NETWORK OR MOVEMENT?
John Linsie Whatever else SoF might be, from the standpoint of an observer it is a social group - but what kind of group is not so readily established. Many SoF members have a strong emotional commitment to the notion of the group as a wholly informal network, a categorisation decidedly questionable from an observer's standpoint. To an observer the group looks more like a social movement. But this categorisation is explicitly rejected in the statement which heads the 1992 application form for membership: • "This overall diversity renders inappropriate any sense of SoF as a 'movement' or a `party' with collective belief and discipline bent to a defined end. Our looser pattern of a 'network' reflects our facilitating nature much better. We are concerned with promoting the general legitimacy and validity of our basic attitude and developing our understanding of it rather than lobbying in any specific institutions under the banner of SoF".
But what that general statement of purpose ignores is that any human group can be viewed from two different standpoints: participation and observation.
Furthermore, the way in which a group's members define their concerns does not, of necessity, constrain how such concerns might be conceived by an observer. And as SoF grows it will attract increasing attention from observers. "Network" is typically used to categorise a loose assemblage of people linked primarily by word of mouth communication. It is that usage which informs, for instance, the use of the term in "network marketing" to point up the way in which knowledge of a commercial product is communicated primarily by word of mouth recommendation and not by some form of commercial media advertising. Network marketing has its overarching elements: the magazine New Network Times and the trade association Multi-Level Marketing International Association. Hence it does not follow that the network marketing of a product is wholly divorced from a formal structure for its manufacture, distribution and promotion.
Examination of the wider use of "network" suggests that it is used to identify a communicational system within which the individual is able to exercise a degree of direct influence. So, for instance, banks typically refer to their hole-inthe-wall machines as forming a network. Thus the general use of "network" involves both formal and informal elements, personal practice and collective conventions, individuals and institutions.
How does this square with the use of the term "network" as in "Sea of Faith Network"? Here there seems to me to be a concern by some members to separate informal communication and association from any kind of formal structure; to distance the individual from the institutional. But from the standpoint of an observer this concern is misleading and difficult to sustain.
What I have in mind is this. For many members their involvement with SoF is certainly via informal conversational exchanges. For instance, a typical meeting of the Loughborough group entails a free-ranging discussion with no set agenda, an open forum within which members raise matters of immediate personal concern. After an hour or so the group disperses into small knots of people, some over drinks at the bar, others remaining in the meeting room.
But the Loughborough group's immediate informal association and conversational exchanges are based on a less obvious formal structure from which has emerged annual conferences, a network secretary and treasurer and so on - though the Network's "officers" are not collectively announced in SoF's literature. Furthermore, the Network does not rely wholly on word-of-mouth communication but issues a magazine, conference reports, advertises in the press and has attracted attention from the media.
Hence, while some members may wish to play down the visibility of its formal structure, that structure exists and cannot be so readily ignored by an observer. Accordingly I conclude that SoF is an informal network of people based on an emergent formal structure, one which will no doubt become more formal as the network expands.
How then is SoF to viewed from the observer's standpoint - by, say, a social psychologist? From such a standpoint SoF is most usefully viewed as a social movement. What do I mean by a social movement? A group with a formal structure of officers and an essentially political agenda - as distinct from a cultural movement (like Impressionism) which is an informal group of practitioners concerned to make marked changes in some form of representational practice.
Unfortunately social psychologists and sociologists CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15 have failed to agree a common definition of the term "social movement", so I offer the following drawn from Hans Toch's Social Psychology of Social Movements (Methuen, 1966): a group of people who have been drawn together to make a collective response to some form of felt deficiency in a society's general working. Social movements emerge in response to institutional failure.
A social movement's operation gives rise, therefore, to two basic questions: what is the institutional failure which underpins its emergence, and by what means is that failure's rectification sought? With SoF, the answer to the first question turns, I suggest, on the failure by the institutional church to maintain the objective credibility of, and hence subjective confidence in, traditional religious teachings. Indeed, it can be argued that it was that traditional teaching's apologetic difficulties, as principally experienced within the priesthood, which provided the major impetus for SoF's emergence.
For some SoF members such difficulties appear to have their locus in rthe loss of credibility in the existence of a subgtantive god. Viewed in that way, SoF becomes a funereal wake to respond to a sense of individual bereavement. But I find this metaphor unacceptable for two reasons.
First, the assertion that god is dead presupposes that he was once alive - which again allows in at the back door a belief in a substantive god as shown out by the front door. Second, if god is dead in a total sense, how is the intellectual hole created by his demise to be filled? Given the longevity of belief in the existence of a substantive god, then if people these days are to reject that belief, lock, stock and chasuble, a massive historical problem is thereby raised: why did people accept such a belief in the past and why was that belief basic to the working of past societies? This problem cannot be solved in simplistic terms of personal shortcomings, credulity, superstition, irrationality and the like - though I suspect that such an explanation is embraced by some in SoF.
In conclusion, it seems to me that the SoF Network, as it expands, will run into similar difficulties to those experienced by other movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the past and the Green Party in the present. Such movements achieve a rapid increase in membership followed by an equally rapid loss of much of that membership through internal dissensions. In essence such difficulties turn on a membership seeking to attain revolutionary ends by essentially reactionary means.
SoF serves to unite people who accept that religion is a human creation. It is a collective which advances a revolutionary view of religion. But it seems to me that SoF members seek to have a humanly-made religion without challenging why it is that institutional religion has traditionally asserted that religion is divinely given. They want the ha'penny and the bun as well. They want to concoct an individually based religion without entering into conflict with the powers who continue to direct institutional religion. And it is for that reason, I suggest, that some members of the Network are so vigorously opposed to viewing it as a social movement.
John Linsie, from Coventry, has worked as an educational psychologist.