Vicarious religious ordinance: forcing your faith on the unsuspecting

ABSTRACT

This paper gives a first theoretical formulation to a religious phenomenon which has not received much attention in philosophical discourse so far despite appearing in different highly heterogeneous religions. Vicarious religious ordinance refers to cases in which a living or deceased fully mature human being is knowingly or unknowingly assigned a religious affiliation without their consent or the consent of their dependents. I shall first offer three real-world examples of vicarious religious ordinance from Mormonism, Islam, and Shintoism and then raise some normative concerns. I suggest (i) that vicarious religious ordinance does not fit neatly into current debates about religious epistemology, especially the recent debate on religious disagreement. I argue (ii) that normative questions as to why vicarious religious ordinance elicits indignation in its ‘victims’ is not easily explained through adducing similar examples. This paper aims to motivate further coordinated research on this topic.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy of religion
• consent
• proselytism
• disagreement
• epistemology
• applied philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has somewhat recently begun to insist on people, in particular official sources like media outlets, using the term ‘Latter-Day Saints’ instead of ‘Mormons’ to refer to its devotees (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/mormon-is-out-church-releases-statement-on-how-to-refer-to-the-organization?lang=eng). This usage has seemingly not yet fully caught on. For the sake of clarity and legibility, I have to decided to stick with the more well-known term ‘Mormon’ or ‘Mormonism’ for the sake of this article.

2. There is a similar religious phenomenon called Anonymous Christianity, due to Rahner 1970). The doctrine of Anonymous Christianity holds that even non-Christians may be ‘saved’ through the grace of Christ, thus universalizing and explicating an implication of the Christian idea of Christ being the savior of all mankind. However, I do not consider Rahner’s idea a straightforward example of vicarious religious ordinance as it does not assert or imply that non-Christians ‘secretly’ are Christians; it just asserts that the grace of God applies to them as well. By the same token, I would not consider Hinduism a case of vicarious religious ordinance. Hinduists believe that everybody is subject to Samsara, regardless of how they identify. But it does not seem that Hinduism thereby implies that even non-Hinduists are ‘secretly’ Hindu. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this to my attention.

3. Hashas, Introduction, 26.

4. Campanini, “Universalism and Cosmopolitanism in Islam”, 117. For an “’intellectualist’ interpretation of fitra”, cf. Von Doetinchem de Rande, An exceptional Sage, 2019.

5. cf. Adang, “Islam as the Inborn Religion of Mankind”. 394f. and Cleary, The Wisdom of the Prophet, 9.

6. Stone, “Proxy Baptism Seekers”. 2012.

7. Oppenheimer, “A Twist on Posthumous Baptisms”. 2012.

8. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/baptisms-for-the-dead?lang=eng.

9. Pye, “Religion and Conflict in Japan”. 50f.

10. Rozman, “Narrowing the Gap between China and Japan”. 2013.

11. Williams, Shinto, 4.

12. Pye, Religion and Conflict in Japan, 55.

13. Ludwig, “Proxy Agency in Collective Action”. 2014.

14. Nagasawa, “Proxy Consent and Counterfactuals”. 16–24.

15. cf. Tillson, Children, Religion, and the Ethics of Influence, 2019; Vopat, Justice, Religion, and the Education of Children, 2009.

16. Cf. for example Haslanger, “Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race”, 2019. Ascription of race may serve different functions, for example in medical care, cf. White et al. “Socially-Assigned Race and Health”. 2020.

17. Cf. the controversial article on the issue, cf. Tuvel, “In Defence of Transracialism”, 2017.

18. De Cruz, “Religious Disagreement”, 2017; Benton and Kvanvig, Religious Disagreement and Pluralism, 2021; Kraft, The Epistemology of Religious Disagreement, 2012: Pittard, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment, 2019; Forrest, “The Epistemology of Religion”. 2021.

19. The aforementioned example of fitra is an exception: it does not require tokening an appropriate speech act.

20. Martiny and Nitkin, “Social Identity Threat”, 117. Cf. also Tajfel and Turner, “An Integrative Theory of intergroup Conflict”, 1979,

21. Deng et al., “Stigmatization and Interpersonal Deviance”. 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported through a postdoc fellowship by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Notes on contributors

Thomas J. Spiegel

Thomas J. Spiegel earned his PhD in 2017 at the University of Leipzig. He is currently a JSPS & Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Waseda University.