The year 2010 marked the hundredth anniversary of the death of the greatest American humorist of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain. Twice there had been premature reports of his death. A man of incisive and acerbic wit, on the occasion of the first announcement of his death, Mr. Twain responded that “. . . the report of my death is an exaggeration.”1 On the second occasion, May 4, 1907, The New York Times published a premature obituary reporting that Twain and the yacht on which he was traveling were lost at sea.2 Upon his return to land, his arrival having been delayed by a deep fog, Mr. Twain promised
. . . that I will make an exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious public. I sincerely hope that there is no foundation for the report, and I also hope that judgment will be suspended until I ascertain the true state of affairs.3
When it comes to premature obituaries, Twain is in good company. Pope John Paul II’s death was announced prematurely on three occasions. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Alfred Nobel of Nobel Prize fame; Lucien Bouchard, former premier of Quebec; actor Sean Connery; and Aden Abdulle Osman Daar, first President of Somalia, were all prematurely bid farewell.
On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time Magazine, in black with bright red letters, asked “Is God Dead?”4 Indeed, over the years there have been numerous reports that God is in fact dead. We believe that these reports are “an exaggeration” and we hope “. . . that judgment will be suspended until [we] ascertain the true state of affairs.” For many years it had been predicted that religion would, in time, become less and less important and eventually disappear as societies modernize. Had these prognoses been accurate there would be no need for a book on religion and religious ethics, as they interact with nursing theory and practice. Instead, God and religion seem to have defied the dire prognosis and made a miraculous recovery. Now, the study of religion is more important to nursing than ever, as will be shown in the chapters that follow, and the reasons for nursing to study religion now go well beyond considerations for direct patient care.
Nursing has largely, if not entirely, neglected religion; thus it is important to look at a number of issues, including the social context and aspirations of nursing that might have fostered such neglect. Specifically, the secularization theories of sociology have become important to explore. Then we turn to the person called Nightingale and her faith as it influenced nursing. Nursing has customarily been cast as having deep roots in religion. These references are often to nursing in the middle ages and the case for a specifically religious motivation in that era, as opposed to a military objective, a desire to secure an education not otherwise available to a woman, as a place for the widow, or the “lovelorn,” needs to be explored more fully by our nursing historians. Nonetheless, it is surely the case that Florence Nightingale was a woman of deep and enduring religious faith, yet she chose to advance a nursing education that was secular in nature. We must see why this is the case. It will be important, thereafter, to examine nursing’s claim to whole-person, holistic care in the face of its silence on religion. We will conclude this chapter with an examination of a perspective in the field of religious studies that religion is a Western construct, and with the problems of defining religion.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra, is largely responsible for popularizing the phrase “God is dead.” The phrase also appears in Nietzsche’s earlier work, The Gay Science. The concept appears thrice, each with a different narrative. Sections 125 and 108, respectively, state
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?5
After Buddha was dead people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!6
Nietzsche (1844–1900) did not maintain in a literal sense that there once was a God who had now died. Rather, his view pointed toward the increasing secularization of Europe and the rise of modern science that “killed” a need for a Christian God. Yet, in Zarathustra, the protagonist proclaims that “Dead are all the gods”7 so that it is all gods who are killed in Nietzsche’s thought, not the God of Christianity alone. For Nietzsche, with the death of God came the death of the religiously based and embedded Western European social meaning and value structures and their attendant ethics; universal moral norms; and objective truth by which lives might be oriented. Into this vacuum created by the death of God steps Nietzsche’s übermensch (über-, superior, transcendent; mencsh, member of humanity); as the goal that humanity sets for itself.8 The übermensch is the creator of new values motivated by and rooted in a regard for this world and this life, not in religion. Nietzsche proposes a perspectivism that rejects the notion of objective ethical or philosophical truths with the claim that what is judged to be true reflects cultural understandings, social location, and individual circumstance. For Nietzsche, truth is now intersubjective in nature. Secularization was leading to the death of God, that is, to an inability of the Christian faith adequately to address the compelling moral and social questions of the day. Our interest here is not in the ethical system that Nietzsche formulates to replace that which is lost when religion dies, but rather our interest is in the Western notion that science is tied to secularization and the interaction that premiss might have with the development of nursing knowledge in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The brief “God is Dead” movement of the 1960s was distinctly a theological movement in Europe and America that was part of a broader “secularization” thesis that began much earlier. Its chief proponents were Protestant Christian theologians Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, Harvey Cox, and Thomas J. J. Altizer and Jewish Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, collectively referred to as the Radical Theologians.9–12 In The Death of God, Vahanian argues that the experience of the sacred, of deity, had ebbed and the secular modern mind had lost any sense of the meaningfulness it had once held, as well as its place in contemporary thought and discourse.13 Both Van Buren and Hamilton held with Vahanian that there was a loss of meaningfulness of the transcendent and, thus, God was in fact dead in modern thought. They would replace this loss with Jesus as an ex emplar of human action-in-love. Altizer14 and Altizer and Hamilton,15 however, went further. They rejected the possibility of a belief in a transcendent God. They held that God had imparted God’s spirit in Jesus and that spirit remained in the world, but Jesus was dead. For Altizer, God had truly died. Rubenstein is situated among those theologians and writers who wrestled with the meaning of the Holocaust. He argued that the Holocaust had shattered any possibility of continued belief in the God of the covenant of Abraham and Israel as God had been traditionally understood. More specifically, he maintained that belief in God’s election (chosenness) of the people of Israel and in God’s omnipotence (all-powerfulness) was no longer possible. Unlike Altizer, he did not reject belief in God or in faith or religion, but rather that the Holocaust had forever changed the way in which God could be conceived and hereinafter a new way had to be found.16
