Religion as a Social Function

This week’s readings provided a good look into the social role that religion plays, both contemporarily and in the retelling of history. Kamen goes over the secondary, social role that Catholicism played in Spain’s Golden Age. As he puts it, “Religious practice was traditional and sociable rather than theological,” (78). People had some relationship with the Church, and that relationship helped them categorize themselves socially and culturally, but they did not know, understand, or hold the Christian beliefs that priests hoped they would. Religious identity functioned, in this case, to define who was “us” and who was “them”. They were Catholics insomuch as it separated them from the Muslims and Jews who were not. The myth of Christian Spain provided a similar function as a social identifier for Spaniards from the 19th century on. The version of Spanish history that tells of a firmly and steadfastly Christian Spain use that Christian identity to separate themselves as true Spaniards, separate from the descendants of Sephardic Jews and Moriscos that try to claim a share in that identity. By insisting on the myth of Christian Spain as a true telling of history, these Spaniards set Christian identity as a stipulation in assuming Spanish identity, using religion to establish an “us” and a “them”.