Introduction
A Sociologist Thinks about Religion
I was not raised to be religious. Though some of my childhood playmates came from families that believed in God, prayed before meals, and went to church on Sunday, I did not. At least not most of the time. Every so often, my grandmother would go on the warpath about how I was being raised ‘heathen’, and my parents would send me down the street to the local Episcopal parish. Though young, I knew that they did this to keep her off their backs. At this time, they had no sense of religious duty.
My father sometimes went with me. He once told me how he, as a child in similar circumstances, had imagined a banner proclaiming “Allah is the All-God” descending over the altar of his own grandparents’ Methodist church. My memory is now vague, but I think he was trying to help.
Like most churches in that era, mine recognized children’s limited attention spans, so my age-mates and I trooped off to Sunday School classes, where we learned what we were supposed to believe to be good Christians. These were Episcopalians, so we did not get lakes of fire to burn the wicked or a glorious Rapture to transport the saved. We mostly got Bible stories. But I still got into trouble by asking who Cain married, whether the Hebrews were right to slaughter the Canaanites, why the Kingdom of God did not arrive as soon as Jesus had said it would, and why a good God would allow six million Jews to be murdered in the war. As my mother put it, I was a bit of a pill.
In my child’s view, religion was something that happened in churches, mosques, or synagogues, that involved believing improbable things about unseen beings, and that was set about by ‘shoulds’ or rules. I was not alone. This image has a long pedigree in Euro-American culture, and I now know that it does considerable disservice both to religion and to religious people. Whatever I may have thought as a child, I now see that religion is more than just a set of beliefs and rules, plus an organization that encourages people to believe and obey them. To use the Latin, religion is more than ecclesia, doctrina, and moralis. Among other things, it involves community, ritual, a sense of the sacred, the cultivation of hope in the midst of despair, and a host of other matters. In many cases, it concerns one’s attitude toward life as much as it does any particular set of supernatural and moral views.
As I child, I knew none of this. I specifically did not know that religion could happen outside of church buildings, that not all religion involves clergy, and that some people consider themselves very religious who have given churches, synagogues, etc. a wide berth. Though people ‘do religion’ in official places, they also do it on mountaintops, in schools and businesses, and in the privacy of their homes. I do not mean just that they pray there as an adjunct to church life. Some people refuse to center their religious lives in the ways that religious organizations want them to. In short, religion and church are just about as connected as are peas and carrots in Midwestern American cooking: they go together well, but they can also go separately.
This notion of ‘churchless religion’ is still controversial. Not only do many preachers decry it; even people who practice it sometimes favor other terms. For example, I have heard many Americans say, “I am very spiritual but not at all religious”—meaning, among other things, that they are very interested in having a connection with ‘higher powers’, the meaning of life, and so on, but they do not patronize any religious establishment to do so. Furthermore, they do not think that they are missing anything worthwhile. They have various reasons for this stance, from bad personal experiences to some religions’ bad public reputations. In many cases, they just do not want religious leaders to tell them what to think or do.
Such people typically see ‘spirituality’ as personal, set against ‘organized religion’ as an impersonal institution. They honor the former while suspecting the latter. This may be cultural, for Americans have long proudly questioned authorities and have emphasized their own individuality. Yet the ‘spiritual but not religious’ trend also tells us that many people now think that religious organizations have no monopoly on the connection with ‘higher powers’, the meaning of life, and so on, that have typically been their raison d’être. If church leaders act as if they own the word ‘religion’ for such connections, then dissidents will just use another term.
Even people who participate regularly in official religious life do things that their leaders shun. Most Christian religious elites, for example, look down on home altars, petitions to St. Jude, May Fests, the use of the Bible for divination, and the purchase and display of Christian-themed trinkets such as Precious Moments figurines (often derisively called ‘Christian kitsch’). They treat these as perhaps suitable for uneducated folk but certainly not as ‘real’ religion. Such practices, though, are central to many people’s religious lives.1 Leaders bemoan them as tangential, but an increasing number of ordinary church members reply: “What do those leaders know? Why should religious leaders get to tell us what to do?”
