Religion
Religion
I. Anthropological StudyClifford Geertz
II. The Sociology Of ReligionRobert N. Bellah
III. Psychological StudyJames E. Dittes
The articles under this heading describe three approaches to the topic of religion in the social sciences. The history and doctrines of the major religions are discussed in Buddhism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism. The organizational aspects of religion are described in Monasticism; Psychiatry, article onthereligio-psychiatricmovement; Religious organization; Religious specialists; Sects and cults.Various aspects of religious belief and practice are reviewed in Canon law; Civil disobedience; Death; Millenarism; Moral development; Myth and symbol; Nativism and revivalism; Pollution; Religious observance; Ritual.Other relevant material may be found in Charisma; Voluntary associations.Biographical articles that are of relevance to the social scientific study of religion include Aquinas; Augustine; Becker; Bloch;Buber; Calvin; Comte; Durkheim; Erasmus; Febvre; Frazer; Freud; HalÉvy; Huizinga;James; Jung; Lowie; Luther; Malinowski; Marett; Marsilius; Marx; Mauss; Montesquieu; Mooney; Ockham; Rank; Seligman, C. G.; Smith, William Robertson; Spinoza; Tawney; Troeltsch; Tylor; Weber, Max.
I ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
The anthropological study of religion has been highly sensitive to changes in the general intellectual and moral climate of the day; at the same time, it has been a powerful factor in the creation of that climate. Since the early discussion by Edward Tylor, interest in the beliefs and rituals of distant, ancient, or simpler peoples has been shaped by an awareness of contemporary issues. The questions that anthropologists have pursued among exotic religions have arisen from the workings—or the misworkings—of modern Western society, and particularly from its restless quest for self-discovery. In turn, their findings have profoundly affected the course that quest has taken and the perspective at which it has arrived.
Perhaps the chief reason for the rather special role of comparative religious studies is that issues which, when raised within the context of Western culture, led to extreme social resistance and personal turmoil could be freely and even comfortably handled in terms of bizarre, presumably primitive, and thus—also presumably—fanciful materials from long ago or far away. The study of “primitive religions” could pass as the study of superstition, supposedly unrelated to the serious religious and moral concerns of advanced civilization, at best either a sort of vague foreshadowing of them or a grotesque parody upon them. This made it possible to approach all sorts of touchy subjects, such as polytheism, value relativism, possession, and faith healing, from a frank and detached point of view. One could ask searching questions about the historicity of myth among Polynesians; when asked in relation to Christianity, these same questions were, until quite recently, deeply threatening. One could discuss the projection of erotic wishes found in the “totemic” rites of Australian aborigines, the social roots and functions of African “ancestor worship,” or the protoscientific quality of Melanesian “magical thought,” without involving oneself in polemical debate and emotional distress. The application of the comparative method—the essence of anthropological thought—to religion per mitted the growth of a resolutely scientific approach to the spiritual dimensions of human life.
Through the thin disguise of comparative method the revolutionary implications of the work of such men as Tylor, Durkheim, Robertson Smith, Freud, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown soon became apparent—at first mainly to philosophers, theologians, and literary figures, but eventually to the educated public in general. The meticulous descriptions of tribal curiosities such as soul loss, shamanism, circumcision, blood sacrifice, sorcery, tree burial, garden magic, symbolic cannibalism, and animal worship have been caught up in some of the grander intellectual battles of the last hundred years—from those over evolutionism and historicism in the late nineteenth century to those over positivism and existentialism today. Psychoanalysts and phenomenologists, Marxists and Kantians, racists and egalitarians, absolutists and relativists, empiricists and rationalists, believers and skeptics have all had recourse to the record—partial, inconsistent, and shot through with simple error as it is—of the spiritual life of tribal peoples to support their positions and belabor those of their opponents. If interest in “primitive religion” among savants of all sorts has been remarkably high, consensus concerning its nature and significance has not.
At least three major intellectual developments have exercised a critical influence on the anthropological study of religion: (1) the emergence, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, of history as the sovereign science of man; (2) the positivist reaction against this sovereignty in the first decades of the twentieth century and the radical split of the social sciences into resolutely psychological approaches, on the one hand, and resolutely sociological ones, on the other; and (3) the growth, in the interwar period, of a concern with the role of ideational factors in the regulation of social life. With the first of these came an emphasis on the nature of primitive reasoning and the stages of its evolution into civilized thought. With the second came an investigation of the emotional basis of religious ritual and belief and the separate examination of the role of ritual and belief in social integration. The concern with value systems and other features of the ideational realm led to an exploration of the philosophical dimensions of religious ideas, particularly the symbolic vehicles in terms of which those ideas are expressed.
Evolutionism and its enemies
Like so much else in anthropology, the study of the religious notions of primitive peoples arose within the context of evolutionary theory. In the nineteenth century, to think systematically about human affairs was to think historically—to seek out survivals of the most elementary forms and to trace the steps by which these forms subsequently developed. And though, in fact, Tylor, Morgan, Frazer, and the rest drew more on the synthetic social-stage theories of such men as Comte and Hegel than on the analytic random-variation and natural-selection ideas of Darwin, the grand concept of evolution was shared by both streams of thought: namely, that the complex, heterogeneous present has arisen, more or less gradually, out of a simpler, more uniform past. The relics of this past are still to be found scattered, like Galápagos turtles, in out-of-the-way places around us. Tylor, an armchair scholar, made no “voyage of the Beagle.” But in combing and organizing the reports of missionaries, soldiers, and explorers, he proceeded from the same general premise as did Darwin, and indeed most of the leading minds of the day. For them a comprehensive, historically-oriented comparison of all forms of a phenomenon, from the most primitive to the most advanced, was the royal road to understanding the nature of the phenomenon itself.
In Tylor’s view, the elementary form out of which all else developed was spirit worship— animism. The minimal definition of religion was “a belief in spiritual beings.” The understanding of religion thus came down to an understanding of the basis upon which such a belief arose at its most primitive level. Tylor’s theory was intellectualistic. Belief in spirits began as an uncritical but nonetheless rational effort to explain such puzzling empirical phenomena as death, dreams, and possession. The notion of a separable soul rendered these phenomena intelligible in terms of soul departure, soul wandering, and soul invasion. Tylor believed that the idea of a soul was used to explain more and more remote and hitherto inexplicable natural occurrences, until virtually every tree and rock was haunted by some sort of gossamer presence. The higher, more developed forms of “belief in spiritual beings,” first polytheism, ultimately monotheism, were founded upon this animistic basis, the ur-philosophy of all mankind, and were refined through a process of critical questioning by more advanced thinkers. For this earnest Quaker the religious history of the world was a history of progressive, even inevitable, enlightenment. [SeeTylor.]
This intellectualistic, “up from darkness” strain has run through most evolutionist thought about religion. For Frazer, a nineteenth-century figure who lived for forty years into the twentieth century without finding it necessary to alter either his views or his methods, the mental progress involved was from magic to religion to science. Magic was the primordial form of human thought; it consisted in mistaking either spatiotemporal connection (“sympathetic magic,” as when drinking the blood of an ox transfers its strength to the drinker) or phenomenal similarity (“imitative magic,” as when the sound of drumming induces thunderheads to form) for true scientific causality. For Durkheim, evolutionary advance consisted in the emergence of specific, analytic, profane ideas about “cause” or “category” or “relationship” from diffuse, global, sacred images. These “collective representations,” as he called them, of the social order and its moral force included such sacra as “mana,” “totem,” and “god.” For Max Weber, the process was one of “rationalization”: the progressive organization of religious concern into certain more precisely defined, more specifically focused, and more systematically conceived cultural forms. The level of sophistication of such theories (and, hence, their present relevance) varies very widely. But, like Tylor’s, they all conceive of the evolution of religion as a process of cultural differentiation: the diffuse, all-embracing, but rather unsystematic and uncritical religious practices of primitive peoples are transformed into the more specifically focused, more regularized, less comprehensively authoritative practices of the more advanced civilizations. Weber, in whom both intellectualism and optimism were rather severely tempered by a chronic apprehensiveness, called this transformation the “disenchantment (Entzauberung) of the world.” [SeeDurkheim; Frazer; Weber, Max.]
On the heels of evolutionism came, of course, antievolutionism. This took two quite different forms. On one side there was a defense, mainly by Roman Catholic scholars, of the so-called degradation theory. According to this theory, the original revelation of a high god to primitive peoples was later corrupted by human frailty into the idol worship of present-day tribal peoples. On the other side there was an attack, mainly by American scholars of the Boas school, upon the “armchair speculation” of evolutionary thinkers and a call for its replacement by more phenomenological approaches to the study of tribal custom.
The first of these reactions led, logically enough, to a search among the most primitive of existing peoples for traces of belief in a supreme being. The resulting dispute, protracted, often bitter, and stubbornly inconclusive as to the existence of such “primitive monotheism,” turned out to be unproductive—aside from some interesting discussions by Lang (1898) concerning culture heroes and by Eliade (1949) concerning sky gods—and both the issue and the theory that gave rise to it have now receded from the center of scholarly attention. The second reaction has had a longer life and great impact on ethnographic methodology, but it too is now in partial eclipse. Its main contributions—aside from some devastating empirical demolitions of evolutionist generalization—came in the field of cultural diffusion. Leslie Spier’s study of the spread of the Sun Dance through the Great Plains (1921) and A. L. Kroeber’s application of the age-area approach to aboriginal religion in California are good examples of productive diffusion studies. However, apart from their importance for culture history, the contribution of such distributional studies to our understanding of religious ideas, attitudes, and practices as such has not been great, and few students now pursue these studies. The call of the Boas school for thorough field research and disciplined inductive analysis has been heeded; but its fruits, insofar as religious studies are concerned, have been reaped by others less inhibited theoretically.
Psychological approaches
The major reaction against the intellectual tradition of the cultural evolutionists took place not within anthropology, however, but in the general context of the positivist revolt against the domination of historicist modes of thought in the social sciences. In the years before World War I the rise of the systematic psychologism of psychoanalysis and of the equally systematic sociologism of the Année sociologique forced evolutionist theorizing into the background, even though the leaders of both movements—Freud and Durkheim—were themselves still very strongly influenced by it. Perhaps even more relevant, it introduced a sharp split into anthropological studies of religion which has resolved into the militantly psychodynamic and the militantly social-structural approaches.
Freud’s major work in this field is, of course, Totem and Taboo, a book anthropologists in general have had great difficulty in evaluating—as Kroeber’s two reviews of it, the first facilely negative, the second, two decades later, ambivalently positive, demonstrate. The source of the difficulty has been an inability or an unwillingness to disentangle Freud’s basic thesis—that religious rituals and beliefs are homologous with neurotic symptoms—from the chimerical ethnology and obsolete biology within which he insisted upon setting it. Thus, the easy demolition of what Kroeber called Freud’s “just so story” concerning primal incest, parricide, and guilt within some protohuman horde (“in the beginning was the deed”) was all too often mistaken for total rejection of the rather more penetrating proposition that the obsessions, dreams, and fantasies of collective life spring from the same intrapsychic sources as do those of the isolated individual.
For those who read further in Freud’s writings, however—especially in “Mourning and Melancholia” and “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices”—it became apparent that what was at issue was the applicability of theories concerning the forms and causes of individual psychopathology to the explanation of the forms and causes of public myth and group ritual. Róheim (1950) analyzed Australian circumcision rites against the background of orthodox Freudian theories of psycho-sexual development, especially those clustered around the Oedipal predicament. However, he explicitly avoided recourse to speculations about buried memories of primordial occurrences. Bettel-heim (1954) adopted a similar, though more systematic and less orthodox, approach to initiation practices generally, seeing them as socially instituted symbolic mechanisms for the definition and stabilization of sexual identity. Kardiner (1945), taking a neo-Freudian position, sought to demonstrate that the religious institutions of tribal peoples were projections of a “basic personality structure,” formed not by the action of an unconsciously remembered historical trauma but by the more observable traumas produced by child-training practices, an approach later extended and cast into quantitative form by Whiting (Whiting & Child 1953). Erikson (1950), drawing upon developments in ego psychology which conceived the emergence of the adult personality to be a joint product of psychobiological maturation, cultural context, and historical experience, interpreted the religious notions of the Yurok and the Sioux in terms of certain basic modes of relating to the world. These relationships gradually developed during the whole course of childhood and adolescence. Others— notably Devereux (1951)—have attempted to use the autobiographical, case-history approach to determine the relations between personality dynamics and religious orientation in particular individuals; still others—notably Hallowell (1937–1954)—have employed projective tests, questionnaires, reports of dreams, or systematic interviews toward similar ends.
In all such studies, even when individual authors have dissented from many of Freud’s specific views, the basic premise has been Freudian: that religious practices can be usefully interpreted as expressions of unconscious psychological forces—and this has become, amid much polemic, an established tradition of inquiry. In recent years, however, responsible work of this type has come to question the degree to which one is justified in subjecting historically created and socially institutionalized cultural forms to a system of analysis founded on the treatment of the mental illnesses of individuals. For this reason, the future of this approach depends perhaps more upon developments within psychoanalysis, now in a somewhat uncertain state, than within anthropology. So far, perhaps only Kluckhohn’s pioneering Navaho Witchcraft (1944) has attempted to systematically relate psychological factors to social and cultural aspects of primitive religion. The great majority of psychoanalytic studies of tribal beliefs and rites remain willfully parochial.
In any case, not all psychological approaches to religion have been Freudian. Jungian influences have had a certain impact, especially on studies of myth. Campbell (1949), for example, has stressed the continuity of certain themes both cross-culturally and temporally. These themes have been interpreted as expressions of transpersonal constancies in unconscious mental functioning which are at the same time expressions of fundamental cosmic realities.
Simple emotionalist theories have also been extremely popular. There have been two main varieties of these: awe theories and confidence theories. Awe theories have been based on some usually rather vague notion of “religious thrill” experienced by human beings when brought face to face with cosmic forces. A wide range of ethnologists, from Max M?ller through Lang and Marett to Lowie and Goldenweiser, have accepted such theories in one form or another. However, awe theories remain mere notations of the obvious—that religious experience is, in the nature of the case, touched with intense feelings of the grandeur of the universe in relation to the self and of the vulnerability of the self in relation to the universe. This is not explanation, but circular reasoning.
Confidence theories also begin with a notion of man’s inward sense of weakness, and especially of his fears—of disease, of death, of ill fortune of all kinds—and they see religious practices as designed to quiet such fears, either by explaining them away, as in doctrines of the afterlife, or by claiming to link the individual to external sources of strength, as in prayer. The best-known confidence theory was that set forth by Malinowski. He regarded magic as enabling man to pursue uncertain but essential endeavors by assuring him of their ultimate success. Confidence, or anxiety-reduction, theories, like awe theories, clearly have empirical foundation but do not adequately explore the complex relationship between fear and religious activity. They are not rooted in any systematic conceptualization of mental functioning and so merely point to matters desperately in need of clarification, without in fact clarifying them.
Sociological approaches
The sociological approach to the analysis of the religions of nonliterate peoples proceeded independent of, and even at variance with, the psychoanalytic approach, but it shared a concern with the same phenomenon: the peculiar “otherness,” the extraordinary, momentous, “set apart” quality of sacred (or “taboo”) acts and objects, as contrasted with the profane. The intense aura of high seriousness was traced by Freud to the projection of unacceptable wishes repressed from consciousness onto external objects. The dramatic ambivalence of the sacred—its paradoxical unification of the commanded and the forbidden, the pure and the polluted, the salutary and the dangerous—was a symbolic expression of the underlying ambivalence of human desires. For Durkheim, too, the extraordinary atmosphere surrounding sacred acts and objects was symbolic of a hidden reality, but a social, not a psychological one: the moral force of the human community.
Durkheim believed that the integrity of the social order was the primary requisite for human survival, and the means by which that integrity superseded individual egocentricity was the primary problem of sociological analysis. He saw Australian totemism (which he, like Freud, made the empirical focus of his work) as a mechanism to this end. For example, the collective rituals involving the emblems of the totemic beings—the so-called bull roarers—aroused the heightened emotions of mass behavior and evoked a deep sense of moral identification among the participants. The creation of social solidarity was the result of the common public veneration, by specific groups of persons, of certain carefully designated symbolic objects. These objects had no intrinsic value except as perceptible representations of the social identity of the individuals. Collective worship of consecrated bits of painted wood or stone created a moral community, a “church,” upon which rested the viability of the major social units. These sanctified objects thus represented the system of rights and obligations implicit in the social order and the individual’s unformulated sense of its overriding significance in his life. All sacred objects, beliefs, and acts, and the extraordinary emotions attending them, were outward expressions of inward social necessities, and, in a famous phrase, God was the “symbol of society.” Few anthropologists have been able to swallow Durkheim’s thesis whole, when put this baldly. But the more moderate proposition that religious rituals and beliefs both reflect and act to support the moral framework underlying social arrangements (and are in turn animated by it) has given rise to what has become perhaps the most popular form of analysis in the anthropological study of religion. Usually called “functionalism”—or sometimes, to distinguish it from certain variants deemed objectionable, “structuralism”—this approach found its champion in Radcliffe-Brown and its major development in Great Britain, though its influence has now spread very much more widely.
Radcliffe-Brown (1952) agreed with Durkheim’s postulate that the main role (or “function”) of religion was to celebrate and sustain the norms upon which the integration of society depends. But, unlike Durkheim (and like Freud), Radcliffe-Brown was concerned with the content of sacred symbols, and particularly with the reasons why one object rather than another was absorbed into rite or woven into myth. Why here stones, there water holes, here camp circles, there personified winds?
Durkheim had held this to be an arbitrary matter, contingent upon historical accident or psychological proclivity, beyond the reach of and irrelevant to sociological analysis. Radcliffe-Brown considered, however, that man’s need for a concrete expression of social solidarity was not sufficient explanation of the structure of a people’s religious system. Something was needed to tie the particular objects awarded sacred status (or, in his terminology, “ritual value”) to the particular social interests they presumably served and reflected. Radcliffe-Brown, resolute empiricist that he was, chose a solution Durkheim had already magisterially demolished: the utilitarian. The objects selected for religious veneration by a given people were either directly or indirectly connected to factors critical to their collective well-being. Things that had real, that is, practical, “social value” were elevated to having spiritual, or symbolic, “ritual value,” thus fusing the social and the natural into one overarching order. For primitives at least (and Radcliffe-Brown attempted to establish his theory with regard to the sanctified turtles and palm leaves of the preagricultural Andaman Islanders and, later on, with regard to Australian totemism), there is no discontinuity, no difference even, between moral and physical, spiritual and practical relationships and processes. These people regard both men and things as parts of a single normative system. Within that system those elements which are critical to its effective functioning (or, sometimes, phenomena empirically associated with such elements, such as the Andaman cicada cycle and the shifting monsoons) are made the objects of that special sort of respect and attention which we call religious but which the people themselves regard as merely prudential.
Radcliffe-Brown focused upon the content of sacred symbols and emphasized the relation between conceptions of the moral order of existence and conceptions of its natural order. However, the claim that the sanctity of religious objects derives from their practical social importance is one of those theories which works when it works and doesn’t when it doesn’t. Not only has it proved impossible to find even an indirect practical significance in most of the enormous variety of things tribal peoples have regarded as sacred (certain Australian tribes worship vomit), but the view that religious concerns are mere ritualizations of real-life concerns leaves the phenomenon of sacredness itself—its aura of mystery, power, fascination— totally unexplained.
More recent structuralist studies have tended to evade both these questions and to concentrate on the role played by religion in maintaining social equilibrium. They attempt to show how given sets of religious practices (ancestor worship, animal sacrifice, witchcraft and sorcery, regeneration rites) do in fact express and reinforce the moral values underlying crucial processes (lineage segmentation, marriage, conflict adjudication, political succession) in the particular society under investigation. Arnold van Gennep’s study of crisis rites was perhaps the most important forerunner of the many analyses of this type. Although valuable in their own right as ethnography and as sociology, these structural formulations have been severely limited by their rigid avoidance, on the one side, of the kind of psychological considerations that could account for the peculiar emotions which permeate religious belief and practice, and, on the other, of the philosophical considerations that could render their equally peculiar content intelligible. [See Gennep.]
The analysis of symbolic forms
In contrast to other approaches—evolutionary, psychological, sociological—the field of what we may loosely call “semantic studies” of religion is extremely jumbled. There is, as yet, no well-established central trend of analysis, no central figure around whom to order debate, and no readily apparent system of interconnections relating the various competing trends to one another.
Perhaps the most straightforward strategy— certainly the most disarming—is merely to accept the myriad expressions of the sacred in primitive societies, to consider them as actual ingressions of the divine into the world, and to trace the forms these expressions have taken across the earth and through time. The result would be a sort of natural history of revelation, whose aim would be to isolate the major classes of religious phenomena considered as authentic manifestations of the sacred— what Eliade, the chief proponent of this approach, calls hierophanies—and to trace the rise, dominance, decline, and disappearance of these classes within the changing contexts of human life. The meaning of religious activity, the burden of its content, is discovered through a meticulous, wholly inductive investigation of the natural modalities of such behavior (sun worship, water symbolism, fertility cults, renewal myths, etc.) and of the vicissitudes these modalities undergo when projected, like the Son of God himself, into the flux of history.
Metaphysical questions (here uncommonly obtrusive) aside, the weaknesses of this approach derive from the same source as its strengths: a drastic limiting of the interpretations of religion to the sort that a resolutely Baconian methodology can produce. On the one hand, this approach has led, especially in the case of a scholar as erudite and indefatigable as Eliade, to the uncovering of some highly suggestive clusterings of certain religious patterns with particular historical conditions—for example, the frequent association of sun worship, activist conceptions of divine power, cultic veneration of deified heroes, elitist doctrines of political sovereignty, and imperialist ideologies of national expansion. But, on the other hand, it has placed beyond the range of scientific analysis everything but the history and morphology of the phenomenal forms of religious expression. The study of tribal beliefs and practices is reduced to a kind of cultural paleontology whose sole aim is the reconstruction, from scattered and corrupted fragments, of the “mental universe of archaic man.”
Primitive thought
Other scholars who are interested in the meaningful content of primitive religion but who are incapable of so thoroughgoing a suspension of disbelief as Eliade, or are repelled by the cultic overtones of this somewhat mystagogic line of thought, have directed their attention instead toward logical and epistemological considerations. This has produced a long series of studies that view “primitive thought” as a distinctive mode of reasoning and/or a special body of knowledge. From Lévy-Bruhl through Lévi-Strauss, and with important contributions from members of the evolutionary, psychoanalytic, and sociological schools as well, this line of exploration has persisted as a minor theme in anthropological studies of religion. With the recent advances in linguistics, information theory, the analysis of cognition, semantic philosophy, modern logic, and certain sorts of literary investigation, the systematic study of symbolic activity bids fair to become, in a rather thoroughly revised form, the major theme for investigation. The “new key” Susanne K. Langer heard being struck in philosophy in the early 1940s—“the concern with the concept of meaning in all its forms”—has, like the historicist and positivist “keys” before it, begun to have its echo in the anthropological study of religion. Anthropologists are increasingly interested in ideational expression, increasingly concerned with the vehicles, processes, and practical applications of human conceptualization.
The development of this approach has come in two fairly distinct phases, one before and one after World War II. In the first phase there was a concern with “the mind of primitive man” and in particular with its capacity for rational thought. In a sense, this concern represented the evolutionists’ interest in primitive reasoning processes detached from the historicist context. In the second phase, which is still in process, there has been a move away from, and in part a reaction against, the subjectivist emphasis of the earlier work. Ideational expression is thought of as a public activity, rather like speech, and the structure of the symbolic materials, the “language,” in whose terms the activity is conducted becomes the subject of investigation.
The first, subjectivist, phase was animated by a protracted wrangle between those who used the religious beliefs and practices of tribal peoples as evidence to prove that there was a qualitative difference between the thought processes of primitives and those of civilized men and the anthropologists who considered such religious activity as evidence for the lack of any such differences. The great protagonist of the first school was the French philosopher Lévy-Bruhl, whose theories of “prelogical mentality” were as controversial within anthropology as they were popular outside it. According to Lévy-Bruhl, the thought of primitives, as reflected in their religious ideas, is not governed by the immanent laws of Aristotelian logical reasoning, but by affectivity—by the vagrant flow of emotion and the dialectical principles of “mystical participation” and “mystical exclusion.” [SeeLÉvy-bruhl.]
The two most effective antagonists of Lévy-Bruhl’s theories concerning primitive religion were Radin and Malinowski. Radin, influenced by Boas’ more general attacks on theories of “primitive mentality,” sought to demonstrate that primitive religious thought reaches, on occasion, very high levels of logical articulation and philosophical sophistication and that tribal society contains, alongside the common run of unreflective doers (“men of action”), contemplative intellectuals (“men of thought”) of boldness, subtlety, and originality. Malinowski attacked the problem on an even broader front. Using his ethnographic knowledge of the Trobriand Islanders, Malinowski argued that alongside their religious and magical nations (which he, too, regarded as mainly emotionally determined) the “savages” also had a rather well developed and, as far as it went, accurate empirical knowledge of gardening, navigation, housebuilding, canoe construction, and other useful arts. He further claimed that they were absolutely clear as to the distinction between these two sorts of reasoning, between mystical-magical and empirical-pragmatic thinking, and never confused them in actual practice. Of these two arguments, the former seems to be today nearly universally accepted and was perhaps never in fact really questioned. But with respect to the latter, serious doubts have arisen concerning whether the lines between “science,” “magic,” and “religion” are as simple and clear-cut in the minds of tribal peoples (or any peoples) as Malinowski, never one for shaded judgments, portrayed them. Nevertheless, between them, Radin and Malinowski rather definitively demolished the notion of a radical qualitative gap between the thought processes of primitive and civilized men. Indeed, toward the end of his life even Levy-Bruhl admitted that his arguments had been badly cast and might better have been phrased in terms of different modes of thinking common to all men. (In fact, Freud, with his contrast between primary and secondary thinking processes, had already made this distinction.) [SeeMalinowski; Radin.]
Thus, the debate about what does or does not go on in the heads of savages exhausted itself in generalities, and recent writers have turned to a concern with the symbolic forms, the conceptual resources, in terms of which primitives (and non-primitives) think. The major figure in this work has been Claude Lévi-Strauss, although this line of attack dates back to Durkheim and Mauss’s influential 1903 essay in sociological Kantianism, Primitive Classification. The writings of E. E. Evans-Pritchard on Zande witchcraft, Benjamin Whorf on Hopi semantics, and Gregory Bateson on Iatmul ritual and, among nonanthropologists, works by Granet, Cassirer, and Piaget have directed attention to the study of symbolic formulation.
Symbolic systems
Lévi-Strauss, whose rather highly wrought work is still very much in progress, is concerned with the systems of classification, the “homemade” taxonomies, employed by tribal peoples to order the objects and events of their world (see Lévi-Strauss 1958; 1962). In this, he follows in the footsteps of Durkheim and Mauss. But rather than looking, as they did, to social forms for the origins and explanations of such categorical systems, he looks to the symbolic structures in terms of which they are formulated, expressed, and applied. Myth and, in a slightly different way, rite are systems of signs that fix and organize abstract conceptual relationships in terms of concrete images and thus make speculative thought possible. They permit the construction of a “science of the concrete”—the intellectual comprehension of the sensible world in terms of sensible phenomena— which is no less rational, no less logical, no more affect-driven than the abstract science of the modern world. The objects rendered sacred are selected not because of their utilitarian qualities, nor because they are projections of repressed emotions, nor yet because they reflect the moral force of social organization ritualistically impressed upon the mind. Rather, they are selected because they permit the embodiment of general ideas in terms of the immediately perceptible realities—the turtles, trees, springs, and caves—of everyday experience; not, as Levi-Strauss says, apropos of Radcliffe-Brown’s view of totems, because they are “good to eat,” but because they are “good to think.”
This “goodness” exists inherently in sacred objects because they provide the raw materials for analogical reasoning. The relationships perceived among certain classes of natural objects or events can be analogized, taken as models of relationships —-physical, social, psychological, or moral—obtaining between persons, groups, or other natural objects and events. Thus, for example, the natural distinctions perceived among totemic beings, their species differentiation, can serve as a conceptual framework for the comprehension, expression, and communication of social distinctions among exogamous clans—their structural differentiation. Thus, the sharp contrast between the wet and dry seasons (and the radical zoological and botanical changes associated with it) in certain regions of Australia is employed in the mythology of the native peoples. They have woven an elaborate origin myth around this natural phenomenon, one that involves a rain-making python who drowned some incestuous sisters and their children because the women polluted his water hole with menstrual blood. This model expresses and economizes the contrasts between moral purity and impurity, maleness and femaleness, social superiority and inferiority, fertilizing agent (rain) and that which is fertilized (land), and even the distinction between “high” (initiate) and “low” (noninitiate) levels of cultural achievement.
Lévi-Strauss contends that primitive religious systems are, like all symbolic systems, fundamentally communications systems. They are carriers of information in the technical Shannon-Weaver sense, and as such, the theory of information can be applied to them with the same validity as when applied to any physical systems, mechanical or biological, in which the transfer of information plays a central regulative role. Primitives, as all men, are quintessentially multichanneled emitters and receivers of messages. It is merely in the nature of the code they employ—one resting on analogies between “natural” and “cultural” distinctions and relationships—that they differ from ourselves. Where there is a distinguishing difference, it lies in the technically specialized codes of modern abstract thought, in which semantic properties are radically and deliberately severed from physical ones. Religion, primitive or modern, can be understood only as an integrated system of thought, logically sound, epistemologically valid, and as flourishing in France as in Tahiti.
It is far too early to evaluate Lévi-Strauss’s work with any assurance. It is frankly incomplete and explorative, and some parts of it (the celebration of information theory, for example) are wholly programmatic. But in focusing on symbol systems as conceptual models of social or other sorts of reality, he has clearly introduced into the anthropology of religion a line of inquiry which, having already become common in modern thought generally, can hardly fail to be productive when applied to tribal myth and ritual.
Whether his own particular formulation of this approach will prove to be the most enduring remains, however, rather more of a question. His rejection of emotional considerations and his neglect of normative or social factors in favor of an extreme intellectualism which cerebralizes religion and tends to reduce it yet again to a kind of undeveloped (or, as he puts it, “undomesticated”) science are questionable. His nearly exclusive stress on those intellectual processes involved in classification, i.e., on taxonomic modes of thought (a reflex of his equally great reliance on totemic ideas as type cases of primitive beliefs), at the expense of other, perhaps more common, and certainly more powerful styles of reasoning, is also doubtful. His conception of the critical process of symbolic formulation itself remains almost entirely undeveloped—hardly more than a sort of associationism dressed up with some concepts from modern linguistics. Partly as a result of this weakness and partly as a result of a tendency to consider symbol systems as entities functioning independently of the contextual factor, many of his specific interpretations of particular myths and rites seem as strained, arbitrary, and oversystematized as those of the most undisciplined psychoanalyst.
But, for all this, Lévi-Strauss has without doubt opened a vast territory for research and begun to explore it with theoretical brilliance and profound scholarship. And he is not alone. As the recent work of such diverse students as Evans-Pritchard, R. G. Lienhardt, W. E. H. Stanner, Victor W. Turner, Germaine Dieterlen, Meyer Fortes, Edmund R. Leach, Charles O. Frake, Rodney Needham, and Susanne K. Langer demonstrates, the analysis of symbolic forms is becoming a major tradition in the study of primitive religion—in fact, of religion in general. Each of these writers has a somewhat different approach. But all seem to share the conviction that an attempt must be made to approach primitive religions for what they are: systems of ideas about the ultimate shape and substance of reality.
Whatever else religion does, it relates a view of the ultimate nature of reality to a set of ideas of how man is well advised, even obligated, to live. Religion tunes human actions to a view of the cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human existence. In religious belief and practice a people’s style of life, what Clyde Kluckhohn called their design for living, is rendered intellectually reasonable; it is shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the world “as it ‘really’ (‘fundamentally,’ ‘ultimately’) is.” At the same time, the supposed basic structure of reality is rendered emotionally convincing because it is presented as an actual state of affairs uniquely accommodated to such a way of life and permitting it to flourish. Thus do received beliefs, essentially metaphysical, and established norms, essentially moral, confirm and support one another.
It is this mutual confirmation that religious symbols express and celebrate and that any scientific analysis of religion must somehow contrive to explain and clarify. In the development of such an analysis historical, psychological, sociological, and what has been called here semantic considerations are all necessary, but none is sufficient. A mature theory of religion will consist of an integration of them all into a conceptual system whose exact form remains to be discovered.
Clifford Geertz
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bettelheim, Bruno 1954 Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male. Glencoe, III.: Free Press.
Campbell, Joseph 1949 The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon.
Devereux, George 1951 Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. New York: International Universities Press.
Eliade, Mircea (1949) 1958 Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: Sheed & Ward. ? First published as Traite d’histoire des religions.
Erikson, Erik H. (1950) 1964 Childhood and Society. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Norton.
Hallowell, A. Irving (1937–1954) 1955 Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Kardiner, Abram 1945 The Psychological Frontiers of Society. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1963.
Kluckhohn, Clyde 1944 Navaho Witchcraft. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 22, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum.
Lang, Andrew (1898) 1900 The Making of Religion. 2d ed. New York: Longmans.
Lessa, William A.; and Vogt, Evon Z. (editors) (1958) 1965 Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. 2d ed. New York: Harper. ? Contains a comprehensive bibliography.
LÉvi-strauss, Claude (1958) 1963 Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. ? First published in French. See especially the chapters on myth and religion, pages 167-245.
LÉvi-strauss, Claude (1962) 1966 The Savage Mind. Univ. of Chicago Press. ? First published in French.