As a theological perspective, the Death of God movement breathed heavily for about 10 years and then died before God did. The diversity, however, of the meaning of the “Death of God” is similar to the diversity of meaning surrounding the concept of secularization. Shiner traces the history of the term secularization with its first instance of usage that corresponds to contemporary historical usage found in the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia.17
The Holy Roman Empire of central Europe was a collection of kingdoms ruled over by “princes” who sought to increase their own power and territories at the expense of the emperor and empire. The emperor did not govern autonomously, but found his powers restricted by the power of the princes. When the Protestant Reformation ensued in the 1500s and 1600s, the religious unity of the Empire was sundered. War broke out bet ween Catholics and Protestants, notably the Thirty Years War, which was largely fought on German soil but eventually involved almost all European nations. This would to be the last great religious war fought on the European continent. That war ended with the Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties signed in 1648 in Germany.18 The French portion of the treaties introduced the term secularization. In addition to establishing national borders and sovereign nation-states, Westphalia also effected secularization, that is, a transfer of lands and possessions from ecclesiastical (church) control to civil control. In addition, the princes could now choose the religion of their own states, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, and impose that religion on their people. The people were now entirely subject to their own ruler and the laws of their nation. This remained the meaning of the term in English from the 1700s to the late 1800s.19,20
The early 1900s saw the rise of the social sciences, with their interest in giving an account of modernity. This account included a concern for modernization, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, rationalization, and secularization and their interrelationships. The social sciences sought to formulate theories of society that would have a predictive capability, much like other sciences.21 Specifically modernization of society was linked to secularization as a consequence. It was predicted that as societies modernize, they would also secularize to the point that religion would eventually disappear, a view asserted by such prominent European figures as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and Sigmund Freud.22–28 The belief that religion would eventually die out was the prevailing wisdom of the social sciences for the late 19th and most of the 20th century and continues to be debated in this century. Hadden observes that
. . . the founding generation of sociologists were hardly value-free armchair scholars . . . they believed passionately that science was ushering in a new era that would crush the superstitions and oppressive structures that the Church had promoted for so many centuries. Indeed, they were all essentially in agreement that traditional forms of religion would soon be a phenomenon of the past.29
In 1905, Max Weber maintained that the rationalization of society, that is, the development of a rational worldview, and the expansion of knowledge through science would ultimately make belief in the supernatural impossible. At the macrolevel, as opposed to the individual level, science would lead to the disenchantment of society, that is, to the loss or devaluation of “mystery” and the “supernatural,” or the demystification of society.30 The advance of science and technology was identified as progress. Epistemology would shift toward a reliance upon science for the formation and advance of knowledge, and the religious knowledge and ways of understanding the world, along with notions of divine authority, would largely fade away and disappear completely. According to this line of thought, only those more “primitive” thinkers, those who cling to superstition, would continue to embrace religion and find it credible. In 1959, Talcott Parson’s perspective on secularization in The Social System is summarized by Mills as,
Once the world was filled with the sacred—in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly in the private realm.31
As secularization theory developed, however, it became clear that there were eventually multiple “secularizations.” Shiner divides them into two categories: dialectical and historical. Dialectical secularization theories are those that hold a polarity between sacred and profane and see the sacred as indestructible. Historical versions of secularization theory focus on the loss of Christianity as the central force of Western society and culture, and hold the loss of the sacral, which is a sense of the sacred in society and culture, as irreversible. Shiner writes that
Those who take a dialectical view are apt to believe that a revival of the “sense of the sacred” or the “cosmic dimension” is essential to a renewal of Christian faith and life; those of an historical bent envisage the possibility of both a non-religious world and a non-religious Christian faith.32
It should be noted that theories of secularization arose in Europe and the United States and largely had as their object of scrutiny Christianity and “historically Christian” societies, hence the limitation to Christianity in these works cited. It has been argued that secularization theories are not so much theories as amalgamations of theses that form a secularization paradigm more than a secularization theory.33 However, it must be further noted that none of the early secularization theorists claimed that secularism was universal, that is, that it would also apply to, for example, largely Buddhist, Muslim, or Jewish nations. Weber went so far as to postulate that the potential for secularization is a feature of Protestant Christian societies.34 Bruce, in his assessment of Western societies, asserts that
“. . . individualism, diversity and egalitarianism in the context of liberal democracy undermine the authority of religious beliefs . . . religion diminishes in social significance, becomes increasingly privatized, and loses personal salience except where it finds work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural.”35
That “work” is cultural in nature and includes cultural defense (as in ethnic conflicts) and cultural transition (as with immigrant populations). Thus, it would seem that these theorists viewed the West as particularly susceptible to secularization. More recent theorists have widened the reach of secularization theory to all modernized or modernizing societies, including those rooted in non-Christian religions.
The most vigorous view of early secularization theories was that modernization leads to “the disenchantment of the world” and its disillusionment, that is, an ablation of its illusions.36 Affirmation of supernatural forces, gods, or spirits is little more than nonscientific, even antiscientific, superstition that would give way to reason, science, and the scientific worldview. Society would come to be organized around rational and scientific principles. Of course, there would always remain small pockets of nonor antirational belief, attitudes, and behaviors that would persist in the face of the availability of scientifically promulgated and validated knowledge. But these would be aberrations. Churches would close, be repurposed, or embrace a secular, religionless religion; that is, a religion without a super natural element.
As secularization theories developed in the late 19th and earlyto mid20th centuries, divergent understandings of secularization arose. They included (a) the loss of the authority of religion in the social and cultural life of a nation; (b) the loss of control over social institutions by religious bodies; (c) a decline in belief in superhuman or supernatural forces, gods, and spirits; (d) a decline in religious belief; and (e) a decline in participation in religious institutions.37,38
Secularization theories have met with significant opposition. Rodney Stark has been a vigorous opponent of secularization theory. He locates the first appearance of secularization theory in about 1710 in a work by Thomas Woolston. Stark writes “Thus, as far as I am able to discover, it was Thomas Woolston who first set a date by which time modernity would have triumphed over faith. Writing in about 1710, he expressed his confidence that Christianity would be gone by 1900.”39 He then proceeds to detail a number of dire predictions of the death of Christianity that have been profoundly wrong. Stark maintains that social scientists
. . . have failed to recognize the dynamic character of religious economies. To focus only on secularization is to fail to see how this process is part of a much larger reciprocal structure . . . Western intellectuals have misread the secularization [of a particular set of religious organizations] as the doom of religion in general . . . secularization is only one of three fundamental and interrelated processes that constantly occur in all religious economies. The process of secularization is self-limiting and generates two countervailing processes. One of these is revival . . . Secularization also stimulates religious innovation.40
Thus, for Stark and Bainbridge, secularization, revival, and religious innovation are always going on in any society. They understand secularization as the first of a three-phase process. First the churches or religious groups become “eroded by secularization” and more “worldly,” that is, more “secular.” This produces, in response, a segment that breaks away in protest, seeking “to restore vigorous otherworldliness to a conventional faith.” These breakaway groups are referred to as sects. This comprises their second stage, revival. Secularization and revival then prompt religious innovation, that is, the formation of new religious traditions.41 They write,
New religions constantly appear in societies. Whether they make any headway depends on the vigor of conventional religious organizations. When new faiths that are better adapted to current market demand spring up, older faiths are eclipsed. Thus did Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other great world faiths wrest dominant market positions from older faiths.42
Traditional secularization theory reached its zenith in the 1960s with such proponents as Harvey Cox and Peter Berger.43,44 Since that time, it has undergone considerable challenge as well as refinement. Some of those who originally led the charge for secularization theory have since, by and large, come to reject it. Peter Berger, an Austrian-born American sociologist, is one such person. Well known for his work with Thomas Luckman on The Social Construction of Reality, in recent decades he has written extensively on the sociology of religion and economics.45,46 He had predicted the universal secularization of the world, but now holds that such an affirmation runs counter to the available data. By the late 1980s, Berger had come to reject the secularization thesis. He recognized that both old and new forms of religion were still vital and vibrant, particularly in the United States, though he notes that Western Europe and Western academia are exceptions. In The Desecularization of the World, he writes, “. . . the world today, with some exceptions . . . is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization’ theory is essentially mistaken.”47 More recent secularization theorists have taken a more global perspective in their analysis of the place of religion. Norris and Inglehart maintain that
. . . the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks . . . people who experience ego-tropic risks during their formative years (posing direct threats to themselves and their families) or socio-tropic risks (threatening their community) tend to be far more religious than those who grow up under safer, comfortable, and more predictable conditions. In relatively secure societies, the remnants of religion have not died away; in surveys most Europeans still express formal belief in God, or identify themselves as Protestants or Catholics in official forms. But in those societies the importance and vitality of religion, its ever-present influence on how people live their daily lives, has gradually eroded.48
This rather lengthy discussion of secularization theory is not for naught. We do not seek, here, to resolve the debate. Instead, secularization theory is presented in order to pose a question: To what extent has nursing been influenced by secularization thought in its own aspirations to become a recognized profession, rooted in science? In other words, have nursing’s own social aspirations led it, implicitly, to embrace secularization thought to the neglect of religion?
From its earliest days, modern nursing in the United States sought the social standing of a profession and the movement from an “art” to a “science,” which it viewed as essential to accomplishing that end. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when modern nursing moved into an educationally prepared occupation, nursing fought against its social image of a manual occupation requiring little more than apprenticeship-type training without education and against both medical and public opposition to advance nursing education. Writing in defense of rigorous nursing education, Isabel Adams Hampton Robb, an early U.S. nursing leader, writes,
To distinguish between this popular idea of the care of the sick and to justify us in our pretensions to the rank of a profession we must consider the demands made by scientific medicine of today. . . . Not so long ago neither medicine nor nursing were scientific in character. But the evolution of the one created a necessity for the other. Modern medicine requires a thorough scientific training and modern methods of treatment require that the work of the physician be supplemented by the constant and intelligent service supplied by the trained nurse. . . . Nursing has thus become a matter of scientific discipline. . . . It is this education of the intelligence that constitutes the main difference between the trained nurse of today and the so-called nurse of former days, and that has rendered nursing worthy to rank as a department in scientific medicine.49
Here we can see how Robb, as did other nursing leaders, bound increased nursing education and the scientization of nursing to its hopes for social recognition as a profession. From its earliest days, nursing struggled with its own self-esteem and self-, social, and medical perception of nursing as a profession. Over the past 100-plus years, the American nursing literature is at times strident about nursing as a true profession, at times reflective, and almost always defensive. The discussion, or argument, of nursing’s status as a profession continues in the literature today.
A few examples of the persistence of this concern will suffice. In 1940, the American Nurses Association (ANA) published A Tentative Code for Nurses in the American Journal of Nursing (AJN), which was a proposed code of ethics for the profession. The publication called for submission of responses, which the ANA received. The first lines of the Tentative Code declare: “Nursing is a profession. The distinguishing characteristics of a profession have been described in many ways. The more fundamental attributes are included in the following compilation. . . .” The code then goes on to list six attributes of a profession, the fourth of which is “the ability of its workers to give a scientific and skilled service. . . .”50 This is, of course, material that does not properly belong in a code of ethics. The AJN cites Abraham Flexner’s criteria for a profession from his article Is Social Work a Profession?51,52 In 1945, at the end of World War II, Genevieve and Roy Bixler published an AJN article The Professional Status of Nursing that assessed nursing’s progress toward status as a profession using seven criteria.53 Fourteen years later, they published a reassessment article of the same title in the AJN using those same criteria. Their two articles are typical of the virtual multitude of such articles in the nursing literature. Most such articles hang on issues of professional autonomy and a distinctive knowledge base rooted in science.
There are differing ways of defining a profession. Some construct “trait definitions” of professions that list attributes of professions then measure a specific occupational group over against those traits. Most of the articles in the nursing literature, in the past as well as in the present, approach professions in this way. Whether or not an occupational group is understood as a profession is based on the degree to which it displays the traits. Trait definitions assume that there are “true” professions that demonstrate all of the essential core traits.
