There are few social scientists who have done as much scholarly research on religion as Christian Smith. Over the past three decades, he has interviewed hundreds of people, fielded numerous surveys, and written dozens of books. And in recent years, he has pushed beyond the boundaries of empirical social research into the neighboring domains of social theory, philosophy, and theology.Footnote 1 Anyone who studies or cares about religion will want to know what he has to say about it.
Apart from his early work on liberation theology in Latin AmericaFootnote 2, Smith's empirical research has focused almost exclusively on American Christianity and especially on American evangelicalism.Footnote 3 For the past several years, Smith has been spearheading a major research initiative on global religion at Notre Dame which has taken him to many other parts of the world. His latest book may be seen as the first fruit of this new intellectual itinerary. Though the book still draws heavily on Smith's voluminous knowledge of American Christianity, it also cautiously incorporates discussions of many other “world religions” as well—as any general theory of religion should.
Of course, there is no shortage of theorizing about religion at the present moment. On the contrary, dozens of books have flooded out of the presses over the last ten years. Not since the decades after World War II have American academics written so much about religion in such a short span of time. A good deal of the recent writing has been the work of humanists and humanistic social scientists. Scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies have been busily interrogating the conceptual history of the word “religion” and its Siamese twin, “secularism.” Another major stream of writing has emanated from the pens of life scientists and their allies in analytic philosophy. Researchers in fields such as evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive science claim to have found the roots of religiosity in our genes and our brains.
While this work has filled in some gaps in the scholarly understanding of religion, it has opened up others. Not surprisingly perhaps, the humanist literature often has an idealist slant. Its shibboleth is “discourse,” specifically, the “discourse of religion.” Meanwhile, the scientific literature often has a reductionist bent. The goal is typically to “explain” religion in scientific terms, and, more often than not, to explain it away. This work has taught us a great deal about the connections between Western colonialism and Western understandings of religion, on one hand, and about human evolution and human religiosity, on the other. What is usually missing though, is sustained and informed attention to religious practices, communities, elites and institutions, and how they have changed over time.Footnote 4
For this reason, Smith's latest treatise, Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters, is not only an important book but also a necessary one. It provides a much needed addition and corrective to perspectives of the humanists and evolutionists. Smith is happy to concede that the religion concept has a complex history that is intertwined with Western colonialism. But this does not stop him from proposing a general definition of religion. Following fellow sociologist Martin Riesebrodt,Footnote 5 Smith argues that religion is best understood in terms of “practices,” specifically, practices oriented towards “superhuman powers.” With this definition in hand, Smith then proceeds to tackle a series of other difficult issues, including what makes religion different from culture, why some people are more religious than others, and, last but not least, the infamous “future of religion” question. In doing so, he draws heavily on his own recent writings on virtue ethics and human personhood and on the philosophy of science known as Critical Realism. And in a clever piece of intellectual jiu-jitsu, he uses the evolutionists’ universalizing claims to challenge the humanists’ historicizing ones and also the New Atheists’ triumphalist ones: religion is not specific to modernity, he argues, and neither is it headed for the dustbin of history.
Riesebrodt and Smith provide an effective response to humanists’ deconstruction of the religion concept. In defining religion in terms of practice, however, they open up another question: how and why do some practices come to be defined as “religious” in the first place rather than, say, “cultural” or “spiritual”? And what difference does language make in all of this? Addressing this question requires systematic attention to the interaction between practices and discourses and the role of power in their outcomes. For help with these questions, we may turn to the work of a number of non-American anthropologists working on non-Western religions. These scholars are well aware that “religion” is not a “native category” in, say, India and China, and that the “discourse of religion” was often introduced into non-Western cultures via Western colonialism. But they reject the view that these cultures were mere palimpsests onto which the discourse of religion was inscribed via the power of the colonizers. They insist that “colonial encounters” were complex, two-way interactions involving cultural translation and cultural appropriation, which affected the culture of the metropole as well as that of the colonies. In this way, they restore the voice and agency of the colonized to the discourse of religion's history.
What they do not do—and what social science cannot do—is tell faith leaders how to respond to the world that globalization has wrought. Here, guidance must come from within the faith traditions themselves.
Religion as Discourse
To understand why Smith's book is necessary and important, one must first be clear about what it is pushing back against: the discourse of religion argument. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in or around an American religious studies department during the last decade or two will have heard or read some version of it; it is the orthodoxy of the moment. The origins of the argument go back to the early 1980s, when postmodernism was still the rage. Canonical texts include Edward Said's Orientalism, Talal Asad's, Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular, and David Chidester's Empire of Religion.Footnote 6 What these works have in common is a neo-Foucauldian perspective which makes language or discourse the medium of all personal experience and also the font of all social power. Our experiences, our identities, and our very subjectivity are structured by language. Those who control language, therefore control. . .well. . .everything, even though they themselves are controlled by it. And those who seek liberation and autonomy and authenticity must disentangle themselves from the snares of language. They must deconstruct, subvert, and disrupt dominant discourses, categories, and binaries, such as “religious/secular.” That indeed is the central task of critical scholarship on religion. Or so they claim.
The specifics of the argument are more or less as follows. The word “religion” is of Western origins. It derives from the Latin religio. It did not have the same meaning in ancient times that it does today. It first acquired that meaning during the Reformation era. The first chapter in this process was the breakup of Latin Christendom. The religion category provided a means of accommodating and managing the confessional pluralism that ensued. The “religion/secularity” binary was further refined and sharpened through overseas travel. Colonial officials and Christian missionaries used it to distinguish true religion from pagan superstition. Later, Orientalist scholars and amateur anthropologists used it to establish a gradated hierarchy, with “indigenous religions” on the bottom, “world religions” in the middle, and Christianity on the top, with Protestantism forming the capstone. By the early twentieth century, in fact, scholarly definitions of religion sounded suspiciously similar to Protestant understandings of Christianity. Amongst other things, religion was creedal, personal, and private. In this way, Protestant “religion” went hand in hand with liberal secularism. Both sought to squeeze religion into the confines of the individual conscience. Throughout its history, then, the religious/secular binary has been an instrument of cultural domination.
The argument is not always stated quite this bluntly, of course. Indeed, some of the writing on this topic often feels willfully obscure. To my knowledge, the clearest rendition can be found in Brent Nongbri's, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. Footnote 7 Nongbri lucidly synthesizes previous work and skillfully assembles supporting evidence into a readable synopsis. Nongbri begins his narrative in Classical Antiquity. Through a careful consideration of the etymological evidence, he shows that the Roman word “religio” did not mean quite the same thing as the modern “religion” concept and also that it had no precise equivalent in other ancient languages. The Latin religio was at best an imperfect translation of the Greek thrēskeia and Arabic dīn. Nongbri then goes on to survey some of the interreligious disputes of Late Antiquity, arguing that Christians, Manicheans, Buddhists, and other movements of the time did not use the word “religion” to describe one another. He then turns his attention to the Reformation era. He contends that the religious/secular binary served a dual function within early modern Europe: it provided a conceptual envelope capacious enough to contain the various Christian confessions and sects; and it made it possible for secular rulers to stuff religion into the pigeonhole of private life, where it could be more easily managed. The religious/secular binary also proved useful outside of Europe and for much the same reasons. It made it easier to categorize and contain the religions of the colonized. Enter the nineteenth century Orientalists. Drawing on the observations of colonial administrators and Christian missionaries, they developed a comprehensive framework for the “world religions.” Thus, was the cacophony of India turned into the symphony of “Hinduism,” and the philosophy of “Confucianism” transformed into the religion of China. Meanwhile, the “little traditions” of aboriginal peoples were carefully sorted into lower drawers with labels like “totemism,” “animism,” and “shamanism.” Over time, the writings of literate cultures were assembled into collections of sacred texts, translated into European tongues, and salted with the word “religion” to make them more palatable for Western consumers. Just as physical space was partitioned into non-overlapping nation-states, Nongbri observes, so cultural space was now cut up into distinct religions. And not by accident, Nongbri argues, but as a means of reinforcing Western domination.
By the end of this passionately argued book, one expects a dramatic conclusion of some sort: “There is no such thing as ‘religion’! Never utter the word again! Renounce Western hegemony!” But Nongbri is too careful a scholar for that sort of grandstanding. In fact, Before Religion ends with the following, carefully qualified summary:
[R] eligion is not a universally applicable first-order concept that matches a native discursive field in every culture across time and throughout history. If we are going to use religion as a second-order, redescriptive concept, we must always be explicit that we are doing so.Footnote 8
More plainly: cultural translations are never perfect; words can change their meaning over time; and the scholar needs to be conscious of the difference between academic and everyday language. These are important maxims, to be sure, not only in religious studies, of course, but in all of the human sciences. But do they really render a general definition of religion impossible? Nongbri himself points to one way out of the discursive impasse when he notes en passant that when “the word ‘religion’ [is] used in a more mundane sense,” it is “used mostly to discuss things involving gods or other superhuman beings and the technologies for interacting with such beings.”Footnote 9 He then goes on to add that a definition of this sort also seems to travel fairly well across space and time.
What if we followed this suggestion and defined religion in terms of practice rather than discourse? This is the starting point for Riesebrodt's theory, which provides the starting point for Smith's.
Religion as Practice
At the beginning of the book-length “chapter” of Economy and Society devoted to “the sociology of religion,” Max Weber famously defers the task of defining his subject matter until the very end and then fails to follow through on his promise. In a work replete with careful definitions, religion remains carefully undefined. Martin Riesebrodt's Promise of Salvation attempts to make good on Weber's broken promise. It offers a clear definition of religion right at the outset. Religions, says Riesebrodt, are best understood as “systems of practices” that are oriented towards “superhuman powers.”Footnote 10
Riesebrodt readily concedes that the meaning of the religion concept “cannot be universalized on the basis of . . . a theory of discourse.”Footnote 11 But he argues that a general definition of religion can still be built on a theory of social practices. While some social theorists draw a sharp distinction between theories of action and theories of practice, Riesebrodt argues that they are interchangeable. By practices, he simply means actions oriented towards other actors, be they individual or collective or via word or movement. In the case of religious practices, action is oriented towards “superhuman” actors. These actors may be superhuman persons (e.g., gods or spirits) or superhuman powers (e.g., forces or laws).
Why do people engage in such practices in the first place? They may sometimes do so out of a sense of awe or obligation, in response to the “starry skies above” or “the moral law within.” But they are more often motivated by “promises of salvation” (Heilsversprechen). Riesebrodt intends the term “salvation” (Heil) in the broadest sense: it encompasses both this-worldly and otherworldly goods. Not only “salvation” in the Christian or Muslim sense of eternal life, then, but also in the root senses of “life,” “health,” “well-being,” and all that conduces to them.
While the concept of “religion” may indeed be specific to the modern West, argues Riesebrodt, the practice of religion is well-nigh universal—and, what is more, universally recognized as such. Riesebrodt backs up this claim with numerous examples: Herodotus and other chroniclers of the ancient world catalogued the religious practices of other peoples; Jesuit missionaries to early modern China recognized Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars as cultural equivalents and vice versa; conquerors often destroyed the religious places of the conquered and erected new ones in their place; and emperors of multi-religious empires accommodated the religious calendars of their various subjects. In short: “Religious activity has always been distinguished from nonreligious activity, religious specialists from other specialists, sacred places from profane places, and holy times from profane times.”Footnote 12
Having clearly specified what religion is and why people engage in it, Riesebrodt then proceeds, in good Weberian fashion, to introduce various conceptual and typological distinctions. He begins by distinguishing “religion” from “religious traditions” and “religiousness.” Religious traditions are “cultural ways of life” that “contain systems of religious practices.”Footnote 13 On Riesebrodt's definition, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are best understood as “religious traditions.” “Religiousness” refers to “the subjective appropriation and interpretation of religion” and religious traditions.Footnote 14
Smith takes Riesebrodt's theory of religion as the point of departure for his own. So what's the difference between them?
