Professional Documents
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The Concept of Religion
The Concept of Religion
1. a system of symbols
2. about the nature of things,
3. that inculcate dispositions for behavior
4. through ritual and cultural performance,[3]
5. so that the conceptions held by the group are taken as real.
One can find each of these five elements separately, of course: not all symbols are religious
symbols; historians (but not novelists) typically consider their conceptions factual; and so on.
For Geertz, however, any religious form of life will have all five. Aware of functional
approaches like that of Tillich, Geertz is explicit that symbols and rituals that lack reference
to a metaphysical framework—that is, those without the substantive element he requires as
his (2)—would be secular and not religious, no matter how intense or important one’s
feelings about them are (1973: 98). Reference to a metaphysical entity or power is what
marks the other four elements as religious. Without it, Geertz writes, “the empirical
differentia of religious activity or religious experience would not exist” (1973: 98). As a third
example, Bruce Lincoln (2006: ch. 1) enumerates four elements that a religion would have,
namely:
1. “a discourse whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that
claims for itself a similarly transcendent status”,
2. practices connected to that discourse,
3. people who construct their identity with reference to that discourse and those
practices, and
4. institutional structures to manage those people.
This definition is monothetic since, for Lincoln, religions always have these four features “at
a minimum” (2006: 5).[4] To be sure, people constantly engage in practices that generate
social groups that then have to be maintained and managed by rules or authorities. However,
when the practices, communities, and institutions lack the distinctive kind of discourse that
claims transcendent status for itself, they would not count for Lincoln as religions.
It is worth noting that when a monothetic definition includes multiple criteria, one does not
have to choose between the substantive and functional strategies for defining religion, but
can instead include both. If a monothetic definition include both strategies, then, to count as
a religion, a form of life would have to refer to a distinctive substantive reality and also play
a certain role in the participants’ lives. This double-sided approach avoids the result of purely
substantive definitions that might count as religion a feckless set of beliefs (for instance,
“something must have created the world”) unconnected from the believers’ desires and
behavior, while also avoiding the result of purely functional definitions that might count as
religion some universal aspect of human existence (for instance, creating collective
effervescence or ranking of one’s values). William James’s definition of religion (“the belief
that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves
thereto”) is double-sided in this way, combining a belief in the existence of a distinctive
referent with the spiritual disciplines with which one seeks to embody that belief. Geertz’s
definition of religion also required both substantive and functional aspects, which he labelled
“worldview” and “ethos” (1973: ch. 5). To treat religion as “both/and” in this way is to
refuse to abstract one aspect of a complex social reality but instead recognizes, as Geertz puts
it, both “the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life” (1973: 113). [5]
These “monothetic-set definitions” treat the concept of religion as referring to a multifaceted
or multidimensional complex. It may seem avant garde today to see religion described as a
“constellation”, “assemblage”, “network”, or “system”, but in fact to treat religion as a
complex is not new. Christian theologians traditionally analyzed the anatomy of their way of
life as simultaneously fides, fiducia, and fidelitas. Each of these terms might be translated
into English as “faith”, but each actually corresponds to a different dimension of a social
practice. Fides refers to a cognitive state, one in which a person assents to a certain
proposition and takes it as true. It could be translated as “belief” or “intellectual
commitment”. Beliefs or intellectual commitments distinctive to participation in the group
will be present whether or not a religious form of life has developed any authoritative
doctrines. In contrast, fiducia refers to an affective state in which a person is moved by a
feeling or experience that is so positive that it bonds the recipient to its source. It could be
translated as “trust” or “emotional commitment”. Trust or emotional commitment will be
present whether or not a religious form of life teaches that participation in their practices
aims at some particular experience of liberation, enlightenment, or salvation.
And fidelitas refers to a conative state in which a person commits themselves to a path of
action, a path that typically involves emulating certain role models and inculcating the
dispositions that the group considers virtuous. It could be translated as “loyalty” or
“submission”. Loyalty or submission will be present whether or not a religious form of life is
theistic or teaches moral rules. By the time of Martin Luther, Christian catechisms organized
these aspects of religious life in terms of the “three C’s”: the creed one believed, the cult or
worship one offered, and the code one followed. When Tillich (1957: ch. 2) argues that
religious faith is distorted when one treats it not as a complex but instead as a function of the
intellect alone, emotion alone, or the will alone, he is speaking from within this tradition.
These three dimensions of religious practices—symbolically, the head, the heart, and the
hand—are not necessarily Christian. In fact, until one adds a delimiting criterion like those
discussed above, these dimensions are not even distinctively religious. Creed, cult, and code
correspond to any pursuit of what a people considers true, beautiful, and good, respectively,
and they will be found in any collective movement or cultural tradition. As Melford Spiro
says, any human institution will involve a belief system, a value system, and an action
system (Spiro 1966: 98).
Many have complained that arguments about how religion should be defined seem
unresolvable. To a great extent, however, this is because these arguments have not simply
been about a particular aspect of society but rather have served as proxy in a debate about the
structure of human subjectivity. There is deep agreement among the rival positions insofar as
they presuppose the cognitive-affective-conative model of being human. However, what we
might call a “Cartesian” cohort argues that cognition is the root of religious emotions and
actions. This cohort includes the “intellectualists” whose influence stretches from Edward
Tylor and James Frazer to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Robin Horton, Jack Goody, Melford Spiro,
Stewart Guthrie, and J. Z. Smith, and it shapes much of the emerging field of cognitive
science of religion (e.g., Boyer 2001).[6] A “Humean” cohort disagrees, arguing that affect is
what drives human behavior and that cognition serves merely to justify the values one has
already adopted. In theology and religious studies, this feelings-centered approach is
identified above all with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, and with the
tradition called phenomenology of religion, but it has had a place in anthropology of religion
since Robert Marett (Tylor’s student), and it is alive and well in the work of moral
intuitionists (e.g., Haidt 2012) and affect theory (e.g., Schaefer 2015). A “Kantian” cohort
treats beliefs and emotions regarding supernatural realities as relatively unimportant and
argues instead that for religion the will is basic.[7] This approach treats a religion as at root a
set of required actions (e.g., Vásquez 2011; C. Smith 2017). These different approaches
disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of
the human. Thus, when William James describes religion as
the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual [people] in their solitude, so far as they
apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. (1902
[1985: 34])
he is foregrounding an affective view and playing down (though not denying) the cognitive.
When James’s Harvard colleague Alfred North Whitehead corrects him, saying that
“[r]eligion is what a person does with their solitariness” (1926: 3, emphasis added),
Whitehead stresses the conative, though Whitehead also insists that feelings always play a
role. These are primarily disagreements of emphasis that do not trouble this model of human
subjectivity. There have been some attempts to leave this three-part framework. For example,
some in the Humean camp have suggested that religion is essentially a particular feeling with
zero cognition. But that romantic suggestion collapses under the inability to articulate how
an affective state can be noncognitive but still identifiable as a particular feeling (Proudfoot
1985).
Although the three-sided model of the true, the beautiful, and the good is a classic account of
what any social group explicitly and implicitly teaches, one aspect is still missing. To
recognize the always-presupposed material reality of the people who constitute the social
group, even when this reality has not been conceptualized by the group’s members, one
should also include the contributions of their bodies, habits, physical culture, and social
structures. To include this dimension mnemonically, one can add a “fourth C”, for
community. Catherine Albanese (1981) may have been the first to propose the idea of adding
this materialist dimension. Ninian Smart’s famous anatomy of religion (1996) has seven
dimensions, not four, but the two models are actually very similar. Smart calls the affective
dimension the “experiential and emotional”, and then divides the cognitive dimension into
two (“doctrinal and philosophical” and “narrative and mythological”), the conative into two
(“ethical and legal” and “ritual”), and the communal into two (“social and institutional” and
“material”). In an attempt to dislodge the focus on human subjectivity found in the three Cs,
some have argued that the material dimension is the source of the others. They argue, in
other words, that the cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of the members of a social
group are not the causes but rather the effects of the group’s structured practices (e.g., Asad
1993: ch. 1–4; Lopez 1998). Some argue that to understand religion in terms of beliefs, or
even in terms of any subjective states, reflects a Protestant bias and that scholars of religion
should therefore shift attention from hidden mental states to the visible institutional
structures that produce them. Although the structure/agency debate is still live in the social
sciences, it is unlikely that one can give a coherent account of religion in terms of institutions
or disciplinary practices without reintroducing mental states such as judgements, decisions,
and dispositions (Schilbrack 2021).