Radcliffe-brown, A. R. (1952) 1961 Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses. London: Cohen & West; Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.
RÓheim, GÉza 1950 Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York: International Universities Press.
Spier, Leslie 1921 The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians: Its Development and Diffusion. American Museum of Natural History, Anthropological Papers, Vol. 16, part 7. New York: The Museum.
Whiting, John W.; and Child, Irvin L. 1953 Child Training and Personality: A Cross-cultural Study. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1962.
II THE SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
Sociologists have undertaken three main types of religious study. They have studied religion as a central theoretical problem in the understanding of social action. They have studied the relation between religion and other areas of social life, such as economics, politics, and social class. And finally, they have studied religious roles, organizations, and movements. This article will be concerned primarily with the theoretical study of religion and secondarily with the relation between religion and the social structure.
Historical background
The sociological study of religion has grown out of and remains inextricably related to the much broader effort to understand the phenomenon of religion that has been made by scholars in many fields, especially since the eighteenth century in the West and more recently in other parts of the world. Theologians, philosophers, historians, philologists, literary critics, political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists have all made contributions. In untangling this immensely complicated story it will be helpful to resort to a simplified schema that focuses on two main lines of intellectual development: the “rationalist” and the “nonrationalist” traditions. (A writer is referred to here as “nonrationalist” not because his thought is considered to be irrational but because he takes the nonrational aspect of human existence as central and irreducible.) Both traditions have roots deep in the history of Western thought and analogues in the thought of some non-Western cultures. The eighteenth century saw a certain crystallization of both traditions, which had important consequences for the nineteenth century and which still affects us in many respects.
The rationalists and nonrationalists
The rationalist tradition, which was closely associated with the rise of secular thought and skepticism in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, later stimulated the nonrationalist tendency as a reaction to it. Of course, the rationalists themselves were partly grappling with the great seventeenth-century antirationalist Blaise Pascal. It was the position of the rationalists that the apparently nonrational could not only be brought within the bounds of rational analysis but also could be eliminated as an influence on human action, though most of them doubted that this would ever be possible for the masses. Thus, they held that the obviously absurd doctrines of established religion had come into existence because of ignorance and the deliberate chicanery of the priests, who were serving their own self-interest as well as that of the secular despots who were often their masters. Behind the absurd historical forms, the deists discerned a natural religion in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Rousseau and Kant were transitional figures. Both believed in a generalized “reasonable” religion in preference to any historical faith, but they grounded their religious convictions on human nature (Rousseau) or the dictates of ethical experience (Kant) rather than on purely cognitive arguments. The nonrationalist tradition, which subsequently developed mainly in Germany, emphasized the sui generis quality of religion. Johann Gottfried Herder held that religion was grounded in specific experience and feeling rather than in reason. In the early nineteenth century Friedrich Schleiermacher undertook the first systematic exposition of this position. He held that religion was to be understood neither as crude philosophy nor as primitive ethics but rather as a reality in its own right; it is grounded neither in knowledge nor in action but in feeling. More specifically, he came to think that religion derives fundamentally from the feeling of absolute dependence. Both Herder and Schleiermacher, rejecting as they did a rationalist understanding of religion, opposed the search for a universal natural religion of self-evident reasonableness. Rather, they insisted on taking seriously the particular forms of culture and religion in all their historical diversity. Herder was, of course, one of the most important forerunners of nineteenth-century historicism, and Schleiermacher was one of the first to develop the tools of cultural interpretation (hermeneutics), which provided the main methodological equipment of the movement in Germany.
While the nonrationalist treatment of religion in Germany was closely related to the development of idealist philosophy there, the rationalist treatment of it was closely related to the rise of positivism in France and utilitarianism in England during the nineteenth century. Historicism cut across these distinctions and came to dominate Anglo-French as well as German thought. In both France and England rationalism in its historicist phase took the form of evolutionism.
Comte’s famous theory of the three stages viewed theology as appropriate in the childhood of man; however, it was to be displaced first by philosophy and then by science as men’s rational understanding of the universe gradually increased. Comte interpreted religion in terms that we would now call “functional,” stressing the contribution of belief and ritual to social solidarity and the control of personal feelings. While thus recognizing nonrational factors in religion and, indeed, arguing from them that religion is a permanent and inescapable aspect of human existence, he nonetheless stressed cognitive factors almost exclusively in his theory of religious evolution.
In England, Spencer developed an evolutionary perspective on religion that was even more narrowly cognitive than Comte’s, and Tylor also undertook an extensive effort to understand the religious development of mankind in these terms. In treating the development from animism through polytheism to monotheism as a succession of more and more adequate cognitive hypotheses, he remained thoroughly in the rationalist tradition. Frazer, while formally maintaining the same point of view, embraced a range of material—ritual kingship, human sacrifice, fertility ritual, and the like—which actually demanded a different interpretation. His.Golden Bough (1890) can be viewed as a marvelously intuitive catalogue of central problems that would have to be solved by other means. Finally, in the English tradition, Marett’s discussion (1900) of mana and preanimism came very near breaking through the preconceptions of the rationalist utilitarian school.
Dilthey, who was a follower of Schleiermacher as well as a neo-Kantian, continued the German nonrationalist tradition by stressing the irreducible nature of the religious Weltanschauung and the necessity for an inner understanding (Verstehen) of its particular forms. This tradition led directly into the modern sociological study of religion through the work of Troeltsch and particularly that of Max Weber, who both transcended the tradition in important respects. Postponing a consideration of these men for a moment, we may trace further into the twentieth century the development of the German tradition that was relatively independent of the influence of Weber and Troeltsch. A certain formal culmination was reached in the work of Rudolph Otto. In his important book The Idea of the Holy (1917), he richly developed the basic intuition of Schleiermacher by spelling out the phenomenology of the holy in terms of the numinous—the notion of the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. Here more clearly than ever was the assertion of the sui generis nature of religion and its “geometrical location” in a certain kind of immediate experience. That experience, according to Otto, can be phenomenologically understood, but it cannot be explained. This point was made quite explicit in the work of van der Leeuw, who shared Otto’s essential position: in the preface to Religion in Essence and Manifestation van der Leeuw said that he specifically disavowed all “theories” ([1933] 1938, p. vi). Thus Otto and the later exponents of this tradition—whether they were phenomenologists (such as van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade) or were specifically interested in the sociology of religion (Joachim Wach and Gustav Mensching) —have given us a rich array of materials without appreciably advancing our theoretical understanding.
Generalizing the argument so far, we may say that while the nonrationalist tradition jealously guarded the specific nature of religion but eschewed any explanation of it, the rationalist tradition provided a number of ways of explaining religion which in the end explained it away. We will argue, following Talcott Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937), that around the turn of the twentieth century several men from both traditions broke free of their preconceptions and converged on a more adequate approach to religion (and indeed to social phenomena generally).
However, just as we have noted that the non-rationalist tradition continues to our own day in relatively pure form, so we must point out that the utilitarian rationalist position also continues, not so much as a conscious tradition of scholarship as a semiconscious preconception of scholars in many fields. This preconception has been strengthened by its gradual fusion with a Marxian understanding of religion as essentially an ideological cover, either for the defense of the social status quo or for protests against it. Here religion is treated as a weapon in the political-economic struggle or as a preliminary stage in a political movement, a stage that may be outgrown with the attainment of political maturity. What is at issue is not the empirical adequacy of such analyses in particular instances, but rather the generalization of them as adequate for the understanding of the phenomenon of religion.
Foundations of an adequate theory
The architects of a more adequate understanding of religion were Durkheim, Weber, and Freud, though others also made important contributions.
Contributions of Weber and Durkheim
Weber maintained the idea of the centrality and irreducibility of nonrational elements in human action as it had developed in the German tradition, but he was not content with a mere phenomenological description of these elements. According to Parsons’ analysis, Weber began, at least incipiently, to place these nonrational elements within the context of a general theory of social action. This he did through two of his central concerns. The first was with the problems of meaning—of evil, suffering, death, and the like—which are inescapable in human life but insoluble in purely scientific terms. Weber argued that the alternative religious answers to these problems of meaning have had not only profound consequences for the motivation of individuals but also, in the long run, important causal effects on social development. The second of Weber’s concerns, which links irrational elements to a more general theory of action, was with what he called charisma. Charisma is primarily a quality of the individual that places him above normal expectations and endows him with the authority to utter new commandments. Charisma is a relational concept—that is, it comes into existence only when it is recognized by a group. It links deeper levels of psychic organization, within the charismatic individual and in the members of the group who recognize him, with the social process and particularly with the possibility of radical discontinuities in social development. In both cases Weber was arguing for the importance of religion in social action on the grounds of its closeness to powerful nonrational motivational forces and its capacity to give form and pattern to those forces, including its capacity to create radically new forms and patterns.
The rationalist positivist tradition was decisively broken through from within by Durkheim, when he recognized that religion is a reality sui generis. By this he meant that religious representations or symbols are not delusions, nor do they simply stand for some other phenomena, such as natural forces or (contrary to some interpretations of his work) social morphology. Rather, in his social Kantianism, he held that religious representations are constitutive of society. They exist within the minds of individuals so as to inhibit egocentric impulses and to discipline the individual so that he can deal objectively with external reality. These shared representations, with their capacity to direct and control personal motivation, are what make society possible. While his treatment of motivation remained rudimentary, he did point out very clearly the great importance of religious action for stimulating individuals to participate positively in social life (see the discussion of collective effervescence in Durkheim 1912, book 2, chapter 7) and for dealing with tendencies of individuals to withdraw from social life (see the discussion of funeral ritual in 1912, book 3, chapter 5).
Although they started from opposite directions, both Weber and Durkheim seem to have overcome the impasse in which the rationalist and non-rationalist approaches to religion had long been caught: they both placed religion in a theoretical rather than a purely descriptive context, without denying its centrality and irreducibility. However, they lacked any fine-grained structural understanding of the nonrational elements involved, even though they recognized their importance. It was in the work of Freud that a structural understanding of the relevant emotional and motivational elements was to be found for the first time.
Freud’s work on religious symbolism
Freud’s early work on the stages of psychosexual development was applied to religion in Totem and Taboo (1913), where the Oedipus complex with its mixture of dependence, love, and hostility was seen as the core problem of religious symbolism, which he treated as largely projective. Freud’s later ego psychology, heralded in the important essays “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921) and “The Ego and the Id” (1923), provided the basis for a much more active understanding of religious symbolism, which could now be treated not merely as reflecting psychic conflict but as actually affecting the outcome of psychic conflict and redirecting psychic forces. This point of view was applied to religion in the somewhat idiosyncratic but extraordinarily fruitful Moses and Monotheism (1934–1938). “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) represents a reversion to the early projective theory of religion and is neither the final statement of Freud’s position nor even typical of his own late thinking.
By the early 1920s, then, the elements of a more adequate theory of religion had come into existence. However, at just this point the primary preoccupation with religion displayed by most of the great social scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries disappeared. Other issues occupied the center of attention. Even today a theoretical concern with religion is only gradually reviving as a central issue in social science.
A theory of religion
Only in the last few years has a new model of human action developed that will allow us to utilize the insights of Weber, Durkheim, and Freud without falling back into the old controversies about idealism and materialism, rationalism and irrationalism, and humanism and science. This is the cybernetic model (for a relevant, though partial, exposition, see Deutsch 1963). Parsons’ action theory is the chief link between earlier social science and cybernetic theory and has itself in recent years been increasingly restated in cybernetic terms. This model, whose basic terms are “energy” and “information,” seems likely to integrate the range of behavioral research that stretches from the work of biologists such as Nikolaas Tinbergen and J. P. Scott on animal behavior to that of philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne K. Langer on symbolic forms.
