26,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Featuring comprehensive updates and additions, the second edition of Understanding Theories of Religion explores the development of major theories of religion through the works of classic and contemporary figures. * A new edition of this introductory text exploring the core methods and theorists in religion, spanning the sixteenth-century through to the latest theoretical trends * Features an entirely new section covering religion and postmodernism; race, sex, and gender; and religion and postcolonialism * Examines the development of religious theories through the work of classic and contemporary figures from the history of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology * Reveals how the study of religion evolved in response to great cultural conflicts and major historical events * Student-friendly features include chapter introductions and summaries, biographical vignettes, a timeline, a glossary, and many other learning aids
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 895
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication page
Title page
Copyright page
Preface to the Second Edition
1 Introduction
A New Kind of Method and Theory Book
From Religion to the “Problems of Religion”
But Why
Did
They Think That They Were Right?
Leading Questions: On Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees
References
PART I: The Prehistory of the Study of Religion
2 Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury
Forming a Common Mind about Religion in Early Modern Europe
Natural Religion, Naturism, the Religion of Nature, and Revealed Religion
Religious Wars, the New World, and the Concept of Religion
A Time of Problems and Creative Ferment Too
Jean Bodin: Comparing Law Teaches Us How To Compare Religions
The True Religion
Must
Be the Oldest Religion
Natural Religion Is the Essence of Religion: Herbert of Cherbury
Herbert’s “Ambidextrous” Theory of Natural Religion
References
Further Reading
3 Understanding Religion Also Began with Trying to Understand the Bible
The Bible’s New Readers: Skeptics and Seekers
“Frodo Lives!” Myth, History, and Mystery
Biblical Criticism’s New Methods
Higher Criticism: Internal Discrepancies
Spinoza
Major Protestant Players: Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen School
The Quest for the Historical Jesus: David Friedrich Strauss
What E.B. Tylor and Max Müller Learned from the Biblical Critics
References
Further Reading
PART II: Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion
4 Max Müller, the Comparative Study of Religion, and the Search for Other Bibles in India
Max Müller in the Center of a Whirlwind
The Bible and Beyond
Müller’s Theological Liberalism and Comparison of Religions
The Discovery of the East–West Link in Sanskrit
Max Müller’s “Romantic” Comparativism and Western Imperialism
The Search for Germany’s National Soul in India … of All Places
German Unity via Hindu Myth
What Max Müller Can Teach Us about Studying Religion
References
Further Reading
5 The Shock of the “Savage”
Mr. Tylor and His Science
Animism as the True Natural Religion and First Attempts at Science
1859 and All That: The Discovery of the European “Primitive”
The Caves and Their Religion
Does Religious or Cultural Evolution Make Sense?
We Have Met the Primitives, and “They” Are “Us”
References
Further Reading
6 The Religion of the Bible Evolves
The Religion of the Bible and Its Problems
The Great Renown and Short Heretical Life of William Robertson Smith
Abdullah Effendi Smith of Arabia
Robertson Smith’s “Arabian Revolution” in the Study of Religion
Robertson Smith and Higher Criticism: Wellhausen, Comparison, and Context
Smith’s
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites
Robertson Smith Can Still Teach Us a Lot
References
Further Reading
7 Setting the Eternal Templates of Salvation
The Long Life and Great Renown of Sir James Frazer
How Did We Get from “There” to “Here” … Again?
From Magic to Religion to Technology, Not Science
The Golden Bough: From Norseland to Nemi
Balder, Death, and Life-Giving Mistletoe
The Lessons Balder Taught Frazer: The Power of Comparative Method
Murder Feeds the Life-Cycle
A Textbook Case of Frazer’s Use of Comparison
The Hidden Paganism of Christianity Revealed
Frazer Finds Other Christs
The Holy Families and Other Christs
References
Further Reading
PART III: Classic Twentieth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion
8 Understanding How to Understand Religion
Religion – It’s So Very Simple
Religion: Simple? Not So Much
What the Phenomenology of Religion Owes to the Dutch Higher Education Act 1876
A New Kind of Science
Phenomenology’s Liberal Christian Beginnings: Tiele and Kristensen
William Brede Kristensen: The First “Phenomenologist” of Religion
Do the “Insiders” Really Know Best?
Understanding Why Most Christians Pray on Bended Knee with Folded Hands
Rudolf Otto and the Autonomy of Religious Experience
Anatomy of Religion: Van der Leeuw’s Phenomenology
What Can We Learn from the Phenomenology of Religion?
References
Further Reading
9 How Religious Experience Created Capitalism
Weber and the Problems of Understanding and Explaining Capitalism
Max Weber Turns the Tables: Religion “Explains” Things, Too
Weber’s Synthesis of Phenomenology and Causal Explanation
Profit, More Profit, and the Rational Outlook
How the West Got Rich: The Basic Values of Capitalism
Traditionalism and Catholicism
How Capitalism Killed Traditionalism
Religion Rushes in to Justify the New Capitalist System
For Calvin, “Calling” Overcomes All Obstacles
References
Further Reading
10 Tales from the Underground
The Freudian Moment
Mentalism and the Two Psychologies
The Behaviorist Revolution
Freudian Psychoanalysis: Pseudo-Science and/or Therapy?