Religion is Real
Smith's latest book, Religion, differs from Riesebrodt's in both philosophical orientation and theoretical scope. Riesebrodt's approach is avowedly neo-Weberian. This means that he understands the religion concept as a heuristic device that the social scientist uses to highlight certain “phenomena” for purposes of analysis. From this perspective, religion exists only in the world of perception, not in the world as such. It also means that our “value commitments”—including our religious values—are the products of human will and decision. (Where values are concerned, Riesebrodt follows Weber who follows Nietzsche.) They are ultimately “subjective” and “irrational.”
Smith is not a neo-Weberian; he is a Critical Realist. As such, he presumes that the religion concept corresponds (however imperfectly) to something that actually exists apart from our theories about it. He does not think that religion is just an “analytical construct” fashioned by the scholar. This difference in philosophical orientation has little impact on Smith's actual definition of religion, however; it is virtually identical to Risesbrodt's.Footnote 15 But it does make a difference in Smith's explanation of religion.
Riesebrodt does not really have much to say about why humans are religious. He mostly just takes human religiosity as an empirical given—a phenomena one observes in virtually all times and places. To the degree that he does try to explain it, he does so in action-theoretic terms. On his account, religious practices are just a means to certain ends. Why people pursue these ends, and why they employ these particular means—about this, he has little if anything to say. Why not? Presumably, because doing so would violate Weber's first commandment: the principle of “value-freedom.” It forbids social scientists qua scientists from introducing “value judgments” into their work.
Smith has no such compunctions. He thinks that human beings try to attain certain ends. And he does not think these ends are subjective; he views them as objective. Why? Because he understands human beings as an evolved species with certain innate and widely shared dispositions and vulnerabilities. Like other species, he argues, humans tend to flourish under certain conditions and falter under others—conditions that are fairly general but also reasonably specifiable. In Smith's view, these include “bodily security,” “moral affirmation,” and “social belonging.”Footnote 16 For Smith, it should be added, religion is not only about the “promise of salvation (Heil)” but also about the threat of bad events (Unheil) such as damnation, illness, and misfortune.Footnote 17
Smith's naturalistic account of human personhood also provides the foundation for his explanation of religion—of why humans use religious means to pursue these ends. He argues that religion arises out of the dynamic tension between our species’ unique capacities and its general limitations. The reason that religion is unique to humans is that other animals do not possess sufficient “capacities for abstract reasoning, creative imagination and symbolization.”Footnote 18 Only humans are able to imagine an unseen world of superhuman powers capable of influencing the visible world and to invent rituals’ means of communicating with and influencing them. The reason that religion arises among humans is that they do not have the capacity to achieve the goods they seek and avoid the bads they fear, at least not on their own. Many humans therefore seek to enlist the aid of superhuman powers.
One of the most surprising and interesting twists in Smith's theorizing is his appropriation of the naturalistic accounts of religion set forth in recent years by the evolutionary sciences and their philosophical allies.Footnote 19 Most sociologists have been pretty resistant to such accounts and for at least two reasons. The first is the historic connection between evolutionary biology and the eugenics movement during the early-twentieth century and between population genetics and racial essentialism during the late-twentieth century. These episodes left successive generations of sociologists suspicious of biological claims about human nature and, more generally, about biological influences on social life (though the rise of social epigenetics has sparked a bit of a rapprochement in recent years). The second reason for these misgivings is the contemporary connection between evolutionism and scientism, with some neo-Darwinians advocating strongly deterministic and reductionistic accounts of human behavior. Scientism of this sort is offensive to the epistemological sensibilities of most sociologists, insofar as they strive to leave room for human agency in their theoretical systems and believe that the social world is a reality sui generis. It is especially offensive to sociologists of religion. It offends Weberians because it seems to deny a core assumption that Weber took over from German idealism, namely, the “inner freedom” of the human “personality.” It also offends Durkheimians, the other major faction, because it emphasizes the biological sources of human religiosity, often to the exclusion of the social ones. For all these reasons, there has been very little uptake of evolutionary accounts of religion amongst sociologists of religion.
