
Just some converging thoughts, along the line of the usual.
I was reading somewhere a footnote with a quote from the historian John Bossy where he wrote something to the effect that the modernization of religion is tied into the transformation of collective religion into individual religion. I think that is a good way of looking at it. But how does that tie in more generally to what was going on in the rest of society?
Then I started to think about the cult of St. Joseph in the West. Why did it evolve so late, and why was it that St. Joseph before the modern period was portrayed as an old man, and why afterwards is he portrayed as a man in his prime? Now, don’t get me wrong. I am very devoted to St. Joseph, but I am wondering whether the interiorization of religion and the rise of the nuclear family (and its apotheosis in Catholicism in the cult to the Holy Family) have anything to do with each other.
As in all questions in the social sciences, you are never going to have a “smoking gun”. Reading certain things in the recent days, however, makes me think that there is at least a significant trend at work here. I suppose I would have to delve into the personal and state that I grew up in an extended family situation. I feel that I was not just raised by my parents, but by my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even my great-grandmother. So the analogy between the Trinitarian God and the nuclear family (father, mother, child) is somewhat lost on me. In rural Mexican society, you felt more part of a clan than a small nuclear family unit, even on this side of the border.
Perhaps this is also why John Paul II’s theology of the body never appealed to me either. I don’t find anything particularly noble or ascetical about the nuclear family situation in that I am used to the idea that the family is about obligations to your clan, and not some “life decision”. But that is a bit of a digression.
What that has to do with the individualization of religion, I am not sure. Perhaps in such a clan-like environment, religion was most seen as loyalty to familial beliefs and rituals. When I was young, this was even more the case than it is now. Before, there was a real series of rituals of food, prayer, and social interaction that had to be observed by everyone. Now, everyone seems to be going their separate ways (and a couple of them have become evangelicals). So there was a more collective attitude towards faith. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing, I cannot say. Only that even in my mother’s family, it is an endangered species.