study of religion
- Key People:
- Elaine Pagels
- Related Topics:
- religion
study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines.
The study of religion emerged as a formal discipline during the 19th century, when the methods and approaches of history, philology, literary criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and other fields were brought to bear on the task of determining the history, origins, and functions of religion. No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. One of the many reasons for this failure is that each discipline enlisted to study religion has its own distinctive methods and topics, and scholars often disagree about how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between these different intellectual perspectives. Another reason is that questions about the origins and functions of religion have often been conflated with questions about the truth of religion, and this has led to controversies that tend to hinder the development of common concepts, methodologies, and problems.
Nature and significance
The essence of religion and the context of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions
Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to establish, though not for lack of trying. Attempts have been made to find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or spiritual, experience, the contrast between the sacred and the profane, and the belief in one or more gods. But objections have been brought against all these attempts, either because the rich variety of religions makes it easy to find counterexamples or because the element cited as central is in some religions peripheral. The gods play a merely subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (“Way of the Elders”) Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though not necessarily universal, such as the occurrence of the rituals of worship. There are religions, however, in which even worship rituals are not central. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena.
Even if an inventory of kinds of belief and practice could be gathered so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion, some scholars would maintain that the differences between religions are more significant than their similarities. Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. Thus, some political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, have been regarded as analogous to religion. Certain attempts at a functionalist definition of religion, such as that of the German American theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), who defined religion in terms of human beings’ ultimate concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of the study of religion (Tillich himself called them quasi-religions). Although there is still no agreement on this issue, the frontier between traditional religions and modern political ideologies remains a promising topic of study.
Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion
Discussion about religion has been complicated further by the attempt of some Christian theologians, notably Karl Barth (1886–1968), to draw a distinction between religion and the Gospel (the proclamation peculiar to Christianity). This distinction depends to some extent upon taking a projectionist view of religion as a human product. This tradition goes back in modern times to the seminal work of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), who proposed that God was the extension of human aspirations, and it is found in the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and others. Barth’s distinction attempts to draw a line between the transcendent, as it reveals itself to humans, and religion, as a human product involved in the response to revelation. The difficulty of the distinction consists chiefly in a denial that God, as the object of the response, is a “religious” being (i.e., God is transcendent, not religious in the sense of being a part of the human product), and the question about revelation as a religious fact thus needs to be answered.
Subjectivity in the study of religion
There are doubts about how far there can be neutrality and objectivity in the study of religion. Is it possible to understand a faith without holding it? If it is not possible, then cross-religious comparisons would mostly break down, for normally it is not possible to be inside more than one religion. But it is necessary to be clear about what objectivity and subjectivity in religion mean. Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of God guiding the life of the devotee. Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. Religion may also be thought to be subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are obscure and hard to come by, so there is no obvious “objective” test, the way in which there is for a large range of empirical claims in the physical world. As to the first sense, one of the challenges to the student of religion is the problem of evoking its inner, individual side, which is not observable in any straightforward way. In considering a religion, however, the scholar is concerned not only with individual responses but also with communal ones. Often the scholar is confronted only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so the inner sentiments that these both evoke and express must be inferred. The adherent of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but what of the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which the adherent participates? Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a dialectic between participant observation and dialogical (interpersonal) relationship with the adherents of the other faith.
The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter for theology and the philosophy of religion. The study of religion can roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries on the one hand and normative inquiries on the other. Normative inquiries primarily concern the truth of religious claims, the acceptability of religious values, and other such normative aspects; descriptive inquiries, which are only indirectly involved with the normative elements of religion, are primarily concerned with the history, structure, and other observable elements of religion. The distinction, however, is not an absolute one, for, as has been noted, descriptions of religion may sometimes incorporate theories about religion that imply something about the truth or other normative aspects of some or all religions. Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a religion. The dominant sense in which the contemporary study of religion is understood is the descriptive sense.
Neutrality in the study of religion
The attempt simply to describe and not judge religious beliefs and practices is often considered to involve epochē—that is, the suspension of belief and the “bracketing” of the phenomena under investigation. The idea of epochē is borrowed from the philosophy of the German thinker Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the father of phenomenology, and the procedure is regarded as central to the phenomenology of religion.
The term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of the religion under investigation but without either endorsing or rejecting the beliefs and attitudes. Thus, the “bracketing” means forgetting about beliefs of one’s own that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. The term phenomenology also refers to the attempt to devise a typology, or classification, of religious phenomena—religious activities, beliefs, and institutions.
To some extent the emphasis on neutral description arises in modern times as a reaction to “committed” accounts of religion, which were for long the norm and which still exist among those who treat religion from a theological point of view. The Christian theologian, for example, may see a particular historical process as providential. This is a legitimate perspective from the standpoint of faith. But the historical process itself has to be investigated “scientifically”—that is, by considering the evidence, using the techniques of historical enquiry and other scientific methods. Conflict sometimes arises because the committed point of view is likely to begin from a more conservative stance, accepting at face value the scriptural accounts of events, whereas the “secular” historian may be more skeptical, especially of records of miraculous events. The study of religion may thus come to have a reflexive effect on religion itself, such as the manner in which modern Christian theology has been profoundly affected by the whole question of the historicity of the New Testament.
The reflexive effect of the study of religion on religion itself may in practice make it more difficult for the student of religion to adopt the detachment required by bracketing. Scholars do generally agree that the pursuit of objectivity is desirable, provided this stance does not involve the sacrifice of a sense of the inner aspect of religion. The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion.