Understanding Theories of Religion

An Introduction

Ivan Strenski

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118457726
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Featuring comprehensive updates and additions, the second edition of Understanding Theories of Religion explores the development of major theories of religion through the works of classic and contemporary figures.

•A new edition of this introductory text exploring the core methods and theorists in religion, spanning the sixteenth-century through to the latest theoretical trends
•Features an entirely new section covering religion and postmodernism; race, sex, and gender; and religion and postcolonialism
•Examines the development of religious theories through the work of classic and contemporary figures from the history of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology
•Reveals how the study of religion evolved in response to great cultural conflicts and major historical events
•Student-friendly features include chapter introductions and summaries, biographical vignettes, a timeline, a glossary, and many other learning aids

1
Introduction: Understanding Theories of Religion Is Better than Just Being Critical

A New Kind of Method and Theory Book

This is not “your mother or father’s” method and theory book. Thinkers who made a big difference in the way we study religion today still lead the way, but with a difference. Competent as several other theory books may be, I feel they leave us uniformed about how and why our leading theories came to be. Yes, we all want to know what’s wrong with a theory. But should we be satisfied with just cutting up a theory? What about how a theory was woven together, built up, brick by brick, and so on? Unless we get deep inside the minds of theorists – unless we really understand them – we cannot hope to do them and the high-order act of theorizing justice. I believe that unless we know why they thought they were right we risk making an empty academic game of the study of theories of religion. Finally, the approach I have been trying to teach in this book entails asking why a theorist thought they were right in going down a certain path. Answers to this question may, in turn, arise from considerations internal to a line of thinking, typically to the world of ideas circulating in a certain field of study or academic profession. But the external context of a thinker’s life – the political, cultural, social, religious world in which they live – may also incline a theorist to think they were right to advance a given theoretical idea.

In the preface to this second edition, I also mentioned recognizing major epistemological breaks in theorizing, such as that between modern and post-modern. I shall argue that theories develop dialectically, according to a logic worked out in history. Theories “speak” to other theories in a kind of conversation with one another. In this light, I am arguing that the new chapters of Part IV on race, feminism, and post-colonialism carry on the conversation theorists in the study of religion have been having for the past 400 years. The story of theory in our field is not, then, a piecemeal and unhistorical serialization of theories, as if they pop up one at a time, here and there, and in no particular relation to one another. What makes the history of theories of religion in the West like none other is the existence of this centuries-long conversation. Thus, while it is vital to recognize classic thinkers from Muslim, Indian, or Chinese civilizations who took a critical, and often comparative, look at religion, their efforts did not add up to a tradition of critical and comparative study of religion. They shot across a sky of discourse like blazing comets, burning brightly, soon to flame out. They failed to ignite the kind of centuries-long controversies that are the stuff of the study of religion as we have come to know it in the West. I am finally, then, arguing that the key to a good theory book is finding the connecting threads in that long conversation. Both Thinking about Religion and, now, Understanding Theories of Religion do this by calling attention to the historical dialectic at work shaping the production of theories of religion.

In treating theories of religion, I am convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn, not only about the past, but also about how we should study religion today. By seeing how our field came about from its classic historical beginnings, we situate ourselves within a long, meandering stream of thinking reaching back to the dawn of the modern era. This takes us back to the childhood of religious studies, a time when people were just discovering the different religions for the first time. What was it like in the minds of our field’s heroes when they met religions unknown up to that point? What was it like when many heretofore unknown peoples of the world first came to know each other? What was it like at first contact? The original edition, Thinking about Religion, told us about these first and subsequent contacts. Working away, mostly in secret, to avoid religious persecution, early modern theorist Jean Bodin put together the first dialogue of religions where the religions spoke to each other as equals. Assembling believers of many different sorts – not only Christians and Jews, but Muslims too, Bodin let them challenge the credentials and validity of each other’s claims to the truth. Just think what Bodin would have done had he known of the Buddhists, Hindus, Native Americans, and Australian or African native folk, as later modern or post-modern theorists would? But Bodin had had no contact with them. We had not yet introduced ourselves to each other. By the eighteenth century, our theorists represent thinkers who had now had that further contact with the many other peoples of the world. Friedrich Max Müller made the religions of India his specialty, and put forward his broad comparative theory of religion that embraced India and the West under one single rubric. How different then from Bodin’s was this new world that Max Műller opened up, when he extended the study of religion to the religions of India? That first contact, as we will see, exploded conventional thinking about the nature of religion in ways we have still perhaps not yet digested. Max Müller spoke of an “Aryan Bible,” and threw open questions about the uniqueness of Abrahamic revelation like none before him. Students still query whether Buddhism can be called a religion, because a god does not occupy its center. Another first contact, here with the archeological remains of the Neolithic ancestors of modern peoples, drove the efforts of anthropologists like E. B. Tylor or Sir James Frazer. Not only did they seek to extend the history of humanity far beyond contemporary imaginings, but their progressive evolutionary vision of the human past reacted dialectically to Max Müller’s diffusionist story of humanity’s decline from a religious golden age.

In this new edition, I update the results of those earlier first contacts and incorporate post-modern approaches – in a broad sense of the term – in Part IV. Doing so permits us to have what we might call dialectical second looks at the entire archive of data of the study of religion given us by the classic modernist theorists, but now through eyes of the post-modern critics of modernist theory. In a way, the entirety of Part IV can be read as a systematic taking apart of the foundations upon which the major theorists of the past have stood – especially the modernists Weber, Freud, Malinowski, Durkheim, and Eliade.