However, the attributes themselves are an untidy aggregation of overlapping, arbitrarily chosen, or undifferentiated elements, lacking in a unifying theoretical framework that explains their interrelationship. Trait theories tend empirically to generate a definition of a profession then ascribe to it a normative rather than a descriptive status.54
Functionalist definitions of a profession focus on the “functional value of professional activity for all groups and classes in society.”55 In functionalist models
. . . there is no attempt to present an exhaustive list of ‘traits’: rather the components of the model are limited to those elements that are said to have functional relevance for society as a whole or the professional-client relationship.56
Johnson critiques functionalist models of professions as ahistorical and rationalistic, and causally linking professional function to social position and the upward social mobility of the profession’s members. This presents a flawed model of the power of expertise and rationality to affect society. It fails to take into account the nonrational nature of social power relations that mitigate against social mobility and social power.57 He maintains that neither approach provides an adequate explanation of professions. He asserts that “a profession is not . . . an occupation, but a means of controlling an occupation,”58 emphasizing, instead, the consequences of the social division of labor for the client-professional relationship and their influence on the power differential between the producer and consumer and on occupational control. He posits three forms of occupational control: collegiate (collegial in American English), patronage, and mediative. In collegiate occupational control, members set the terms of their occupational work and “community-generated role-definitions and standards are maintained by a code of ethics and autonomous disciplinary procedures.” In patronage occupational control, the profession is responsible to an individual or corporation who defines the parameters of their work. In mediative control, toward which Johnson sees collegiate occupations moving, a third, outside party (such as the state) exercises authority over both the producer and consumer of the occupation.59 In this schema, considerably more social power resides in the hands of those in collegiate forms of occupational control. Despite some shifts away from trait and functionalist definitions of professions in the sociology of professions literature, for the most part, nursing persists in measuring itself over against trait definitions of professions.
Why seek to be identified as a profession? Occupational groups regarded as professions have social standing, power, respect, privilege, and authority. Indeed, a cynical view of professions is that they are “specialized, monopolistic, power elites that serve their own ends of social dominance, further power, privilege, exclusive authority, suppression of competition, and a secured position, through the exploitation of a social need.”60 The evidence would indicate that nursing’s aspiration for status as a profession is tied to its concerns to gain autonomy of practice against medicine specifically, social regard, and to secure the economic and social welfare of the nurse. So nursing seeks to be regarded as a profession and sees science as the chief vehicle for realizing that aim. While society modernizes, rationalizes, scientizes, and secularizes, nursing, reflecting the society in which it is embedded, contemporaneously modernizes, rationalizes, scientizes, and secularizes as well. Nursing science gains ascendency and the journal Nursing Research begins in 1952. However much it may have affected patients and their decisions, religion is not among the topics that make it into nursing’s research agenda. Yet nursing does not, historically, fall completely outside the purview of religion.
Premodern nursing has some interaction with religion in the form of medieval religious nursing orders. Their charism, or spiritual gift, often formally included care of the sick, poor, widow, orphan, stranger, and the pilgrim. Although some orders were specifically devoted to nursing, one cannot assume that those who entered the order were committed to nursing. Their commitment may have been religious and devotional in nature, expressing a commitment to God and not specifically to those under their care. Some young girls were known to have been given to religious orders as a tithe (a tenth-part of what one has), particularly if they were the tenth child in a family. Some widows entered religious orders for reasons of survival, whether economic or political. For some, convents may have served as places of comfort for the “lovelorn.” This is to say that we must be cautious in attributing a nursing motivation where perhaps none exists.
It is clear, however, that Florence Nightingale was possessed of a religious sensibility. Over the course of her life, she experienced a “call” from God on four occasions. Her journal has the following cryptic entry dated February 7, 1892:
Calls to work, to holiness?
Lea Hurst: shore’s door. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
Embly, 7 February 1837 “the way to do good.”
Bridge Hill, 1844, call to hospital work, which have I followed?
Lea Hurst, 1848, on my knees on Middle Hurst, not going to Hamburg nuns.
Alexandria, 1850, to throw my body in the breach.61
Her first call occurred at the age of 16 at the family home at Embley, as a call to serve God, the nature of which was not further defined. She would refer to this date throughout her life. Her diary records six occasions on which “the Voice” spoke to her; some of which seem to have occurred when she was engaged in lectio divina. Lectio divina is a medieval tradition in which one prays with sacred scriptures in order to combine scriptural study with reflection, meditation, and prayer with listening for God. She felt herself called by God, and more specifically called to nursing as service. However, she also came to regard nursing itself as a calling and wrote to probationers (early nursing students) and nurses that “Nursing is said, most truly said, to be a high calling, an honorable calling.”62
Nightingale was a devout Christian in the Anglican (Church of England) tradition with a Unitarian heritage. A large body of her writings has been preserved. It displays a deep and abiding interest in theology and in the Bible, a personal devotion to God, prayer, scripture, and service to God in the world and a rocky relationship with her Church. Just as some of her social beliefs were contrary to the social norms of the day, particularly for and as concerning women, likewise some of her theological beliefs could be regarded as heterodox. In a number of important ways (but not all) her decidedly feminist perspective, not to mention her own education and upbringing, placed her out of the mainstream or, more correctly, in advance of the eventual mainstream.63 Showalter describes Nightingale’s Cassandra as “a major text of English feminism, a link between [Mary] Wollstonecraft and [Virginia] Woolf.”64 Nightingale protested against the prevailing Victorian norm of feminine helplessness and socially useless life for women and was an ardent supporter of women’s education. Nightingale’s sometime departure from orthodox Christian theology can be seen in her work Suggestions for Thought as well as in others of her writings.65,66 Although her theology may at points be found problematic in its heterodoxy, what is beyond question is that her Christian faith was devout and was lived out in service to God through her call to nursing and her embrace of nursing as a high calling in itself. As she moved into nursing education, she demanded a rigorous education for women who would become nurses. Surprisingly, however, she sought for a thoroughly secularized nursing education.
