Symbolic Interactions in Popular Religion According to Dimensions of Religiosity: A Qualitative Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

One small suggestion: Even though the paper is a study case in Croatia, the first time we are introduced to Croatia is at the end of the introduction (lines 80-89). I suggest to describe it in the beginning of the paper.

 

Author Response

Inserted paragraphs on the Croatian context

66 -71 - inserted

Here, we take a perspective towards symbolic sociology and the system of signs and symbols in understanding the popular religion and religiosity of Croatian society as a historically living part of history and maintained social and spiritual continuity. A modern society marked by the scientific and technological revolution and mass culture first led to the alienation of individuals from religion and then to the return of the sacred as well as the return of some older, traditional forms of religiosity.

94-101 – inserted

In Croatian history, the Catholic Church played an important role in strengthening and preserving the national spirit. Over time, it became one of the most prominent symbols of national homogenization. Considering the importance of this historical factor, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church in Croatia has expanded its activities to popular Christianity in Croatian society. Precisely such a form of participation in religious life is a manifested expression of the symbolic domain mediated by the Church's social power (Mardešić, 2007: 756 -757). In Croatian society, this means that today's thinking about religiosity is directly related to the role of religion and the Church in the past as well as to the nature of social processes that have greatly influenced the social functions of religion.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very interesting paper with a variety of references to work in sociology and religious studies. The references to Carl Jung are especially engaging and can be developed in more detail. My main concern with the paper is the writing style, there are quotations and paragraphs that do not have a clear relationship to the paragraphs above and below them, for example the series of quotes on pages 8 and 9 of 17. These paragraphs and quotations should be discussed and there should be clear transitions between them. The paper is interesting and engaging, but the information is not expressed clearly and in an organized way. Please revise.

Author Response

The string of quotations and vague paragraphs have been adapted, elaborated and supplemented with new references and answers of the research participants.

344-345 - inserted

This is where the degree of belonging to a symbolic community comes from, experienced within the community and tradition.

347-349 - inserted

These accompany popular religion, they are external expressions of faith that are not necessary as such, but are useful if their foundation is not forgotten.

351-356 - modified

Mutual affiliation is based on the source of that affiliation and it is not of great importance whether it is manifested or not manifested the explanation which gives 'rationality' and comprehensibility to the complex moral order that implicity organizes mentioned activities. „Schutz and Garfinkel explicitly highlight the 'natural attitude' as the institutional, interactive structure of society; and seek to explicate in different contexts and with differing levels of generality how this structure emerges and operates, how it is renewed and persists“ (Ferguson, 2006, 97).

357-361 - modified

Namely, Harold Garfinkel uses „the term 'Ethnomethodology' to refer to the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life“ (Garfinkel, 2018, 11). Garfinkel points out that common-sense understanding of everyday activities is constitutive as well as explanatory of these practices:

 

367-398 – inserted

Pace (2009) claims that in Croatia religion developed the main features of the national culture shaped by the European historical, cultural and political matrix within which it occurred. Croatia is part of Western culture which can be seen in the events and motivations that present the clearest reflection of the cultural identity of the nation (Kale, 1992). In Croatian society, religion manifested in its first type as a means of social integration of the people in its efforts to preserve and keep its national identity in the face of threats from the political (or atheistic) enemy. Other types or reasons for the emergence of religion played a negligible role in the religion of Croatian society (Mardešić, 2007: 756). For Croats, religion became a means of struggle, and grew into a means of constructing, or more precisely preserving and reconstructing the national identity of the people themselves.

Along with such an understanding of religion goes the claim that religion acts as a politics of identity. Enzo Pace uses this term in his book Why Do Religions Go to War? (Perchè le religioni scendono in guerra?, Pace, 2009)

The danger of understanding symbolic interaction in popular religion as identity politics due to the direction of the developmental processes of transformation and continuity of popular religion should be seen within Croatian society, discussing every type of "exclusive" or "ultimate" discourse, from social and historical to traditional and political, as the areas where living “authentic Christian life” is being lost. Hence the understanding of Christianity in itself (the understanding of Christianity as a metasocial phenomenon that cannot be reduced or explained only by social relations, but which has its own social dimensions and functions). This approach attempts to answer fundamental questions about the origin, meaning, and function of Christianity (directly related to the philosophy and psychology of religion) within the context of symbolic interaction in popular religion.

