Praying Together, Hating Together—Transforming Hostility through the Effective Direction of Religious Communitarization

Abstract

Perceived belonging to a community is one of the most frequently given reasons for the regularity of religious practice. However, it also plays a key role in the practice of religious violence. The paper addresses the relationship between felt belonging, which is established in shared religious experiences, and different expressions of religious hostility. By means of a phenomenological analysis based on the work of Bernhard Waldenfels, the author distinguishes between different modes of religious self-localization. On the one hand, the performative moments of religious practices are reconstructed, unfolding their effect even in regular and less intensive experiences. On the other hand, the intrinsically shared nature of religious assemblies becomes describable, which includes the co-actors in the process of religious self-constitution. Due to the existential and shared nature of this self-constitution, violent affects appear to be group-directed, which particularly encourages the self-sacrificial behavior that seems to distinguish religious violence. This methodological focus on performative communitarization keeps the study also interoperable with a variety of meaning-based theories, promoting phenomenology as a resourceful method for a philosophical division of labor.