What Lies Beneath: Freud’s Idea of the Unconscious
The Structure of the Self: Ego, Superego, and Id
Totemism, Taboo, and Sacrifice: A Father’s Burden to Bear
Oedipal Consequences
Mighty Mothers and Their Dying, Risen Sons
The Psychodynamic Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary
References
Further Reading
11 Bronislaw Malinowski and the “Sublime Folly” of Religion
Anthropology’s Pragmatist
Bipolarity in Life and Letters
A Biology of Religion: Survival Fits
Death: It All Ends Badly
Malinowski Thinks He Knows All This because of Freud
The “Phenomenological” Malinowski?
Malinowski, Sex/Gendered?
References
Further Reading
12 Seeing God with the Social Eye
Think Group!
Life and Times
Durkheim’s Theory Begins with Problems
God Is Really Society, but Society Is Really Godly
The Spirit Is Willing
Durkheim’s
Sociologie Religieuse
Explains Religion in General
“Their” Secret Is Sacrifice
References
Further Reading
13 Mircea Eliade
A Real Religious Radical
An “Antihistorian of Religion”
Eliade as Psychologist of Religion
The “Worm of Doubt” Turns: Eliade’s Creative Hermeneutics
Time and Space of the Creative Center
Myth Tells Us of the Eternal Time of Origins
Another Life: Eliade’s “Ficciones”
In and Out of Romania’s “Hooliganized” History
Swept Away
References
Further Reading
PART IV: Liberation and Post-Modernism
14 From Modernism to Post-Modernism
A New “New Generation” Takes on Eliade
Foucault’s Radiance: A Usable Theory of Power and Liberation
Power, Power, Power
Politics Is Everywhere
Liberationism and Foucault’s Discourse on Power
Foucault, Japanese Women Shamans, and the Power of the Male Gaze
Foucault’s Liberalism Meets Post-Modern Liberationism
Liberalism and Liberationism, Negative and Positive Liberty
Post-Modernism after Post-Modernism: Four Key Points
Questions
Post-Modern Studies of Religion Focus on Race, Gender, and Post-Colonialism
References
Further Reading
15 Theorizing Religion with Race in Mind
What “Color” – Race – Is Your Theory?
Social Research and History: The Two Cardinal Methods
Du Bois and His Modernist Program of Social Research
The Making and Breaking of a Scholar-Activist
Du Bois: A Prophet of Positive Liberty
History’s Radical Legacy for Black America
What Black Post-Modernism Owes Foucault
Cornel West: A Black Scholar’s Post-Modern Dilemma
An Irresistible Prophetic Urge? Theory, Religion, and Race
Black Religious Studies in a New Key
Pinn and “Rituals of Reference”: A Theory of How Black Religion Came to Be
William D. Hart’s Doubts about Pinn’s Theory of Black Religion
Raboteau’s “Slave Religion”
References
Further Reading
16 Sex/Gender and Women
It’s About Women
Six Principles
Why the Fuss about Sex and Gender?
Putting Concepts of Sex and Gender to a Test: Women’s Ordination
Feminist Theory of Religion and Its Moral Bases
Feminist Strategies for Studying Religion
Historian Caroline Walker Bynum: What Gain from Such Pain?
Karen Brown’s
Mama Lola
: A Woman at the Center
Feminists Should Resist Abstraction and Objectification
A
Mama Lola
Theory of Knowledge?
Critical Remarks
Feminist Biblical “Higher Criticism” and Christian Origins
Schüssler-Fiorenza’s Critique of New Testament “Kyriarchy”
Marija, the Great Mother Goddess, and the Two Christs
A New Women’s History: Prelude to Liberation and Prophecy?
References
Further Reading
17 Another “Otherness”
Said, Asad, Spivak, and Lincoln
Hindus Discover America: A Post-Colonial Thought Experiment
Post-Colonial Discourse: “Varied Genealogies”
The Secular Post-Colonial Marx
Cultural Critiques, Not Marxist Ones
Foucault and Culturalist Post-Colonial Thought
Breast-Beating around the South African Bush: Chidester and Foucault
Edward Said and “Orientalism”
Edward Said: “Can the Canaanites Now Speak?”
Post-Colonial Thinkers Don’t Like Religion or “Religion”
Orienting Minds
Gayatri Spivak Speaks Up for the “Subaltern”
Talal Asad: “Religion” Reformer and Eliminator
Asad, Reformer of “Religion”
Asad’s Other Side: Eliminating “Religion”
Why Asad “Thinks He Is Right” to Eliminate “Religion”
Bruce Lincoln and the Discourses of Resistance
Conclusion: Post-Post-Colonial?
Appendix: Major Post-Colonial Religious Studies Thinkers and Concepts
References
18 Conclusion
Post-Modern Virtues
Post-Modern Vices
How to Think
with
“Religion,” and Not Just
about
It
It’s the “Religion,” Stupid!