The survey data about this dismissal are stunning. For example, only 43% of adult Americans think that one needs to attend church or synagogue regularly to be a “good Christian or Jew.” Fifty-five percent of those who identify themselves as strongly religious say that it is important or very important to follow one’s conscience, even if it means going against church authorities. Just 30% of these “strongly religious” people have “a great deal” of confidence in organized religion. In 2000, nearly half of American Catholics reported that they would be just as happy in another church than their own. This was before the clergy sex scandals, which by 2002 had cut by a third (to 19%) the percentage of Catholics who say they have “a great deal of confidence” in church leadership. (This number has since rebounded to about 25%.) Interestingly, the percentage of conservative Protestants claiming “a great deal of confidence” in their own leaders declined by one third (to 22%) during the same period. Disaffection in the pews seems to be rather common in American religious life.2
The same is true in other parts of the world. Polling data from Western Europe show that only 18% of people who identify themselves as religious have a great deal of confidence in their churches and that 35% of religious people have little or no confidence in them. That low/no confidence figure drops to 27% in Latin America, though this varies from country to country. For example, 45% of Argentines have little or no confidence in their churches, as opposed to ‘just’ 30% in Mexico. That counts the whole population, however, not only those who are religiously oriented. The figures for the latter are respectively 27% and 23%. That’s pretty close, overall.3
My point is: even religious people do not have perfect faith in their leaders and do not follow their dictates—at least not in any simple way. I am not thus alone in thinking that religion involves more than church life and more than whatever supernatural beliefs those churches preach about the ultimate nature of the universe. My child’s image of religion was mistaken. Official religious organizations—churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, gurdwaras, and so on—no longer monopolize religious life. As a result, I now see religion as far more interesting than I did when I was younger.
The precise story of how I moved from my childhood rejection of religion to my adult appreciation of it is not relevant to this book. It involves, among other things, work with religiously based anti-war protesters, a stint teaching at a Catholic college run by some very perceptive nuns, study (as a self-described “lapsed atheist”) at an interdenominational seminary, several years spent doing research among odd, interstitial religious groups, and a long and varied encounter with Quakers.
My parents, too, ultimately outgrew their identification of religion with unresponsive churches, odd beliefs, and top-down morality. Religious sensitivity became, for each of them, an emotional solace and a healing. I have dedicated this book to their memory.
Two Stories from the Field
Every book has an intellectual inspiration and this one is no different. I am a professional sociologist, and my decision to write it began with my observation that the sociology of religion has been scarred by a too-limited sense of its subject matter. Just as my childhood experience led me to identify religion with churches, beliefs, and rules, so the central role that Christianity has played in Western history has led most sociologists to emphasize organizations, ideas, and morality as the universal core of religious life. Too many sociologists seem unaware that these elements do not dominate many non-Western religions; nor do they dominate Judaism, Western Christianity’s much-abused cousin. Church organization and doctrinal purity have not even been central through major stretches of Christian history. They achieved their current stature during a specific institutional crisis: the struggle between elites and laity over the essence of Christian life that took place during the period that historians now call the “long reformations” (1350–1750).4 That struggle deeply shaped the West. Intellectually, it created many of the lenses through which we now see the world.
Sociology as an intellectual discipline was not born during those reformations, however. It arose in 19th-century France. As we shall see, sociology had to justify its claim to scientific relevance, and it did so in part by distinguishing itself from a particular kind of backward-looking religion. In France, this involved opposing a reactionary, anti-Republican Catholicism. In the Protestant parts of Europe and in the United States, the enemy was a form of Christian revelation that emphasized personal sin as the source of social ills. The well-known fight between science and Fundamentalism played a part, with sociology coming down on the scientific side.
Scholars are no less likely than other people to base their thinking on their own culture and history, so it is no wonder that sociologists’ default view sees church, belief, and morality as central to the religious enterprise. To use a slightly broader, and still recognizably Christian, language, we sociologists focus too many of our studies on creed, canon, cult, and cathedral—the centerpieces of post-reformations Protestantism and particularly of the 19th-century religions against which the early sociologists struggled. This renders invisible great swathes of the religious landscape.
