Politics, Religion & Ideology

ISSN: 2156-7689 (Print) 2156-7697 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftmp21

The Conflict Between Secular and Religious

Narratives in The United States: Wittgenstein,
Social Construction, And Communication

Arpita Roy

To cite this article: Arpita Roy (2019): The Conflict Between Secular and Religious Narratives
in The United States: Wittgenstein, Social Construction, And Communication, Politics, Religion &
Ideology, DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2019.1568683

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2019.1568683

Published online: 24 Jan 2019.

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POLITICS, RELIGION & IDEOLOGY

BOOK REVIEW

The Conflict Between Secular and Religious Narratives in The United States:
Wittgenstein, Social Construction, And Communication, by John Sumser, Lanham,
MD, Lexington Books, 2016, 184 pp., $84 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4985-2208-3

John Sumser delves into communication narratives to give an account of how religion forms a
fulcrum of personal identity in the United States. The chief concern of the book is framed in
the interesting paradox of decline of institutional religion, on the one hand, and enhanced
communication of religious ideas, on the other. It is one of the enchanting merits of this
slim volume that it does not evade the difficulties in the study of religion. Indeed, it boldly
seeks to define the scope and limits of this contentious, if central, concept for contemporary
usage. Chapter 1, takes off with the aim of reflecting on a working definition of religion and
reviews, among others, Durkheim’s contrast of sacred and profane. It is well known that Dur-
kheim repudiated various definitions of religion as something to do with gods, spirits, sin, or
supernatural since, for example, in Buddhism the idea of god plays a secondary role or in Hin-
duism notions of sin are almost absent, and settled on the set-apart and forbidden character of
sacred as the core of religious beliefs and rituals. Regardless of whether one is willing to follow
Durkheim’s formulation in every step, for Sumser what is worthy of consideration is the sacra-
lizing tendency that human societies disclose, of ‘the idea that we are connected to something
bigger, that the connection matters, and that we are always accountable’ (p. 16). Undoubtedly,
what is sacred lends itself to a bewilderingly wide range of examples, so Sumser adopts Witt-
genstein’s idea of family resemblances to show how divergent conceptual trajectories are to be
read and related to the whole complex of sacred. However, this venture is open to one critical
objection, namely, how does one reconcile contradictory or extreme positions under the
concept of family resemblances?
In his later writings, Wittgenstein explicitly abandoned the distinction between prop-
ositions expressing fact and propositions of value and adopted the view that religious beliefs
are not amenable to a rational investigation. His argument, for instance, that the Biblical
theory of Last Judgment is important not because there is some factual reality or palpable
being which corresponds to it but is meaningful because we live by it and guide our lives by
it, is radically at odds with Durkheim who is preoccupied with the facticity of religious
beliefs and from which his notion of sacred emerges. Be that as may, Sumser contends that
family resemblances of the thing we call religion help us to make sense of the world.
Chapter 2, is about the stories employed in sense-making, or to put it in summary fashion:
narratives. Sumser’s point here is that religious narratives are not so much about internal
coherence or factual consistency as about linking ‘the way things are with the way things
should be’ (p. 44). Chapter 3, is refreshing in how the search for religious truths is conveyed
through a deeper understanding of myths, folk-tales and histories, and it is heartening to find
that these distinctions are vigorously drawn even outside of anthropology, though the text is
not unduly cluttered with references to Malinowski or Lévi-Strauss.
In Chapters 4 and 5, Sumser provides the clearest discussion on the social construction of
religious-secular boundaries with an emphasis on Christian Fundamentalism and what he
identifies as New Atheism. He offers an instructive hypothesis here: the denial of existence
of god is not the crux of new atheism as much as the intellectual unreasonableness of religious
explanations is, and to that extent it takes on a dogmatic or fundamentalist tinge. What makes
2 BOOK REVIEW

the argument so marvelously appealing is that it is not presented as a causal claim, but rather as
a correspondence. General notions of social justice, individual salvation, or public morality are
inextricably woven with concerns about health care, gun rights and global warming. However,
I am not sufficiently persuaded that modern crises of terrorism or sectarianism are only
kindled by a psychologism of threat or risk. To be accustomed to psychological intentions
is germane to our times, but myths and narratives are never far from cosmological elabor-
ations, and I wish that Sumser were a little more receptive to the communicative themes of
symbolic cosmology, especially since he displays such a fantastically fluid mind in transposing
and analyzing webs of meaning from theology to politics.
Finally, the book moves towards some of the fierce controversies being waged in online
forums, such as tolerance for gay marriage or abortion rights, to substantiate the larger stand-
point that constructed ideologies have real consequences. Chapter 6, is dedicated more than
anything else to highlighting anxious discussions on marriage and morality with the apodictic
certainty of America under siege. In these debates, polarizations, miscommunications, ‘talking
past’ one another are rampant and these are approached not as symptoms of irrationality but
as bearing on ‘epistemological awareness’ of nature, history, and truth. Above all, the relativism
that Sumser encounters in everyday online debates seems perfectly poised to address his own
vantage point that secular modernity’s questioning of religion is open ended and a task never
finished.
In his ‘Lecture on Ethics,’ Wittgenstein argued that to make ethical or religious claims, is to
‘run against the boundaries of language.’ In this volume, Sumser makes an eloquent attempt to
ground the power and force of religious ideas in the diverse language games we engage in daily
life. Given the depth of Sumser’s interests in the reach of religion in contemporary times, it is
not surprising that the conceptualization of chapters is wide in scope and allows for extensive
reflection. I personally believe that the most stimulating contribution of the text lies not so
much in its methodological espousal of social constructivism as in the subtlety with which
it weaves original insights into the nature of problems in the various language games of reli-
gion, the significance of creation myths, or the accepted rules of empirical reasoning with
thought-provoking debates on secular rationality. The writing style is lucid, conversational,
and invigorating. Quite a few readers of this journal will find Sumser’s emphasis on Wittgen-
steinian sense-making in anchoring narratives helpful. I think the book should be made an
obligatory reading for upper-level undergraduate students interested in pursuing communi-
cation studies so that they can draw on the remarkable middle ground of language in formu-
lating their own questions on contemporary religion and morality.

Arpita Roy
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
roy@mmg.mpg.de
© 2019 Arpita Roy
https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2019.1568683