To Study Religion Is at Least to Study “Problems of Religion”
Ninian Smart’s “Dialectical” Phenomenology “Brings Religion Back In”
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vii
viii
ix
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
To Rebecca Harkin
the best imaginable editor an author could have:
encouraging, critical, and inspiring
Understanding Theories of Religion
An Introduction
SECOND EDITION
Ivan Strenski
This second edition first published 2015© 2015 Ivan Strenski
Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2006)
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Ivan Strenski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strenski, Ivan. [Thinking about religion] Understanding theories of religion / Ivan Strenski. – Second edition. pages cm Revised editon of Thinking about religion / Ivan Strenski. 2006. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3084-7 (pbk.) 1. Religion–Methodology. I. Title. BL41.S72 2015 200.7–dc23
2014024544
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: © pashabo / ShutterstockCover design by Nicki Averill Design & Illustration
Preface to the Second Edition: Understanding, Instead of Just Thinking
This is the second edition of Thinking about Religion, now retitled Understanding Theories of Religion. This new edition slightly trims the original, but adds an entire new part, containing four new chapters and a new conclusion. So, given the substantial extent of these additions, I thought it best retitle the book to bring out better a key aspect of the original. There, I emphasized the remarkable fact that at some time in the history of early modern Europe, a few rare individuals systematically began doing something radically different with what one and all assumed was a special feature of their lives – religion. They could be said to have begun thinking about religion, instead of just believing. This is not to say that those who did such thinking stopped believing, merely that they did more. And this brings me to the reason for the new title. In taking the original, often brave, step of taking religion as an object of human inquiry and curiosity, they wanted to give an account of religion. They wanted to understand it, and often to explain it. Religion became something these pioneers of human consciousness wanted to hold up for thoughtful consideration – and finally, to understand or explain.
At the same time, the founders also assumed a certain identity to this object of their discourse, called “religion.” Religion was for them a natural object, like other objects of their world – nature, the economy, arts, music, politics, and other dimensions of human life. That these categories emerged at certain points in history, and in certain places, was something of which, they, on the whole, were unaware. Of course, in our own time, we resist seeing these objects of knowledge as “natural kinds,” independent of the way the knowing subject decided to carve up the world of experience. Except for rare cases, it would have been unthinkable to contest the definitions of such categories, such “objects.” We, on the other hand, rightly in my view, assume a “critical” attitude to these categories of human experience. We are thus, also, loath to think of them naively as “out there,” objective realities unconnected to the way people in a certain part of the world live. The modern critical attitude entails that we believe that categories are historical and geographical – they emerged at a certain time, in a certain place. Religion today is seen in the same way, spawning an entire literature about the precise time and place of its origins as a term or category of thought.
Since this side of the critical study of religion may seem remote and abstruse to many readers, let me suggest an analogy to help convey the point I am making about how the modern critical attitude to categories differs from the point of view of most of the theorists in Parts I–III of this book. Perhaps what I mean by pointing out the emergent character of religion can be seen in the analogy of the category of “gay” to signify a distinctive class of sexuality. Consider alone how in the lifetimes of many readers of this book this category emerged into general usage. For many, to be gay simply names an objective state of a person’s sexuality. It is not something, for example, that can be cured or “prayed away.” But to these folks one needs to say that the category or term – as currently understood – has not always existed, and that people everywhere and at all times did not have such a notion in mind. As a category of sexuality, it is a distinctly Western notion, whose origin can be traced to no earlier than the end of the nineteenth century. So there’s a historical or subjective side to the concept to match the conviction that there really are objectively, and “out there,” gay people. “Religion” is just like “gay.” Readers need, then, to note this: Today, we and the theorists of Part IV, as we will see, tend to take the subjective, critical and historical character of the term “religion” as decisive, while the thinkers of Parts I–III see “religion” as the name of an objective, natural kind that they discovered.
Thus, although I realize I am running somewhat against the current of the age in celebrating the founders for what some would say was naivety, I continue to have deep appreciation for them. Their efforts were aimed at understanding something they thought was a natural part of their world – religion – rather than either just accepting its practice or even idly thinking about it. And, besides, even those who approach the term “gay” historically surely don’t think that real gays don’t exist in the world outside our critical efforts. The new title of this volume thus also reflects my admiration for the attempts by the founders to understand religion, instead of just adhering to it mindlessly.
The new material in Part IV also prompted me to change the title. This book has never been conceived as an encyclopedia, which partly explains the absence of a number of well-known theorists in the study of religion, such as J.Z. Smith, W.C. Smith, William James, or even Clifford Geertz. I was determined not just to tag on theorists to an ever longer list. I am arguing that a theoretical trajectory can be discerned in the study of religion as it has come to be institutionalized in departments of religious studies. The present volume is, then, more like John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage than an exhaustive Who’s Who in the study of religion. I have done some controversial selection, including some theorists, but also, to the displeasure of some readers, excluding others. But any book such as the present one will perforce do the same, unless it is to result in a massive encyclopedia, which no publisher could afford to sell and few students afford to purchase. I invite those who disagree with my construction of the history of the study of religion to join with me in debate. What I offer, I am prepared to argue, is a possible trajectory. I welcome critics who wish to take issue with my proposals.
For this reason, I decided to mark what I am arguing has been a radical historical shift of register in the theoretical study of religion. This is the shift to “post-modern” styles of inquiry that I argue, again, can best be understood in dialectic tension with the trajectory and character of the theories in the first three parts of this book. Part IV has been added to mark this change of register. Part IV is not about stringing another theory or two along the same thread as the original. Rather, it signals what for many in our field believe to be a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Here readers will find four additional chapters, one each on religion and post-modernism, race, sex/gender and the post-colonial condition, respectively. I have added a new conclusion to round things out.