The cybernetic model
An action system may be defined as the symbolically controlled, systematically organized behavior of one or more biological organisms. The energy of such a system is supplied by the organism and is organized through genetically controlled organic structures that are not directly open to symbolic influence. Thus the basic motivation of the action system—its drives and needs—is partially determined by organic structure, although it is subject, through learning processes, to a considerable degree of symbolic control. The precise boundary, or, perhaps better, the area of overlap, between what is genetically and what is symbolically controlled is by no means clear, and important research on the problem is continuing. For present purposes it is only necessary to note the relatively broad plasticity for symbolic learning that is usually recognized, at least in the human species.
Information in such a system consists largely of symbolic messages that indicate something about either the internal state or the external situation of the action system. These messages are understood or interpreted by matching them with previously learned symbolic patterns, which make up the memory of the system. New situations can be understood through a recombination of previously learned elements, so that a new symbolic pattern is created. Thus, the set of symbolic patterns existing in a system will be partially determined by the nature of the external world with which that system has had to deal and by the nature of the laws governing the cognitive processes of the brain. Within these limits there is a wide range of freedom, within which alternative symbolic patterns may operate with equal or nearly equal effectiveness, as is best illustrated perhaps in the phenomenon of language.
The cybernetic model thus conceives of a human action system as autonomous, purposive, and capable of a wide range of external adaptations and internal rearrangements within the very broad constraints inherent in the nature of energy and information. It is precisely the stress on autonomy, learning capacity, decision, and control that gives the cybernetic model the ability, lacking in previous mechanistic and organic models, to assimilate the contributions of the humanistic disciplines— the Geisteswissenschaften—without abandoning an essentially scientific approach [seeSystems analysis, articles onsocial systemsandpolitical systems].
The openness of an action system is always relative to its particular structure. We have noted that energy is structured by genetic information from the organism and by symbolic information from the culture. Energy and information are further structured by two systems that can be seen as integrating organic motivation and symbols: personality and society. These are symbolically patterned motivational systems; the first centers on individual organisms, and the other on groups. Any particular personality or social system will be determined in large part at any given moment by its history, for its learning capacity will be largely a product of the structures it has built up over time. However, if a system has managed to develop a broad and flexible capacity for rapid learning, and if it has a reserve of uncommitted resources, its reaction to any given internal or external situation will be open to a wide variety of alternative choices; in other words, it will have a high degree of freedom.
The role of religion in action systems
Religion emerges in action systems with respect to two main problems. In order to function effectively, it is essential that a person or group have a relatively condensed, and therefore highly general, definition of its environment and itself. Such a definition of the system and the world to which it is related (in more than a transient sense) is a conception of identity. Such a conception is particularly necessary in situations of stress and disturbance, because it can provide the most general set of instructions as to how the system is to maintain itself and repair any damage sustained.
In addition to the identity problem, there is the problem of dealing with inputs of motivation from within the system that are not under the immediate control of conscious decision processes. We have already noted that such motivation is partly under the control of genetic rather than symbolic processes. In addition, as Freud discovered, there are important symbolically organized systems of motivation that are partially blocked or screened off from consciousness through the mechanism of repression; this happens partly as a result of the pattern of child raising. Though these unconscious motivational forces exist in individuals, they are to a large degree shared in groups, because human biology and child-raising patterns are, broadly speaking, similar. The emotions can be seen as signaling devices by which the conscious decision process (the ego, in Freud’s terms) becomes aware of the existence of important inputs of motivation from unconscious levels of the system.
The problems of identity and of unconscious motivation are closely related, for it is just those situations of threat, uncertainty, and breakdown, which raise the identity issue, that also rouse deep unconscious feelings of anxiety, hope, and fear. An identity conception capable of dealing with such a situation must not only be cognitively adequate but must also be motivationally meaningful. It is precisely the role of religion in action systems to provide such a cognitively and motivationally meaningful identity conception or set of identity symbols. It is such a set of symbols that provides answers to Weber’s problems of meaning and to which Durkheim referred in speaking of religious representations. It is also what in large part Freud meant when he spoke of the superego. This mode of analysis leads to a definition of religion very close to that of Clifford Geertz, who wrote: “A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (1966, p. 4).
The conception of religion briefly sketched here—religion as the most general mechanism for integrating meaning and motivation in action systems—applies to all types of action systems, not only to whole societies or groups of them. Many smaller units (individual personalities and groups) appropriate the religious symbols of their social and cultural environment in dealing with their own religious problems, though always with some degree of individual variation. Moreover, even where prevailing religious symbol systems are rejected, the idiosyncratic solutions of individuals and groups to fundamental problems of orientation and identity may be viewed in terms of this scheme as “religious.” Of course, the degree to which religious problems will be salient for any individual or group is quite variable.
Current theoretically relevant research
While the theory outlined above has not previously been stated in exactly these terms, some recent research seems to be guided by a conception of religion as a control system linking meaning and motivation—a conception that is a close parallel of this theory. Three particularly interesting examples of such research will be cited. Each of them concentrates at a traditional level of social science—psychological, social, or cultural—but it is noteworthy that they all transcend the discipline boundaries in trying to understand rehgion.
Analysis of historical figures
The first is the application of detailed psychological analysis to significant figures in religious history. Erik H. Erikson, in Young Man Luther (1958), has overcome a tendency toward psychological reductionism that was evident in some earlier work of this sort. He is careful to place Luther’s life history in its proper social, historical, and religious context. In doing so, he shows how Luther was able to solve his own problem of identity, which had its roots deep in his unconscious conflicts, through constructive innovation with respect to religious symbolism. However, Erikson’s knowledge of the deep motivational forces involved does not lead him to deny the contribution of the religious reformulation itself. Rather, he emphasizes the fusing and forming power of the symbols to synthesize motivational conflicts and control destructive impulses.
Erikson also contributes to the broader problem of religious change by indicating that Luther’s solution, once it was embodied in communicable symbolic form, could be appropriated by others in the same society who had analogous identity problems arising from social-historical matrices similar to Luther’s own. Moreover, although the argument is not worked out in detail, Erikson implies that Luther was able to contribute to certain social and cultural identity problems of Germany in particular and of Western civilization in general. This detailed analysis of the mechanism involved in a major example of religious change, although it involves only one among several types of change, is an important contribution to one of our least understood problems. [SeeIdentity, psycho-social.]
Small-group research
The second new line of research has to do with the analysis of religious phenomena in small groups, as illustrated in Philip E. Slater’s Microcosm (1966). The small-group situation provides a laboratory within which the symbolic processes involved in group formation, as hypothesized by Durkheim and Freud, can be empirically synthesized. Slater shows how the group and its leader become foci for the unconscious anxieties, hopes, and fears of the members in the initial situation of uncertainty and lack of definition. These feelings are handled initially by the development of projective symbols, which are redolent with the mysterious potency of the unconscious feelings, that is, are highly magical and sacred. However, over time, as more and more of the group process becomes consciously understood and as the deeper feelings about the group and the leader are worked through, the group itself becomes “secularized” and the quality of the sacred is relegated to certain group ideals and symbols of group solidarity.
Slater’s comparison of this process of group development with the long-term process of religious evolution is highly suggestive. Particularly important is the perception of the changing role of symbolism with respect to the meaning-motivation balance as the group itself undergoes new experiences and changes in structure. Also of great general significance is Slater’s observation that social and psychological aspects of group process interpenetrate at every point and that a purely psychological or a purely sociological theoretical framework would result in an inadequate understanding of the processes at work.
Analysis of language as symbolic action
A third area of promising research is the analysis of language as symbolic action as it has been developed by Kenneth Burke in his Rhetoric of Religion (1961) and other works. Burke’s theory of artistic form (defined as “the arousing and fulfilling of expectations”), which is based on the Aristotelian theory of catharsis, emphasizes the working through of emotional tensions in symbolic form; thus, it is very close to the theory of religion developed above. Burke has pointed out that the tensions may be social as well as psychological, though they must be presented in personal terms if they are to have emotional impact. He has also pointed out the function of social and psychological control that such symbolic working through performs.
Perhaps Burke’s chief contribution is his insistence on the special formal qualities of language and symbolism generally. Language does not merely reflect or communicate social and psychological realities. Rather, language contains within itself a “principle of perfection” (1961, epilogue), which operates relatively independently of other factors. That is, a terminology, once established, has certain “entelechial” implications. For example, once the terms king, society, and god come into existence, there is the logical possibility that someone will ask what a perfect king, society, or god is and from this analysis actually draw conclusions about existing kings, societies, or ideas of god. Regardless of the many actual social and psychological blocks to carrying through such analyses, the fact is that the possibility of pushing toward terminological perfection is always present, and under certain circumstances it will actually be pursued. This is one of the chief reasons why cultural symbol systems cannot be treated entirely reductionistically. In The Rhetoric of Religion Burke has applied these insights with great brilliance to two key religious documents: the first three chapters of Genesis and Augustine’s Confessions [seeInteraction, article ondramatism].
Religion and society
An interest in the social consequences of religious belief and action is probably as old as the interest in religion itself. In the sixteenth century Machiavelli gave, in his Discourses, a functional analysis of Roman religion which had considerable influence. Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Comte continued and developed the analysis of the political significance of religious commitment and the related problems of the influence of religion on personal morality and social solidarity. In one of the earliest quantitative studies in sociology, Durkheim introduced a “religious variable” in his study of suicide (1897). Subsequently many studies of varying breadth and quality have included a religious variable and thus advanced our knowledge of the influence or lack of influence of religion on some aspect of social existence; however, a comprehensive survey of the results obtained is still lacking.
The man who contributed most to the systematic understanding of the interrelations between religion and society and who stimulated more research (both quantitative and nonquantitative) than any other scholar was undoubtedly Max Weber. The most influential single hypothesis in this field is certainly his thesis on the influence of the Protestant ethic on the rise of modern society (1904–1905). Although the cumulated argument and evidence on this thesis are too massive to review here, one recent study by Gerhard Lenski (1961) is worth mentioning, not only because it sheds light on the Protestant-ethic thesis in contemporary America but also because it is perhaps the most successful attempt to apply the methods of survey research to the sociology of religion. Lenski was concerned with the influence of religious affiliations and beliefs on attitudes toward work, authority, education, and a variety of other matters in a large American city, and he found this influence to be considerable. Weber’s ideas on the non-Western religions have been applied much more sporadically (see the incomplete review in Bellah 1963), but as the comparative horizon of the sociology of religion widens, these ideas seem likely to attract more attention. In this same connection, a revival of interest in religious evolution as providing the soundest classificatory system for comparative work can also be expected.
Religious evolution
Although foreshadowings of the idea of religious evolution can be traced as far back as classical times, the first extensive effort in this direction was that of Vico in the eighteenth century. Elaborate schemes of religious evolution with copious empirical illustration were developed in the nineteenth century by Hegel, Comte, and Spencer. In more modest and judicious form, evolutionary ideas provided the basis of the sociology of religion of Durkheim (1912) and Weber (1922). Though long neglected and in some quarters excoriated, the idea of religious evolution has recently been revived (Bellah 1964). It provides the natural link between the kind of theory of religion sketched in this article and the comparative study of religion.
