Syncretism can involve substitution. For example Mayan syncretism has Christian elements that were substituted for Mesoamerican religious beliefs (Tavanti, 2003). Historically, syncretism has had a bad name because some substitutions don't make much religious sense. For example practitioners of the Santeria religion will substitute Catholic saints for the spirits that were featured in the indigenous folk religion. This doesn't make much sense.
Make sense to whom? Who gets to decide what makes sense and why? Some Catholic saints were originally taken from Pagan gods and goddesses... so is it really that odd that they then are substituted for spirits?
That's another syncretic religion that evidently emerged in the context of slavery and forced conversion. You say this is an example of syncretism creating something new. I question that. The Haitians adopted apparently adopted Christian beliefs without actually believing them. How can there be a creative synthesis under those circumstances?
Do you have any evidence for your assertions that: (1) Vodun as a syncretic religion makes little or no sense and (2) the Haitians do not believe Christian beliefs (as opposed to blending Christianity with indigenous beliefs)?
I think it is a bit presumptuous to assert that Vodun, Santeria, and so on are somehow religiously non-sensical because they arose from syncretism. On the contrary, I have spoken to Vodun practitioners that have said they find assertions that their religion is inferior to others on this basis offensive. I can understand why.
Christianity itself, as it is in mainstream Catholicism and Protestantism today, is syncretic- incorporating (minimally) elements of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, potentially Buddhism, and certainly a wide range of Paganism.
To speak of any religions as being "pure" and immune from syncretism, borrowing, and substitution over time is, to me, a bit naive about how human ideology and culture changes.
I might add that so far into the discussion, we have not seen a single example of the personal or relational benefits of syncretizing at either level of analysis.
Tolerance? There's one. Most syncretic people I know are very tolerant and interested in other cultures and religions.
Self-reflection? There's another, on a personal level as opposed to a relational one. Creativity is another.
Basically, take the benefits that are proposed for spiritual development and practice in general- and you'll find the same in syncretic movements. I fail to see why you seem to assert that syncretic movements (of which there are many) are somehow inferior to a proposed (but non-existant) "pure" faith tradition. People borrow, they learn from each other, they challenge each other... they misinterpret, they create, they look for similarity and difference. The history of humanity is a history of communication and borrowing and learning from others- most of the time, in a rather willy-nilly seat-of-your-pants way.
To my way of thinking, whether a proceeding is done on a doctrinally sound way is less important than whether it's done in a way that sheds light on the sacred message of which it is a symbol. I am by no means encouraging doctrinal accuracy for the sake of conventionality. I am merely suggesting that someone who might otherwise be content to free associate with an existing ritual without knowing much about its original context of use might get more out of it if they had a big picture of where a particular ritual enactment fits into a larger symbolic system. If they had more information, they would probably be able to to deploy a more complete theological vision.
I can see your point, but I would still maintain that this is bound to particular ways of learning and perceiving the world. Not everyone would or should have the goal of "deploying a more complete theological vision." Some people are in spiritual practice for practical ethics. Some are in it for ecstatic experience. Some are in it for social and relational aspects. I don't think that one person's spiritual path and goals are necessarily better or worse than another person's, nor do I consider something like ecstatic experience inferior to theology.
For someone who is interested in a high degree of meaningfulness, it may actually make very little sense to focus on a single aspect of a religious proceeding, just as it may make little sense to do any single ritual in isolation without knowing how it's connected to other rituals.
This depends on how one creates or perceives meaning.
Someone suggested that a person can't be expected to believe in a religious text that they can't adequately comprehend. I don't think you are suggesting that it's enough to look at Greek typography in order to a appreciate the New Testament if one does not know Greek.
Sacred text is a different matter from ritual, as it is linguistic only in its form. Ritual is a form that includes many different entry-ways for the practitioner to create meaning, including body movement, sound, scent, symbology, ritual time and space, and so on.
Meaningfulness is a matter of degree, isn't it? Doing any one practice may actually require doing others if the one practice is to provide meaningful exposure to the religion as a whole.
Well, yes- if the goal is to provide
accurate exposure to the religion as a whole. But that says little of
meaning. Doing one practice may provide a great deal of meaning to an individual, while allowing them to still be relatively ignorant of the religion as a whole and the ritual's conventional message.
This, however, does not mean that no meaningful message is created by the participant.
A scattered/fragmented approach would be expected to lead to reduced meaningfulness. Kind of like suggesting that we read a book starting with a few lines from the last page, with no plan to look at the beginning or the middle (as though they're irrelevant). It's hard to make a credible case for knowing what the book is about if you've only read the last page.
What I am trying to say is that there are different ways something can become meaningful, and this meaning can be defined by various people. The individual can create a meaning that is useful in his/her spiritual development without having a credible case for understanding the religion as a whole. Conversely, a religious adherant can be well-versed in understanding his/her religion and know the institutionally approved meanings of a ritual without having any personal experience or meaning in doing it. Knowledge about something does not yield meaningful experience by default. It can be of assistance, but it could be a hindrance as well. There is a difference between the conventional
message of a ritual and its capacity to create a
meaningful experience.