But Part IV does not, as I have said, stand alone as if it had nothing to do with the classic theorists of the past. Therefore, readers will find that Part IV integrates post-modern theories of religion with those “modern” and “early modern” theories treated in Thinking about Religion. Post-modern theorizing of the last quarter of the twentieth century fits into a pattern with the classic “early modern” and “modern” theories of religion, dating from the sixteenth through the mid- twentieth centuries, respectively. Just how they do is something readers will have to find out for themselves. I trust readers will also find the new versions of the original Parts I–III somewhat tighter and more condensed. In the new Part IV, they will find what I hope is a recognizable and welcome extension of the method followed in the original to many of the latest theoretical trends in the study of religion.
A few more words about Part IV. Readers will find the length of the three principal chapters of Part IV – chapters 15–17 – much greater on average than comparable chapters in Parts I–III. Their extensive length reflects the explosion of scholarship in the study of religion in the last third of the twentieth century up to the present. Most chapters in Parts I–III center about the theorizing of single individuals. But, in our day religious studies have arrived, and scholarly production has exploded. There are, without doubt, more scholars studying religion today, and more who explicitly identify with the academic study of religion, than ever before in the history of the West, if not the world. One naturally faces the daunting task of doing justice to the immense quantity that has been written. Similarly, the history of these theories is harder to read, in part because insufficient time has elapsed to assess their overall position in the sweep of theoretical approaches to the study of religion. However, I have still been guided by the key question, “Why did they think they were right?”, and shall pursue it throughout as ardently as data will allow. So, too, I will not be shy about arguing why I think a theory is wrong, as I have in early discussions. But overall I try to maintain consistency over the course of 200,000 words of text. I look critically at the validity of theories, yet still organize my thinking around the same question that shaped the first edition: “Why did they think they were right?”
Ivan Strenski
Los Angeles
1Introduction: Understanding Theories of Religion Is Better than Just Being Critical
A New Kind of Method and Theory Book
This is not “your mother or father’s” method and theory book. Thinkers who made a big difference in the way we study religion today still lead the way, but with a difference. Competent as several other theory books may be, I feel they leave us uniformed about how and why our leading theories came to be. Yes, we all want to know what’s wrong with a theory. But should we be satisfied with just cutting up a theory? What about how a theory was woven together, built up, brick by brick, and so on? Unless we get deep inside the minds of theorists – unless we really understand them – we cannot hope to do them and the high-order act of theorizing justice. I believe that unless we know why they thought they were right we risk making an empty academic game of the study of theories of religion. Finally, the approach I have been trying to teach in this book entails asking why a theorist thought they were right in going down a certain path. Answers to this question may, in turn, arise from considerations internal to a line of thinking, typically to the world of ideas circulating in a certain field of study or academic profession. But the external context of a thinker’s life – the political, cultural, social, religious world in which they live – may also incline a theorist to think they were right to advance a given theoretical idea.
In the preface to this second edition, I also mentioned recognizing major epistemological breaks in theorizing, such as that between modern and post-modern. I shall argue that theories develop dialectically, according to a logic worked out in history. Theories “speak” to other theories in a kind of conversation with one another. In this light, I am arguing that the new chapters of Part IV on race, feminism, and post-colonialism carry on the conversation theorists in the study of religion have been having for the past 400 years. The story of theory in our field is not, then, a piecemeal and unhistorical serialization of theories, as if they pop up one at a time, here and there, and in no particular relation to one another. What makes the history of theories of religion in the West like none other is the existence of this centuries-long conversation. Thus, while it is vital to recognize classic thinkers from Muslim, Indian, or Chinese civilizations who took a critical, and often comparative, look at religion, their efforts did not add up to a tradition of critical and comparative study of religion. They shot across a sky of discourse like blazing comets, burning brightly, soon to flame out. They failed to ignite the kind of centuries-long controversies that are the stuff of the study of religion as we have come to know it in the West. I am finally, then, arguing that the key to a good theory book is finding the connecting threads in that long conversation. Both Thinking about Religion and, now, Understanding Theories of Religion do this by calling attention to the historical dialectic at work shaping the production of theories of religion.
In treating theories of religion, I am convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn, not only about the past, but also about how we should study religion today. By seeing how our field came about from its classic historical beginnings, we situate ourselves within a long, meandering stream of thinking reaching back to the dawn of the modern era. This takes us back to the childhood of religious studies, a time when people were just discovering the different religions for the first time. What was it like in the minds of our field’s heroes when they met religions unknown up to that point? What was it like when many heretofore unknown peoples of the world first came to know each other? What was it like at first contact? The original edition, Thinking about Religion, told us about these first and subsequent contacts. Working away, mostly in secret, to avoid religious persecution, early modern theorist Jean Bodin put together the first dialogue of religions where the religions spoke to each other as equals. Assembling believers of many different sorts – not only Christians and Jews, but Muslims too, Bodin let them challenge the credentials and validity of each other’s claims to the truth. Just think what Bodin would have done had he known of the Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, and Australian or African native folk, as later modern or post-modern theorists would? But Bodin had had no contact with them. We had not yet introduced ourselves to each other. By the eighteenth century, our theorists represent thinkers who had now had that further contact with the many other peoples of the world. Friedrich Max Müller made the religions of India his specialty, and put forward his broad comparative theory of religion that embraced India and the West under one single rubric. How different then from Bodin’s was this new world that Max Műller opened up, when he extended the study of religion to the religions of India? That first contact, as we will see, exploded conventional thinking about the nature of religion in ways we have still perhaps not yet digested. Max Müller spoke of an “Aryan Bible,” and threw open questions about the uniqueness of Abrahamic revelation like none before him. Students still query whether Buddhism can be called a religion, because a god does not occupy its center. Another first contact, here with the archeological remains of the Neolithic ancestors of modern peoples, drove the efforts of anthropologists like E. B. Tylor or Sir James Frazer. Not only did they seek to extend the history of humanity far beyond contemporary imaginings, but their progressive evolutionary vision of the human past reacted dialectically to Max Müller’s diffusionist story of humanity’s decline from a religious golden age.