If one defines religion as a control system linking meaning and motivation by providing an individual or a group with the most general model that it has of itself and its world, then it becomes apparent that such a control system can vary in degree of complexity in ways that are not entirely random with respect to the degree of complexity of the social system of which it is a part. Since it has been clear for a long time that levels of social and cultural complexity are best understood in an evolutionary framework, it seems inevitable that religion too must be considered in such a framework.
Here it is possible only to enumerate some of the most important dimensions along which religious evolution can be expected to occur. The central focus of religious evolution is the religious symbol system itself. Here the main line of development is from compact to differentiated symbolism, that is, from a situation in which world, self, and society are seen to involve the immediate expression of occult powers to one in which the exercise of religious influence is seen to be more indirect and “rational.” This is the process of the “disenchantment of the world” that was described by Weber. Part of this process is the gradual differentiation of art, science, and other cultural systems as separate from religious symbolism. Furthermore, changes in the nature and position of religious symbolism effect changes in the conception of the religious actor. The more differentiated symbol systems make a greater demand on the individual for decision and commitment. To support this growing religious individualism, specifically religious group structures are required, whereas at earlier stages religion tends to be a dimension of all social groups. Finally, the capacity for religion to provide ideals and models for new lines of social development increases with the growing symbolic, individual, and social differentiation.
An adequate theory of religious evolution would have to go hand in hand with a general theory of social evolution. For example, the varying saliency of law, custom, and religion as agencies of social control in different societies, which was long ago pointed out by Montesquieu, could probably best be explicated by a general analysis of the evolution of control systems. Moreover, the contribution that a theory of religious evolution could make to a general conception of social evolution is also considerable. Such an approach would begin to indicate the ways in which changes in social structure impinge on the integration of established cultural meanings with the deeper levels of individual personalities and how shifts in that meaning-motivation balance can in turn help or hinder social differentiation.
Robert N. Bellah
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bellah, Robert N. 1963 Reflections on the Protestant Ethic Analogy in Asia. Journal of Social Issues 19: 52-60.
Bellah, Robert N. 1964 Religious Evolution. American Sociological Review 29:358-374.
Burke, Kenneth 1961 The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon.
Deutsch, Karl W. 1963 The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, Émile (1897) 1951 Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press. ? First published in French.
Durkheim, Émile (1912)1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. ? First published as Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, le systeme totemique en Australie. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.
Erikson, Erik H. (1958) 1962 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. Austen Riggs Monograph No. 4. New York: Norton.
Frazer, James (1890) 1955 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3d ed., rev. & enl. 13 vols. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. ? An abridged edition was published in 1922 and reprinted in 1955.
Freud, Sigmund (1913) 1959 Totem and Taboo. Volume 13, pages ix-162 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.? First published in German. Freud, Sigmund (1921) 1955 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Volume 18, pages 67-143 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan.? First published in German.
Fkeud, Sigmund (1923)1961 The Ego and the Id. Volume 19, pages 12-63 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. ? First published in German.
Freud, Sigmund (1927) 1961 The Future of an Illusion. Volume 21, pages 5-58 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. ? First published in German.
Freud, Sigmund (1934–1938) 1964 Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. Volume 23 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth; New York: Macmillan. ? First published in German.
Geertz, Clifford 1966 Religion as a Cultural System. Pages 1-46 in Conference on New Approaches in Social Anthropology, Jesus College, Cambridge, England, 1963, Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Edited by Michael Banton. A.S.A. Monographs, Vol. 3. London: Tavistock; New York: Praeger.
Leeuw, Gerardus Van Der (1933) 1938 Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology. New York: Macmillan. ? First published as Phanomenologie der Religion. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper.
Lenski, Gerhard E. (1961)1963 The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion’s Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Lessa, William A.; and Vogt, Evon Z. (editors) (1958) 1965 Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. 2d ed. New York: Harper.
Marett, Rohert R. (1900) 1929 The Threshold of Religion. 4th ed. London: Methuen.
Mensching, Gustav 1947 Soziologie der Religion. Bonn: Rohrscheid.
Otto, Rudolph (1917) 1950 The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. 2d ed. London: Oxford Univ. Press. ? First published as Das Heilige.
Parsons, Talcott (1937) 1949 The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory With Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. Glen-coe, 111.: Free Press.
Slater, Philip E. 1966 Microcosm. New York: Wiley.
Troeltsch, Ernst (1912) 1960 The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. 2 vols. New York: Harper. ? First published as Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen.
Wach, Joachim (1944) 1951 Sociology of Religion. Univ. of Chicago Press
Weber, Max (1904–1905) 1930 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Scribner. ? First published in German. The 1930 edition has been reprinted frequently.
Weber, Max (1922) 1963 The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon. ? First published in German as Book 2, Chapter 4 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
III PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
Religion affords dramatic, insistent phenomena centrally entrenched in the intimate structures and functions of personality. These phenomena are likely to intrigue a psychologist for one of two contrasting reasons: either for their challenging uniqueness or for their vivid illustration of factors of more fundamental and general interest in psychology.
Sometimes, such phenomena as sudden conversion, mysticism, glossolalia, ritual, and intense religious commitment may seem incomprehensible in terms of readily available psychological theories and therefore may spark the development of new ones. Alternatively, they may appear to be particularly vivid instances of processes of central importance to psychology. In this case, these phenomena become a challenge in that they demand an account from those who aspire to a comprehensive theory of personality and its development and change, motivation, emotion, cognition, perception, group behavior, attitudes, values, socialization, guilt, or virtually any other theme of common psychological interest. In particular, religion poses urgent questions about the relation between affective and cognitive processes and between the individual and his social environment.
Religion appears to share with abnormal phenomena this characteristic of presenting seemingly dramatic and unique manifestations which at the same time illustrate processes of central concern to any personality psychologist.
This distinction—between the seeming uniqueness of religion and its instancing of general problems in psychology—suggests alternative strategies in the study of the psychology of religion. One strategy begins with careful attention to the phenomena and to the development of useful descriptive categories to handle them. The other strategy turns to religious phenomena only after a theory has been developed in another segment of personality and behavior. Of the pioneer systematists at the beginning of this century who turned their attention to religion, James (1902) represents the former strategy, Freud (1913; 1927; 1934–1938) the latter.
The phenomena-based strategy generally, although of course not exclusively or necessarily, has been employed by those who were personally more “sympathetic” to religion, who therefore tended to claim a greater richness or validity for their “participant” observations.
The psychology of religion has been marked by a schism between these two strategies. Descriptive, phenomena-based approaches of various kinds have made little progress toward developing genotypical categories useful for theoretical analysis. On the other hand, the “theoreticians” starting “outside” religion have made little use of the distinctions or other descriptive gains made by those interested in the phenomena.
While empirical research by either group has been limited—because practical, design, and measurement problems are formidable—the split, with regard to empirical work, is particularly wide. The theorists have apparently felt that any empirical obligation was already satisfied by demonstration— often clinical—of their theory before they applied it to religion or else by anecdotal application to instances derived from “armchair” observations or library resources. Empirical research by the phenomena-based group has tended to be limited to the most superficial data, such as church attendance or questionnaire self-report of “belief.” Questions of greatest interest and importance have not been asked.
Background and context
Beyond the general psychological fascination which religion may have, impetus for work in the psychology of religion has come from at least three sources. The first, and perhaps the major, impetus has come from practical and theoretical concerns within institutionalized religion, especially Protestantism.
For example, the field of religious education has provided prominent focus, suggesting both problems and theories. Especially among Protestants in the early decades of this century, as sudden adolescent conversion became less normative, those concerned with religious education required that more attention be paid to the processes of religious development. This was encouraged by an optimistic, “liberal” theology which anticipated (in harmony with other progressive ideologies of the time) the possibility of developing ideal Christians, with the aid of scientifically discoverable principles. More recent “existential” concerns, emphasizing the role of “experience” in Christian nurture, as distinguished from intellectual instruction, has again brought new urgency to psychological questions.
During the middle decades of the twentieth century there has also been concern, especially among Protestant and Jewish clergymen, with finding sound psychological bases for dealing, as pastors, with personal and family crises. The acceptance of “depth psychology” has coincided with the development of a less optimistic “neo-orthodox” theology which emphasizes the darker side of human existence rather than its progressive improvement.
Furthermore, the general loosening of traditional religious institutions and roles has sometimes left clergymen searching for a clearer pragmatic basis for defining, and perhaps even justifying, their role. This concern has coincided with greater institutional concern with recruiting, screening, training, and evaluating clergymen. The resulting research on the role, personality characteristics, and motivation of clergymen (Menges & Dittes 1965) has represented a new focus for the psychology of religion. [SeePsychiatry, article onthe religio-psychiatric movement.]
A second impetus, beyond the bounds of institutionalized religion, is a single frequently replicated empirical finding in social psychology: the positive correlation between indices of religion and of prejudice, authoritarianism, or other conservative attitudes. This finding has occasioned a continuing sequence of empirical and theoretical work for two decades. This has perhaps been provoked in part by the conflict in values aroused by the finding: religion is commonly regarded as a desirable value, and prejudice is not, and the official doctrines of organized religions generally repudiate prejudice.
The third impetus arises from the intrinsic connections between religion and psychology, especially clinical psychology. In many ways, religious and psychological enterprises have parallel, if not overlapping, concerns. Both call attention to, and offer conceptualizations about, human aspirations and apprehensions, about the relation of an individual to his total environment, about the processes of coping with stress, and about ameliorating the human condition. It is not surprising, then, that each should be intrigued by the prospective insights of the other.
Contemporary theologians (e.g., Roberts 1950; Tillich 1952) have systematically attempted to make theology take account of psychological formulations. Relatively little “adaption” in the other direction—exploitation of theological formulations for psychological research—has been attempted, although it would seem profitable (Hiltner & Rogers 1962). Theological formulations frequently include implicit or explicit psychological theories, including propositions about both the antecedents and the consequences of particular beliefs or other religious behavior.
Philosophical and logical distinctions
Some methodological attention must be paid to the important distinctions between religion and psychology. Psychological analysis of religion operates within certain clear and logically necessary, but not always understood, restrictions which distinguish it from other intellectual disciplines related to religion. There is sometimes a special problem in relating, or distinguishing between, the psychology of religion and both philosophy and theology.
Logically, the distinction seems clear and has been made in similar terms by writers in the psychology of religion; James devoted an eloquent chapter to the point (1902). Psychology, philosophy, and theology may all be concerned with the same phenomenon, such as a particular belief or a particular ritual, but they ask different questions about the phenomenon. Psychological analysis is concerned with the psychological development and the functions of the belief or ritual. Philosophy is concerned with the correspondence between the belief or ritual and some criterion of truth, logic, or goodness, and theology, with its correspondence with such criteria as the will of God or other given norms of faith. The answers to the psychological questions do not necessarily imply or presuppose answers to the philosophical or theological questions. Even a thorough assessment of the psychological history and functions of a particular belief carries no ordinary implications for the “truth” or “faithfulness” of the belief; these must still be ascertained by the criteria appropriate to philosophy and theology. Both “true” and “false” beliefs may develop out of a particular pattern of social influences or personal motivation. The “genetic fallacy“—the evaluation of belief or behavior in terms of an analysis of its origins—has been soundly discounted by every major writer in the psychology of religion, including Freud (1927), who carefully used the term “illusion,” when applied to religion, to refer to certain wish-fulfilling functions, not to religion’s objective validity. Freud even acknowledged that science, a preference for which he argued on other grounds, was an “illusion” in this same sense.