Furthermore, Simmel argues that we need to preserve an awareness of relative independence from spiritual culture, i.e. the impossibility of sociologically reducing spirit and culture to social conditions without any residue. The human spirit is an instance that produces forms that faithfully exist independently of its creator and the historical and social moment of creation because their subject/creator is limited in time, the created being eternal (Simmel, 2001). According to Simmel, we can state that the symbolic interaction in the popular religion in the Croatian Christian context is directed towards objective products of culture, based on constant spiritual creation and the created based on the "formative instinct" of the spirit. This interdependence and connection contain the metaphysical meaning of Christianity as a historical product, without anticipating certain negativities of the historical spirit of Christianity; parareligious and pseudoreligious phenomena and, on the other hand, a false belief in the universal validation of some random, ephemeral forms.

 

404-411 – inserted

In addition to its social, political, psychological security, symbolic interaction in popular religion, according to the dimensions of religiosity, is also a way of placing oneself in relation to the basic reality - the manifestation of something that emerges in the senses - in imagination, gesture, feeling. A symbol is also an expression of the foundation of a symbolic community that can be said to be shown and concealed. Yet, showing-hiding double meaning is not always concealing what is meant, rather it is sometimes "a manifestation, a revelation of the sacred." The phenomenology of the sacral in the consideration of interpretation and understanding should be understood as a preparation for the discovery of meaning.

 

416-417 - inserted

…of the phenomenology of the sacred since every phenomenology of religion is at the same time the phenomenology of the sacred.

439-440 – inserted

Respondents' answers show that one cannot speak unequivocally about God, much less in His Name - it is often better to be silent about Him.

471-493 – modified and developed

 

Believer, by virtue of her/his ability to convert signs into symbols, as in Kant’s criterion of ‘indirect meaning’ and ‘analogy’, brings symbol in close connection with metaphor. According to Kant, in humans, the symbol is an indirect representation of a concept (image) based on the study of such an analogy between two objects, which lies not in material similarity but in the rule of reflection, not in content, but in the form of reflection on those objects. "The Judgement exercises a double function; first applying the concept to the object of a sensible intuition, and then applying the mere rule of the reflection made upon that intuition to a quite different object of which the first is only the symbol. Thus a monarchical state is represented by a living body, if it is governed by national laws, and by a mere machine (like a hand-mill) if governed by an individual absolute will; but in both cases only symbolically. For between a despotic state and a hand-mill there is, to be sure, no similarity; but there is a similarity in the rules according to which we reflect upon these two things and their causality" (Kant, 1976, p. 189).

Kant considers the schematic and symbolic mode of presentation to be exemplary modes, which he contrasts with the discursive mode. "The intuitive in cognition must be opposed to the discursive (not to the symbolical). The former is either schematical, by demonstration; or symbolical as a representation in accordance with a mere analogy" (Kant, 1976, p. 189). He emphasizes that these are modes of hypotyposis, that is, “‘exhibitiones’ ('Frege refers to it as ‘Vorstellung’ − an inner image that is created through memory and active experience'), and not mere characterisations” (Kant, 1976, p. 188-189). According to Kant, characterisations are "designations of concepts by accompanying sensible signs which contain nothing belonging to the intuition of the Object, and only serve as a means for reproducing the concepts, according to the law of association of the Imagination, and consequently in a subjective point of view" (Kant, 1976, p. 188-189).

494-496 - inserted

"...for me, God is always alive... My image of God comes down to a personal relationship. That personal relationship is built communicatively, therefore, the relationship is alive, there is internal communication, internal conversation, there is listening, there is oblivion ... ”(S2).

 

501-510 - inserted

Respondents show that communication with God requires breaking through one's own thoughts and feelings, entering into dialogue with those similar and different from us, and not taking anything for granted, especially not ready-made answers from anyone who offers them. They can only be given by God, and we can only taste, listen and hear them, over and over again, every day, in concrete situations of our lives rather than in abstract principles and regulations.

Thus, the respondents confirm that the cognition of the world is the penetration of the sacred into the profane. The sacred has the character of being, existence, a kind of "fullness", and the profane has the character of non-being, non-existence and "emptiness"; in-between, as respondents show, there are countless transitions. On the one hand, the sacred is related to its original meaning, literally, sensory; on the other hand, the literal meaning is bound by the symbolic meaning that rests on it.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Good response from author, some revision has been made. I would suggest that some of the author's response would be best placed as footnotes in the published paper itself as well.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

We have made a changes according to reviewers requests of citation updates.

Thanks,

Kind regards,

Goran Kardum

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf