Рatchwork religion — term in the sociology of religion for indicating situations, when individual or religious movement forms its own world view from different elements, which were taken from different existing religions or own religious experience. Collected from these elements religious world view reminds of a patchwork quilt with a unique pattern. Term has common features with social concepts like syncretism, bricolage, sheilaism.
Contents
History
Use of term patchwork concerning religion was for the first time suggested by an American sociologist Robert Wuthnow. Wutthow studies aspects of American religiosity, believing that its patchwork and avoidance of keeping to strictly defined forms are its essential features. Thus he writes:
“Now, at the end of the twentieth century, growing numbers of Americans piece together their faith like a patchwork quilt. Spirituality has become a vastly complex quest in which each person seeks in his or her own way”.
At the same time patchwork of individual religiosity, as Wuthnow states, doesn’t contradict loyalty of individual to church’s official position, in which it must be. In his other book Wuthnow connects patchwork with a feature of American religiosity called The Shopping Mentality. Bearers of such mentality mostly admit the existence of God or some kind of mystical force, but believe that none of religions is able to explain exhaustively this mystery to people. At the same time within the framework of each religion good examples of penetration into mysterious spheres of divine can be found, which means that a person can take some elements from each religion in order to gather them into a general picture of individual religiosity.
“When God is ultimately a mystery, it is easy to assume that all religions contain insights about God but no religion provides a complete understanding of God, and thus one way to increase one`s understanding of God is by gleaning ideas from many different religious traditions”.
Wuthnow writes about spiritual shoppers as about people, who
“Having learned to be open-minded and to patch together ideas from many different sources”.
Patchwork religion in collective consciousness
Nevertheless the fact that originally patchwork religion was applied to individual religiosity, it’s also being used in description of public worldview features. Patchwork is inherent in religious traditions, when their representatives include in original teaching or practice not originally inherent elements, for example which were characteristic for other religion, which was dominant among these representatives before. This explains dual faith, superstitions, which can be characterized as interpolations, brought not by an individual believer, but during a historical process. Some scientists think that each religious tradition has its people’s version, which includes such kinds of interpolations (for example, people’s Catholicism, people’s Buddhism etc.). Collective form of patchwork religion, as well as an individual, is an evidence of a conjunction to religious tradition of elements, which were not inherent before, or of a refusal to admit elements, which are inherent in it.