Religion

Religion

DEFINITION AND SCOPE

RESEARCH CONCERNS

DEMOGRAPHICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Though difficult to define from an intercultural perspective, religion informs the lives of virtually every society as a complex system involving beliefs, behavior, organizational structures, and symbols. Problems in satisfactorily defining the term emerge from the manifold ways in which religion expresses itself, the varied roles that it performs both for individuals and for social groups, and the plethora of academic disciplines that study it.

DEFINITION AND SCOPE

Beliefs that may be deemed “religious” range from precisely articulated perceptions of a complex array of anthropomorphic deities, such as the myriad levels of divinity recognized in Hinduism, to vague notions of impersonal, overarching power—for example, the concept of mana recognized in many Polynesian societies. Behaviors include a variety of practices, such as the silent meditation practiced on a personal level by mystics from a diversity of religious traditions, including Buddhism and Christianity, and complicated ritual scenarios involving scores of people such as the annual Sun Dance that has provided the central corporate religious experience for many American Indian groups on the Great Plains. Religion’s organizational structure may be simple groupings of individuals brought together temporarily for specific religious purposes, such as the big meetings held by some Aborigines in the Western Australian desert, as well as multileveled hierarchies that have endured over millennia (for instance, the Roman Catholic Church). Symbolic representations with religious dimensions can be discrete metaphors that stand for a single concept (e.g., a shaman’s characterization of his or her mystical experience as a death and rebirth) as well as variegated iconographic vocabularies of interrelated images, such as that which characterized medieval and Renaissance Christianity and which continues to afford ways for Christians to communicate about their faith.

Social scientists and others have noted that religion plays varied roles in society, including validating other features of a society, such as its political or economic system, and compensating individuals for the limitations that their humanity imposes on them and for the prohibitions dictated by specific societal norms. Religion also has an integrative function as it provides a focus for cultural identity, endorses those values and norms that ensure that a person will truly be a respectable member of the society, and discourages behavior that undermines social cohesion. Religion also offers answers to some of life’s persistent problems, especially the meaning of death and the possibility of an afterlife.

The study of religion is genuinely multidisciplinary, and different fields stress different emphases in their approaches to the concept. Sociologists, for example, usually highlight the organizational structures and patterns of behavior as central to their concerns, whereas practitioners of philosophy, theology, and comparative religious studies focus their attention on beliefs. Literature and art history are most likely to foreground religious symbolism. Priding itself on its holistic approach to society and culture, anthropology is more apt than other disciplines to pay more or less equal attention to all four components of religion.

The problem of defining religion is further complicated when one attempts to differentiate it from other systems of belief, behavior, organization, and symbolism. These attempts often rely on terms that themselves need definition and clarification: sacred, transcendent, supernatural, spiritual, and ultimate. Most of these terms suggest that religion focuses on nonroutine phenomena that are set apart in some way from nonreligious experience (the secular or the profane ). But exactly what sets them apart and the degree to which they differ from the rest of life have not been consistently articulated. What may be perceived as sacred phenomena in some systems of belief may be regarded as secular elsewhere. Mysterious lights, for example, may signal the presence of a supernatural entity, or they may be explained as the product of gases emitted by decaying vegetation. One may base the decision whether to eat meat on religious proscriptions, or the decision may be simply a nutritional issue.

Another contributor to the difficulty in defining religion is that although religion is apparently universal— that is, found in all societies—the concept of a system of beliefs, behavior, organizational structures, and symbolism distinct from other social systems is largely a Western construct. Many languages have no equivalent for the English word religion, though the societies that speak those languages evince much that would be considered religious in Western terms.

RESEARCH CONCERNS

Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of religion generally reflect different emphases in how the concept is defined. Whereas social scientists, for example, usually focus on how religion operates within specific cultural contexts, theologians and comparative religion scholars may examine the nuances of religious beliefs. But one area of concern that has transcended a range of academic disciplines is the issue of origins. For example, a historian may be interested in how Mormonism emerged from the ferment of religious enthusiasm that characterized the burned-over district of western New York in the early nineteenth century, or in tracing the origins of Christian apocalypticism of the twenty-first century to Zoroastrian beliefs in Persia from perhaps as early as the tenth century bce.

More fundamentally, interest in origins has often addressed how religion as a system originated in the human individual and collective psyche: as a response to dream experiences (the view of the nineteenth-century anthropologist E. B. Tylor), out of fear and guilt regarding a primordial father figure (one of the ideas articulated by Sigmund Freud), as a product of the human tendency to personify incomprehensible natural forces (articulated by the eighteenth-century philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, among others), as a method for suppressing social discontent and for promoting adherence to a society’s power structure (advocated by philosophers from Plato to Marx), and even as the product of revelation from a god or other spiritual being or force (the stance assumed by many religious adherents—at least in regard to their own religions). Of course, many other explanations of religion’s origin have been and continue to be proposed, and many of them lack the criterion of testability upon which many academic fields insist in order for an idea to be more than hypothesis. Consequently, many other issues in religion have received more scholarly attention.

Many sociologists, in particular, look to the pioneering concepts of Émile Durkheim, a late-nineteenth-century social scientist who argued that religion is principally a social phenomenon. Drawing upon data from the religions of Australian Aboriginal groups, he proposed that the object of religious belief and behavior was, in fact, the society itself, and that religion operated to maintain social stability through the devotion of its adherents. Whereas many of his contemporaries were more attracted by the issue of religion’s origins, Durkheim concentrated on how religion operated. This concern anticipated the functional emphases of anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who early in the twentieth century examined how religion operated as a support for other social institutions and—in Malinowski’s case—how it might assist believers in their everyday lives by providing ways of dealing with issues that lay beyond their scientific knowledge. Malinowski studied the culture of the Trobriand Islanders, Melanesians who inhabited an archipelago to the east of New Guinea and who relied on seafaring for much of their livelihoods. He noted that Trobriand sailors did not evoke religion when they were operating within the peaceful lagoons just offshore from their island homes, but when they faced the potentially uncontrollable forces of the open seas, they turned to religious beliefs and behavior to complement their knowledge of ocean currents, the weather, and other variables.

Though they might reject the designation “functionalist” as too simplistic for how they approach the study of religion, many social scientists nevertheless continue to deal principally with how religion operates in social life collectively and in the lives of individuals. Durkheim’s belief that the object of religious interest symbolizes the society finds echoes in the more recent ideas about civil religion. Sociologist Robert Bellah has suggested that in many societies—the United States, in particular—patriotism has developed beliefs, behaviors, organizational structures, and symbolism tantamount to a religious system (1967).

Many social scientists have been especially interested in the nature of religious participation: who finds given religious systems amenable to meeting their particular needs and who performs what roles in religious behavior and organization. In heterogeneous, stratified societies such as those in the West, research has attempted to correlate membership in a particular class or caste with participation in a particular religious system or subset thereof. For instance, the wealthy and highly educated populations in the United States are more likely to affiliate with branches of Christianity that stress the importance of formal liturgy, whereas middle- and lower-class individuals prefer Christian groups that stress less organization and underscore instead the importance of personal religious experience. Ethnicity also has been a frequently identified variable in determining religious affiliation. In fact, some ethnic groups in the United Kingdom and France use religion, particularly Islam, to reinforce and signal their ethnic cultural identity. In the latter half of the twentieth century, researchers became more and more interested in ways in which gender might affect not so much a person’s specific affiliation but the nature of that person’s involvement in religion. While the women’s movement was encouraging a more visible, active role for women in many Christian denominations in the West, researchers looking at religions in other parts of the world often found that women traditionally had been central in local religious belief and polity.

Another focus of social scientific interest in religion has been the way in which it interacts with other systems of ideology in a society. Max Weber is an important early figure in this interest because of his demonstration of the way in which Protestant Christianity, especially Calvinism in western Europe, created a milieu conducive to the emergence of capitalism by emphasizing individualism and hard work, among other values. Of particular interest in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the association between religion and nationalism. Islamic-based governments, primarily in the Middle East, have become among the most important participants in global politics, and competition between different branches of Islam (Sunni and Shia, in particular) has characterized their internal politics. Christianity has assumed a similar role in some Western nation-states such as the United States, where fundamentalist groups have become powerful elements on the political landscape. Sociologists and political scientists have shown particular interest in measuring the ways in which religious affiliation has affected the voting patterns of the U.S. electorate and in shaping the programs of the politicians they support.

