Religous Studies Program

INTRODUCTION TO RELIGION

ORGANIZING QUESTIONS

1. What is the difference between the religious and social scientific perspectives on religion?

2. What are the essential commonalities and differences among the psychological, anthropological, and sociological perspectives on religion?

3. What are the different sociological approaches to conceptualizing religion?

4. How can magic be distinguished?

5. What is the difference between being "religious" and "spiritual"?

RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWLEDGE ABOUT RELIGION

Revelatory Explanation

Deity created religion through the process of revelation

Deity created the world and humans, established the principles and laws by which the world operates, intervenes in history, alters the normal course of events, and speaks through prophets

Through prophetic revelation, deity deliberately adds to human knowledge

Natural Knowledge of God Explanation

All human beings are born with a fundamental awareness of the divine, a rudimentary knowledge that some greater power is ultimately responsible for what they experience (Wonder and complexity of nature, beauty in the universe, experience of the seasons, complexity of life forms)

All religions build on this fundamental awareness and make sense of it

Religions are diverse because awareness of the greater power is vague and diffuse

The story of the blind man and the elephant

SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVES ON KNOWLEDGE ABOUT RELIGION

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Study of primitive religion arose within the context of evolutionary theory.

Basic assumption – complex, heterogeneous present arose out of a simpler, more uniform past

Animism - belief that inanimate as well as animate objects possess a life principle or soul of some kind that are conceived of anthropormorphically (Must be deferred to, can be placated, are dangerous)

Polytheism - belief in multiple deities

Monotheism - belief in a single deity

Edward Tylor

Tylor defined religion as the "belief in spiritual beings."

Dreams, possess, reflections lead humans to posit a spiritual entity - a soul - separate yet connected to the body

The dream experience is interpreted as one of the soul. Individuals know they are asleep but also are somewhere else

Max Muller

Since prehistoric people saw other people cause events, they reasoned that everything that happens must be caused by other human or humanlike agents

A. R. Radcliffe Brown

Religion expresses the prime values of a society and helps to perpetuate these values and the society itself. Things that have social value are elevated to having spiritual value

E. Franklin Frazer

Mental progress evolved from magic (sympathetic and imitative) to religion to science

Sympathetic Magic (drinking the blood of an ox for strength)

Imitative Magic (drumming to produce thunderhead clouds)

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Walter Huston Clark

Humans have four wishes/drives (security, response, recognition, new experience) that account for the need and appeal of religion

George Spinks

Religion fulfills fundamental human needs by explaining the uncertainties and terrors that continually threaten to overwhelm the individual

Sigmund Freud

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities." It is a dramatization, projected into cosmic order, of sentiments, fears and longings that develop from the relationship of child to parents. "If one attempts to assign religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."

Religious practices are the expression of unconscious psychological forces. Humans also have a basic desire to control the terrifying forces that surround them

Religion is a means of sublimating the primitive instincts that society represses. God characters are the projections of wishes and conflicts within the person

The model for control is the child’s father, which is projected as a God character.

Religion stems primarily from the sense of guilt derived partly from the Oedipus complex and attempts by the male to construct a father image after his love affair with his mother and the ritual killing of his father

SOCIOLOGICAL

Emile Durkheim

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things (things set apart and forbidden) which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them

Religion is primarily a system of ideas with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are members.

The object of religious veneration, therefore, is society itself

Karl Marx

Economic forces are the principal factors in shaping human behavior. Ideas, values, and beliefs are shaped by economic forces

Religion is an expression of prevailing economic relationships

For the elites, religion serves as a tool of oppression, a rationalization and justification for elite’s own power and privilege

DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION

Substantive Definitions: Focus is on the substantive, essential characteristics of religion

Issue of whether referent should be gods, beings, powers

Issue of whether referent should be belief or action

Issue of whether emphasis should be on separation of sacred and profane

Functional Definitions: Focus is on what religion does, how it functions for individuals and groups

Issue is what are the ultimate problems of human life

Issue is what kinds of belief and practice systems to include (capitalism, communism, nationalism, science)

Substantive Definitions:

Melford Spiro -- Religion is an institution consisting of cultural patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings

Peter Berger -- Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established

Roland Robertson -- Religious culture is that set of beliefs and symbols pertaining to a distinction between an empirical and super-empirical transcendent reality; the affairs of the empirical being subordinated in significance to the non-empirical

Functional Definition

J. Milton Yinger -- Religion can be defined as a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life (death, suffering, evil, injustice)

Robert Bellah -- Religion is a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate people to the ultimate conditions of their existence.