In this new edition, I update the results of those earlier first contacts and incorporate post-modern approaches – in a broad sense of the term – in Part IV. Doing so permits us to have what we might call dialectical second looks at the entire archive of data of the study of religion given us by the classic modernist theorists, but now through eyes of the post-modern critics of modernist theory. In a way, the entirety of Part IV can be read as a systematic taking apart of the foundations upon which the major theorists of the past have stood – especially the modernists Weber, Freud, Malinowski, Durkheim, and Eliade.
These newly added chapters on post-modern theories of religion showcase a clear and thorough dialectic reaction to the modernist theoretical trends of the past. These primarily deal with religion in terms of issues that particularly vex us in ways ignored by modernist theories. Against modernist claims of scientific objectivity and neutrality, the post-modernists assert a concern for human dignity, social justice, and the victims of a globalized world. Themes such as power, race, sex/gender, and global social justice run through these theories like a bright red thread. Post-modern theorists would, accordingly, be prompted to raise such questions as whether, for example, Tylor would have referred to the folk of traditional societies as “savages” or “primitive” had he not been comfortably ensconced in the seat of imperial power. Or would Eliade have written of “religious man” had he been more sensitive to the way classic theorists overlooked sex/gender in the make-up of the religious world? In reaching all the way back to the past and concluding with the present, theorizing about religion shows both longevity and vitality. We own a marvelously rich tradition of scholarship. Like some luxurious oriental carpet, theory in the study of religion has, over many centuries, been woven together out of a dialectical arrangement of contrasting and complementary intellectual threads into something rich.
There is also a second way this method and theory book departs from conventional ways of studying theories. I absolutely love theory and theorizing. I think it is one of the finest acts we can perform as thinkers. But it is not a game. Therefore, to me, doing theory is not just the analysis of ideas, or a contest to see who is the sharpest knife in the drawer. It is about showcasing a worldview, telling an important story, engaging an often dramatic clash of ideas. As such, theories have their “internal” and “external” contexts. They are formed within an internal intellectual context of a disciplinary or academic craft, where one member of the craft speaks to another. At some point, musicians or mathematicians can only talk to other musicians or mathematicians, because only a narrow sliver of humanity can master their refined, specialized languages. Nevertheless, musicians perform for audiences, often illiterate in their special language: music connects because it taps into larger emotional networks, external to the disciplined world of the musician. What makes music work is its ability to connect with the totality of human life external to the special language of music. That is why I also insist upon studying the formation of theories within a wider, external, context defined by the political, religious, sexual, esthetic worlds that we all inhabit.
Beyond saying what a theory is, the study of theories of religion is about accounting for how and why theories actually came to be. Part of my answer to this question of how theories came to be resides in life itself. That is why I have brought in the external context of theorizing – the network of politics, religion, esthetics, etc., – that often weighs on theorists in the formation of their theories. Theories, thus, emerge to some degree from attempts to make sense of the world and our place in it. More than just smart, a good theory also evinces wisdom and wide experience of life in all its diversity. Theories have implications beyond the classroom or seminar, shaping the way we see life overall. Thus, theories and worldviews are often hard to tell apart. Malinowski, for example, wrote some of the first books about sexual practices among faraway tribal folk, but he was also active in the early days of Planned Parenthood. Do we really think we could – or should – separate these “external” interests in sex from his overall “internal” intellectual and professional theoretical perspective on religion? I don’t think so. In my chapter on Malinowski, readers will discover why.
Teachers are always pleased if students are smart about theories, and can master their logic. Jumping through the mental hoops of explaining a theory and pointing out its strengths and weaknesses are basic skills. But I look for more than cleverness in a student, more than the ability to rack up good scores in an exam, or even to get the right answer. I look for students ready to study theory in quite another spirit. I look for students moved by real curiosity who try to understand why theorists thought they were right about their theoretical proposals. In brief, I look for students who want to understand theory and theorists! This book will invite students to dive into the lives and times of theorists to see how theories emerged from a picture of why they thought certain ideas were “right.” Let’s begin.
From Religion to the “Problems of Religion”
Understanding Theories of Religion takes its stand squarely on the importance of understanding how and why people have come to think about religion, and how they try variously to understand or explain it. Everybody knows that people can often be passionate, even violently so, about religion, either for or against. Many Christians feel that the imperative to “preach the gospel to all nations” weighs heavily upon them. That is why is, along with Buddhism, Christianity is the most successful of all missionary religions. For these Christians, religion is so charged with emotion that it bubbles over in zealous energy to proselytize. But someone might note that powerful emotions do not accompany the missionizing enterprise of Buddhism, nor is its spread impelled by a strong imperative. Instead, Buddhists get especially emotional when they feel under threat of attack or elimination. Protecting the key Buddhist institutions, such as the Sangha, then becomes an overriding imperative. This book too lives by passion. In the theorists we study, I want to convey their thirst to know and understand, their reckless lust for truth and obsession with curiosity. I want us as well to experience for ourselves something of their relentless impulse to question and doubt.
People may have been believers or just have “lived” their religions from time immemorial. But the characters in this book were the first who subjected religion to questioning and curiosity. They submitted religion to endless systematic interrogation in the quest to understand and explain this seemingly unexplainable and mysterious aspect of life. In a way, they truly made “religion” emerge. What, for example, was the first religion? How does it compare to the religions of our day? Are there religions elsewhere than in the West? Or is religion a univocal, culturally-specific term that cannot be employed outside the West? How has religion been employed as means of resistance to domination? How does a religion articulate with the nation-state”? Does religion change – say, according to any regular principles that we might discover, such as evolution or degeneration? Is religion essentially private or instead essentially social (Strenski 2003)? The attempt to solve these and similar problems marks the beginning of what we call theories. This is not to say that in the spotty history of human curiosity these questions never occurred to believers. It is only to say that until fairly recently there were no major books or treatises, no sustaining institutions or “schools,” no lasting cultural influences in the forms of lines of inquiry or major questions about religion. And as schools of mathematics and the scientific study of language developed first in ancient India, and not in, say, Frankish Europe, so also was it in the West that the study of religion as we know it came to be. The study of religion came to be because religion itself became the object of questions and problems in some sustained way. That is why this book places so much emphasis on understanding theories and theorists: why did they think they were right?”
British cultural critic Terry Eagleton catches the spirit of our book. He explains that the appearance of theories indicates the existence of perceived “problems” – that “something is amiss.” Problems of religion pop up like those dreaded small bumps on the neck, warning us that all is not well in the religious world (Eagleton 1990). Theories aim to fix these problems by explaining how and why they occur. In the modern West, we have experienced a rash of such questioning and what Eagleton calls “a really virulent outbreak of theory,” something indeed “on an epidemic scale” (Eagleton 1990). This epidemic of problems of religion has ignited intense theorizing about religion that has conspicuously engaged practically every major Western thinker of any note since the 1500s – Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Max Müller, Freud, and, into our own day, figures like Ninian Smart, Charles Long, Caroline Walker Bynum, or Bruce Lincoln. Understanding Theories of Religion is about trying to understand and explain this “epidemic” of theorizing about religion. What are the reasons – intellectual, social, and cultural – why the great figures in the study of religion bothered to theorize about religion? Why did these thinkers believe that they were right in giving their particular answers to the many problems of religion?
Like other aspects of life, such as society, culture, art, and economic concerns, religion became the object of a disciplined academic program of self-reflection – what can be called “science.” Only in the past century and a half has there been anything called a “science of religion.” Although we tend not to use the term these days, it is still the normal way the study of religion is identified, for example in France, where the sciences religieuses can claim a solid history of over a century and a half. Likewise, in the German-speaking world under its formidable-sounding title, Religionswissenschaft holds sway, as it does in the Netherlands, as we will see, in the title of the Dutch scholar Cornelis P. Tiele’s major work, Elements of the Science of Religion, itself inspired by Max Müller’s project for a “Science of Religion” at Oxford. All these represent major and deliberate efforts to go beyond belief, and even to go beyond everyday curiosity about religion. If this situation were otherwise, we would have to explain why the documentary evidence for a “natural” or much earlier disciplined and systematic study of religion is simply non-existent.
Until the time thinkers started studying religion in order to understand and explain it, studying religion was the main business of the religions themselves. Their intellectual efforts served the special needs of religious communities. Shakers, for example, worried about how they might expand their membership. Muslims meditated about whether their chief leadership should be confined to blood relatives of Muhammad. Roman Catholics disputed among themselves about how to deal with the role of women and the like.
While the problems that the individual religions wrestled with were real problems, they were “in-house” problems. They were not the kind of problems that mattered to any and all religions, or for religion as religion. Shakers, Muslims, or Catholics may well have had their problems, but they were those only afflicting Shakers, Muslims, and Catholics, respectively. As such, the answers offered for their problems were not like scientific theories, since they did not need to appeal to the broad range of human belief and experience. Shakers did not have to satisfy Catholics about the answer they gave to their own “in-house” Shaker problems, and vice versa. But the theories we will study did need to speak across sectarian and religious lines. These theories needed to speak about issues of understanding and explaining. They had to appeal to the broadest consensus about the nature of facts, evidence, and such that they could. The new studies of religion had therefore to be in some sense objective and subjective at the same time. Subjective states and experiences were part of the data of religion. Visions of Jesus were data as much as a lock of his hair. The study of religion was objective in the sense that anyone of any religious persuasion, in principle, could agree on what the data were. Jesus may or many not be Lord, but the date of his birth is a datum. Flowing from this ideal of a common world of data, the study of religion was comparative in the sense that no religion could be privileged, and all religious facts mattered equally.
But Why Did They Think That They Were Right?
My way of tying the great theorists together is to ask each of them, in effect, why they thought they were right about the answers they gave the problems of religion. Why were their theories the right ones? In this way, Understanding Theories of Religion differs fundamentally from most other treatments of theories in the study of religion. Most other treatments are obsessed with showing why the great theorists were wrong. While this volume is critical about the major theories, it is more than that. I concentrate on why they thought they were right because I think we can learn much more by this approach than by a relentlessly negative one. This does not mean that I am a relativist who believes that all theories and methods are equally true. There are real flaws in any theory. But I have yet to meet the perfect “Prince Charming” of theories that waits to carry us off to some intellectual paradise. In the absence of this charming Prince, and since making the flaws in theories our main preoccupation is sterile, I have opted for another way. Once we get over the idea of a Prince Charming and once we have exposed the weakness or fatal flaws of a theory, what have we finally accomplished? Do we draw the conclusion that theorizing is a relatively worthless activity, since any theory can have holes shot in it? Do we scorn theorizing in the same way biblical Creationists disparage Darwinian evolution, because it is, after all, “only a theory”? Or, if we still think theorizing may be a worthy activity, what have we learnt about how theories actually come to be – and thus perhaps how we ourselves might construct them – merely by shooting holes in them, or by cutting them up? Every course in methods and theories that I know seems to conclude by leaving a trail of wreckage – a littered scene of disabled or terminated theories breathing their last. Is this what we really want as the end result of our critical inquiry into theories of religion? Understanding Theories of Religion was written and conceived in the belief that those who value theorizing in the study of religion want more.
Leading Questions: On Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees
This “more” is to deepen our understanding of theorizing as an embedded activity. What did the great theorists want to achieve – even when they failed to achieve it? This “more” involves delving into the contexts of the creation and formation of theories, so that we can begin to see what the theorists were really trying to achieve. As such, this effort at understanding theories of religion essentially entails an approach to theorizing about religion as a historical enterprise. The classic thinkers of Part I sought first to uncover by repeated historical searches Natural Religion, conceived as the “first” religion, or the origin of religion. The answers given in the quest for Natural Religion by the first wave of great theorists dominate the polemic of Part I. The second thing the classic thinkers sought to do was to address the central problem of the ultimate nature and status of religious experience. Was there some common psychological denominator of all religions, some fundamental human capacity for religiousness, analogous to a moral sensibility or the esthetic sense? Here, the historical quest for an absolute beginning point has been abandoned in favor of attempts to explain what essential religious experience was. Was it some sort of absolute dependence upon a great power, often constituting the essence of the reports of encounters with the sacred by believers, to be taken at face value? Or, as Freud would suggest, are we not rather in the presence of mythologized versions of our childhood memories of parental power? Or again, to follow Durkheim, are we better advised to trace these indubitable feelings to the even more indubitable fact of our absolute dependence upon society? Part II of the present volume seeks to lay out some of the more influential accounts of the real nature of so-called religious experiences. In Part III, the concern lies with the way religion is shaped in and by the realities of diversity – diversity of race or sex/gender, or the differentials of global power. Are there such things as Black theories of religion, or female ones? Does one’s race, sex, or relation to the centers of world power change how one would, or should, theorize?
One final suggestion for students as they read through the book. Be alert to three steps I tried to follow as I wrote each chapter. First, each chapter tends to be organized about a basic problem of religion emergent at a particular time because of various changes that occur in a society. Such a change might be the discovery of heretofore unknown prehistoric societies of Europe, and the way they put into question the Bible’s version of the human past. This, in turn, put into question the account of the world and humanity given in the sacred scripture of the West, and thus of the religious life led in accord with its guidance. Or such a change might be the “discovery” of the Freudian unconscious and the revision this has caused in many quarters of our sense of our own ability to know ourselves – and especially to know if we can trust our religious experiences.
Second, once these shocks to the religious self-consciousness are felt, what reactions by way of new theories of religion emerged? What, for example, did Robertson Smith have to say about modern Christianity, with it strong emphasis on belief in God, once what he took to be the earliest levels of biblical religion seemed totally devoid of beliefs as such? What was Freud to make of the prevalence of modern Christian religious experience of absolute dependence upon God the Father, when to him it seemed as if this might be based on childhood memories of the power of our own human fathers?
Third, and finally, no matter whether we find that thinkers like Robertson Smith or Freud were wrong or not about their conclusions about religion, the job of understanding these (and all the other) theories is only complete when we have satisfied ourselves that we understand why the theorists thought that they were right! How and why, for example, could anyone, like Robertson Smith, to take a case in point, think that there could even be people, much less religious people, who lacked beliefs? Whatever else students take from this book, I hope they will at least feel that they understand how and why some remarkable folk tried to understand and explain religion. And that, incidentally, is why I titled this book Understanding Theories of Religion.
References
Eagleton, T. 1990.
The Significance of Theory
. Oxford: Blackwell.
Strenski, I. 2003. “Why It Is Better to Have Some of the Questions than All of the Answers.”
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
15(2): 169–186.
PART IThe Prehistory of the Study of Religion: Responses to an Expanding World
2Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury: True Religion, Essential Religion, and Natural Religion
Forming a Common Mind about Religion in Early Modern Europe
In sixteenth-century western Europe something unprecedented in human history happened to religion. Radical curiosity was turned upon an aspect of human life generally recognize as “religion.” From the beginning, it was just assumed that such cultural phenomena as Judaism, Islam, paganism, Brahminism (what these thinkers called the religion of the Hindus), as well as the cultic systems of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germanic tribes, belonged to the same class of human cultural phenomena. They accepted such a designation as surely as they accepted, without any critical questioning, that different peoples had different cuisines, because they cooked and ate differently, that they showed different styles and forms of art, because they fashioned images and plastic forms differently, that they practiced different forms of morality or had different customs, because they ruled certain behaviors in or out.
