Module 2: Studying

Religion
JASON M. BROWN
Perspectives in Studying Religion
• Immediate (First): The Religious Insider,
participating in their tradition.
• Reflective (Second): Insiders or Outsiders
reflecting on the significance or meaning of
some dimension of the religions.
• Academic (Third): Studying religion through
the lens of a particular discipline, using a
particular method to gather data.
• Zero Order: What we take for granted about
the world, the reality we perceive and
experience, or know to be true.
• Karmic? Materialistic? Dualistic?
The Challenges of Studying Religion
• In the 19th century, several fields of the Western sciences
began to focus their attention on Religious Studies rather
than Theology.
• Typical Research Questions:
• How did religion begin?
• How old and who wrote the religions’ sacred texts?
• Are their stories compatible with emerging scientific discoveries?
• Difficulties:
• Religion involves subjective and objective elements.
• Religious phenomenon were often described by nonreligious factors.
 The Trouble with Theory
• Gk: Theoria: Deep seeing.
• A hypothesis is not a theory. Theories
are made from testing hypotheses.
• Theories make sense of facts.
• However, theories can become
heuristics, or lenses through which
we see everything.
• “If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you will start treating all your problems
like a nail.”
Dana Scully and Fox
• “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Mulder
in The X-Files (1993-
2018)
 The Possibility of Religion
• From an evolutionary perspective
religious behaviors emerged from
our:
• Symbolic consciousness
• Social behavior
• Comprehension of time/future
• Emotional complexity
• Human brains have hyper agency
detection system.
• Religious behaviors was adaptive to
human survival. Inclusive Fitness.
 Homo Religiosus?
• Hominids began using stone tools around 2
million years ago.
• Fire was domesticated some 500,000 years ago.
• By 100,000 years ago, homo sapiens were
burying their dead. Often in the fetal position.
• By 30,000 years ago, figurines.
• Venus of Willendorf, Icon of a fertility, Mother Goddess?
• Ritual and shamanism as spiritual ‘technologies.’
• Sacred spaces were delineated from
mundane/profane space (chaos).
Venus of Willendorf
Chauvet Cave in France, South Hillaire Chamber
 Studying the Origin of Religion
• E.B. Tylor (1832-1917): Coined the
term Animism: Worldview where world
is animated by spirits.
• Tylor assumed this was a “false belief”.
• Max Müller speculating that religion
was a “disease of language.”
• James Frazer’s (1854-1941) The
Golden Bough: Religion/myth an
attempt to explain the world.
• Stages of Development: Magic > religion > James Frazer
science.
• Belief in gods the survival of primitive
ignorance.
 Several Fields and Their Methods
• Philosophy/Theology: Study of
knowledge: Analytical reasoning.
• Textual Criticism: The study of texts
and meaning: Analysis of text through a
hermeneutic paradigm.
• Archeology: Study of human activity
through analysis of material culture.
Excavation.
• Psychology: Study of human mind and
functions. Survey, observation.
Göbekli Tepe
• Anthropology: Study of human culture.
Ethnography/phenomenology.
 William James (1842-1910)
• American Pragmatist
philosopher/psychologist at Harvard
University.
• The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902): Religious “genius” is the origin of
religious institutions. Idiosyncratic.
• Pragmatism: An experience’s
effectiveness proves its value.
• There is a difference between origin and value
in religion.
• A religion persists because it is captivating,
useful.
Religion as Mystical Experience
• Founding mystical
experiences have common
qualities:
• Ineffable: The inability to
describe the encounter.
• Noetic: States of knowing, or
learning.
• Passive: Outside one’s control.
• Transient: They do not last very
long.
From William James’ The
Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902).
 Marx on Religion
• Karl Marx (1818-1885) rejected the idealism
of Hegel; for strong materialism.
• The human story is a story of the struggle
to live.
• The structures of power/economics give
rise to the super-structures of culture and
religion (not the other way around).
• Those in power use religion to oppress the
masses. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
• Religion prevents people from seeing their
own oppression.
• Escape and balm from the harsh realities of
oppression.
 “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is
the opium of the people.”
—Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) on Religion
• The Future of an Illusion (1927),
explained religion as “wish fulfillment”
projected onto reality.
• Religion provides an Ultimate Authority.
• Consoles us from Fear of Nature, Fear of
Death.
• Reason is superior to faith, rather than
supportive/complementary.
• Science would replace religion as
civilization matures.
“Religion would thus be the universal obsessional
neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional
neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus
complex, out of the relation to the father. If this
view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-
away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal
inevitability of a process of growth, and that we
find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle
of that phase of development.”
–Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
 Carl Jung (1875-1961) on Religion
• Jung saw religion in positive terms.
• Humans share a collective unconscious.
• Religion forms emerges from unconscious.
Shapes individuals.
• Individuation is process of self-realization; at
the heart of all religion.
• Divine knowledge is self knowledge.
• Jung integrated alchemy and astrology into his
Depth Psychology.
• In 1959, John Freeman of BBC’s Face to Face
asked whether Jung believed in God. “I do
not need to believe in God. I know.”
 Archetypes
• Archetypal Images: Universal patterns
or motifs which come from the collective
unconscious.
• Archetypal Images emerge from the
collective unconscious and give
structure, orientation to the psyche.
• Common Archetypal Images: King,
mother, hero, sage, trickster, child.
• The Hero Archetypal Image for example
was represented by JRR Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings by Frodo.
The Archetype of the Mother
Leonardo Da Vinci’s
The Virgin and
Child with Saint
Anne, 1503.
 Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
• Durkheim wrote, The Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life (1912).
• What is the individual without the
social?
• Religion acts as social glue.
• Religion tells us who we are: Creates a
moral community in relation to the
sacred held up and against the profane.
• “Collective effervescence” brings
common ideas, emotions together to
reinforce identity, connection to the
sacred.
 “A religion is a unified system of beliefs
and practices relative to sacred things,
that is to say, things set apart and
forbidden—beliefs and practices which
unite into one single moral community...”
–Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of
Religion
 (Social) Functional Approaches
to Religion
• Social functional approaches to
religion define religion as primarily
emerging out of society.
• Religion emerged as an adaptive
function for uniting society.
• Religion is the stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves.
Bronislaw Malinowski
• Totemic items and species take on (1884-1942)
symbolic and community identity. with study subjects
in the Trobriand Islands
 Structuralist Approaches
• Mary Douglas (1921-2007): Natural Symbols;
Purity and Danger (1945)
• Douglas took a Structuralist approach to
culture and thus religion.
• Structuralism sees culture as a framework for
understanding the world (structures like purity
and pollution, sacred and profane, etc.)
• E.g., Jewish Kosher Laws are about boundary
maintenance, rather than health, or
commandment from God.
Mary Douglas
• Pigs are an ambiguous category from other
animals.
 Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)
• Geertz is a symbolic or interpretive
anthropologist.
• “Man (sic.) is an animal suspended in webs
of significance he himself has spun…”
Religion: “A system of symbols which
acts to establish powerful, persuasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men
(sic.) 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.”
 Centrality of Ethnography
• Definition: “The recording and analysis
of a culture or society, usually based on
participant-observation and resulting in a
written account of a people, place or
institution” (Simpson & Coleman 2017).
• Participant Observation: “Achieve an
understanding of local knowledge,
values, and practices ‘from the “native’s
point of view.”
• Hanging out as research.

