Much of human life is mundane, familiar and routine but we attend to some things which are very important to us. When the importance comes from God we call it the sacred. In a religious society, the distinctions are clear. In a largely secular world less so.
Lynch begins with a good clear summary of two well-known treatments of the sacred. The ontological approach associated with Otto and Eliade supposes that all people have an innate ‘capacity for a particular kind of religious experience, as well as the indefinable, mysterious phenomenon of the numinous that gave rise to such experiences’ and ‘an unquenchable ontological thirst’ (p. 10). The problem with this is that cultures vary so much that it is now hard to believe in universal needs much beyond the strictly biological. Patently, many of us are not ontologically thirsty. The main alternative is to see the sacred as a socially constructed category and, as Durkheim does, explain that construction by social needs and purposes. A few critical tweaks of Durkheim lead Lynch to define the sacred as ‘what people collectively experience as absolute, non-contingent realities which present normative claims over the meaning and conduct of social life’ (p. 29).
Modern societies have little consensual collective experience so people disagree about the sacred. Lynch illustrates this with a detailed account of the discovery of systematic abuse and neglect of children in the Irish industrial school system: a long conflict between the sacred of the Catholic Church's institutional authority and the sacred of loving and protecting children.
The sacred is now mediated by the mass media. Lynch illustrates this with an account of arguments over the BBC's refusal to broadcast a fund-raising appeal for children in Gaza because it would involve taking sides.
The sacred can be bad as well as good. To the extent that it unites a people and makes them feel good, it alienates others and makes them feel bad. Whatever benefit non-Muslim Americans get from treating the Ground Zero site as sacred has its cost in the demonising of Muslims. Lynch accepts the atheist's assertion that the sacred can be dangerous but he still thinks it is socially useful. ‘What is needed . . . is critical reflection upon the effect of sacred commitments, for us to be mutually accountable for these and to support structures that make non-violent and respectful discussion of the nature and consequence of sacred forms possible’ (p. 136). Or play nice.
The theoretical discussions of Otto, Eliade, Durkheim et al. are sensible and may be instructive to theologians who overlook or deny the social causes of religious belief, though I suspect few of them will read Lynch. The examples used to illustrate the fact that people argue over the sacred are interesting and informative. The Irish material in particular offers a useful ‘prequel’ to the priests and sexual abuse scandals. However, I am not sure what we gain by treating all strongly held values with behavioural consequences (e.g. one should not be cruel to children) as sacred. Defining the sacred as deriving from God limits the phenomenon. Freed from that base, it just becomes ‘what people take very seriously’ and as Lynch's contested examples show, one then has to ask how many (or which) people, and how seriously. If loving children is sacred, is loving dogs?
Lynch's treatment, though interesting, fails to answer the obvious question raised by his definition of the sacred by social convention. If it is not their putatively divine origins, what (if anything) limits candidates for sacred status?