Smith does not share this resistance in part because he rejects the idealistic and reductionistic assumptions that underlie and trigger it. As a Critical Realist, he is perfectly happy to accept the idea that human personality rests on a biological substrate without, however, being fully reducible to it. He does not see biology as a threat to agency. Smith is even prepared to consider the possibility that variations in personal religiosity may be partly due to variations in “biologically grounded genetic and neurological traits.”Footnote 20 But Smith is equally adamant in defending the possibility of “downward causation” in which higher-order structures (e.g., social structures) influence lower-order ones (individual religiosity). Smith is able to steer this via media between idealism and reductionism because of his commitment to the Critical Realist doctrine of emergence, i.e., the view that wholes can be greater than the sums of their parts and, more specifically, that structured wholes sometimes possess “causal powers” not possessed by their parts in isolation.Footnote 21
This brings us to another unusual aspect of Smith's theory of religion: its emphasis on causation, a core concern of Critical Realism. For Smith, processes of “causal attribution” are the foundation for human religiosity. To be religious, at base, is to incorporate superhuman powers into one's explanations of human events.Footnote 22
It should be noted that this is a somewhat unusual approach within sociology. Most sociological theories of religion focus on experience and emotion. Some follow William James and Rudolf Otto by emphasizing individual experiences of “transcendence” and “heightened states” of emotion. Here, one thinks of the phenomenological approach developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann or, more recently, of the neo-pragmatist account set forth by Hans Joas.Footnote 23 Other sociologists have followed Emile Durkheim by stressing collective emotion and experience, specifically ritually-induced experiences of “collective effervescence.” Here, one thinks, for instance, of the “strong program” in cultural sociology developed by my colleague, Jeffrey Alexander, which places the sacred/profane binary at the very center of human culture.Footnote 24 Some others focus more on rationality and cognition. Most in this group take their cues from Weber and Troeltsch, who conceived of religions as “world pictures”—cosmological maps that social actors draw on to interpret events and make their way through the world. A few have also followed Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone, who analyze religion through the lens of economic theory.Footnote 25 They conceive of religious institutions as “firms” that provide certain goods (e.g., eternal salvation), and religious believers as “consumers” trying to maximize their “utility” (not only in this world but also the next). (Ironically, the “religious economies paradigm” is the least influential of the foregoing approaches within academic sociology but also the most influential within public discourse.)
Insofar as it emphasizes rationality and cognition, Smith's theory is (again) closest to the Weberian tradition. But the immediate inspiration actually comes from outside of sociology, namely, from neo-Darwinian theory, and, more specifically from Justin Barrett's theory of the “Hyperactive Agency Detective Device” (HADD).Footnote 26 Like Steven Pinker and other cognitive scientists,Footnote 27 Barrett argues that the human mind (read: brain) is not a “blank slate,” as John Locke once claimed, but a jumble of “modules” that have evolved over time for highly specific purposes. One such purpose is “not being eaten.” Over time, natural selection led to the development of a highly sensitive apparatus for detecting foreign agents in the surrounding environment. This module helped our ancestors to evade predators. But it also led them to see agents everywhere they looked: in flitting shadows, rustling leaves, and howling winds. This, said Barrett, is why so many humans believe in God. They are hardwired to see agents behind events. Over the last decade, HADD theory has become an omnipresent meme in evolutionary accounts of religion.
While Smith accepts the premise of the theory, he does not accept the conclusion that most evolutionary theorists of religion draw from it, namely, that the human propensity for religion is a bit like our propensity for back problems: an unfortunate side-effect of a functional adaptation—HADD in one case, upright gaits in the other. For what looks like a side-effect to the cognitive scientist could be read as the main effect by the religious believer. A theist might just as easily argue that HADD is a providentially generated means of opening up human minds to divine presence. On Smith's reading, then, HADD implies methodological agnosticism rather than methodological atheism.Footnote 28
In an interesting excursus, Smith extends this line of argument to “the war between science and religion” thesis.Footnote 29 On his view, the conflict arises out of a specific (mis)understanding of science and religion: a deterministic and reductionistic understanding of science qua inviolable, physical laws, on the one hand, and, on the other, a literalistic and simplistic version of religion as a set of empirical propositions about history and cosmology. Smith regards both conceptions as mistaken. He argues that the conflict is not between religion and science per se so much as scientism and fundamentalism. The conflict disappears if one embraces an “orthodox” theology and a Critical Realist understanding of science. If one understands God as both “radically other” and yet “completely immanent” within Creation, then there is no inherent conflict between divine power and natural law. God is no longer confined to the gaps. The miracle is being itself. Conversely, if one understands causation in nature as complex, contingent, and multi-leveled, then a certain amount of chance and unpredictability will be an inherent feature of the world. God doesn't need to work the gaps any more. There is plenty of room for good luck and maybe even for divine providence. Smith is not trying to make a scientific argument for God's existence. He is simply arguing that religious belief and scientific knowledge are not incompatible so long as they are properly understood.