• Reflective turn with rise of post-modern

philosophy, Ethnographer questions their
role in the representing other cultures.
 Religion and Ritual
• Rituals are sequences of words,
gestures, actions that perform or
reenact sacred or mythical stories or
tasks.
• Rites of Passage are rituals that
“accompany a passage from one
situation to another or from one cosmic
or social world to another.” –Arnold van
Gennep (1873–1957) Indigenou
• Separation/purification (Pre-liminal) s coming
of Age
• Transition (Liminal)
• Incorporation (Post-liminal)
Phenomenology of Place Among Catholic Monks

New Camaldoli Hermitage New Clairvaux Abbey

Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey Christ in the Desert Abbey

Toward a Phenomenology of Religion
• Edmund Husserl (1859-1938): Began studying
subjective experience of the phenomenal (material,
substantive), world.
• Epoché: The Greek root means suspension.
• In Religious Studies: The setting aside of truth
claims to understand religious experiences as such.
• E.g., Not ‘do ancestors exist as spirits’ but ‘how does
religious community X experience ancestors?’
• Religion taken as its own explanation. Not as a
remainder of some higher cause: Political
manipulation, evolutionary fluke, neurosis or social
glue.
A Mudang in
Korea
“No statement about a religion is valid
unless it can be acknowledged by
that religion’s believers…On the
external data about religion, of course,
an outsider can by diligent scholarship
discover things that an insider does not
know and may not be willing to accept.
But about the meaning that the system
has for those of faith, an outsider
cannot in the nature of the case go
beyond the believer. . .”
–Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1973)
 Mircea Eliade (1907–1986)
• Born in Romania. University of Chicago scholar
of religion.
• The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion (1959), religion as encounter with the
sacred that organizes the social.
• Unlike Durkheim he does not reduce the
sacred to a category of society.
• Seeking communion with the “really real”
religion organizes sacred space, time and
symbols.
• Differentiates between sacred, profane and
chaos.