I did not know this when I began my sociological career. My views have changed from listening to religious people as part of my field work. They have also changed as I read and interacted with two generations of sociological colleagues who have also questioned our discipline’s default view of religion. I shall present some of their work in Chapter One, where I describe that default view in greater detail.
First, though, I want to tell two stories from my field work on American religions. Each pushes the limits of what sociologists used to look for in religious venues. If pictures are sometimes better than words, stories can convey the sense of an intellectual argument more clearly than philosophical prose. By telling them, I hope to give readers a trial run, so to speak, at this book’s central message. I also hope to encourage readers to recall similar tales from their own experiences.
My first story takes place in an Episcopal parish, where I was hired to explore the sources of that parish’s spiritual vitality. I shall call the site Redemption Parish (a pseudonym), and note, first, that the study was a nationwide study of “spiritually vital parishes,” and, second, that neither the sponsors nor the leaders of the study knew at the outset what the term “spiritually vital” meant. They hired a team of researchers to learn what went on at various parishes that had been described as “vital” by their respective bishops. I suppose that the sponsors hoped to replicate such vitality, though the study was never published. In fact, the study leader recently told me that our research sites had little in common. Some ‘spiritually vital’ Episcopal parishes were quasi-Pentecostal, others emphasized social service, others favored meditation. My parish emphasized study programs in various spiritual traditions. This was part of its vitality, but not the central part, as I was to learn.
Let’s start, though, with belief—that supposedly core element of religion. Episcopal services certainly seem to highlight Christian belief, and those at Redemption Parish were no exception. Its services followed The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), which specifies exactly what is to be said at each moment of the ritual, and by whom. The priest and congregation read along, reciting specific creeds, prayers, and intentions. Core Christian beliefs are prominently displayed; indeed, on a verbal level the service resembles a public catechism. There are choices, of course; the prayer book contains two versions of the ritual. “Rite I” was the order of service common in my childhood, dating, I believe, from 1928. “Rite II” was composed about fifty years later. Different parishes emphasize one or the other of these, sometimes even using them at alternate services to make sure that everyone feels at home. Episcopal services also vary through the liturgical year, all of which is specified in the BCP. As much as possible, the prayer book covers all occasions.5
Even the “prayers of the faithful” go by rote: “we pray for our country’s leaders,” “we pray for our pastors and bishops,” “we pray for the poor,” etc. Then comes a six-second pause6 during which individuals can pray (silently) for specific people whom they think need special care. Only the sermon and the announcements are not predetermined.
This sounds more rigid than it is in practice, at least at Redemption Parish. Though the services that I attended followed the BCP exactly, they never felt forced. They proceeded smoothly, with both grace and style. What struck me, though—and was my first clue that belief was not at the center of what was going on—was the fact that both priest and parishioners always read the order of service from their prayer books, even though they already knew it by heart. This seemed to me both strange and useless. Though it had been over thirty years since I had last attended an Episcopal service, I remembered Rite I rather well. It did not take me more than a couple of services to pick up Rite II. Why read along, when one knew exactly what one was supposed to say?
I asked Redemption’s head priest why he and the parishioners always read from the book rather than memorizing the relatively easy lines. His answer told me quite a bit about the parish. The reason for reading along, he said, was so that the congregation could be sure of his orthodoxy. “The great Episcopal compromise was on wording,” he said, “not belief. We’ve got a big tent: everyone from Anglo-Catholics to Anglo-Baptists. You can believe anything you want, but you all have to say the same words. It’s the words and the ritual that keep us together. Individuals can mean quite different things by those words. We don’t want those beliefs to divide us.”
Though this was probably a jest,7 it matched what I had already learned about Redemption Parish’s spiritual vitality. As I have noted, the parish offered study programs in various spiritual traditions. Among these were a popular Celtic Spirituality course, a course on Desert Fathers and Mothers, another on Women’s Spiritualities, Bible studies from various points of view, and a theology reading group. The parish also regularly sponsored Cursillo retreats, a healing ministry, and a contemplative Taizé service.8 During my fieldwork, one parish group set up a labyrinth and taught labyrinth-walking as a form of contemplative prayer. Another group explored Jewish traditions, opening the pulpit to local rabbis. “I’ve just discovered that I am a Jew,” one parishioner told me after one of these guest sermons. He meant this spiritually, for what he had learned about Judaism taught him something about himself and about his own inner life. For him, as for many of Redemption’s congregants, the purpose of religion is to develop a deep personal spirituality. He saw no conflict in learning from many religious traditions. Indeed, he welcomed it. The more open one is to other people’s paths, he said, the more likely one is to discover one’s own.
