Navel of the Demoness : Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in ...

14 thenavelofthedemoness
Thrower goes so far as to propose a direct historical link between the civil
religion of ancient Rome and that of the Soviet Union, ‘‘mediated to Russia
from Byzantium and ...passed on to the new Communist rulers of Russia and
her Empire’’ (1992: 145).
Much as in the case of France immediately after her own revolution,
Russia in 1917 saw a proliferation of secular rites—‘‘Bolshevik ceremonies’’—
that were fabricated as substitutes for the discredited Orthodox rituals: an
Octobrist ceremony to celebrate childbirth, ‘‘red weddings,’’ ‘‘red funerals,’’ and
so forth. However, it was only in the decade following the death of Lenin in
1924 that Marxism-Leninism began to take on the characteristics of a civil religion;
it became the ‘‘transcendental reference’’ in the background of all Soviet
Russia. ‘‘The first step in this process was taken when the Communist Party,
the Government and the State became an interlocking, single monolithic institution—an
institution that from this period until his death in 1953, was both
symbolically and effectively, Stalin himself ’’ (Thrower 1992: 164). To this extent,
Thrower suggests, Stalin’s position was analogous to that of Augustus in
later Roman civil religion.
The importance of a canon in the constitution of any religion—civil or
otherwise—will be discussed in chapter 9 (where the concept of transcendence,
invoked above, will also be considered). Soviet civil religion, Thrower
maintains, was no exception: the canon was the only permitted interpretation
of Marxism-Leninism—Stalin’s own A History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): A Short Course (1938). The real purpose of the Short
Course was not history but myth: it was intended to legitimise the Soviet state
and the Communist Party’s role in it. Marxism-Leninism was ‘‘a civil religion
whose primary purpose, like that of the great state civil religions of antiquity,
was to legitimate the existing order of society, keep chaos at bay, and to purvey
a sense of historic mission’’ (Thrower 1992: 168).
According to Liebman and Don-Yehiya, it is precisely the fact that it is
elaborated around a social agenda that distinguishes Israel’s civil religion from
Judaism. The former may look very similar to traditional religion (the authors’
term), ‘‘but at its core stands a corporate entity rather than a transcendent
power, even if it also refers to a transcendent reality or even a supernatural
power’’ (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983: 4). What gives traditional religion its
superiority is the centrality of God and the concomitant possibility of a private
soteriology. The transfer of supreme authority from God to society means that
civil religion ‘‘can neither provide the individual with ultimate meaning nor
evoke from him the intensity of commitment which traditional religion can.’’
The ‘‘objective’’ of civil religion, that is, ‘‘the sanctification of the society in