Materiality of Religion
Discussion
Mark Whitaker:
"against Marx’s ahistorical claim of an exclusively ideological view of religion as a distraction from historical material politics, to the contrary there is a ‘materiality of religion’ in three senses.
In the first sense, there is a materiality of religion in the opposition and creativity of local religious communities and/or individuals choosing to animate their own local material concerns of growing health, ecological, and economic externalities in their regions against those unrepresentative forces creating these externalities in their lives and as they set up more positive pro-human and pro-environmental development simultaneously. Thus, there is a materiality to religion in the world history of environmental movements as well as a materiality to the origins of periods of scientific movements motivated in their research by the same issues of changing dynamics of health, ecology, and economy and deeply connected to the history of religious movements as well because both changes of historical religion and changes of historical science are the same ecological revolutionary movements.
In the third sense, there is a materiality of religion in the material ownership and in the ongoing consolidation of wealth in a political economy under jurisdictional guise of religious legitimations yielding many large scale state-supported religious institutions that are tactically used as elite tax havens as well as are ongoingly contributed to materially by the people at large as well: these become off-tax ways for the wealthy to hide taxable income while still controlling it (like putting a son of a local aristocrat in as an abbot, a common occurrence in Catholic Christianity for centuries) as well as become privatized welfare states and social security for the increasingly materially impoverished that join them and donate to them at the same moment. Simultaneously, the first point about material opposition in religion and the second point about off-tax religious material organizations overlap, giving ongoing contention and accommodation within established religious institutions for whom such material edifices will serve and to what degree over time or whether the latter aspects will be completely rejected by the former aspects for other religious developments in an ecological revolution.
In a third point against Marx’s ahistorical claim of an exclusively ideological view of religion as a distraction from historical material politics, since environmental movements are religio-scientific movements with growing material social movements of health, ecology, and economic concerns framed in religiously rebellious discourses of a particular context (sometimes adapting existing legitimate religious discourses toward it, sometimes entirely rejecting existing religious discourses as illegitimate), this means a more geographically specific awareness of the particular material ecological side of history of such expansionary corrupt states, of expansionary consolidated religious institutions, and of such environmental revolutionary movements is a context of importance in material history. This leads to an awareness of more trialectical dynamics in history and nstead of merely dialectical ones. This means that in addition to ongoing interactions in time (dialectics) there are ongoing interactions in time over particular plural geographic/ecological spaces (which is here defined as trialectics). Marx’s mere dialectical philosophical adaption from Hegel and Feuerbach as his interpretation of history is questionable as a materialist view, because instead of Marx offering a materialist-based history at all, he was offering a great oversimplification and falsification of materialist history to attempt to explain history within dialectical materialism instead of a trialectical materialist view that addresses all the above points. In a fourth point against Marx’s ahistorical claim of an exclusively ideological view of religion as a distraction from historical material politics, this view is a particular materialist view while Marx is a neutered view of materialist issues turned into a materialism, i.e., turned into an ideology. This is because particular choices of materials matter over other choices instead of all material issues capable of being characterized as wholly good or evil. We should know the materialist specifics to have a materialist view of history and Marx’s dialectical materialism fails in this endeavor by concentrating only on one institutional sector of social relations in ownership, labor and institutions of labor and production as if that were the only material area within social relations. Marx offered a materialism which is an ideological reduction from Marx about one sector of our social lives being the only independent variable as if could explain every other social issues as a dependent variable. This is untenable because materialist issues are connected to all sectors of our lives equally in their biophysical specifics such as the material organization of a state’s choices of extraction/taxation across a particular ecological situation of territory; the biophysically specific material organization of science, religion, and media/communication materials; the biophysically specific material organization of consumption (which includes production instead of consumption being left out of this); and the biophysically specific material organization of financial mediums. Thus there are many areas of biophysically specific materialist influence in our social lives that are equal independent variables upon each other depending upon the choices made. This biophysical view of materialist communications began in Innis’s view of two terms describing the different social ‘biases’ of medias depending on their biophysical characteristics. I have expanded this to 20 terms, as well as expanded Innis’s ideas to other areas beyond communication like in the state, in consumption, and in finance in which the same 20 terms describing the particular social characteristics connected to the particular biophysical choices in all of these areas.
These total five points summarize why Whitaker argues the origins of the axial faiths were in hydra-headed multi-regional “ecological revolution” in their original meanings, while any (reputed) singular stabilities of the axial faiths were closer to a highly policed, fragile, and unpredictable endeavor that always threatened to get out of elite management."