A story I heard about the head priest illustrates this openness. A Presbyterian had apparently come to him seeking advice about the Nicene Creed. The visitor had underlined passages in various colored inks, depending on whether he agreed or disagreed with them. How could he be a good Christian, he said, if he disagreed with so much? The priest’s response was to note that the key matter was whether he believed in the God whom Jesus had followed, and whether he was willing to follow that God too. Beside this, said the priest, church doctrines and creeds only get in the way.
For this priest, as for his congregation, belief was not central to religious life. Any study that limited itself to belief would have missed most of what was going on in this parish. Almost uniformly, my informants spoke of the importance to the parish of each individual’s spiritual life and of building a setting in which that inner life flourishes. For them, spirituality does not operate at the level of ideas. The church certainly does not exist for the sake of religious purity. Instead, they believed that spiritual vitality operates at the level of the individual, nurtured by the organization. Though parishioners appreciated Redemption’s study programs, and spoke of how such programs facilitated their personal growth, they saw them as merely tools. The same was true of the parish’s culture of tolerance. Yes, it was good that Redemption Parish encouraged people to be themselves, and it was good that it encouraged wide spiritual diversity, but these, though they can help sustain an inner life, do not create one. What made Redemption Parish spiritually vital, for its members, was its ability to let its parishioners create their own inner lives—and its willingness to support them as they did so.
In keeping with this approach, most of my informants defined the spiritual life as a personal quest, as a response to what they called “God’s redemptive call.” Most members used idioms of “growth” and “journey” to describe their spiritual paths. Many used Twelve-Step language; others used the languages of various mystics, often rationalized by such psychological metaphors as James Fowler’s “stages of faith.”9 In this understanding, spiritual growth is a process of coming to terms with life as a manifestation of God, of learning to see and to seek God through the midst of life’s externals. One’s personal problems are one’s opportunities; firmly grasped, they are God’s helping hands.
Though perhaps unusual, Redemption Parish is a recognizable part of the American religious scene. The question that we shall pursue in the following chapters is whether the sociology of religion’s received concepts help or hinder our understanding of such cases. To the degree that we see beliefs, rules, and church structures as the center of the religious life, they miss much of what goes on at Redemption. Are there other concepts, still sociological, that might do better?
At least Redemption Parish had walls and a roof. We cannot capture its religious life by asking its members about their beliefs, quizzing them about their social connections, nor asking about their church attendance, but at least the parish provided a place, a container, for religion. At least it is a clearly religious organization. My next story breaks even this bound.
Over the last twenty-something years, I have interviewed scores of religious social activists. I talk to them about their work, their sense of calling, their religious lives, their personal histories—whatever will help me understand how people can devote years of service to others. I am especially interested in those who work for social change. These activists seek to transform society’s way of treating people, and are willing to interrupt their careers, risk public hostility, and even go to jail to carry out what they see as God’s call.
All of these activists identify themselves as religious, and all identify themselves with one or another religious tradition. Yet they do not typically accept the institutionally generated identities that most scholars assume accompany these traditions. For example, one woman, working full-time in a Catholic women’s peace and justice center, described her religious identity as follows:
I have to say that, in a public sense as well as a private sense—I grouse a lot about it, but I’d say—yes, I’m a Roman Catholic, comma, damn it! And worse yet, I’m a Roman Catholic woman. And so I think that will be for me what I will continue to identify myself as being—for all the good of it, for all the bad of it, and all the stuff in between. . . . I think it would be easier to change the color of my eyes or to get a new genetic code than it would be to stop being a Roman Catholic.
