What religion is and how scholars study it fairly

That test is more difficult than it sounds, and it is where the academic study of religion begins. Religious studies is the university field that describes, compares, and explains religious life across cultures and history. It is not the same as theology, which reasons from inside one tradition about what is true for believers, and it is not the same as the philosophy of religion, which tests arguments for and against religious claims (PHIL 101 takes up that branch). Religious studies asks a different question: what are religions, and how do they work in human lives (Schilbrack, 2022)?

This first lesson gives you the scholar's toolkit. You will meet the classic attempts to define religion, the debate over whether the word "religion" fits every culture, the difference between an insider's and an outsider's account, and the working stance that lets a scholar describe a tradition fairly without first deciding whether its claims are true.

Serious comparison is older than any university department, but the modern field took shape in Europe between the 1700s and the early 1900s. In 1723 the Amsterdam publisher Jean Frédéric Bernard and the engraver Bernard Picart began issuing Religious Ceremonies of the World, a set of illustrated volumes that placed the rituals of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas side by side. Historians argue that this one work taught many European readers to see their own faith as one religion among many (Hunt, Jacob, & Mijnhardt, 2010). The drawing at the top of this page is by Picart.

In the 1870s the German-born Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller called for a "science of religion" that would compare traditions the way linguists compare languages. His slogan, adapted from the poet Goethe, was that a person who knows only one religion knows none (Müller, 1873). Figure 1.1 shows the books that shaped the field from Picart to the present. The rest of this lesson walks through the ideas behind them.

Because every definition draws a border, and every border either leaves out something that seems religious or lets in something that does not. Scholars sort definitions into two families. A substantive definition says what religion is about, such as gods or spirits. A functional definition says what religion does, such as binding a group together or giving life an order (Schilbrack, 2022).

The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor offered the classic substantive definition. As a "minimum definition," he proposed "the belief in Spiritual Beings" (Tylor, 1871). Tylor chose a broad definition on purpose: he wanted the practices of peoples whom Victorian Europeans dismissed as primitive to count as religion on the same scale as the religions of his readers. He also gave the word animism its modern meaning, belief in souls and spirits, which Lesson 2 examines.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, whom SOC 101 Lesson 1 introduces as a founder of sociology, offered the classic functional definition:

For Durkheim the key is the line between the sacred, things set apart and protected by rules, and the profane, ordinary things. He used "Church" for any such community, not only a Christian one. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz later defined religion as "a system of symbols" that shapes people's moods and motivations by presenting a picture of the general order of existence so convincingly that it seems uniquely real (Geertz, 1973). Figure 1.2 compares the three.

Some of the field's founders thought so. The American psychologist and philosopher William James studied religion from the inside, through the first-person reports of believers. For his Gifford Lectures he defined religion as:

The German theologian Rudolf Otto went further. In The Idea of the Holy he argued that the core of religion is an experience that reason alone cannot capture, which he called the numinous. He described it with a Latin phrase, mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that makes a person tremble and, at the same moment, draws that person in (Otto, 1923). The Romanian-born historian of religions Mircea Eliade built on that idea. In The Sacred and the Profane he called any appearance of the sacred in the ordinary world a hierophany: a stone, a tree, or a mountain that, for a believer, becomes the place where another reality shows itself (Eliade, 1959).

These writers gave the field its interest in experience, and their work is still read. Their critics object that treating "the sacred" as one universal reality behind every religion is itself a religious claim, and a neutral scholar cannot simply assume it (McCutcheon, 1997). That criticism leads to the next tool.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that some words, his example was "game," name a set of things that share no one common feature but instead overlap like the faces in a family: one member has the family nose, another the family eyes. He called this a family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953, sections 66 and 67). Many scholars now treat religion the same way. A definition of this kind lists typical features and counts a tradition as religious when it has enough of them, without requiring any single feature (Schilbrack, 2022).

The best-known list comes from the British scholar Ninian Smart, who founded one of the first departments of religious studies in Britain. Smart described seven dimensions of religion, shown in Figure 1.3 (Smart, 1996). A tradition can be strong in one dimension and light in another. An unprogrammed Quaker meeting, which gathers in silence without clergy or a set liturgy, is light on formal ritual and strong in the ethical dimension; a village festival in India may be rich in ritual and material culture while saying little about doctrine. The dimensions give you a checklist for describing any tradition, including ones that do not call themselves religions.