What about the relationship between religion and culture? Where does the one end and the other begin? Smith does not address this question explicitly. But he does have an answer or rather, two answers, one in terms of causes, the other in terms of effects. Smith readily acknowledges that non-religious forms of culture have many of the same causal powers as religious ones. Other cultural practices (e.g., art, science, and sports) can also be sources of motivation and meaning in people's lives. But not to the same degree, for religion can “generate a level of intensity, depth, and persistence in people's motivations, commitments, and endurance not often seen in non-religious life.”Footnote 30 This intensity gap derives from belief in superhuman powers that place greater demands on humans but also promise greater rewards. Perhaps this is why people of faith have been at the forefront of so many movements for change. Of course, religious practice also has many other effects as well. Amongst other things, on “identity,” “community,” and “experience.” Indeed, Smith lists some eighteen “secondary effects” of this sort. In these and other ways, religion becomes entangled with culture.
The practice-centered approach championed by Riesebrodt and Smith enables the social scientific observer to make a clear, second-order distinction between religion and culture. But it does not account for the first-order distinctions that social actors themselves make between various domains of practice. For that, we need to “bring discourse back in”—but without kicking practice back out. For that, in other words, we need field theory.
Religion as Field
Is yoga a religious practice or a cultural practice? Or is it actually a form of exercise or a type of therapy? What about meditation? Or meditation bells, for that matter? What does it mean when they are sounded during a Christian liturgy? The answers to such questions will depend a lot on whom, where, and when you ask. A devout Hindu might give one answer; a secular Indian another. People in rural China would give different answers from people in Midtown Manhattan. And most people in the late-eighteenth century wouldn't even understand the questions at all.
Useful as it is for other purposes, Riesebrodt's and Smith's theoretical approach does not give us much leverage over questions like these. To address them, we need at least four more conceptual tools. The first thing we need to do is to put “discourse” back into our tool box. Specifically, we need to look at the structure of the discursive field in a given context. “Discursive field?” Imagine the word cloud that forms around the vocable “religion,” its pre-modern equivalents, and its non-Western translations. In the modern West, the cloud would have large plumes around terms like “culture” and “spirituality” and perhaps also smaller and more distant ones around “therapy” or “well-being.” The discourse around vernacular terms in (say) pre-modern China or India would of course look very different. And that is consequential.
The second conceptual tool that will prove helpful here is “symbolic boundaries.”Footnote 31 Symbolic boundaries exist where discursive binaries map onto social practices. Some boundaries are relatively clear and uncontested. For example, few Westerners would regard a Catholic mass as a “secular” rather than a “religious” practice, though some people in some contexts (an Easter mass in the USA, for instance) might also experience it as a “cultural” practice. Other boundaries are very blurry and contested. Consider the yoga example above. Most yoga practitioners in the USA probably understand it as a form or “exercise” or “therapy.” But more than a few will understand it as “spiritual” and perhaps even “religious.” Moreover, how Westerners experience yoga will influence, and be influenced by, where they practice it and with whom: in a multi-purpose exercise studio at the local gym with a spandex clad fitness instructor or in a special purpose, temple-like setting led by an Indian guru.