Whether a monothetic approach focuses on one essential property or a set, and whether that
essence is the substance or the function of the religion, those using this approach ask a
Yes/No question regarding a single criterion. This approach therefore typically produces
relatively clear lines between what is and is not religion. Given Tylor’s monothetic
definition, for instance, a form of life must include belief in spiritual beings to be a religion;
a form of life lacking this property would not be a religion, even if it included belief in a
general order of existence that participants took as their ultimate concern, and even if that
form of life included rituals, ethics, and scriptures. In a famous discussion, Melford Spiro
(1966) works with a Tylorean definition and argues exactly this: lacking a belief in
superhuman beings, Theravada Buddhism, for instance, is something other than a religion.
[8]
For Spiro, there is nothing pejorative about this classification.
Having combatted the notion that “we” have religion (which is “good”) and “they” have
superstition (which is “bad”), why should we be dismayed if it be discovered that that
society x does not have religion as we have defined the term? (1966: 88)
assumptions, if not explicit Protestant apologetics. In the short preface to that book, Smith
famously says,
[T]here is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is
created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and
generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. (1982: xi,
italics in original)
This dramatic statement has sometimes been taken as Smith’s assertion that the
concept religion has no referent. However, in his actual practice of comparing societies,
Smith is not a nonrealist about religion. In the first place, he did not think that the
constructed nature of religion was something particular to this concept: any judgement that
two things were similar or different in some respect presupposed a process of selection,
juxtaposition, and categorization by the observer. This is the process of imagination in his
book’s title. Second, Smith did not think that the fact that concepts were human products
undermined the possibility that they successfully corresponded to entities in the world: an
invented concept for social structures can help one discover religion—not “invent” it—even
in societies whose members did not know the concept.[17] His slogan is that one’s (conceptual)
map is not the same as and should be tested and rectified by the (non-conceptual) territory (J.
Z. Smith 1978). Lastly, Smith did not think that scholars should cease to use religion as a
redescriptive or second-order category to study people in history who lacked a comparable
concept. On the contrary, he chastised scholars of religion for resting within tradition-
specific studies, avoiding cross-cultural comparisons, and not defending the coherence of the
generic concept. He writes that scholars of religion should be
prepared to insist, in some explicit and coherent fashion, on the priority of some generic
category of religion. (1995: 412; cf. 1998: 281–2)
Smith himself repeatedly uses religion and related technical terms he invented, such as
“locative religion”, to illuminate social structures that operate whether or not those so
described had named those structures themselves—social structures that exist, as his 1982
subtitle says, from Babylon to Jonestown.
The second most influential book in the reflexive turn in religious studies is Talal
Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993). Adopting Michel Foucault’s “genealogical”
approach, Asad seeks to show that the concept religion operating in contemporary
anthropology has been shaped by assumptions that are Christian (insofar as one
takes belief as a mental state characteristic of all religions) and modern (insofar as one treats
religion as essentially distinct from politics). Asad’s Foucauldian point is that though people
may have all kinds of religious beliefs, experiences, moods, or motivations, the mechanism
that inculcates them will be the disciplining techniques of some authorizing power and for
this reason one cannot treat religion as simply inner states. Like Smith, then, Asad asks
scholars to shift their attention to the concept religion and to recognize that assumptions
baked into the concept have distorted our grasp of the historical realities. However, also like
Smith, Asad does not draw a nonrealist conclusion.[18] For Asad, religion names a real thing
that would operate in the world even had the concept not been invented, namely, “a coherent
existential complex” (2001: 217). Asad’s critical aim is not to undermine the idea that
religion exists qua social reality but rather to undermine the idea that religion is essentially
an interior state independent of social power. He points out that anthropologists like Clifford
Geertz adopt a hermeneutic approach to culture that treats actions as if they are texts that say
something, and this approach has reinforced the attention given to the meaning of religious
symbols, deracinated from their social and historical context. Asad seeks to balance this bias
for the subjective with a disciplinary approach that sees human subjectivity as also the
product of social structures. Smith and Asad are therefore examples of scholars who critique
the concept religion without denying that it can still refer to something in the world,
something that exists even before it is named. They are able, so to speak, to look at one’s
conceptual window without denying that the window provides a perspective on things
outside.
