Fai-da-te! Doing-it-Yourself through Religion in Italy

Fai-da-te! Doing-it-Yourself through Religion in Italy. F. Garelli, Religion Italian Style: Continuities and Changes in a Catholic Country, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014, 244 pp., Ashgate AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Series, £54.00. I can remember my first visit to Italy vividly—most Anglophones can. The light, the sense of space-in-tension defined by the sound of bells and bodily motion, the ordered chaos, the unplumbed echo of historic lives beneath stone and mosaic -- all signal subliminally that one is not in Kansas any more . Or Sydney, or New York, or London. Things go differently here, as I discovered in many return trips. The disenchanted enchantment of long-term expats who cannot go home , and yet are not quite at home in Roma, or Firenze or Milan, either, is a litmus test of its alien-ness. They have, like Keats, Shelley, and many another, fallen under its spell and died a little by living its life. They re mad , says one expat, struggling with semi-employment but driven by a vision for church expansion, they re all mad . )t was a great food city , says an American academic long resident in the Rome, but now it is on the slide. All of )talian life, if one follows the doom sayers, is on the slide: it has been, ever since the Ostrogoths took over the joint. And yet what a sparkling, intoxicating decline it still is. This is the tenor and driving question underlying Franco Garelli s book Religion Italian Style. Based on extensive social survey results, Garelli reports on those elements of Italian life which reflect broader European trends—growing laicization, secularization and experimentation across the board—the growth of private religion, the culture of do it yourself religion. And yet, at the same time, there are the obdurate particularities of religion in a country where even the atheists are Catholic. No, really – his survey of over 3000 people points to 17% of Catholics who belong without believing in God , as well as a stable number of those who do not believe or belong (while generally appreciating the Catholic role in providing social services in Italy), and a growing proportion who believe (in something) while either not belonging, or at least practicing. In the Anglosphere, patterns of belief indicate a redefinition of the core, while Italy remains much more akin to American exceptionalism: the redefinition of religious life is happening around the edges, causing reflexive shifts in the various cores which form )taly as a nation. Hand in hand with Peter Berger (whose work is referenced repeatedly) Garelli returns repeatedly to the oddities which are posed by Italian religious experience for the standard presumptions of secularization theorists. The fact that 86 per cent of Italians associate with Catholicism is only the start: the persistence of Catholic doctrines is another, despite a noted softening and universalization of Catholic soteriology. )rregularity of attendance is not necessarily associated here with the sort of decline talked about across the border in Germany and France (p. 37). In part, this may be because Catholic praxis and cultural reach is rather more nuanced in its layering than individualized, ascetic Protestantism, aided by a well-articulated Catholic presence in higher education. The apparent spread of direct, individual experiences of the divine (admittedly a difficult category to measure) threatens another, older sort of secolarizzazione, where religious experience is decreasingly communal, unitive and ritual, and increasingly privatized, divergent and subjective. Garelli suggests that this is a trend associated with marginalization caused by economic insecurity, the ineffectiveness of educational systems as mechanisms for social mobility, restrictive gender roles etc. Thus belief in experiences of the spiritual, the demonic or of divine presence and grace, are most common in the South of Italy, among women, the elderly and the uneducated, but there is (as readers of Umberto Eco will remember) also a broader ecumenical openness to spiritualities of many types. )t is here that Garelli s survey-based approach faces a common limitation among the Italian sociologists of religion. At its foundation, he accepts the core cultural proposal that religion in )taly means Catholicism, unless one is talking about immigrants and foreigners. This is still common among Italian scholars, who work out of a language deeply shaped by Catholic presumptions as to the embedded semantics of words like religione or spiritualità. In 1990, Roberto Cipriani described the emergence of )talian sociology of religion from an essentially Catholic and confessional "religious sociology” towards a scientific sociology of religion. Garelli shows just how difficult it remains for scholars to detach themselves from their culture and linguistic location, and how valuable it is to ask, as he does, questions which invite international comparisons. Just as Americans overemphasize evangelicalism and Britons their Anglicanism (for often