Religious Submission: Agency, Surrender, and the Enactment of Sacred Experience

• In Event: Diverse Visions and Perspectives on the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

In this paper we shed light on the taken-for-granted yet undertheorized interactive process in which religious practitioners work to achieve states that appear, on the surface, to contradict individual agency. We define religious submission as the skilled accomplishment through which practitioners transform their relationship to their own agency, actively working to "let go" of control to experience their actions as guided by divine authority or ultimate reality. Drawing on ethnographic studies of collective Buddhist meditation retreats and Torah study in a Jewish Haredi yeshiva, we track the delicate balance between “doing religion” (active, conscious engagement) and “being done by religion” (experiencing religious forces as taking over). In Torah study, students move from vigorous textual debate to submission to “divine thinking” through group partnerships. In Buddhist meditation, practitioners shift from conscious bodily performance to passive synchronization, enabling embodied submission to “ultimate reality.” Both cases reveal how practitioners actively create interactive spaces where religious submission unfolds as both deeply personal and transcendently powerful. This paradox—that practitioners must exercise agency to achieve states that appear to negate it—illuminates how religious doctrines become personalized through embodied practice, offering new insights into the accomplished nature of religious experience.

Authors

• Michal Pagis, Bar-Ilan University

• Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli, Bar-Ilan University