cultus

tpm café

by David Headman

I'm a grad student studying Philosophy of Religion, and I had to write about the "cult" meme which is bouncing around lately.

This meme, started largely by Paul Krugman suggests that Obama's movement is a cult. There may be a grain of truth to this, but its a gross distortion. What Obama's huge crowds represent is not a cult, but a group of people engaging in the practice of cultus.

"Cult" in our current parlance, is used to refer to groups like the Branch Davidians, the Heaven's Gate folks, and Scientology, in which members are manipulated, controlled, and intimidated by an individual or small group of individuals. Cultus by contrast, is a term used in the study of religion to denote those ritual practices in which a community comes together to establish a collective picture of the world, themselves, and their place in it.

What ritual practice achieves is not, as some would have, a blind submission to authority or adherence to rigid and inflexible dogma. Rather, it is a collaborative process in which the community re-affirms the cultural values and ideals that they hold and the foundational narratives which help them to understand who they are as people. More importantly, ritual praxis involves creatively adapting those ideals to new circumstances and re-telling the narratives in such a way that they remain relevant. And perhaps most crucially, it is a process in which even apparently passive observers are crucial participants.

Ritualization is something all of us do in large and small ways, every day, whether we are religious or not, because it is the mechanism by which human beings inherently make sense of the world - It is a form of reason which functions differently to abstract rationality, but is no less adaptive and constructive.

Certainly, there are geniuses who have a unique talent for re-telling the American story in such a way that it can captivate and enthrall the nation. JFK was one. Regan, unfortunately, was another - and each is still practically deified within their party. These individuals often do aquire an almost religious following - because what they are doing is functioning as the high-priests of American Civic religion. But there is nothing irrational about that. People respond to them not merely because of their personality; rather, people voluntarily participate in the ritual and theater of the political process because they make the rational (if sometimes unconscious) judgment that the narrative which these leaders construct is uniquely fitting to the needs of the historical moment, and because it helps people to answer the fundamental existential question of who we are as a people, and what that means for how we conduct ourselves as a nation.

Presidents like that achieve with the bully pulpit what would be impossible for managers whose influence derives solely from having a steady hand on the levers of power in the bureaucracy. They re-frame the national dialog and re-shape the electorate.