Other critics have gone farther. They build upon the claims that the concept religion is an
invented category and that its modern semantic expansion went hand in hand with European
colonialism, and they argue that people should cease treating religion as if it corresponds to
something that exists outside the sphere of modern European influence. It is common today
to hear the slogan that there is no such “thing” as religion. In some cases, the point of
rejecting thing-hood is to deny that religion names a category, all the instances of which
focus on belief in the same kind of object—that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive
definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case, the objection bolsters a
functional definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a functionally distinct
kind of form of life. Here, the “no such thing” claim reflects the unsettled question,
mentioned above, about the grounds of substantive definitions of “religion”. In other cases,
the point of this objection is to deny that religion names a defining characteristic of any kind
—that is, the slogan is a rejection of all monothetic definitions of the concept.
Perhaps religion (or a religion, like Judaism) should always be referred to in the plural
(“Judaisms”) rather than the singular. In this case, the objection bolsters a polythetic
definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a distinct family of forms of life.
Here, the “no such thing” claim rejects the assumption that religion has an essence. Despite
their negativity, these two objections to the concept are still realist in that they do not deny
that the phrase “a religion” can correspond to a form of life operating in the world.
More radically, one sees a denial of this realism, for example, in the critique offered by
Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1962). Smith’s thesis is that in many different cultures, people
developed a concept for the individuals they considered pious, but they did not develop a
concept for a generic social entity, a system of beliefs and practices related to superempirical
realities. Before modernity, “there is no such entity [as religion and] … the use of a plural, or
with an article, is false” (1962: 326, 194; cf. 144). Smith recommends dropping religion. Not
only did those so described lack the concept, but the use of the concept also treats people’s
behavior as if the phrase “a religion” names something in addition to that behavior. A
methodological individualist, Smith denies that groups have any reality not explained by the
individuals who constitute them. What one finds in history, then, is religious people, and so
the adjective is useful, but there are no religious entities above and beyond those people, and
so the noun reifies an abstraction. Smith contends that
[n]either religion in general nor any one of the religions … is in itself an intelligible entity, a
valid object of inquiry or of concern either for the scholar or for the [person] of faith. (1962:
12)
More radical still are the nonrealists who argue that the concepts religion,
religions, and religious are all chimerical. Often drawing on post-structuralist arguments,
these critics propose that the notion that religions exist is simply an illusion generated by the
discourse about them (e.g., McCutcheon 1997; 2018; Fitzgerald 2000; 2007; 2017;
Dubuisson 1998; 2019). As Timothy Fitzgerald writes, the concept religion
picks out nothing and it clarifies nothing … the word has no genuine analytical work to do
and its continued use merely contributes to the general illusion that it has a genuine referent
…. (2000: 17, 14; also 4)
Advocates of this position sometimes call their approach the “Critical Study of Religion” or
simply “Critical Religion”, a name that signals their shift away from the pre-critical
assumption that religion names entities in the world and to a focus on who invented the
concept, the shifting contrast terms it has had, and the uses to which it has been put. [19] Like
the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g., Nye 2020), religion is a
fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and
deployed not to respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control people.
The classification of something as “religion” is not neutral but
a political activity, and one particularly related to the colonial and imperial situation of a
foreign power rendering newly encountered societies digestible and manipulable in terms
congenial to its own culture and agenda. (McCutcheon & Arnal 2012: 107)
As part of European colonial projects, the concept has been imposed on people who lacked it
and did not consider anything in their society “their religion”. In fact, the concept was for
centuries the central tool used to rank societies on a scale from primitive to civilized. To
avoid this “conceptual violence” or “epistemic imperialism” (Dubuisson 2019: 137), scholars
need to cease naturalizing this term invented in modern Europe and instead historicize it,
uncovering the conditions that gave rise to the concept and the interests it serves. The study
of religions outside Europe should end. As Timothy Fitzgerald writes, “The category
‘religion’ should be the object, not the tool, of analysis” (2000: 106; also 2017: 125; cf.
McCutcheon 2018: 18).