The third conceptual tool that we need is “artefacts.”Footnote 32 Here, the artefacts concept is used in the philosophical sense to refer to any human-made and purpose-built object. It includes the archeological connotation of “ancient artefacts” but also encompasses present-day objects. Sometimes, human artefacts function as “boundary objects” or boundary markers—the material expression of a discursive boundary.Footnote 33 A statue of a Hindu goddess might serve as a boundary marker for a “spiritual” space. A wooden box full of yoga mats suggests that you are entering a “fitness” space. The physical practices might be the same in each space, however, the practitioners will probably experience them somewhat differently. But some artefacts can also cross boundaries. The Hindu statue might find its way into the “South Asia” wing of a Western art museum or, for that matter, into the corner of a wealthy, Westerner's home. Likewise, a Tibetan prayer bell might travel from the Buddhist monastery where it was fashioned into the sanctuary of a “spiritually” oriented American mega-church. In this case, the artefact serves to blur a boundary, the boundary between “religion” and “spirituality.”
The fourth and final tool that we need is “social fields.” It will enable us to put human agency and social conflict back into our account. Field theory comes in various flavors; the most popular flavor—also my personal favorite—is “Bourdieusian.” It was invented by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.Footnote 34 He has two favorite metaphors he uses to illustrate how social fields work. Sometimes he likens them to magnetic fields and social actors to iron filings. Put people into a field and they will arrange themselves—or rather, the forces of the field will arrange them—into characteristic patterns, just like iron filings in a magnetic field in a middle school science class. What patterns? On Bourdieu's account, the forces in social fields are exerted along two main axes: a vertical axis of hierarchy and a horizontal axis of orthodoxy. This means that struggle within fields will generally be structured around conflicts between dominant groups and dominated ones and between orthodox factions and heterodox ones. These cleavages can be cross-cutting as well. This magnetic field metaphor highlights the objective character of social fields: they have a certain structure that exists apart from the individuals who populate them.
To capture the subjective aspect of social fields, Bourdieu often uses the metaphor of a playing field (e.g., a football field or a basketball court). Like playing fields, social fields typically have boundaries, rules, players, and teams. Consider the social field of higher education. It has social boundaries that exclude certain people (people without the requisite academic credentials). It has rules about how one is admitted into and advances within the field (via various types of academic work). It is made up of numerous different players (students, faculty, administrators, and so on) who are seeking to advance in various ways. And it is broken up into various teams that compete with one another for recognition and resources (e.g., academic disciplines, professional schools, and various universities). Most players simply seek to move up or on within the existing structure of the field. But others seek to change the structure of the field by altering the boundaries, rules, players or teams.
Bourdieu's theory of social fields was originally inspired by Weber's sociology of religion. But he himself never systematically applied it to the study of religion, and other social scientists have only recently begun doing so. One of the most sophisticated efforts in this direction is David Palmer and Vincent Goosaert's monumental study of The Religious Question in Modern China.Footnote 35 If one were only ever going to read one book on Chinese religion, this would be the one. It charts the evolution of the religious field in China from the Late Qing through the Communist Revolution right up to the present day. Drawing on their own extensive fieldwork in contemporary China as well as an exhaustive reading of the secondary literature on the history and anthropology of Chinese religion, they recount the various mutations that the religious field in modern China has undergone since the late-nineteenth century.
I will not try to summarize their account here; it is too rich and complex for that. Instead, I will simply note how it differs from and improves upon both a purely discourse-centered and practiced-centered account. Neither “religion” nor “secularity” were “native categories” in pre-modern China; they were introduced into China by Western missionaries and modernizers. About this, the discourse theorists are quite right. But they are wrong to imply that the “discourse of religion” was simply imposed on China or that the new Chinese discourse of religion was simply a carbon copy of the original. The Western missionaries and modernizers had Chinese allies, who turned the new categories to their own purposes, e.g., to attack some traditional religious practices as “superstitious” or to place themselves on the side of “modernity” and “progress.” This is not to say that there was no “religion” in China before this time. Ritual communications with superhuman powers were not imported into China in the cargo holds of Western ships. About this, the practice-theorists are absolutely right. But they do not provide us with the tools we need to understand how various practices—and artefacts—were mapped onto the first-order categories contained in the new word cloud that formed around the religious/secular binary. In part, this is because that word cloud was not identical to the Western one, but it is also because there were competing maps and heated and sometimes violent struggles over which map was authoritative. In short, while the practice-theoretic approach provides a relatively stable foundation for a second-order definition of religion, it does not allow us to explain shifting boundaries and mappings of the religious field.