All I'm saying is: why settle for a part when you need the whole? Taken together, a set of rituals and the liturgy can help clarify underlying doctrine. As compared to being done in isolation, a given ritual is likely to make more sense when it appears in context of supporting liturgy and adjoining rituals.
Again, it depends on who defines what makes sense to whom. Yes, a religion as a package with liturgy, ritual, and doctrine generally has an intrinisic order to it, and each piece helps to create solidarity among practitioners- as well as social control. In telling people what a ritual should mean, and then using ritual experience to form a sense of identity and investment in the group, religion has a high capacity for creating social order that is felt on both institutional/cultural and individual levels.
However, none of that means a hill of beans for an individual's spiritual development as a person. Religion is full of people who are trained adherants, take on the identity, and behave in the socially conditioned way who really may not have any appreciable spiritual life at all. That is, knowing the liturgy, the ritual, its proper meanings, doctrine, and sacred text do not directly yield meaningful spiritual experience or development.
The Dalai Lama himself pointed this out, estimating that despite the many religions and adherants in the world, only a small fraction probably obtained spiritual development from their religion. This is, in part, why he advocated compassion as a secular (but spiritual) revolution.
A single practice in isolation can easily create confusion and may be seem as alien or bizarre in the absence of adequate context.
Confusion can be a good thing for spiritual development. Just as culture shock can often yield personal growth, tolerance, and a greater ability to be flexible, so too can the challenge of a ritual in the absence of "adequate" (and again, who gets to determine what this is for others?) context.
As a result, participants/observers would be less convinced of its validity and the ritual's underlying message and the religion would lose appeal.
On the contrary, the New Age movement is full of people who are fully convinced of the validity of various rituals and practices with very little understanding of the original message and religion. Religion actually seems more appealing to people in the first world the less it is understood and the more mysterious it is. On the other hand, you have many atheists who are very well-versed in Christianity but have wholly rejected it- often explaining that its appeal was lost over time- the more they learned, the less appealing they found the religion.
Validity of ritual depends a great deal on how the practitioner assigns validity. Personal experience? Authority figure approval? Time-honored tradition? New and improved or ancient? And this is carried into different religions' ways of assessing validity. In religions with trained centralized authority, validity of ritual is generally thought to be based on the training of the priest and proper execution of liturgy. In religions that are more shamanic or mystical in nature, training and proper execution are worthless if the individual has no power or ecstatic experience. Conversely, rituals may be created rather spontaneously and be considered valid and effective if they work- that is, if they connect the practitioners with deity, or heal someone, or allow the soul to journey.
Outsiders who have been exposed to weird rituals may never give the religion another chance if they are turned off by the experience. As a result, they won't understand the rituals, nor will there be much chance of understanding the religion as a whole.
On the other hand, outsiders might find weird rituals intriguing, and thereby begin to study and research so as to learn more.
A lot of an individual's response will be grounded in their personality, learning style, and existing conditioning.
I think Catherine Bell would say it does matter whether I can appreciate the dynamics of ritualization based on a consideration of the larger context of ritual traditions and systems.
If the goal is the study of religion, I'd entirely agree. If the goal is spiritual development, then it becomes a much more complex issue.
But as we have seen, a scattered/fragmented approach can have a negative impact on meaning and thereby cause the person to lose interest.
Or it can be personally challenging and have a positive impact, allowing new and creative individualistic meanings to be found and causing someone to be intrigued.
Low expectations of meaning based on past experience will mean the person will be less likely to look into the religion in the future. One could easily imagine a situation where the person loses interest in a religion that would have been helpful to them because the rituals were not adequately explained to them.
And one can also easily imagine a situation where a person rapidly loses interest because before experiencing anything of a religion, they have to undergo extensive study until they are deemed "adequately" prepared (by who, we still don't know). One can also imagine that such preparation assures, in part, that the institution will have greater social control, and indeed, the more institutionalized and organized religions have long used preparation to partake in ritual as a means of indoctrinating practitioners to ensure less revolution, creativity, and individual liberty in spiritual practice and ideas.
I don't argue against the idea that studying a religion in its full context is necessary for understanding it in its full context. Such studies are necessary for social and humanities studies of religion, for example. However, I do argue against the idea that any institutional body should determine what is best for other people and their spiritual development, as well as what creates meaningful experience for others. To me, this limits personal spiritual freedom in a way that is not only non-beneficial to individuals, but also creates a controlling environment socially, stifling creativity, debate, revolution, and other aspects of human society that I find desireable.
Sorry. Anyway, one of the more notable voices on this subject of fakery in allegedly syncretic religions is an anthropologist by the name of Melville Herskovits, who reported fieldwork findings. If you do a search on him, you will find numerous other papers concerned with the masking or cloaking functions of overtly adopted religion.)