Yet what marks the historical period in this chapter is that instead of just observing their own forms of religious belief or practice, or indeed those of others, people started asking questions about what they believed and practiced, often doing so in response to the stimulation of their encounter with religions other than their own. The mid-sixteenth century saw the beginnings of widespread attempts to do what we would recognize as “comparative study of religion.” What had seldom or never stood out for attention, gradually did so, and did so in comparison with other like-fashioned religions. Religion began having what we call “salience” – literally something that “leaps out” – from the quotidian background of human affairs. While today this might lead us to think that these thinkers had in fact invented the phenomenon we call religion, for them it was pure discovery. Of course, in some sense the first comparativists of religion did their share of creating as they went about their business. But that was definitely not how they would have seen their work of discovery. Religion, for them, existed as an objective and plural reality. So, in this time when skepticism flourished across the progressive spectrum of European intellectual life, they raised all sorts of questions about religion and the religions as, indeed, they did about all the foundations of their way of life.
But they also sought to transcend mere skepticism, and strove instead to form something of what we can call a “common mind” about religion. The founders took the first steps toward what might be called a science of religion, since they sought to establish consensus about religion so that it could become the object of common discourse and debate. In this, these first thinkers about religion fall into place as paradigm members of their age. We might recall that in this so-called early modern period of European history we also witnessed the rise of the natural sciences, or sciences of nature, such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Our founders then were kin to the likes of Newton, Galileo, Kopernick, Descartes, Kepler, and a host of other scientists in their efforts to come to a common mind about the objects they studied.
But religion, of course, differs from the objects of the sciences of nature. Religion involves people in existential life choices and life commitments. So, by studying religion, some of the founders felt that they might deepen their own religious life. Others, however, studied religion to free themselves of it. These thinkers “thought they were right” to be curious about religion because the world presented them with real problems about religion. Religions claiming the exclusive possession of divine revelation – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – drew the sharpest questions. This chapter explores how these thinkers both posed and addressed fundamental questions about the very nature of religion itself. To understand these pioneers we will have to take note of some of the social, cultural, and political changes rocking western Europe from the sixteenth century onward.
Here are some of the places curiosity about religion led these first religious studies theorists. Which of the many religions is the true religion? And how can we tell, given that everyone thinks their own religion is the true one? Is it natural for people to be religious, or is religion something imposed? Indeed, is religion a good thing, given the strife it seems to have caused in so many places? If religion is part of our human nature, what do the great teachers or prophets like Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, or Muhammad add to it, if anything?
Of course, religious people have always puzzled about their own personal faith. They have had to form a common mind about the meaning of their own personal and collective religious lives. Religious folk have wondered about the nature of their God, about whether it was better to pursue Nirvana, or to follow the Bodhisattva path, whether there be life into eternity, or whether we are doomed to eternal reincarnation, or damned to eternal hell fires, and so on. In different religious traditions, people have had to come to some sort of resolution to these questions because, in varying degrees, their answers shaped their religions. These are “insider” questions – problems one encounters when one tries to form a common mind about one’s own religion.
But forming a common mind about one’s own religious life is far from forming a common mind about religion, or the religions. Commitment to a particular religion is at issue for the insider. It is not for us, as students of religion. Our questions are not “insider” questions, but problems arising when we try to form a common mind about the basic nature of religion in general – like the question of whether religion is a good thing at all – or about the religions taken comparatively – like which religion is the oldest. These questions assumed that we could (and should) place different religions alongside one another to compare them for different purposes. Which religion is richest in ritual life, in mythology, in the expressive graphic and plastic arts?
Consider again the question of the identity of the true religion. I believe that this is a question that cannot be fruitfully broached from the inside, because everyone will say that their own religion is the true one! That question can only be asked by agreeing to lay the facts about the many religions alongside one another to compare the evidence. It is not a job for insiders. Sometimes this question was answered by equating it with the question of which religion, if any among the many, could claim to be the first or oldest religion. In this way, a common mind could be achieved by agreeing upon rules of evidence – a way we could date the various religions vying for the title of oldest, and thus true. In this chapter, we see how Jean Bodin, for example, takes on this question by appealing to comparative religious evidence, framed in the form of an inter-religious dialogue and debate. Once set on this course, the first, and most important, device the founders created to achieve a common mind about religion was their idea of Natural Religion.
Natural Religion, Naturism, the Religion of Nature, and Revealed Religion
Since terms like “Natural Religion,” “religion of nature,” “nature religion,” and such can cause confusion, let’s make some distinctions. Herbert and Jean were, not on the whole, great nature lovers. Centuries later, the Romantics, especially the English and German Romantics, declared their love of nature both as a source of poetic inspiration and, most importantly, as a source of spirituality or contact with divinity. As we will see in Chapter 4, Friedrich Max Müller swam with this cultural tide. And just to make it more confusing, he also coupled his nature religion with a more abstract and philosophical Natural Religion.
Because of cases like Max Müller, I want to distinguish four terms that use “nature” or some derivative of it: the naturalistic study of religion, Natural Religion, naturism, and the religion of nature