These newly added chapters on post-modern theories of religion showcase a clear and thorough dialectic reaction to the modernist theoretical trends of the past. These primarily deal with religion in terms of issues that particularly vex us in ways ignored by modernist theories. Against modernist claims of scientific objectivity and neutrality, the post-modernists assert a concern for human dignity, social justice, and the victims of a globalized world. Themes such as power, race, sex/gender, and global social justice run through these theories like a bright red thread. Post-modern theorists would, accordingly, be prompted to raise such questions as whether, for example, Tylor would have referred to the folk of traditional societies as “savages” or “primitive” had he not been comfortably ensconced in the seat of imperial power. Or would Eliade have written of “religious man” had he been more sensitive to the way classic theorists overlooked sex/gender in the make-up of the religious world? In reaching all the way back to the past and concluding with the present, theorizing about religion shows both longevity and vitality. We own a marvelously rich tradition of scholarship. Like some luxurious oriental carpet, theory in the study of religion has, over many centuries, been woven together out of a dialectical arrangement of contrasting and complementary intellectual threads into something rich.

There is also a second way this method and theory book departs from conventional ways of studying theories. I absolutely love theory and theorizing. I think it is one of the finest acts we can perform as thinkers. But it is not a game. Therefore, to me, doing theory is not just the analysis of ideas, or a contest to see who is the sharpest knife in the drawer. It is about showcasing a worldview, telling an important story, engaging an often dramatic clash of ideas. As such, theories have their “internal” and “external” contexts. They are formed within an internal intellectual context of a disciplinary or academic craft, where one member of the craft speaks to another. At some point, musicians or mathematicians can only talk to other musicians or mathematicians, because only a narrow sliver of humanity can master their refined, specialized languages. Nevertheless, musicians perform for audiences, often illiterate in their special language: music connects because it taps into larger emotional networks, external to the disciplined world of the musician. What makes music work is its ability to connect with the totality of human life external to the special language of music. That is why I also insist upon studying the formation of theories within a wider, external, context defined by the political, religious, sexual, esthetic worlds that we all inhabit.

Beyond saying what a theory is, the study of theories of religion is about accounting for how and why theories actually came to be. Part of my answer to this question of how theories came to be resides in life itself. That is why I have brought in the external context of theorizing – the network of politics, religion, esthetics, etc., – that often weighs on theorists in the formation of their theories. Theories, thus, emerge to some degree from attempts to make sense of the world and our place in it. More than just smart, a good theory also evinces wisdom and wide experience of life in all its diversity. Theories have implications beyond the classroom or seminar, shaping the way we see life overall. Thus, theories and worldviews are often hard to tell apart. Malinowski, for example, wrote some of the first books about sexual practices among faraway tribal folk, but he was also active in the early days of Planned Parenthood. Do we really think we could – or should – separate these “external” interests in sex from his overall “internal” intellectual and professional theoretical perspective on religion? I don’t think so. In my chapter on Malinowski, readers will discover why.

Teachers are always pleased if students are smart about theories, and can master their logic. Jumping through the mental hoops of explaining a theory and pointing out its strengths and weaknesses are basic skills. But I look for more than cleverness in a student, more than the ability to rack up good scores in an exam, or even to get the right answer. I look for students ready to study theory in quite another spirit. I look for students moved by real curiosity who try to understand why theorists thought they were right about their theoretical proposals. In brief, I look for students who want to understand theory and theorists! This book will invite students to dive into the lives and times of theorists to see how theories emerged from a picture of why they thought certain ideas were “right.” Let’s begin.

From Religion to the “Problems of Religion”

Understanding Theories of Religion takes its stand squarely on the importance of understanding how and why people have come to think about religion, and how they try variously to understand or explain it. Everybody knows that people can often be passionate, even violently so, about religion, either for or against. Many Christians feel that the imperative to “preach the gospel to all nations” weighs heavily upon them. That is why is, along with Buddhism, Christianity is the most successful of all missionary religions. For these Christians, religion is so charged with emotion that it bubbles over in zealous energy to proselytize. But someone might note that powerful emotions do not accompany the missionizing enterprise of Buddhism, nor is its spread impelled by a strong imperative. Instead, Buddhists get especially emotional when they feel under threat of attack or elimination. Protecting the key Buddhist institutions, such as the Sangha, then becomes an overriding imperative. This book too lives by passion. In the theorists we study, I want to convey their thirst to know and understand, their reckless lust for truth and obsession with curiosity. I want us as well to experience for ourselves something of their relentless impulse to question and doubt.

People may have been believers or just have “lived” their religions from time immemorial. But the characters in this book were the first who subjected religion to questioning and curiosity. They submitted religion to endless systematic interrogation in the quest to understand and explain this seemingly unexplainable and mysterious aspect of life. In a way, they truly made “religion” emerge. What, for example, was the first religion? How does it compare to the religions of our day? Are there religions elsewhere than in the West? Or is religion a univocal, culturally-specific term that cannot be employed outside the West? How has religion been employed as means of resistance to domination? How does a religion articulate with the nation-state”? Does religion change – say, according to any regular principles that we might discover, such as evolution or degeneration? Is religion essentially private or instead essentially social (Strenski 2003)? The attempt to solve these and similar problems marks the beginning of what we call theories. This is not to say that in the spotty history of human curiosity these questions never occurred to believers. It is only to say that until fairly recently there were no major books or treatises, no sustaining institutions or “schools,” no lasting cultural influences in the forms of lines of inquiry or major questions about religion. And as schools of mathematics and the scientific study of language developed first in ancient India, and not in, say, Frankish Europe, so also was it in the West that the study of religion as we know it came to be. The study of religion came to be because religion its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: The Prehistory of the Study of Religion
• PART II: Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion
• PART III: Classic Twentieth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion
• PART IV: Liberation and Post-Modernism
• Index
• End User License Agreement