Religion and Globalization
For the better part of a century now, most social scientific analysis of religion has been framed within the master narrative of “secularization.” It would be too simple to say that secularization theory has been “falsified,” much less that the world is currently undergoing a process of “de-secularization.” Within Western Europe, after all, the predictions of secularization have proven all too accurate. Even within the United States, rates of religious belief and practice are now showing unmistakable signs of rapid decline.
But there is also much that the secularization narrative misses—the profound and paradoxical effects of globalization, for example. Of course, the movement of religious people, artefacts, and ideas around the globe is nothing new. The spread of the various world religions provides the obvious counter-example. But for much of the modern era, at least, this movement was heavily constrained and relatively unidirectional: constrained by the boundaries of the nation-state and directed from “the West” to “the rest.” This is what has changed.
The social geographer, David Harvey, coined a phrase that succinctly captures this change: “time-space compression.”Footnote 36 Globalization means that the amount of time that it takes to traverse a given increment of space has decreased, and vice versa. The effects this has had on the global economy are well-known: a growing and accelerating movement of people, goods, and information around the world. And so are the social dislocations: rapid urbanization, skyrocketing inequality, and rampant “disruption,” to name a few. National governments have only a limited ability to contain and ameliorate these changes.
The effects that globalization has had on religion are as yet poorly understood. The most obvious effect is pluralization. The likelihood that any given individual will encounter a person, object, or idea from an unfamiliar faith tradition has almost certainly increased in recent decades, along with the frequency of such encounters. Rapid advances in information and communications technologies allow texts and ideas to flow across or around national and cultural boundaries. The canonical texts of various traditions are now just a Google search and a mouse click away. Meanwhile, rapid increases in the voluntary and involuntary movement of people within and between nation-states mean that more and more of these encounters will now be face-to-face.
A related effect is hybridization. The likelihood that persons, objects, and ideas from different faith traditions will be brought into durable relations with each other has probably also increased with globalization, as has the frequency of such hybrids. These hybrid relations can take many forms. Sometimes, they are commodified, as when a religious artefact becomes a decorative item adorning a person's body or dwelling. At other times, they are syncretistic, as when ideas or practices from different faith traditions are blended together in an individual's personal spirituality or a group's communal rituals. At still other times, they are social, as in the case of cross-religious friendships or marriages.
But these trends have also catalyzed counter-trends—powerful ones. In this way, the trend towards pluralization has sparked a counter-trend towards homogenization. This counter-trend is visible at various geographical scales and in religious and secular registers. The same improvements in communications and transportation that drive pluralization and hybridization also facilitate homogenization. People can and do now isolate themselves in online echo-chambers of the religiously likeminded, for example, where their beliefs and prejudices will be continually affirmed and sustained. Or they can sort themselves into equally homogeneous offline communities as well, where they will be unlikely to have any unmediated encounters with religious or cultural others. Nor is the counter-trend towards homogenization confined to private life. It is increasingly evident in public life as well, not only in ethno-nationalist movements that seek to (re)institute racial supremacy in various parts of the world, but also in religious nationalist movements claiming to defend a particular “civilization” — “Hindu,” “Judeo-Christian,” “Islamic,” or whatever.
If homogenization is the passive-aggressive form of this counter-trend, then purification is the actively-aggressive variant. Instead of voluntary segregation of the religiously or culturally like-minded into sectarian communities, it entails the involuntary expulsion of religious others from the body social. Purification occurs in varying intensities and forms. One low-intensity form involves the symbolic expulsion of a religious other from the national community, as when Islam is declared to be irreconcilable with “liberal democracy” (or “Western values” or whatever). A high-intensity form involves the physical expulsion of a religious or cultural other from the national territory, as when the Rohingya minority was driven Myanmar.
Social science provides helpful tools for describing and explaining such processes after the fact or from afar. In this way, it can provide historical and comparative context that may help faith communities to understand the roots and the effects of globalization on religion today. But it cannot provide much guidance about how religious communities should respond to them. This is the point at which sociology must give way to theology.
