There was a time when scholars understood morality as a universal abstract of human reason, a Kantian understanding of morality and decision making. In a form of cosmic purity, each individual had but tap into the universal reason available to us all and share a common morality.
Yet, some scholars have challenged this framework by emphasizing the role of the physical body upon the production of moral virtues. These thinkers contend that the moral self is a social construct, not an abstract principle, and religious institutions provide the map for the individual moral self to develop through bodily ritual.
For example, when describing the activities of medieval monastic communities, Talal Asad argued that the monks viewed religious rituals as an embodied experience that was “essential to the production of Christian virtues” (Genealogies of Religion, 63). In a sense, the ritual act embodied the realization of truth, and through communal living, the monastic community sought to cultivate the specific virtues of obedience and penitence. Similarly, Saba Mahmood’s study of Islamic women’s piety found that Egyptian Muslims used religious practices to instill the specific moral dispositions of humility and modesty. The body, then, provided the terrain for the moral self, as Mahmood writes, “For the mosque participants, it is the various movements of the body that comprise the material substance of the ethical domain” (Politics of Piety, 31).
If the body, then, is actually an important part of the production of the religious life, then perhaps more focus should be made on the way in which our actions are socially and religiously informed.
In less theoretical language, when we claim something is immoral or moral, we should recognize that the very idea of morality is deeply shaped by our personal social communities. These communities, then, play a significant role in shaping our interactions with the world, including providing our worldview and programming our habits to respond to certain social events in specific ways.
However, we are not drones simply receiving the commands of morality blindly from our social group, but our own bodies engage with society in a dialectic, what Pierre Bourdieu called a socially informed body or habitus. We consciously and unconsciously make decisions on whether we will continue to follow our group’s proscribed morality. The religious institution does not simply create the moral construct that group members robotically comply with, rather we also have the agency to recognize when a religious institution’s morality is serving us well or not.
The body is situated in an embodied history. Our habits reveal the extent of our moral selves, constructed by our specific religious and/or social communities. Thus, the moral decisions we make are not based on an abstract universal standard but on the social virtues of our community, even when those virtues are not always beneficial. It is no wonder that Jesus said “you will know them by their fruit,” (Matt 7:16) for it is not our minds that govern our moral decisions but our very bodies betray our true moral selves.