She is not, however, willing to let the Catholic hierarchy define for her what a ‘good Catholic’ should do. In fact, she thinks that the priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and even the Pope have lost sight of the Catholic mission. She agreed with one of her co-workers, a nun, whom I asked why she remained in a church with which she is so often at odds:
I see many cases in which the Roman Catholic Church is no longer faithful to the tradition . . . [yet] I believe that culturally and to the very core of my being, I’m Catholic, and I do believe that there are members of the Catholic Church beyond the hierarchy who are capable of being even more faithful than they [the hierarchy] are. And so, [the hierarchy] is going to have to leave me, because I’m not going anyplace. [laughter]
What does ‘being a Roman Catholic’ mean to these women? It certainly does not involve regular Mass attendance, especially so long as the official Mass has to be conducted by a male. As the first of these interviewees described her evolving religious life, she said:
So I really set aside exclusive Roman Catholicism. . . . I remained a religious woman and I have never stopped thinking of myself as a religious woman, ever, not for a moment. But I began to weave in understandings of a variety of different religious and . . . spiritual traditions, and . . . ways of behaving in the world—concrete actions. So the traditions that I looked most closely at were Native [American] traditions, the Jewish tradition—and I (because of intermarrying in my family) have a number of men and women who came out of a Jewish faith tradition—and Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism.
In actual fact, her ritual life takes place among her co-workers. She describes combining elements from various traditions into a rich woman-centered spirituality, which she practices with them:
What we do when we pray together is the same model that we do [for] everything else. We pray together collaboratively. We have experience, we reflect on it socially, . . . and on most days we are given to do an action around that.
I haven’t been to Mass in a long time. There’s a longing in me . . . the memory of how good it felt to have the sensuousness of church. But then I get very angered because I immediately remember what the priest sounded like, and these damn, excuse me, male homilies that had absolutely nothing to do with experience. . . . [So] I choose to pray with women. And I choose to pray collaboratively. I choose to pray toward action. That’s how my community’s set up.
Like many of my interviewees, she and her co-workers have taken control of their religious self-definition. They allow no Church hierarchy to tell them how to live their Catholicism. Instead, they fashion it as they feel the spirit leads.
I often get an interesting response from people whom I tell about my social activist research—one that reinforces the common image of religion as a matter of belief. Many folks, including scholars, have what I have come to call a “What heroes!” reaction to my project. They say that they wish that they could be like the people I am interviewing. They take me aside or drop their voices, admitting to me in confidence that they have long been fascinated by religious social activism and admire such activists greatly. Of course, they tend to admire those activists with whom they agree: leftists admire those working for peace and justice; the right wing admires anti-abortion groups like Operation Rescue. But in both cases their admiration is palpable and deep.
In my observation, such folk think of these activists as heroes on two counts. First, they are heroes for their willingness to ‘put themselves on the line’, non-violently, for social causes. Second, they are heroes for their imagined firmness of belief. My interlocutors—especially quasi-secular left-liberals—appear to project onto those activists the religious certainties that they, themselves, think they lack. They say (in paraphrase), “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, to be so sure of my beliefs that I could go to jail for them? Wouldn’t it be good to stand up for things about which I’m certain?”
Like default sociology, the “What heroes!” response puts belief at the center of religious life. It imagines that religious social activists accept their creeds to a depth impossible for ordinary people. It imagines that their activism grows out of a root intellectual certainty. It thinks them to be so steeped in religious conviction that they will suffer for their beliefs, knowing that they are doing God’s work.
The fact is, however, that the activists I interview are, on the whole, no more certain of religious truth than is anyone else. Quite the contrary: one of their distinguishing marks is that they do not have answers. Over and over in my interviews, it became clear that they are making their lives up as they go along. They start from a sense of what is right, but they constantly test that sense, to see if it is true. Sometimes, even often, they find they have been wrong. When they do, they modify their beliefs, saying that they now understand their faith more deeply. Their ‘religiousness’ consists precisely in their taking seriously the idea that God demands something of them, clues to which can be found in their religious traditions. Clues, but not answers! Indeed, most of the activists, especially Catholics, are so alienated from their churches that they leave almost nothing unquestioned. They even question God, to put a traditional label on whatever it is that they hear calling them. Instead, their spiritual lives are a constantly evolving mix of alienation, devotion, action, and passion. These inner lives are turbulent but fulfilling. The only constant is that these activists insist that their lives be meaningful.