There seems to be three predominating reasons for this. The first is a disillusionment with nursing orders as well as the fact that, pragmatically, English Anglican religious orders for women never caught on. McDonald notes that “The young Nightingale’s high opinion for religious communities of women did not survive later experience. As a nurse, Nightingale came to have a poor opinion of them.”67 Second, she loathed “saving souls” in the practice of nursing, though with greater nuance, it appears that making nursing subservient to proselytizing (attempting to convert others to one’s own religion) was the particular irritant as opposed to proselytizing per se. Again, McDonald writes,
The exacting workload, character, and devotion long required of the nurse go back to Nightingale’s conceptualization of nursing as a religious calling, a calling to patient care and health promotion. She abhorred nurses acting as missionaries to save the souls of the sick or dying, which prompted her to insist that her training school for nurses be non-sectarian. Crimea had given her too much experience of people neglecting their nursing duties to gain another convert to their denomination. . . .68
Third, Nightingale wanted to accept students into her school independent of their religious commitment. Even so, while the school was to be nonsectarian, it was nevertheless Christian.
Nightingale wanted nurses to be ordinary women, not nuns, and the profession to be open to all without any religious test. But her letters to nurses and nursing students are full of religious material, advice and prayers, for she believed that nurses needed ongoing spiritual nourishment. . . . While nightingale insisted that her training school be non-sectarian, accepting students on the basis of merit regardless of religion, there was a significant Christian (indeed Church of England) element in the daily routine.69
Nursing schools were also to be based in science. Interestingly, however, Nightingale tied religion and science together. For her, observation of nature led to a recognition of the fixed laws that God had ordained as well as to a knowledge of God. However, she railed against positivism. In a “Note of Interrogation,” Fraser’s Magazine, in 1873, she wrote “By positivists, it is thought that, to learn laws of nature as far as we can, without troubling our heads about Him who made them, if indeed there be One (about whom, they say, we can know nothing), is the only course for man. Is not this leaving out of the most inspiring part of life?” For her, the study of the social sciences was coterminous with the study of God. She writes,
Is, then, moral science, the science of the social and political improvement of man, the science of education or administering the world by discovering the laws which govern man’s motives, his moral nature, is synonymous with the study of the character of God, because the laws of the moral world are the expressions and solely the expressions of the character of God. . . .70
Science, in terms of nursing science, was a matter of observing God’s laws of nature, of cooperating with them, and of both using them to prevent disease and promote health and to teach nursing students and nurses. Nightingale “. . . believed that nurses, with their responsibility for maintaining hygiene, had a unique opportunity for spiritual advancement, discovering the nature of God by learning his ‘laws of health.’”71 For Nightingale education, specifically nonsectarian education, and science were the soil of nursing, but faith was its bedrock.
A number of factors, thus, conspire toward modern nursing silence on the topic of religion: the legacy of Nightingale’s nonsectarian and scientific educational structure, even if covertly religious; the modernizing and scientizing social context that surrounded the emergence of modern nursing in the 20th century, and nursing’s own aspirations toward social recognition as a full profession based on scientific knowledge. Although Nightingale’s viewpoints are not determinative of nursing’s future, they are initiative. It remains a fertile point for historical research to ferret out more causative and less correlational factors, some of which receive attention in succeeding chapters. However, in view of the fact that nursing lays claim to whole person care, the absence of nursing discourse on religion that might inform practice is perplexing. The American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses states that
An individual’s lifestyle, value system and religious beliefs should be considered in planning health care with and for each patient. Such consideration does not suggest that the nurse necessarily agrees with or condones certain individual choices, but that the nurse respects the patient as a person.72
We would maintain that a consideration of or respect for the patient’s religious beliefs necessitates at least a basic understanding of religions, religious beliefs, and religious ethics as they interact with health and nursing theory, practice, and health policy.
The nursing scholarship examining religion is cachexic, a sharp contrast to the burgeoning nursing literature on the more generic concept of spirituality. A survey of nursing databases73 for articles in English scholarly journals for the past 30 years (1982 to present) yields only 783 articles with religion and nursing coexisting as subject terms. When filtered to exclude articles principally on spirituality, not religion, that number drops precipitously. The most recent and prevailing themes for this body of literature include religion as an aspect of culture, as part of nursing history; and as a topic for ethical, philosophic, or conceptual discourse (usually about spirituality, but recognizing religion). Literature about faith community (parish) nursing, nurses’ and nursing students’ religious attitudes also exist to a lesser extent. An occasional article about religious restrictions pertaining to medical care can be found (e.g., how to care for the Jehovah’s Witness whose tradition proscribes the acceptance of most blood products). Furthermore, only 330 of these articles were classified as research. This nursing research characteristically includes religion as one among many variables for study, often studies about factors related to coping and quality of life. Likewise, many introduction-to-nursing textbooks present a cursory discussion of religion, but only in terms of patients’ religious behaviors or artifacts at the bedside that should be noted.74 Often, nursing assessment tools do little more than to prompt the nurse to take note of dietary restrictions, artifacts, religious affiliation, or faith community. Actual attention—beyond stereotyping—to such things as the influence of religion on clinical moral decision-making, concepts of illness, understanding of suffering, motivations for caring, or nurse prescriptions for social justice in health care are remarkably absent. Nursing has made claims to whole person and holistic care. How can such a claim be made when religion does not substantively figure into the equation?
