Religious Power

Reference to power of one sort of another is remarkably common in the study of religion. For some early anthropologists, the recognition of power or magical powers in extraordinary things, events, or individuals was the primordial experience out of which religion developed. In some of its forms, religion can be seen to share with magic this belief in a numinous power inhering in particular objects or persons. Common ideas about the evolution of religious traditions regard such beliefs as belonging to their primitive stage, however much they might continue to subsist within the ambit of the so-called higher religions. A critical shift is generally assumed to have occurred during the so-called Axial Age, from circa 600 BCE, when notions of transcendence began to displace more material concerns such as the coming of the rains or protection from disease from their central place and substitute for them a distinctive concern for salvation. In Ernest Gellner's account this shift coincided with the development of sacred texts and the emergence of groups of religious specialists: priests, scholars, prophets, and other religious virtuosos. From this time on religious power—as invoked or exercised by religious specialists—could be distinguished from political, economic, and other forms of ideological [Page 569]power. In modern times, the power exercised by religious specialists has been constrained as processes of differentiation progressively removed the polity, the economy, society, and culture from their sphere of influence. The late 20th century, however, has seen a resurgence of the use of religious power by fundamentalist or revivalist movements, as for example in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Following Michael Mann and Gianfranco Poggi, religious power can be seen to derive most distinctively from the authority claimed by, or conferred on, religious specialists in matters of belief, so that religious power might be considered a species of power that derives not from the use of force (as with political or military power) or the deployment of material incentives (as with economic power), but from influence over the formation of beliefs, norms, and values and over their role in guiding action. This perspective, with its emphasis on creed and meaning, is sometimes thought to underestimate the power and influence that in traditional societies derives from religious specialists' control over cultic practices and the interpretation of law. Among the monotheistic religions, the latter can be seen to be of great consequence in Islam and Judaism, for example.

In traditional societies, religious power derived in large degree from the successful exercise by religious specialists of the claim—either unmediated, in the case of individuals who could claim charismatic status, or mediated, as with the holders of office in religious institutions—that they could authoritatively determine correct belief and/or decide on correct observances. The efficacy of such authority could be measured by the extent to which their pronouncements were respected and the judgments for which they provided the rationale were successfully enforced—typically on their behalf or at their behest by the wielders of political or material power. In some cases, of course, even within the Christian tradition, where the spiritual and the temporal were typically understood as belonging to different spheres, the holders of religious power were also themselves occasionally the holders and exercisers of political, economic, and military power; thus the various crusading orders of the medieval period, such as the Knights Templar or the Teutonic Knights, were religious orders that under papal authority exercised the full range of temporal authority within their own jurisdictions.

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