This is one of the liveliest debates in the field. The Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that the idea of "religions" as separate, bounded systems with names, such as "Hinduism," is largely a modern Western development; he proposed speaking instead of a person's faith and the cumulative tradition they inherit (W. C. Smith, 1962). The historian Brent Nongbri has argued that ancient peoples did not divide life into a religious part and a secular part the way modern Westerners do (Nongbri, 2013).

The American historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith put the point most sharply in the preface to Imagining Religion:

That line is often misread as saying religion is fake. Smith's point is narrower. Human beings around the world really do pray, sacrifice, tell sacred stories, and honor the dead. "Religion" is the scholar's second-order category for grouping those facts so they can be compared, and like any map it must be tested against the territory and corrected when it distorts (Schilbrack, 2022). A good scholar keeps both in view: the people being studied, in their own words, and the category used to compare them.

Each sees something the other can miss. The linguist Kenneth Pike coined two terms for the two views (Pike, 1967). An emic account describes a practice in the insiders' own categories and words: what it means to them. An etic account describes it in the observer's categories, built for comparing many cultures. Pike took the terms from "phonemic," the sounds speakers of one language treat as different, and "phonetic," the sounds as a trained linguist measures them.

The tension between the two views is called the insider/outsider problem (McCutcheon, 1999). Insiders may know their tradition's meaning from the inside but take its history for granted. Outsiders may see patterns across cultures but miss what the practice actually means to the people who perform it. Max Weber, the other founder introduced in SOC 101 Lesson 1, made a related demand on social science: understand what an action means to the person doing it, which he called Verstehen. Figure 1.4 applies both views to one practice.

Yes, and the field has a name for the stance. In 1967 the sociologist Peter Berger proposed methodological atheism: for the purposes of research, treat religion as a human product, explained by human causes, whatever one believes privately (Berger, 1967). Ninian Smart objected that this stance quietly takes a side, because it assumes the sacred is not really there. He proposed methodological agnosticism instead: for the purposes of research, neither affirm nor deny the existence of what believers worship, and describe what is real for them in their own world (Smart, 1973). Figure 1.5 compares the stances.

Methodological agnosticism grew out of the phenomenology of religion, an approach that describes religious phenomena as they appear to the people who experience them. Phenomenologists such as the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw borrowed from the philosopher Edmund Husserl the idea of epoche (from Greek, "holding back"): suspending one's own judgments long enough to see the phenomenon clearly (van der Leeuw, 1938). Later scholars added that no one fully escapes their own standpoint, so a careful scholar states that standpoint openly and then holds it back (Flood, 1999).

Methodological agnosticism is not the same as personal agnosticism. A devout believer and a convinced atheist can both use it, in the same way that a judge can set aside her own opinion of a defendant while weighing the evidence. What it rules out is letting a private verdict decide in advance how a tradition gets described.

Many introductory courses are organized around a short list: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and sometimes a few more. Scholars call this the world religions paradigm. The historian Tomoko Masuzawa traced how European scholars assembled the list in the 1800s and early 1900s (Masuzawa, 2005). Critics add that the list tends to model every tradition on a Protestant pattern: a founder, a sacred book, a creed, and a membership (Cotter & Robertson, 2016). Traditions that did not fit that pattern, such as Indigenous religions, folk practice, and the mixed practice common in China and Japan, were pushed to the margins or labeled "primitive."

Scholars do not respond by abandoning the big traditions, which really are large and historically connected. They respond by studying religion as people actually live it, which is often more local, more mixed, and more about practice than the textbook summaries suggest (Cotter & Robertson, 2016). This course follows that advice. It spends whole lessons on spirits and ancestors, on ancient polytheism, and on Chinese and Japanese practice, and it treats each tradition through all seven of Smart's dimensions instead of only through its official teachings.

Four habits carry through the rest of the course:

• Pass the recognition test. Describe a tradition so that its own members would recognize it before you analyze it.
• Name your definition. When you call something religious, say which definition you are using and what it leaves out.
• Check all seven dimensions. Do not reduce a tradition to its official teachings; ask about ritual, story, experience, community, ethics, and material life too.
• Bracket, then judge. Hold back your own verdict while you describe. Questions of truth come afterward, in the right place.