Differentiating Religion and Medicine
Michael DeJonge, PhD, University of South Florida
The 2023 Conference on Medicine and Religion invites conversation about “the intersection of medicine and religion.” To speak of the “intersection” of medicine and religion presupposes that the two are delimited from each other, that there are, as the conference title puts it, “limits of medicine.” So, how should we understand the difference between religion and medicine?
The call for papers offers several (not entirely compatible) ways of understanding the difference between medicine and religion. One way the call differentiates between them is through the distinction between body and soul; medicine attends to the body, and religion attends to the soul. A second way the call distinguishes between them is, with reference to Charles Taylor, through the distinction between the secular and sacred; medicine’s concerns are secular and religion’s concerns are sacred. A third way the call distinguishes between them is through the kinds of questions each asks. Medicine, being pragmatic and technological, asks ‘how?’ Religion, being fundamentally moral, asks ‘should?’
Apart from the question of how these three differentiating strategies relate to each other, questions arise about the adequacy of each. Does the soul occupy the same foundational place in religion that the body does in medicine? Does the notion of secularity bring us close to the heart of medicine when other non-religious discourses in modernity (economics, science, etc.) claim secularity as well? Can religion, itself shot through with techniques and practices, be identified instead with the moral ‘should’?
This paper offers for discussion an alternative approach to marking the boundaries of medicine and religion, one grounded in the social theory of the twentieth-century German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann. According to Luhmann’s thinking, both medicine and religion are social or communicative systems, but they differ according to the respective communicative “codes” that organize them. Medicine is organized around the code of health/illness, while religion is organized around the code of immanence/transcendence. That is, while medicine concerns itself with the promotion of health and the elimination of disease, religion concerns itself with the transcendent interpretation of phenomena that it marks as immanent, including the phenomena of health and disease.
Such an approach offers a framework for understanding both the “limits” of medicine and religion as well as their various “intersections.” Put schematically, the differentiation of medicine and religion according to their codes occurs with the emergence of modern society so that the dominant expectation in modernity is for medicine to deal with health/illness while religion deals with immanence/transcendence. This is the expectation, in any case, for mainstream medicine (i.e., biomedicine, ‘Western’ medicine) and mainstream religion, here defined as those social systems dedicated to transcendent meaning which respect the differentiation of medicine and religion. But there are also alternative forms of medicine (which do not fit the biomedical model) and alternative forms of religion, here defined as social systems dedicated to transcendent meaning which reject the differentiation of medicine and religion. Luhmann’s social theory, it is argued, is a well-theorized and sophisticated tool for differentiating and relating medicine and religion.
The call for papers offers several (not entirely compatible) ways of understanding the difference between medicine and religion. One way the call differentiates between them is through the distinction between body and soul; medicine attends to the body, and religion attends to the soul. A second way the call distinguishes between them is, with reference to Charles Taylor, through the distinction between the secular and sacred; medicine’s concerns are secular and religion’s concerns are sacred. A third way the call distinguishes between them is through the kinds of questions each asks. Medicine, being pragmatic and technological, asks ‘how?’ Religion, being fundamentally moral, asks ‘should?’
Apart from the question of how these three differentiating strategies relate to each other, questions arise about the adequacy of each. Does the soul occupy the same foundational place in religion that the body does in medicine? Does the notion of secularity bring us close to the heart of medicine when other non-religious discourses in modernity (economics, science, etc.) claim secularity as well? Can religion, itself shot through with techniques and practices, be identified instead with the moral ‘should’?
This paper offers for discussion an alternative approach to marking the boundaries of medicine and religion, one grounded in the social theory of the twentieth-century German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann. According to Luhmann’s thinking, both medicine and religion are social or communicative systems, but they differ according to the respective communicative “codes” that organize them. Medicine is organized around the code of health/illness, while religion is organized around the code of immanence/transcendence. That is, while medicine concerns itself with the promotion of health and the elimination of disease, religion concerns itself with the transcendent interpretation of phenomena that it marks as immanent, including the phenomena of health and disease.
Such an approach offers a framework for understanding both the “limits” of medicine and religion as well as their various “intersections.” Put schematically, the differentiation of medicine and religion according to their codes occurs with the emergence of modern society so that the dominant expectation in modernity is for medicine to deal with health/illness while religion deals with immanence/transcendence. This is the expectation, in any case, for mainstream medicine (i.e., biomedicine, ‘Western’ medicine) and mainstream religion, here defined as those social systems dedicated to transcendent meaning which respect the differentiation of medicine and religion. But there are also alternative forms of medicine (which do not fit the biomedical model) and alternative forms of religion, here defined as social systems dedicated to transcendent meaning which reject the differentiation of medicine and religion. Luhmann’s social theory, it is argued, is a well-theorized and sophisticated tool for differentiating and relating medicine and religion.