Yet, despite the logical distinction—well accepted in principle—between psychology, on the one hand, and philosophy and theology, on the other, there remain at least two psychologically understandable grounds for the continuing confusion and blurring —-perhaps more among the audience of the psychologist than by the psychologist himself.
One of these grounds for confusion is an unfamiliarity with, or a mistrust of, discrete disciplines of thought which claim correspondence, not with the “whole truth,” but only with an abstracted and limited segment. Most socializing and reality-orienting processes accustom persons to regard reality as unitary and therefore to expect statements about reality to be similarly unified. Discrete disciplines or systems of thought are expected to be integrated. Differing statements—for example, psychological and philosophical statements about the same belief—are perceived as mutually implicative. If mutual implications cannot be recognized, the statements are perceived as necessarily inconsistent.
The attempt to integrate different statements into a single statement or system often leads to an unwarranted syncretistic identification of terms (for example, “neurosis” and “sin” or “psychological anxiety” and “ontological anxiety“) drawn from discrete psychological and theological systems (e.g., Roberts 1950; Tillich 1952). When such integration is not easily accomplished, then the psychological and philosophical (or theological) systems are seen as antagonistic, competing for the status of the one valid approach. With respect to Copernican astronomy, geology, and biological evolution, the result of long battles is the general acknowledgment that statements about history and function and statements about meaning and truth may both be true without having to be consistently integrated. But this acceptance is not yet universally accorded to psychological analysis. The view commonly persists that a belief must be either psychologically motivated or true (e.g., Havens 1961; Outler 1954).
A second psychological basis for confusion is a persistent notion in our culture, apparently related to Greek philosophy and perhaps to America’s Puritan roots, that psychological history and motives are “unworthy” vehicles for truth. Epistemologically and theologically, it may be argued, in principle, that truth may readily arise through such psychologically discernible processes as social or motivational influences, as well as through pure reasoning; such a view would seem especially consistent with Christian notions of incarnation or Jewish emphasis on the importance of the community. But psychologically, the distinction between rational and emotional aspects of man doggedly persists in our culture and, hence, in psychologies of religion (e.g., Allport 1950; Clark 1958), with higher status accorded the rational aspects. Thus, a discipline, such as philosophy, that is concerned with intellectual processes and criteria may be accorded a superior role, to which the contributions of psychology must be accommodated [e.g., Outler 1954; see also Knowledge, Sociology of].
Phenomena-based approaches
The search within the phenomena of religion for useful descriptive and analytical categories has, ironically, been impeded by the dramatic strikingness of the phenomena. It has been found expedient to conceptualize religion largely in terms of particular phenomena: for example, conversion experience, church attendance, personal prayer, assent to a particular dogma. These phenomena are so insistent and attention to them becomes so entrenched that it becomes difficult to break away from phenomena-based ad hoc categories, into the isolation of more genotypical and psychologically relevant variables.
For example, it is possible that some conversion, some church attendance, some prayer, and some belief—but not all of such instances—may share guilt-coping obsessional characteristics. Scientific progress may be gained by the development of such a category, cutting across groups of behaviors. But such progress has been slow because of the seeming dramatic insistence of the phenomena to be studied in their own terms—just as the descriptive, diagnostic categories of abnormal psychology have only slowly yielded to more “dynamic” variables, cutting across the phenomenological descriptions.
”Religion” as a single variable
The attempt to regard all religion as an integral phenomenon or as a single variable is the most significant and awkward illustration of the persistence of culturally convenient, but scientifically dubious, categories. A society finds it convenient and possible to group a great variety of behavior and institutions within the single category of “religion.” To its own frustration, psychological inquiry has commonly followed this practice.
Argyle (1958), for example, explicitly regards religion as a single quantifiable variable, with institutional membership or attendance, devotional practice, and orthodoxy of belief used as interchangeable indices. Other measures frequently used uncritically as a single index of “religion” are the religious-interest scale of the Allport-Vernon Scale of Values, scales such as Thurstone’s for assessing attitudes toward church, God, and Sunday observances, various tests of religious information, and self-ratings of religiosity.
Most attempts to define religion as a single variable also emphasize the uniqueness of religion as compared to other psychological and cultural phenomena. Such definitions tend to identify religion with mystical characteristics and also serve to exclude, by implication, the application to religion of psychological analyses applied to other types of behavior (Airport 1950; Clark 1958; James 1902).
But the usefulness or validity of such a global, single-variable definition of religion is not easily defended against a sophisticated theoretical viewpoint. As Johnson has dramatically argued:
In the name of religion what deed has not been done? For the sake of religion men have earnestly affirmed and contradicted almost every idea and form of conduct. In the long history of religion appear chastity and sacred prostitution, feasting and fasting, intoxication and prohibition, dancing and sobriety, human sacrifice and the saving of life in orphanages and hospitals, superstition and education, poverty and wealthy endowments, prayer wheels and silent worship, gods and demons, one God and many gods, attempts to escape and to reform the world. How can such diametrical oppositions all be religious? ([1944] 1959, pp. 47-48)
Several recent factor-analytic and correlational studies have suggested a single prominent factor, but it is a factor defined almost exclusively by attitudes toward religious institutions, the visible factor by which Western culture generally identifies religion. The few studies which have used more subtle indices than attitudes toward the church, and more sophisticated samples of persons more familiar with elements of religion other than institutional affiliation, have suggested that religion be considered as reflecting a multiplicity of factors (Dittes 1967).
Furthermore, empirical studies of “religion” defined as a single variable—primarily church affiliation and participation—have not tended to produce consistent, meaningful relations with other variables (perhaps because other variables are also grossly defined, in terms of such easily accessible measures as personality variables, age, education, diagnosis of pathology). Studies using such data typically show that religious involvement is “greater” among women, among young adolescents and those past middle age, among the less educated and less intelligent (when class differences are held constant), among members of the middle class, and among those scoring higher on measures of ethnocentrism and authoritarianism.
Definitions and descriptions which attempt to embrace in a single statement the religions of diverse cultures invariably seem to lose the critical and significant characteristics of any one. The number of facets of religious phenomena increases so greatly as one crosses cultural lines that cross-cultural definition and generalization are exceedingly treacherous. One perhaps ought to be pessimistic about developing a psychology of religion in general and perhaps instead learn more from studying cultural group and individual differences.
Descriptive distinctions
Among those committed to description of phenomena, the use of typologies has represented one attempt to define somewhat less global variables. These types are characteristically taken from those established by practitioners themselves—for example, distinctions between mystic, prophet, priest (e.g., see Clark 1958, chapters 12 and 13).
James (1902) proposed the much-quoted distinction between the religion of the healthy-minded and of the sick soul—perhaps more a distinction between personality types than between religious orientations per se. The distinction appears related to the manic-depressive continuum, with one end representing the extroverted personality (”positive thinking” in Norman Vincent Peale’s terms) and the other a more depressed, introverted, openly conflicted person.
Pratt’s (1920) distinction between subjective and objective worship has persisted, perhaps more as a haunting methodological dilemma than as a genuine phenomenal distinction. Objective worship, typified by the Roman Catholic mass, refers to intention and reference beyond the worshiper; subjective worship refers to self-conscious awareness of the effects of worship on the worshiper, as typified by much Protestant worship.
These typologies have not lent themselves to easy operational definitions, nor have they found themselves as part of more elaborate theoretical statements. Users of typologies have been content with typologies per se, rather than curious about the relation of the type with other variables.
Differing beliefs suggest another variable of potential psychological significance. But when these are taken in the language and the dimensions of the practitioners, they tend to emerge along a single conservative-liberal dimension, highly correlated with general “nonreligious” conservatism-liberalism and its known determinants. Other categories suggested by research in attitudes and perception outside religion, such as suggestibility, conformity, or dogmatism, may be more useful.
Religion-religiosity
Many writers have suggested the important distinction between “authentic” intensive inner religious experience, on the one hand, and routine peripheral religious activity, on the other. The distinction has been labeled internal-extrinsic by Adorno and others (1950), interiorized-institutionalized by Allport (1954), intrinsic-extrinsic by Allport (1959; Allport & Ross 1967), primary-secondary by Clark (1958), committed-consensual by Allen (1965; Allen & Spilka 1967), and religion-religiosity by many. The distinction reflects a value judgment and is analogous to one commonly made by religious participants themselves—especially by those regarded as prophets and reformers—who frequently call attention to the inverse relation between the two types of activity.
In empirical studies most measures used are of explicit, objective religiosity, usually involving participation in, or attitudes toward, the formal religious institution, its overt activities, and its official doctrines. On the other hand, most theoretical efforts, including attempts at establishing distinctions between, and categories of, phenomena, are concerned with the more intrinsic, subjective religion—the inner “spiritual” life, personal attitudes and orientations, values, loyalties, and commitments. Indeed, assuming the present distinction, a major methodological weakness of most empirical research in the psychology of religion is the use of instances of extrinsic religiosity as indices of an intrinsic religious orientation (e.g., Argyle 1958).
Factor-analytic studies (e.g., Cline & Richards 1965; Allen 1965; Allen & Spilka 1967) tend to support the distinction between the explicit institution-oriented religiosity and more personal intrinsic religion. Most attempts to provide scales or other indices for each of these two elements have foundered on the likelihood that each is not a discrete variable but, like “religion” itself, a general rubric covering many independent variables. Allen (1965) and Allport and Ross (1967) report scales of extrinsic and intrinsic religion that have some construct validity (extrinsic religion was correlated with prejudice, but intrinsic religion was not).
Psychoanalytic description
Much psychoanalytic writing is essentially descriptive. It has been a common practice among psychoanalytical writers to identify themes thought to be of psychological significance in religious material. Religious symbols, activities, and legends have provided fertile ground in which both Freudian and Jungian adherents could discover disguised symbolic “meaning.” A recent example (La Barre 1962) argues at length for the phallic symbolism of the snake in contemporary and historical cults and legends, including the Garden of Eden story. This work is classified here as largely descriptive because it focuses on the identification of a single variable rather than on the advancement of a theoretical understanding of the relation between that variable and others.
Freud’s first writing on religion (1907) called attention to several descriptive similarities between religious ritual and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The theoretical implications of common etiology and common functions have been extrapolated from this observation by others, for example, Ostow and Scharfstein (1954) and Jones ([1923] 1964, chapter 9).
Theory-based approaches
The two major psychological theories generally used in analyzing religious phenomena are both associated with Freud, although neither was fully originated or developed by him. One theory emphasizes the psychological motive of dependence, the position of the mother, and the solicitous aspects of religion. The other theory emphasizes the psychological motive of hostility, the role of the father, and the demanding aspects of religion. Both theories reflect the fundamental hypothesis that the “religious life represents a dramatization on a cosmic plane of the emotions, fears, and longings which arose in the child’s relation to his parents” (Jones [1923] 1964, p. 195).
The general distinction between the more solicitous and more demanding modes of religion has long been noted by many observers both within and without religion. Examples are the common adage of clergymen that their aim is to “comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable” or the distinction between the creative, redemptive, justifying attributes of God—or the “saving,” healing functions of religion—and the wrathful attributes of God—or the demanding, law-abiding, sanctifying functions.
