, at face value, evident. 

       Those individuals who feel systematically oppressed by pop culture and who fail to find belonging in religious solace are left to create highly deviant alternative cultures that often follow equally deviant religious doctrines. It is for this reason that Satanist communities rarely exist in a traditional rural setting, if they do at all.

They are largely confined to large cities, where they offer a means for individuals to escape the anomie that plagues them without having to give up their all-important individuality. The main problem with this is the widespread idea that adherence to religious doctrine eliminates individuality. Durkheim’s view of religion as the most fundamental social institution of mankind is made no clearer than in the instances such as these, where the lack of an appropriate replacement for that institution leads to deviance and amorality (38).

            While religious pluralism is often seen from a sociological viewpoint as performing a great good for metropolitan societies in helping them maintain order amongst a multicultural background that would surely devolve into massive reciprocal violence, it comes with a lack. That lack can be seen most clearly when compared to the relative abundance of spiritual belonging in rural and orthodox societies where the vast majority of individuals are adherents to a single religion.

On a certain fundamental level, it no longer even matters what that religion specifically is or what values it implies. Only the fact that each and every member of the society in question is on equal footing in a religious and spiritual sense is enough to create a sense of camaraderie that is sorely missing from the urban environment. 

Instead of adopting religious and social stances solely for the purpose of reducing violent and immoral behavior, rural societies have long-standing cultural traditions that are impossible to extricate from their religious context. In a rural society, cultural and spiritual values gain a sense of importance that precludes the banalities of pop culture and leads to resistance to their encroachment whenever encountered.

          The religious beliefs of rural societies, while far more collective in their scope and empowered with a much greater ability to resist anomie, are not without their faults. Many social and religious critics pinpoint rural societies as being backwards in scope, standing in the way of progress, and indulging in immoral traditions. 

         While there are certainly enough individual examples of each of these situations being true in certain cases, they should be taken at face value as being the direct effect of having a small society free of the constraints of religious pluralism. It should be noted that all of these characteristics are equally observable in modern, urban societies and, while easily stereotypical of the “country-bumpkin” mentality, are not representative of the lives that individuals who form a part of this kind of society live. 

        In fact, rural societies can much more liberal and progressive than their metropolitan counterparts when aided by the social structure afforded by a church that is both trustworthy and relatively unhindered by repressive dogma and superstition. The ability for rural societies to achieve metropolitan levels of social progress, however, is not part of this discussion beyond the extent that it forms the first barrier to acceptance of these cultures when compared to urban societies.

The fact remains that individuals who are part of a rural society, or even those who currently live in metropolitan ones but were raised in a rural environment, have a much greater sense of belonging and an ability to follow the moral guidelines that their religious culture set out for them in a way that religious pluralism often hinders in a social context.

            The merits of religious pluralism are inarguable when understood for their purpose and scope in urban environments but are not widely necessary and, when necessary, need to be compensated for by something greater than pandering pop culture. In the 18-19^th centuries, this was achieved through nationalism, which, when not mixed into the religious fervor that it often accompanied, did an excellent job at providing a foundation for a cultural system of values that a great majority of people both rural and urban could benefit from.

National sentiments, however, led to greater global dilemmas by the time the 20^th century arrived, and led to the embroilment of the most civilized nations on earth at the time in a series of vicious wars. In a scrambling effort to fill the social, cultural, and spiritual gap left by the large-scale abandonment of nationalism on a global scale following both world wars, mass media set itself in place and took up the task by attempting to offer a sense of belonging that would resonate with the very lowest common denominator of each level of society. 

This, in turn, allowed for the idea of religious pluralism to gain widespread acceptance due to its promises of reducing violence and promoting tolerance– two values that have been given far greater importance in the second half of the 20^th century than they ever had previously.

            Where modern society goes wrong at the moment, now almost 100 years past the beginning of the first world war, is in the adoption of the lack of norms that religious pluralism encourages without also providing an accompanying set of moral guidelines by which people can live their lives. In the end, people are expected to come up with their own ideas about morality, to use their own means of measuring the effectiveness of their ideas, and to come to terms with their spiritual development on their own.

If such an empowered individual chooses to follow a singular religious path towards their enlightenment, it is only through the adoption of the norms offered by religion that they can reach their goal, and very few make that critical step. 

         What happens much more commonly, however, is that individuals adopt religious beliefs for social motives and begin taking small elements of different religions to form a highly personalized and unique spiritual identity that, despite having all the markings of a religion, fails to provide the most basic and fundamental human services that religion does. It is in the accepting of multiple mutually exclusive truths that religious pluralism offers the greatest peril for the spiritual development of the individual who indulges them.

            It is in this new half-hearted caste of spiritual-but-not-religious individuals who attempt to take the meaningful parts of each religious whole and fashion them into their own purpose-built religion that the greatest societal disadvantages are to be seen. These individuals, while doubtlessly empowered by their decisions, suffer from the inability to cooperate with their peers or to form a meaningful part of a religious body or network. 

          This elimination of collectivism effectively undermines whatever moral guidance they may have fashioned for themselves, and opens the doorway to any number of immoral activities that, instead of being seen as outlandish or out of the ordinary, are celebrated as new social norms in a situation where all the previous norms have already been all but obliterated.

The cultivation of this type of individual remains the most dangerous effect of religious pluralism in multicultural, urban societies; while definitely preferable to a society marked by religious violence and conflict, it is still a situation that demands a better, more collective solution. 

If members of these societies are left to cultivate their spiritual elements in this way, the rest of the religious and secular world can only expect to see further degradation as the historical movement of people towards cities continues on unabated.

Both rural and urban societies have the same religious needs, but find wholly different ways to meet those needs, and often find that those means are mutually exclusive with one another. It may not be possible to return to the folk traditions of yore, but a greater focus must be placed on the development of a singular spiritual path for those people who need it most. 

The fact that all religions lay claim to the one and singular truth is only the first obstacle that stays in the path to proper religious cultivation for the masses, because it leads to problems of trust among the populace.

The second is the newfound power of mass media, which has ill-fittingly replaced many of the societal benefits and values that religion once provided, leading to a religiously pluralist society that has given up its own spiritual and moral values for secular ones. 


These obstacles have no solution yet, but will become more pressing until they are met by a new religious concept that either renders the current form of religious pluralism irrelevant, or transcends it entirely.