In tracing the holism discourse in nursing, Owen and Holmes take note of the fact that Nightingale promoted holistic principles. She “challenged nurses to identify the influences of the patients’ social setting, and focused attention on prevention and ’natural’ responses to disease. The concern was for the whole patient—mind, body, sprit—and the higher total environment . . .75 The nursing literature does not question that nursing is concerned about the whole person or that it approaches the patient holistically, giving whole person care. Nursing scholars neither challenge nor speak unapprovingly of either. Where the disagreement and debate resides is in how holism is defined and the varying definitions of holism that are employed. Kolcaba notes that “Holistic thinking is so diverse that practically every theorist can claim holistic credentials. The challenge for nursing, then, is not whether holism but which holism? As a practice-centered discipline, nursing gives a central role to whole person holism.”76 In a world where a nurse cannot escape caring for persons who are religious adherents, and in a world where religion plays a significant role in social, political, and economic life worldwide, as well as in the lives of individuals, families, and their communities, there is a critical need for nursing to engage in comprehensive study and research in order to understand religious traditions, values, questions, issues, and social perspectives. And, after 150 years of a whole-person holism in nursing, it is time for nursing to add religion into that equation by formally attending to the nature of religion and how it influences nursing theorists, educators, researchers, practitioners, and those whom nursing serves.
Outside of nursing, the concept of religion has come under criticism among contemporary scholars in the social sciences and humanities, particularly in the past 20 years. The names of Daniel Dubuisson,77 Russell McCutcheon,78 Timothy Fitzgerald,79 Tomoko Masuzawa,80 and Talal Asad81 are prominent in the debate about the legitimacy, coherence, and validity of the concept religion. Mercea Eliade writes of humans as homo religiosus, that is, of human religious behavior as a universal phenomenon by which the sacred could be apprehended through hierophanies, meaning through revelatory events and objects.82 This would then make religion sui generis (of its own kind) a category of mind. It would seem that nursing’s embrace of spirituality, shorn of religion, is in some way an embrace of a variant form of homo religiosus. Rejecting Eliades perspective, in 2003, Daniel Dubuisson writes “Just like the notion itself, the most general questions concerning religion, its nature and definition, its origins or expressions, were born in the West. From there, they were transferred to all other cultures, however remotely prehistoric or exotic.”83 He asks three questions: (a) Is Christianity a Western form of a universal phenomenon? (b) Is religion a unique and original creation of Western civilization? and (c) Is religion the West’s most characteristic and self-defining concept? Masuzawa, tracing the lineage of the field of world religions, maintains that “the modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning—that is to say, inherently, if also ironically—a discourse of secularization; at the same time, it was clearly a discourse of othering.” (p. 20).84 She continues with the assertion that
. . . world religions as a category and as a conceptual framework initially developed in the European academy, which quickly became an effective means of differentiating, consolidating, and totalizing a large portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable among the inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world.85
McCutcheon raises an additional critique that the study of religion is lacking in scientific rigor and method.86
Although the aforementioned scholars each address different questions, collectively they provide answers: yes, religion is a Western construct that is neither universalizable nor transcultural; yes, religion is distinctive of the West, and the concept by which the West defines itself; and yes, religious studies lack the rigor that science possesses. These lines of argument maintain that religion is an intellectual creation of the 19th century West that embeds a Christian vision of the world that functions to maintain a Western Christian intellectual hegemony, which further serves the function of “othering” non-Western cultures and peoples.87 Dubuisson writes,
In asserting the West invented religion and has continuously lived under its influence, we must, of course, understand that the West was not the only civilization to ask metaphysical questions, to try to understand the world in which it lived, to conceive of imaginary beings (gods, spirits, demons, ghosts), to develop theologies, organize worship, invent cosmologies and mythologies, support beliefs, defend morals and ideals, and imagine other worlds—but that it made this collection of attitudes and ideals an autonomous, singular complex, profoundly different from everything surrounding it. And it conferred on this distinct complex a kind of destiny or essential anthropological vocation: humans are held to be religious in the same way as they are omnivorous, that is, by nature, through the effects of a specific inborn disposition. . . . While religion remains largely the incarnation of an atemporal notion or indestructible essence, it is . . . only the result of a discriminatory act performed in the West and there alone.88
For Dubuisson, other cultures asked similar metaphysical questions but did not then divide the world in secular and sacred categories.
In this view, religion is not a phenomenon sui generis, not a distinctive thing of its own, composed of a set of ahistorical, transcultural, even a priori features that form a distinctive and differentiated analytic category. The consequence of this perspective is that religion then becomes, not a field unto itself, but properly the object of study of any of the fields that study “nonreligious” social phenomena.89 Dubuisson further sees religion as a tautological Western invention.
Facts, of whatever kind, are not in themselves religious in the sense that they are endowed with some kind of specific, sui generis quality, come from who knows where. They only become religious at the point where individuals isolate them by invoking a certain number of criteria and then apply this distinct designation.90
In this view, religion is Eurocentric and Eurohegemonic in nature. The discourse of religion, then, becomes a discourse of othering that retains the center for the West and maintains all “others” at the margins. This perspective is less concerned with the nature of religion than with what religion means as a process.
Those who focus on the nature of religion present a contrasting approach. Riesebrodt asserts the universal applicability of religion cross-culturally.91 He claims that religion has a referential legitimation, that is, the features of religion can be seen cros s-culturally and that
. . . religious actors and institutions recognize each other as similar. They mutually constitute, define, and transform each other; they compete with each other, polemicize against each other, and borrow from each other. In short: the systems of reference, in which religions emerge and interact with each other, resemble each other, a fact that we witness throughout history and across cultures.92
He gives as examples the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Biblical story of the ancient Hebrews is one of being constituted as a monotheistic people whose God is not that of the surrounding Ancient Near Eastern and Canaanite religions. Furthermore, early Christianity was seen to differentiate itself, first as a sect of Judaism, and thereafter over against Hellenistic mystery religions and Gnosticism. Islam too carved out a distinctive and contrasting identity over against both Judaism and Christianity. Riesebrodt also points to the emergence of Buddhism, distinguishing itself from both Brahmanism and other ascetic movements of the day. He concludes that religion, as an analytic category,
. . . is not necessarily an imposition of a modern Western category on phenomena that are perceived and categorized totally differently in non-Western or premodern cultures. . . . These examples contradict the postmodern assumption that non-Western religions have been constituted as such only after they encountered the West and then began modeling themselves after the Western notion or religion.93
Neither Western hegemony nor Christian imperialism across history can be denied. However, the question is whether that history can bear the weight of rendering the concept of religion invalid as an analytic category.