An important and very fundamental development in social scientific interest in religion concerns the way in which scholars position themselves in regard to their subject. Conventionally, social scientists have been urged to develop a stance of methodological agnosticism in which they eschew their own religious beliefs at least temporarily and adopt a perspective of cultural relativism that is not concerned with whether a religious belief is true or whether a ritual actually produces the results that its practitioners desire. Instead, researchers have attended to the internal consistency of belief systems, the social and cultural functions of ritual, and the extent to which adherents lend credence to beliefs and rituals. Recently, however, some social scientists have begun to recognize that this perspective brings with it certain assumptions that color what researchers observe, how they report what they encounter, and the directions taken by their analyses. Influenced by the set of ideas loosely known as “postmodernism,” researchers have become more aware of the role of their own religious ideas in their work and have become more forthcoming about those ideas. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, for example, was usually very open about his own Roman Catholicism in his work focusing on the symbolic dimension of religious systems. In addition to this move toward reflexivity on the part of religious researchers, some social scientists have begun to accept that religious beliefs may often stem from actual wondrous events that an individual has experienced and which the social group interprets in terms of the events’ relation to indigenous ideas about the sacred, the supernatural, the spiritual, or the ultimate.

New tools have allowed social scientists to explore traditional areas of religious study more fully and accurately. The availability of computer programs, for instance, allows demographic studies to be done more quickly and with a larger number of variables than was feasible before the computer age. Meanwhile, technology has taken religious studies into some new, still controversial, and largely unexplored areas such as the possibility of a genetic basis for the need for religion. Interestingly— and perhaps counterintuitively—the growth of technology during the latter half of the twentieth century did not parallel a decline in religious adherence; instead, many religions have witnessed significant growth as technology has blossomed.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Literally thousands of religious systems flourish throughout today’s world. Although many of these appeal only to small groups (and have consequently been labeled “tribal” or “primal-indigenous” religions), even these may exert international influence through the globalized mass media and through such phenomena as cultural tourism. Other religious systems are truly world religions whose practitioners believe that they can and should promulgate their beliefs to everyone. Despite their purported international scope, though, these world religions are often focused on specific territories. For example, the largest religious system, Christianity (with more than two billion adherents), developed in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea and then spread primarily through Europe and then to those parts of the world that were subjects of European colonialism. Most branches of Christianity retain primary geographical ties with Europe or with the United States, but some are flourishing most luxuriantly in other parts of the world—Roman Catholicism in Central and South America and in Africa, for example.

Meanwhile, Islam—second in number of adherents to Christianity with perhaps a billion and a half followers—maintains its primary geographical association with southwestern Asia and southeastern Europe. But it has spread throughout the world, and, in fact, the country with the most Muslims is Indonesia. Hinduism, with close to a billion practitioners, remains principally associated with the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism, with maybe half a billion adherents, also has an Asian focus. Nevertheless, both these religions have had enormous influence elsewhere, especially as replacements for or supplements to Christianity. The diaspora of the Jewish population has made Judaism a world religion with a symbolic attachment to the nation of Israel.

As contact between societies becomes more efficient, these world religions as well as more local systems of belief, behavior, organizational structures, and symbolism will spread more widely. Meanwhile, they will continue to influence one another to create syncretistic systems such as the Native American Church, which blends Christianity, various North American Indian religions, and ritual behavior that apparently originated in Mexico; and Vodoun, the principal religion of Haiti, which merges Roman Catholic Christianity and several West African religious systems, with influences from native Caribbean religions. The endurance of religions whose roots lie in the distant past, as well as the emergence of new religions, often the result of syncretism and other processes of cultural exchange, ensures that social scientists and other scholars who specialize in the study of religion will not lack for subject matter any time soon.

SEE ALSO Animism; Anthropology; Buddhism; Christianity; Church and State; Church, The; Coptic Christian Church; Cults; Durkheim, Émile; Ethnicity; Heaven; Hell; Hinduism; Islam, Shia and Sunni; Jainism; Judaism; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Monotheism; Polytheism; Protestant Ethic; Protestantism; Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.; Rastafari; Religiosity; Roman Catholic Church; Santería; Shinto; Sociology; Weber, Max

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (Winter): 1-21.

Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Carmody, Denise. 1979. Women and World Religions. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.

Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1987. The Encyclopedia of Religion. 16 vols. New York: Macmillan.

Guthrie, Stewart Elliott. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lessa, William A., and Evon Z. Vogt, eds. 1979. Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. 4th ed. New York: Harper and Row.

Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents. Adherents.com.

McClenon, John. 1994. Wondrous Events: Foundations of Religious Belief. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Smith, Huston. 1991. The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. San Francisco: Harper.

Wilson, Brian. 1990. The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism: Sects and New Religious Movements in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Yinger, J. Milton. 1970. The Scientific Study of Religion. New York: Macmillan.

William M. Clements