ideological ends), Italians infer that—in a country with the largest indigenous Pentecostal movement in Western Europe, and an evangelical tradition which precedes the Reformation—to be non-Catholic is, in effect, to be non-Italian. Some of the problem is methodological, and the result of the survey approach. Seeking for higher level generalizations, the big subject group (Catholicism) is de-grouped and subjected to nuanced analysis, while smaller subject groups particularly Protestants are grouped with other religions and treated without discrimination. Garelli s lack of knowledge of his own country s history can cause the book to obscure, even as it attempts to enlighten. To refer to Islam as the first non-Catholic denomination to shake up seriously a country which is not used to having to deal with different religions and cultures is to collapse Italian state formation into (to quote Firpo about interpretations of the Council of Trent an anodyne and misleading past.1 One doesn t need to go as far back as the turbulent repressions of the Waldensians (Giorgio Rochat) or the more recently rediscovered )talian Reformation Tedeschi, Caponetto, Firpo et al). As Giorgio Spini has noted, the Italian liberalism which helped bring into being the Savoyard Kingdom of Italy drew repeatedly on the links enjoyed by Italian Protestants with the Anglophone world, and counted among its leadership and rank and file a disproportionate number of Protestants and anglophiles.2 1 Massimo Firpo, Juan de Valdé s and the Italian Reformation, Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2015, ix. 2 Giorgio Spini, Italia liberale e protestanti, Torino: Claudiana, 2002. Without making too much of this, it is an important counter-point to Garelli s survey-based snapshot in time, with its mixture of consolidated and analytical categories. As Massimo D Azeglio noted after the unification of )taly: Fatta l )talia, bisogna fare gli )taliani . [ )taly is made, now it remains to make the )talians ] The category )talian is one which has been contested since its beginning, just recently beyond the veil limiting living memory. Those who hold conservative views do not hold what Garelli unfortunately refers to as religious models of the past 9 --a categorization he doesn t seem willing to apply to Wahhabi Islam, for example, which, with Soka Gakkai Buddhism among newer migrant waves, is rolled into an indistinct great historical religion 9 . No, evangelicals, Protestants, conservative Catholics hold those beliefs now, and so they are present and future categories, however uncomfortable that may be for the neo-whiggism of the new knowledge class. It is a reminder that we are all of us the subjects of our own inquiries, limited by our own methods. Garelli s volume is not, and is not intended to be, Bowling Alone or Habits of the Heart:3 it is a straight interpretation of a limited data set. At points, it suffers for this, with a certain ponderous in-text analysis occluding the occasional gems of insight in his high-level conclusions. The comparison, however, is instructive. It is worth remembering that Bowling Alone came out of Putnam s famous studies of the effectiveness of Italian municipalities, elucidating what has since become a much more articulate theory of social capital.4 One of Putnam s questions was why is it that the )talian state continues to work despite the corruption and bureaucratic pettifoggery for which it is infamous? (e contrasts the virtuous equilibrium of the North (based on dense networks of civic engagement through secondary and tertiary associations, from soccer clubs to bird watching societies, leading to trust, corporate efficiency, and mutual enrichment), with the impoverishment of a South which has found a vicious equilibrium through the need for primary institutions--the family, the village-- to replace the functions of colonizing and domineering elites and a distant and inefficient state). Unlike Garelli, Putnam attempted to locate these problems in the historical contexts of North, Centre and South, rather than in the demographic challenges of the present. He was duly criticised for his simplification of history, in particular his overly sanguine view of the merits of the northern Italian medieval commune. One reviewer also suggested that it was a book written too soon: soon after its publication, the Tangentopoli trials in Milan indicted thousands, led to the dissolution of hundreds of municipalities, and the collapse of the First Republic. With an even longer view, however, one might say that Putnam s emphasis on the value-trust link and the dynamics of social cohesion were confirmed shortly afterwards by the Leeson scandal (1995), and later the exposure of casino capitalism following the collapse of Lehman Brothers (2008). 3 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000; Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton (eds), Habits of the Heart Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press: 1985, 1996, 2007. 