Despite these types of concerns regarding religion as a legitimate object of study, many have and continue to maintain that religion is a distinctive phenomenon capable of analysis.94 However, religious scholars widely accept that there is no one essence of religion that is shared by all religions. Attempts to define religion in terms of a superhuman being have been rejected in the face of Buddhism and Jainism. Stark and Bainbridge, however, do distinguish between religion and other “ideological systems” by embracing Durkheim’s notion that “religions involve some conception of a supernatural being, world, or force, and the notion that the supernatural is active, that events and conditions here on earth are influenced by the supernatural.”95 In Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs, Ninian Smart identifies seven dimensions(not an essence) of religion.96 They include: ritual, narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions. Religions tend to demonstrate these dimensions, though some religions may emphasize one dimension over another. Even within a given religion there will be diverse subtraditions, family members, so that one can only say that a particular religion “tends to” emphasize certain dimensions. No definitive set of characteristics or properties can be given that is broad enough to encompass all religions without at the same time folding in philosophies that are not religions. Attempts to precisely define religion have largely been abandoned. Even attempts to describe or define a specific religion (as opposed to religion per se) are often essentializing. Yet, there are good reasons not to abandon altogether an attempt to define religion if only to delimit the phenomenon of concern to avoid inconsistency, vagueness, narrowness, confusion, and bias.
There are, broadly, two types of definitional approaches: substantive and functional. These approaches are not unique to religion, but characterize attempts to define any basic term e.g., person, profession, nursing, or religion. Substantive definitions attempt to identify what religion is, its content, substance, or essence. Functional definitions attempt to identify what religion does relative to something such as culture, society, or the psyche. Both approaches have problems. Substantive definitions tend to incorporate terms such as the sacred, numinous, transhuman, or transcendent and consequently to be less verifiable by empirical research. Functional definitions tend to be reductionistic, reducing religion to its social or psychological or cultural function, making it an aspect of these. The often unspoken part of the debate arises from the prior understanding of whether the study of religion belongs to the humanities, or to the sciences. In the United States, this debate is reflected in the differences between the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, over against the American Academy of Religion, both of which are devoted to the study of religion but do so from largely different perspectives. Although it ought not to go unexamined, Nursing’s predisposition will be toward science and toward definitions with empirically verifiable terms, thus toward functionalist definitions.
Geertz offers a functionalist definition of religion that is perhaps more satisfactory than many:
Religion is (1) a system of symbols that acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting mods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.97
The virtues of this definition are several. It is holistic and a system; it encompasses moral feeling, disposition, and action; it allows for the construction of a larger worldview; and its “aura of factuality” permits the human symbol system to have a realism beyond the subjective experience of the religion’s community of adherents. It seemingly maintains an “empathetic objectivity” (over against hostile disbelief) toward those human symbol systems that point toward the sacred, transcendent or transhuman.98
An additional point remains to be addressed: the popular tendency to reduce all religions, collectively, as paths to the same destination. However much religions might converge on certain ethical perspectives, neither their central theological questions and concerns, nor the theological ends that they seek redound to the same thing. Prothero writes that ”what the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point: something is wrong with the world.”99 In discussing their differences, Prothero characterizes several religions, their central questions and aims, and summarizes their distinctiveness in a phrase. Although this runs the risk of essentializing traditions, it does point to content in each that is not of mutual religious concern. For example, he refers to Islam as “The Way of Submission;” to Christianity as “The Way of Salvation;” to Daoism as “The Way of Flourishing;” to Buddhism as “The Way of Awakening,” and so on.100 This is to say that some central concepts in one religion do not find resonance in another. Sin, so central to Christian theological understanding, is not a central concern in Buddhism. Even more, central theological concerns in one religion may not be shared by its own sub traditions. For example, theological questions that burned hot in Western Christianity found no ready connection in the theology of the Eastern Christianity. Religions only collapse into oneness when their understanding is based on stereotypes, stereotypes that can ultimately have negative consequences for patient care. In the face of this flawed understanding, religious literacy needs to be strengthened.
We return now, for a moment, to the acknowledged founder of modern Western Nursing, Florence Nightingale. She was born into a wealthy, upper-class, English family almost 200 years ago. Her social station in English society encumbered her with a set of expectations for her role as an adult woman in society. However, her family was a mix of convention and unconvention that served Nightingale well as she kicked against the social goad, seeking to achieve an active and educated life over against the ideal of “uselessness” of Victorian womanhood. She developed her statistical abilities and engaged in theological reflection. She was not satisfied with simple devotion to her Christian faith but became a lifelong student of theology. Her family wealth allowed her to travel, and in her travels she learned experientially as well as through readings of other religions and sects, both ancient and modern. Nightingale’s writings speak analytically of Zorastrianism, Manichaeism, Socinianism, Jansenism, Muhammadanism (Islam), Judaism, Sufism, and more. Born into the British Empire, a vast 19th century empire “upon which the sun never set,” her writings also reflect that she both transcended and was captive of her social station, gender, culture, religion, time, and empire.101 Nightingale’s religion was of surpassing importance to her. She saw fit, however, to move nursing both into formal education and into formally secular education. This would not have precluded the study of religion for the improvement of patient care. Even so, nursing has neglected religion for the past 150 years. There are many reasons for nursing to engage in religious study. Such study lends itself to a greater understanding of the geopolitical world and the larger societies in which nursing is situated. Engaging with religion would also afford nursing a glimpse into millennia of religious discourse—and wisdom—on the human condition, and alternative perspectives on person, health, society, and environment, care of the stranger, global health, and ethics. Even greater self-understanding of our profession might result. And, not least of all, for the sake of patients, it is time that today’s nursing education, research, and practice take from Nightingale a measure of her intellectual commitment to the exploration of religion.