Challenging the Default View
Both of these stories challenge the standard depiction of religion in much of the sociological literature. Neither the members of Redemption parish nor my social activist interviewees placed ‘belief’ at the center of their religious lives. Instead, “personal transformation” and “community” played larger roles. Only Redemption members located themselves in a formal religious organization, though they did not see it as controlling their lives. Most of the activists struggled against the religious organizations with which they were supposedly identified. Rather than defining themselves out of Catholicism, for example, the Catholic activists tended to define themselves as the true Catholics and the hierarchy as having fallen away. Textbook sociology of religion cannot illuminate either group very well.
Besides questioning the centrality of ‘belief’ and ‘church’, these two stories similarly draw into question the ways in which sociologists have treated people’s religious identities. With few exceptions, the pattern is supposed to be as follows.
First, one is born into a family, which either is or is not a member of a religious group. One’s earliest religious identity comes from that family. One learns how to be a Catholic, for example, or a Presbyterian or a Quaker—or even an atheist—from one’s family, growing up thinking that their beliefs, practices, and so on are normal. I would agree with this: having rebelled from her Baptist upbringing, my mother raised me not to believe in a child’s image of an angry Baptist God. It worked, and I do not, but it did not inoculate me against religion of every kind.
The second step, however, is more problematic. Sociologists trace another form of religious socialization, one that involves formal institutional training, usually in childhood, that is supposed to result in a dedicated church member. Sunday School, confirmation classes, First Communion, and the like provide formal religious socialization that is supposed to generate a solid religious identity. Once established, this institutionally generated self is supposed to produce religiously appropriate behavior, religiously motivated actions, and commitment to the religious group in which one was raised.10
Mainstream sociology typically presumes that religious identity forms around church-defined patterns of religiosity, morality, and role-behavior. It sees such elements as central parts of how religious people understand themselves and of how they organize their individual lives. It allows, at the edges, some diversity in individual ways of being religious. A Catholic, for example, might choose praying the Psalms over praying the Rosary, or might participate or not participate in Wednesday night devotionals. Sociologists typically assume, however, that the options open to the individual come from a socially recognizable set, accepted if not encouraged by official religious institutions.
This is clearly not what is happening to the activists I interviewed, nor to the members of Redemption Parish.
The plot gets thicker. In the default sociological view, one measures both religiosity and religious identification organizationally. Survey research, in particular, takes such items as the frequency of church attendance, one’s agreement or disagreement with established church doctrines, and the like as indications of one’s religious commitment. One problem is that such research would count these activists as irreligious, when just the opposite is the case. A greater problem is that such measures do not necessarily capture even churchgoing people’s sense of religious life.
What is central to contemporary religious life? Though there are several answers to this, at least one stream of sociological thinking sees religious individualism as a growing trend. Meredith McGuire wrote about the various ways that religious people now define their faith for themselves. Clark Roof charted a growing religious individualism in America, especially among Baby Boomers; Tom Beaudoin tracked this among “Gen Xers.” Robert Bellah and his colleagues noted the rise of what they call “Sheilaism”—individualized religions made up of personal preferences. Nancy Ammerman suggested that the effort to craft a spiritually meaningful personal life may be a central aspect of post-modern individualism.11
Among earlier scholars, Thomas Luckmann argued that worldviews used to be mediated by official religions, which could articulate coherent, relatively stable, socially supported systems of ultimate meaning for their members. In his view, many social-structural changes have undermined, perhaps eliminated, the ability of any official religion to direct the construction of individual identity. Growing pluralism—the tolerated co-existence of competing worldviews within the same society—meant that no worldview could present itself as the final arbiter for each individual’s system of ultimate meaning. Luckmann suggested that the marginalization of official religious organizations and the concomitant privatization of several spheres of life (among them religion, family, leisure activities) have reduced both religion and personal identity to a private affair. As such, each individual is now free to construct an utterly personal identity and an individual system of ultimate significance.12
Though this does not describe all religious people, it clearly matches both the religious activists and the members of Redemption Parish. Sociology’s default view of religion captures only parts of their religious lives. Yet religion is a core constituent of their self-identity. Any sociology of religion that ignores this kind of religiosity, or (worse) treats it as irreligion, needs repair.
My full treatment of these religious social activists will have to wait for another book, and the data from the Spiritually Vital Episcopal Parish Project are likely to remain forever in the archives of the agency that commissioned it. Both stories, however, tell us that religion-as-practiced is a whole lot more complex than the mere combination of supernatural beliefs plus organizational structures on which sociologists of religion typically focus.
What Lies Ahead
I have written this book to explore some alternative ways of seeing religion—ways that remain sociologically fruitful while emphasizing the parts of contemporary religions that default sociology generally misses. The first two chapters outline what I am calling sociology’s “default view”: the idea that religion is largely constituted by formal organizations, is focused on beliefs, and promulgates moral rules.
Chapter One looks at the present. It shows how sociology textbooks and the two dominant sociological theories of religion typically take this default view for granted. It also notes some current alternatives, including the just-mentioned focus on religious individualism, a push to examine religion in non-religious places, and an attempt to develop an ‘agent-oriented’ sociology that treats organizations and beliefs as less important than personal religious action. These efforts have shaken the default view but they have not replaced it. Though worthy, these approaches have not wrestled with the default view’s historical-cultural roots nor traced that view to the particular historical-cultural circumstances of sociology’s emergence as an intellectual discipline. I do this in Chapter Two. I chart the historical and cultural forces that let the default view became dominant in sociology. Once dominant, it became the place from which sociologists had to start. It became ‘natural’ and thus largely unquestioned. That, I argue, is an important reason why it is so hard to overcome.
If Euro-American sociology of religion developed its core concepts out of a particular culture and history, what happens if we set that history aside? What if sociology had arisen in another civilization, with a different religion and culture? What could we see about religion, if we set sociology’s default view of religion aside? Chapters Three through Eight explore three alternate approaches to religion, arising from three non-Western civilizations. They form the core of this book’s effort to construct conceptual alternatives.
Chapters Three and Four take us to China. In Chapter Three, I focus on the early Confucian notion of the relational self and on the role of ritual propriety (lǐ 禮) in generating personal and communal virtue (dé 德). Confucian thinkers located the sacred in the activities that maintain proper human relationships. Their understanding of the sacred would produce a profoundly different sociology of religion than we find in the West. Chapter Four explores what that sociology might look like. To show my cards just a little, it would pay a great deal more attention to women’s work in church life: such things as church suppers, guilds, Sunday Schools, visitations, and so on—all of which focus on the creation of community. It would also pay more attention to non-church-based religion, although in a less individualistic mode than is common among those Western sociologists who are already studying religions outside formal religious organizations. As we will see, these under-studied parts of religious life are more central to religious life than Western sociology would have us believe.
Chapters Five and Six take us to Muslim North Africa. Chapter Five explores the writings of the great 14th-century Muslim jurist Walī al-Dīn Abū Zayd ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Khaldūn al-Tūnisī al-Haḑramī—known to posterity as Ibn Khaldūn. His central concept, al ‘așabiyyah—generally translated as “group-feeling”—highlights a form of social solidarity that is oriented toward centers, not toward borders. Much current sociology focuses on the divisions between groups, showing how those divisions drive social conflicts. Reading Ibn Khaldūn encourages us to examine what draws people together, and he shows us how religion can do so, overcoming other social divisions. Unlike default sociology, which uses one set of concepts to understand ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ and another set to understand ‘religion’, Ibn Khaldūn used al ‘așabiyyah to understand both ethnic and religious solidarities. The resulting sociology is potentially as useful for the contemporary world as it was for the multi-religious, multi-ethnic North Africa of his time. Chapter Six applies this sociology to two recent cases of multi-religious and multi-ethnic conflict. The first is the events surrounding the ‘miracles’ at Medjugorje—the early 1980s apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Bosnian-Croatian village surrounded by Bosnian Muslims. The second is the rise and attractiveness of the current Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). How might our understanding of these two cases change were we to see them with Khaldūnian eyes?