Fromm (1963) has sharply contrasted these two theoretical orientations and has attempted to invoke them sequentially, in relation to changing social conditions, to account for changing emphases in early Christian centuries. Erikson (1958) has both distinguished and blended the theories in an intensive “case study” of Martin Luther’s developing religious convictions. Bakan (1966) has proposed that religion represents the projection and management of parents’ conflicts between personal “agency” motivations—including hostility to children—and nurturant motives.
Theories based on dependence
Dependence-based theories associated with Freud’s second book on religion (1927) emphasize religion as a source of comfort, solace, or assurance in the face of external stresses and frustrations. A protective and projective parent is associated with deferred or fantasied satisfactions, especially in relation to keenly experienced frustrations. The religious response is one of submission, in imitation of such a figure as Jesus, the dutiful son.
Supporting data, beyond general reflections, are not overwhelming. Especially missing are what would be the most convincing data—correlations between evidence of significant life frustrations and submissive reliance in the framework of this particular kind of religious formulation. Some general evidence has accumulated suggesting generally “greater” religious involvement among groups such as the less intelligent and the economically deprived, who, one might infer, experience deprivation, frustration, and a sense of inadequacy. Evidence along these lines has been surveyed by Cronbach (1933), by Argyle (1958, pp. 145-154), and by Dittes (1967).
Theories based on hostility
Freud applied to religion the full range of his Oedipal theory and apparently believed that this application was confirmed by anthropological and historical materials he cited (1913; 1934–1938). Emphasis is placed on relations with a paternal god-figure and on coping with largely “inner” stresses generated by this relation, particularly hostility and rebellion. Various elements of belief and of practice are analyzed as allowing for the expression of such hostility, for its control, and for the consummating receipt of punishment and forgiveness. A prototype is the identification with a Christ-figure who assumes the role of God, yet submits to the father, is crucified, and reconciled through resurrection and ascension.
The subtle and complex variables of motivation and of religion with which this theory is concerned have so far eluded controlled empirical study.
Projection and wish fulfillment
Projection to God of attitudes toward a father are assumed by both theories. This assumption has given rise to empirical tests of various designs to discover whether there is a similarity between attitudes toward God and attitudes toward the actual father. The degree of correspondence discovered has varied widely, perhaps because the research has not carefully taken into consideration the theories’ proposal that such projection takes place under conditions of particular personal motivation.
Wish fulfillment, or perhaps more accurately, “rationalization,” is a general process postulated especially by the theories based on dependence. The degree and process by which conceptualization follows and is made consistent with motivation and practice has attracted varying formulations (e.g., Dunlap 1946). All tend to assume an independent “need to conceptualize” or a “need for consistency” among conceptualizations and between conceptualizations and behavior.
Religion and ethnocentrism
Perhaps the most effective fusion of empirical and theoretical work has developed from the repeated empirical finding of correlations between indices of religion and of conservative social attitudes—especially, because of the cultural importance given them in the mid-twentieth century, attitudes of anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. This correlation was brought into sharp focus and most of the subsequent developments were given direction by the work of Adorno and others (1950).
The finding has, among other things, stimulated attention to definitional problems, cited above, especially to the distinction between religiosity, which Adorno’s measures reflected, and religion. Most theories, guided by an understanding of official religious doctrine, might expect religion to be directly related to liberal attitudes. [SeeAnti-SemitismandPrejudice.]
Beginning with data in the Adorno volume, studies have regularly reported suggestions of a curvilinear relation between ethnocentrism and frequency of church attendance, with both non-attenders and the most faithful attenders showing more liberal attitudes than occasional attenders. If the most regular attendance can be interpreted as an index of more personal internalization of religious norms, beyond perfunctory institutional loyalty, then this may be some evidence of the theoretically expected relation between intrinsic religion and liberalism. Other evidence awaits the definition and measurement of such elements of intrinsic religion as faith, hope, love, trust, freedom, etc.
Personality variables
The relationship between religion and ethnocentrism has led to theory and research aimed at designating the personality characteristics that underlie both variables and mediate the relation. Research findings suggest that a person for whom both conservative ideology and conventional, institution-based religion are functional is a person with a “weak ego” or “severe superego,” who is threatened by external circumstances or internal impulse and therefore likely to be responsive to the unambiguous external controls, structures, and supports provided either by a religious institution and its ideology, rituals, and moralisms or by the strict categorizing and self-enhancement provided by ethnocentric doctrines.
Such an interpretation of the function of religion is supported by a wide range of empirical reports of the correlation between religion (especially as measured by institutional loyalty and adherence to conservative doctrines) and lower intelligence, disrupted emotional life, suggestibility, constricted personality, and awareness of personal inadequacy (Dittes 1967). These findings, suggesting that religion may attract the relatively inadequate and helpless, may be less shocking than first supposed to the exponents of religious traditions whose highest religious celebrations commemorate a captivity or a crucifixion and who generally preach man’s fallen state and fundamental helplessness.
An extension of this general view also seems to account for a range of dramatic phenomena, such as glossolalia, sudden emotional conversion, faith healing, and trance states. Reports, though meager, of personality characteristics and of environmental characteristics associated with such participation suggest the existence of a general trancelike, regressive “ego constriction” that produces greater expression of impulses and greater responsiveness to suggestion and social influence. [SeeHypnosis; Hysteria; Persuasion; Suggestion.]
Finally, the relation between religion and ethnocentrism has stimulated further attention to defining cognitive variables and especially to making the distinction (e.g., Rokeach 1960) between the content characteristics of a belief or attitude and the content-free or structural characteristics of the style, such as the openness or the dogmatism with which it is held. This has led to the hypothesis that religion is related more to elements such as the need for closure than to the conservative elements of ethnocentrism. [SeePersonality, political, article onconservatism and radicalism; Systems analysis, article onpsychological systems.]
James E. Dittes
[Directly related are the entriesAttitudes; Ideology; Myth and symbol; Ritual. Other relevant material may be found inAnalytical psychology; Defense mechanisms; Fantasy; Obsessive-compulsive disorders; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, article onexistential psychology; and in the biographies ofFreud; James; Jung.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, T. W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper.
Allen, Russell O. 1965 Religion and Prejudice: An Attempt to Clarify the Patterns of Relationship. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Denver.
Allen, Russell O.; and Spilka, Bernard 1967 Committed and Consensual Religion: A Specification of Religion-Prejudice Relationships. Unpublished manuscript.
Allport, Gordon W. 1950 The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Macmillan.
Allport, Gordon W. 1954 The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. ? An abridged paperback edition was published in 1958 by Double-day.
Allport, Gordon W. 1959 Religion and Prejudice. Crane Review 2:1-10.
Allport, Gordon W.; and Ross, J. Michael 1967 Personal Religious Orientation and Prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 5:432-443.
American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education. ? Published from 1904 to 1911.
Archiv für Religionspsychologie und Seelenführung. ? Published from 1914 to 1915, from 1918 to 1930, and from 1962 onward.
Argyle, Michael 1958 Religious Behaviour. London: Routledge. ? A compendium of social-psychological research relating religion, conceived as a single quantifiable variable, with various social and social psychological indices.
Bakan, David 1966 The Duality of Human Existence: An Essay on Psychology and Religion. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Catholic Psychological Record. ? Published since 1963.
Clark, Walter H. 1958 The Psychology of Religion. New York: Macmillan. ? A textbook primarily surveying early descriptive material.
Cline, Victor B.; and Richards, James M. Jr. 1965 A Factor-analytic Study of Religious Belief and Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1:569-578.
Cronbach, Abraham 1933 The Psychology of Religion. Psychological Bulletin 30:327-361. ? A comprehensive survey of 361 publications of varying methodology.
Dittes, James E. 1967 The Social Psychology of Religion. Unpublished manuscript. ? Projected for publication in the revised edition of Gardner Lindzey (editor), Handbook of Social Psychology.
Dunlap, Knight 1946 Religion: Its Function in Human Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Erikson, Erik H. (1958) 1962 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. Austen Riggs Monograph No. 4. New York: Norton.
Freud, Sigmund (1907) 1959 Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices. Volume 2, pages 25-35 in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers. International Psycho-analytic Library, No. 10. London: Hogarth; New York: Basic Books. ? First published as “Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübung.”
Freud, Sigmund (1913) 1959 Totem and Taboo. Volume 13, pages ix-162 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. ? First published in German.
Freud, Sigmund (1927) 1961 The Future of an Illusion. Volume 21, pages 5-58 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. ? First published in German.
Freud, Sigmund (1934–1938) 1964 Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. Volume 23 in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. ? First published in German.
Fromm, Erich 1963 The Dogma of Christ. Pages 3-91 in The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture. New York: Holt. ? Summarizes the various psychoanalytic theories of religion and applies them to changing social conditions in the early Christian centuries.
Havens, Joseph 1961 The Participant’s vs. the Observer’s Frame of Reference in the Psychological Study of Religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1:79-87.
Hiltner, Seward; and Rogers, William 1962 Research on Religion and Personality Dynamics. Religious Education 57, no. 4. ? Both summarizes and evaluates a number of more recent studies; especially urges psychoanalytic and theological sophistication.
James, William (1902) 1963 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. Enlarged edition with appendices and introduction by Joseph Ratner. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books. ? Based largely on literary records; discusses conversion, mysticism, saintliness, and other phenomena. Establishes typologies which have endured; sets a mood and a philosophic context for the psychological study of religion.
Johnson, Paul E. (1944) 1959 The Psychology of Religion. Rev. ed. New York: Abingdon. ? A textbook; includes a good history of the field.
Jones, Ernest (1923) 1964 Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis. Volume 2: Essays in Folklore, Anthropology and Religion. New York: International Universities Press. ? Includes 8 chapters on religion summarizing compactly the fundamental psychoanalytic views of religion, plus some intriguing excursions; more compact and less polemic than Freud’s own writings.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. ? Published since 1961.
La Barre, Weston 1962 They Shall Take Up Serpents. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
Lumen Vitae Studies in Religious Psychology. ? Published irregularly since 1959, by the Lumen Vitae Press in Brussels. These volumes contain empirical and theoretical studies which originally appeared in the journal Lumen vitae.
Meissner, William W. 1961 Annotated Bibliography in Religion and Psychology. New York: Academy of Religion and Mental Health.
Menges, Robert J.; and Dittes, J. E. 1965 Psychological Studies of Clergymen: Abstracts of Empirical Research. New York: Nelson.
Ostow, Mortimer; and Scharfstein, Ben-ami 1954 The Need to Believe. New York: International Universities Press. ? An elementary but fairly comprehensive statement of Freudian theories of the social-controlling and guilt-reducing functions of ritual and other aspects of religion.
Outler, Albert C. 1954 Psychotherapy and the Christian Message. New York: Harper.
Pratt, James B. 1920 The Religious Consciousness: A Psychological Study. New York: Macmillan.
Review of Religious Research. ? Published since 1959.
Roberts, David 1950 Psychotherapy and a Christian View of Man. New York: Scribners. ? An attempt by a theologian to integrate theological and psychological conceptions.
Rokeach, Milton 1960 The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations Into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books.
Strunk, Orlo Jr. (editor) 1959 Readings in the Psychology of Religion. Nashville: Abingdon. ? A fairly comprehensive, condensed collection; emphasizes early descriptive work.
Tillich, Paul 1952 The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1959. Illustrates an explicit attempt to incorporate psychological insights into theology.
Zeitschrift für Religions-psychologie. ? Published from 1907 to 1913.