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4. Time Magazine. 87.14 (8 Apr. 1966): cover.
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30. Weber.
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32. Shiner. 279.
33. Bruce, Steve. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. 1-43.
34. Weber.
35. Bruce. 30.
36. Weber.
37. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 3-79.
38. Bruce. 1-44.
39. Stark, Rodney. “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion 60.4 (1999): 249-273. See also: Dobblaere, Karel. “Towards and Integrated Perspective of the Processes Related to the Descriptive Concept of Secularization.” Sociology of Religion 60.4 (1999): 229-247.
40. Stark, Rodney, and William Bainbridge. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 2.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Cox, Harvey. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. Collier Books, 25th anniversary edition. New York: Collier Books, 1990.
44. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion(1967). New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1990.
45. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1967.
46. Berger, Peter. The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. New York: Doubleday, 1979. See also: Berger, Peter, ed. The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions. New York: Anchor, 1981. See also: Berger, Peter, ed. The Capitalist Spirit: Toward a Religious Ethic of Wealth Creation. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1990. And: Berger, Peter, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House, 1973.
47. Berger, Peter, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999. 2.
48. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 4.
49. Robb, Isabel Adams Hampton. Nursing Ethics: For Hospital and Private Use. New York: Koeckert, 1900.
50. American Nurses Association. “A Tentative Code.” American Journal of Nursing 40.9 (1940): 977.
51. Flexner, Abraham. “Is Social Work a Profession?” The New York School of Philanthropy Studies in Social Work 4 (1915): 10.
52. American Journal of Nursing. “The Flexner Criteria.” New York: American Journal of Nursing 48.9 (1948): 589.
53. Bixler, Genevieve, and Roy Bixler. “The Professional Status of Nursing.” American Journal of Nursing 45.9 (1945): 730-735.
54. Fowler, Marsha. “Social Ethics and Nursing.” The Profession of Nursing: Turning Points. Ed. Norma Chaska. St. Louis: CV Mosby, 1990. 24.
55. Johnson, Terrance. Professions and Power. London: Macmillan, 1972. 37.
56. Ibid., 23.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 45.
59. Ibid.
60. Fowler. 25.
61. McDonald, Lynn, ed. Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journey: Biblical Annotations, Sermons and Journal Notes. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 2. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. 516. See also: Bostridge, Mark. Florence Nightingale. London: Penguin Books, 2008.
62. Nightingale, Florence. Florence Nightingale to her Nurses: A Selection from Miss Nightingale’s Addresses to Probationers and Nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s Hospital. London: Macmillan, 1914. 116.
63. Florence Nightingale. Cassandra. Ed. Myrna Stark. New York: The Feminist Press, 1979.
64. Showalter, Elaine. Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. Vol. 1. New York: WW Norton, 2007. 1016.
65. Calabria, Michael, and Janet Macrae, eds. Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
66. McDonald, Lynn, ed. Florence Nightingale’s Theology: Essays, Letters and Journal Notes. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol 3. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002. See also: Vallée, Gérard, ed. Florence Nightingale on Mysticism and Eastern Religions. Collected Works of Florence Nightingale. Vol. 3. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2003.
67. Ibid., 69.
68. Ibid., 74.
69. Ibid., 74-75.
70. Ibid., 28.
71. Attewell, Alex. “Florence Nightingale.” Prospects. Paris: UNESCO 28.1 (March 1998): 156.
72. American Nurses Association. Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements. Washington, DC: American Nurses Association, 2001. 7. Section 1.2.
73. Medline, ISI web of science (including the science citation index, the social science citation index, and the arts and humanities index), Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, NAHL, PubMed.
74. Pesut, Barbara, Marsha Fowler, Elizabeth J. Taylor, et al. “Conceptualizing Spirituality and Religion for Healthcare.” Journal of Clinical Nursing 17.21 (2008): 2803-10. See also: Pesut, Barbara, Marsha Fowler, Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham, et al. “Particularizing Spirituality in Points of Tension: Enriching the Discourse.” Nursing Inquiry 16.4 (2009): 337-46.
75. Owen, Martin, and Colin Holmes. “’Holism’ in the Discourse of Nursing.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 18.11 (1993): 1689.
76. Kolcaba, Raymond. “The Primary Holisms in Nursing.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 25.2 (1997): 290.
77. Dubuisson, Daniel. The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology. Trans. William Sayers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
78. McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. See also: McCutcheon, Russell. Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (Controversies in the Study of Religion). New York: Continuum, 1999.
79. Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. See also: Fitzgerald, Timothy. Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth. New York: Continuum, 2011.
80. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
81. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
82. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard Trask. San Diego, CA: Harvest/Harcourt, 1957.
83. Dubuisson. 9.
84. Masuzawa. 20.
85. Masuzawa.
86. McCutcheon, Russell. The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric. London: Routledge, 2003. See also: McCutcheon, Russell. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
87. Dubuisson. 10.
88. Ibid., 14.
89. Wiebe, Donald. “Theory in the Study of Religion.” Religion 13.3 (1983): 303.
90. Ibid., 15.
91. Riesebrodt, Martin. “Religion”: Just another Modern Western Construction? http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/122003/riesebrodtessay.pdf.
92. Ibid., 2.
93. Ibid., 9.
94. Pals, Daniel. “Is Religion a Sui Generis Phenomenon?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55.2 (1987): 259-282.
95. Stark and Bainbridge. 5.
96. Smart, Ninian. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
97. Geertz, Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System.” Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. Eds. Lessa, William, and Evon Vogt. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1979, 79-80.
98. Smart, Ninian. The Phenomenon of Religion. London: Macmillan, 1973.
99. Prothero, Stephen. God Is Not One. New York: Harper One, 2010. 11.
100. Prothero.
101. Vallée.