4 Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making democracy work: civic traditions in modern Italy, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1993. The value of Putnam s telescopic approach, overlooked by Garelli s deductive, survey-based method, is that it demonstrates that a community is more than simply a congeries of rights and opinions . People live associationally: they are made up not only by what they do or think, but by the relational networks to which they belong. These are dynamic, as both Garelli and Putnam demonstrate in part because of the mobility of economic relations, in part because (as Rodney Stark has shown) people get to choose, to make and remake their identities and the quality of their group memberships. Here--to gloss Giorgio Spini s statement that Italy had learned not too much from America, but too little--one wishes that Garelli had read more of Berger, rather than less. Berger s longevity is based in part on a model of human nature (as explored in his classic The Sacred Canopy), as incomplete and reflexively self-making. It avoids the problems, seen in much social scientific work, associated with camping on some categories as if they were static, in ways which are ultimately political. One might think here of how the category evangelical is used in American political parlance. Pundits often use the term to mean white, middle class protestant conservatives, rather than the very significant number of Black or (ispanic churchgoers who hold almost identical beliefs. The White Man s Last Tantrum is how one political pundit summed up Tea Party politics in , with seemingly little consciousness of the history of populist politics in the West.5 It is a definition which is in itself political: evangelical in this usage becomes shorthand for the core constituency of anti-progressives. The beliefs and history of the subject group are erased in favour of the measurable material elements of their make-up (gender, race, socio-economic status, etc.). What is observed, in other words, is largely determined by the method of measurement already determined upon by the observer. For all that he describes the differences of Italian exceptionalism, therefore, Garelli s findings might be seen as gaining traction only because its methods are (in disciplinary terms) unexceptionable. The danger he faces is joining the sort of deadening, self-enclosing obtuseness noted among sociologists by David Martin (with regard to doctrinaire secularisation theory), Pierre Bourdieu (with regard to the French sociological academy), or Christian Smith (with regard to their colleagues in the USA).6 Though he avoids that danger in this volume--largely by concentrating on the detail and skimming over definitive discussion of large interpretative frameworks--Garelli s mental shortcuts and occasional lapses betray how close he skirts to a similar sort of fate. In the end, it does seem a great deal of grinding to come up with very little meal, and one hopes that this is a book on the way to a larger interpretative sketch. The trans-Atlantic tendency to understand )taly as one of the sick men of [Western] Europe , as being on the slide , has long affected the type of attention that fertile, fascinating and important country has received from the Western Robert Parry, The White Man s Last Tantrum? , Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/04/the-white-mans-last-tantrum/ Accessed 12 Jan 2016. 6 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978; Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988; Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 5 academy. Scholars wrote about it as an extension of tourism, organized crime, or studies in political dysfunctionality, an approach which simply reinforced the disappearance of )taly as a subject of serious attention after the marginalization of the Italian communist party from 1948. As Garelli notes, however, it is a vibrant place of change, a frontline in issues critical to the emerging global order. )ts people have under the obscuring cloud of more important countries, as defined from the American strategic perspective, such as France and Germany, or the idiosyncracy of its political class) made significant contributions to all aspects of human flourishing. In emphasizing Italian religious exceptionalism, Garelli throws out the challenge to dreary, Franco-centric secularisation theory. While it is a shame he has not here pushed the challenge further by getting beyond macro-scale culture, he again demonstrates why trans-Atlantic scholarship needs to decouple its interests from the dominant concerns inscribed by the post-World War II settlements. When that is done, Italy (as recently demonstrated by Roderick Bailey, Katen Mistry, among others)7 emerges from under British and American orientalism as a coherent and important culture for understanding the past, present and future of the West. Mark Hutchinson Alphacrucis College Roderick Bailey, Target: Italy – The Secret War against Mussolini – The Official History of SOE Operations in Fascist Italy, New York: Faber & Faber, 2014; Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945-1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 7