Inspired by the post-structuralist critiques that religion does not apply to cultures that lack
the concept, some historians have argued that the term should no longer be used to describe
any premodern societies, even in Europe. For example, Brent Nongbri (2013), citing
McCutcheon, argues that though it is common to speak of religions existing in the past,
human history until the concept emerged in modernity is more accurately understood as a
time “before religion”. His aim is “to dispel the commonly held idea that there is such a thing
as ‘ancient religion’” (2013: 8). Citing Nongbri, Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin (2016)
argue that the Latin religio and the Greek thrēskeia do not correspond to the modern
understanding of religion and those studying antiquity should cease translating them with
that concept. There was no “Roman religious reality”, they say (2016: 19). These historians
suggest that if a culture does not have the concept of X, then the reality of X does not exist
for that culture. Boyarin calls this position “nominalism”, arguing that religion is
not in any possible way a “real” object, an object that is historical or ontological, before the
term comes to be used. (2017: 25)
These critics are right to draw attention to the fact that in the mind of most contemporary
people, the concept religion does imply features that did not exist in ancient societies, but the
argument that religion did not exist in antiquity involves a sleight of hand. None of these
historians argues that people in antiquity did not believe in gods or other spiritual beings, did
not seek to interact with them with sacrifices and other rituals, did not create temples or
scriptures, and so on. If one uses Tylor’s definition of religion as belief in spiritual beings or
James’s definition of religion as adjusting one’s life to an unseen order—or any of the other
definitions considered in this entry—then religion did exist in antiquity. What these
historians are pointing out is that ancient practices related to the gods permeated their
cultures. As Nongbri puts it,
To be sure, ancient people had words to describe proper reverence of the gods, but … [t]he
very idea of “being religious” requires a companion notion of what it would mean to be “not
religious” and this dichotomy was not part of the ancient world; (2013: 4)
there was no “discrete sphere of religion existing prior to the modern period” (2019: 1, typo
corrected). And Barton and Boyarin:
The point is not … that there weren’t practices with respect to “gods” (of whatever sort) but
that these practices were not divided off into separate spheres …. (2016: 4)
Steve Mason also argues that religion did not exist in antiquity since religion is “a voluntary
sphere of activity, separate in principle” from politics, work, entertainment, and military
service (2019: 29). In short, what people later came to conceptualize as religion was in
antiquity not a freestanding entity. The nominalist argument, in other words, adds to the
definition of the concept religion a distinctively modern feature (usually some version of
“the separation of church and state”), and then argues that the referent of this now-
circumscribed concept did not exist in antiquity. Their argument is not that religion did not
exist outside modernity, but that modern religion did not exist outside modernity.
These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that religion is “out there” have a
realist alternative. According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human
conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect one’s life, whether or not
any human beings have identified it. This is true of things whose existence does not depend
on collective agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta particles,
and it is equally true of things whose existence does depend on collective agreement, like
kinship structures, linguistic rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social
structures holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a Uralic
language, and can be a member of a religion—even if they lack these concepts.
This realist claim that social structures have existed without being conceptualized raises the
question: if human beings had different ways of practicing religion since prehistoric times,
why and when did people “finally” create the taxon? Almost every scholar involved in the
reflexive turn says that religion is a modern invention.[20] The critique of the
concept religion then becomes part of their critique of modernity. Given the potent uses
of religion—to categorize certain cultures as godless and therefore inferior or, later, to
categorize certain cultures as superstitious and therefore backwards—the significance of the
critique of religion for postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is undeniable. Nevertheless, it
is not plausible that modern Europeans were the first to want a generic concept for different
ways of interacting with gods. It is easy to imagine that if the way that a people worship their
gods permeates their work, art, and politics, and they do not know of alternative ways, then it
would not be likely that they would have created a concept for it. There is little need for a
generic concept that abstracts a particular aspect of one’s culture as one option out of many
until one is in a sustained pluralistic situation. The actions that today are categorized as
religious practices—burial rites, the making of offerings, the imitation of divinized ancestors
—may have existed for tens of thousands of years without the practitioners experiencing that
diversity or caring to name it. Nevertheless, it is likely that a desire to compare the rules by
which different people live in relation to their gods would have emerged in many parts of the
world long before modernity. One would expect to find people developing such social
abstractions as cities and then empires emerged and their cultures came into contact with
each other. From this realist perspective, it is no surprise that, according to the detailed and
example-filled argument of Barton and Boyarin (2016), the first use of religion as a generic
social category, distinct from the concept of politics, for the ways that people interact with
gods is not a product of the Renaissance, the Reformation, or modern colonialism at all, but
can be found in the writings of Josephus (37–c. 100 CE) and Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220 CE).
[21]
From the realist perspective, it is no surprise to see the development of analogous terms in
medieval China, centuries before interaction with Europeans (Campany 2003, 2012, 2018)
and in medieval Islam (Abbasi 2020, 2021). The emergence of social kinds does not wait on
language, and the development of language for social kinds is not only a Western project. If
this is right, then the development of a concept for religion as a social genus is at least two
thousand years old, though the social reality so labeled would be much older.
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