Chapters Seven and Eight take us to the American Southwest. Chapter Seven explores traditional Navajo religion, particularly focusing on its healing rituals. Navajo religion does not center on church buildings, nor on congregations, nor on beliefs and creeds. Instead, its five- to nine-day ceremonies seek to maintain or restore hózhǭ (beauty, harmony, goodness) and counteract hóchxǭ (evil, disorder, ugliness). In Navajo theology, the world was created in harmony, but that harmony is often destroyed. Ritual renews this harmony, which brings physical health to individuals and social health to communities. It does so not just symbolically, but in the moment-to-moment experiences of its participants. Chapter Eight explores the potential of this approach to religion by applying Navajo concepts to the house Masses celebrated by the members of a radical Catholic commune. We will see how these rituals restore members’ hope in their mission to create social justice. The chapter develops this into a theory of ritual that puts experience at the heart of the ritual process. This gives ritual a much different role in religion than does sociology’s default view.
These three themes—the creation of sacred community, the relationships between religion and ethnicity, and the role of ritual experience in generating community healing—are the focus of this book’s central chapters.
The book’s last chapter locates these cross-cultural explorations in our contemporary historical-cultural situation. Ours is a global world, but an unequal one. Politically, economically, militarily, and intellectually, it is still shaped by three centuries of Western colonialism. Though the former colonies are now technically free, the power relationships that bound them to their European and American masters have not disappeared. Our world revolves around New York, Paris, London, and Berlin far more than it revolves around Dakar, Colombo, and Santiago. To think otherwise is to be hopelessly naïve about the world in which we live.
Edward Said famously pointed out the perils of “Orientalism”—the intellectual move by which scholars from the colonizing powers dominated (and misunderstood) the colonies, devaluing their indigenous knowledge.13 On one level, this book attempts the opposite. It shows the limits of Western sociology’s default view of religion and proposes that other civilizations’ ways of seeing can highlight things that we have missed. Said and I both show the limits of an unconscious Western view.
On another level, however, this book risks being one more colonial imposition. To express this in personal terms, is it not rather colonialist for a White, male, American scholar to pluck Confucian, Muslim, and Navajo ideas out of their indigenous contexts and bring them home for his own society’s intellectual enjoyment? Chapter Nine draws the parallel between this effort and Lord Elgin’s early-19th-century theft of the Parthenon Frieze. Who gets to appropriate whose ideas in a world where some people rule and others must submit? To put the matter more neutrally, if the intellectual consequences of the sociology of religion’s unconscious reliance on Western history for its core concepts limits our vision, what does the unconscious appropriation of other civilizations’ insights do? Chapter Nine explores this matter, with examples.
Chapter Nine also responds to this challenge. Said based his work on the close connection between intellectual attitudes and colonial power relations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. That era was much more intellectually unipolar than our own. Specifically, we have much more international communication than was then possible. We have much more access to other voices. Those voices, indeed, are increasingly skilled at producing their own messages. Where the Orientalists could (in Said’s presentation) interpret the East quite freely, now the Empire talks back.14 Post-colonial theorists contest Euro-American intellectual hegemony,15 ‘indigenous theorists’ tout the superiority of native worldviews,16 and deconstructive methodologists expose the colonial underpinnings of Western scholarly techniques.17 While acknowledging continuities, has not the situation changed?
I think it has. Rather than looking backward to an era that has partially passed, what happens if we look forward to an era that is partially emerging? What kind of sociology can we now create, to match a world in which cross-civilizational contact is a daily affair? Perhaps more importantly, how would we have to position ourselves, intellectually, to take ideas from other traditions as seriously as we take our own?
For that is what this book is trying to do. I am, essentially, engaged in an act of imagination. What parts of religion would we understand more clearly, were we to stop privileging the ideas about religion that stem from Western civilization’s Christian heritage? We cannot know until we try. I have written this book in a spirit of exploration.
Kim Robinson’s wonderful novel The Years of Rice and Salt imagines a world history without a Europe.18 My task is similar, but on a different intellectual level. What would the sociology of religion emphasize, had it developed in other civilizations than our own? My goal is not to replace Western sociological insights; they have, after all, been very useful. My goal is to expand our disciplinary toolkit—to supplement established ways of thinking with other ideas drawn from other histories, eras, and cultures. A global era demands nothing less.