Substantive and Functional Definition

Emile Durkheim -- A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred thing, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into a single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them

Other Types of Definitions

Felicitas Goodman -- Religion is an ancient part of human culture. It shares cross-culturally a set of universals, namely, ritual, the religious trance and its attendant ecstasy, the alternate reality, ascription to the alternate reality of changes in fortune and rituals of divination, a system of ethics and a named category.

William James -- "Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul"

Clifford Geertz -- Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in (people) by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic

CLASS DEFINITION OF RELIGION

Religion is the social form that is the product of the social construction of a transcendent realm (world, sphere, level, plane, power, force) that possesses qualitatively different attributes, the sacred, which distinguish it from the profane, everday realm. The social construction of religion involves creating narratives that describe the relationship between the sacred and profane (myth), procedures through which a relationship of the sacred and profane is maintained (ritual), and social collectivities through which adherents organize themselves (church). The social construction of religion involves the mobilization of symbolic and organizational power that operates as a system of meaning, order, and control.

RELIGION VERSUS MAGIC
(The characteristic of religion is listed first and of magic second for each item)

1. Sense of a "group of common believers: a church

No church or group consciousness involved

2. Moral ethos, or a system of ethics to guide behavior

No moral ethos or systematic pattern of ethics

3. Rites are meaningful; they reinforce patterns of belief

Rites not necessarily meaningful; they are used to cast a spell or make something happen

4. Rites occur calendrically

Rites occur at critical (crisis) times

5. Functions for both the individual and the structure

Functions only for individuals, not for social structure

6. Participation is open; leader leads entire group in performance of ritual

Leader is only one to know ritual and how to perform it; others present are passive

7. Worship of transcendent Being or Power as intrinsically worthy of one's attention

Manipulation of impersonal, transcendent power for utilitarian reasons

THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF MAGIC AND RELIGION

The category “magic” was constructed during the “Long Reformation” (1400-1700)

The reformations that occurred during this period involved the restructuring of both Protestant and Catholic religious traditions

In pre-modern Europe there was no clear boundary between sacred and profane

There was no clearly designated sacred space that was set apart and used solely for religious purposes

There were numerous spaces that were sacred, (local wells, shrines) and churches were not treated reverentially

Rituals were calendrical through the year and structured time and schedules collectively (changing of seasons, planting harvest)

Rituals were conducted by ordinary laypersons

The sacred was treated with familiarity depending on results (reverent or irreverent treatment of saints depending upon harvest success)

Miracles were expected events

In the post-reformation, modern Europe, the sacred and period, the sacred and profane were partitioned

Sacred and profane space were separated

Churches were treated as sacred space to be treated reverentially

Rituals were organized and controlled by the church around religious events

Important rituals were conducted by religious officials

The sacred was treated with awe and set apart

The church recognized only officially designated saints and approved miracles (Eucharist) and treated them with awe

One important aspect of establishing church control over sacred power was distinguishing “religion” from “magic”

Religion and magic had been previously intermingled (blessed candles)

Protestant religion stripped churches of material through which magical action was accomplished and Catholic religion kept only church controlled miracles

There are three basic types of relationships among humans as well as between humans and the sacred (Coercive, Utilitarian, and Normative)

Utilitarian relationships with the sacred are defined as magic and normative relationships are defined as religion

Designating utilitarian relationships with the sacred that can be controlled by practitioners as magic is a means of politically defining and controlling “true religion”

RELIGIOUS VERSUS SPIRITUAL

Unchurched Americans are not all alike

Secular humanists - reject supernatural understandings in favor of naturalistic understanding

Non-attending belongers - have membership but rarely attend

Spiritual - concerned with spiritual issues but pursue them personally, outside of formal religion

Spiritual and Religious share three characteristics

Belief in some type of Higher Power

Desire to connect with the Higher Power

     Interest in rituals and practices that foster that connection

Spiritual but not religious

     Reject traditional religion as the most valuable way of furthering spiritual growth

     Are more likely to be agnostic

Engage in church attendance and prayer less frequently

     Are more likely to have had negative experiences with organized relgion

     Are more likely to view spirituality as a journey of personal growth and development

     Are more likely to have an agnostic worldview, a college education, a white-collar
     profession, liberal political views, non-religious parents, a greater sense of personal
     independence

Factors in shift toward "spiritual"

     Prestige of science

     Advances in technology

     Modern biblical scholarship

Cultural relativism