Approaches to Religious Studies

By Kwan Shui-man

Class Discussion

What is Religion?

Some definitions• Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed creature, the heart

of a heartless world, the soul of souless circumstances. It is the opium of the people. (Marx)

• A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things - that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community all those who adhere to them. (Durkheim)

• A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (Geertz)

• Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine (William James)

• "Religious ideas...are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind...(They are) born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race."

Religion is "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father." (Freud)

• Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life. (Tillich)

• Ninian Smart’s 7 dimensions (The World’s Religions)

1. Practical or Ritual Dimension

2. Experiential and Emotional Dimension

3. Narrative or Mythic Dimension

4. Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension

5. Ethical and Legal Dimension

6. Social and Institutional Dimension

7. Material Dimension

Religious Studies as Polymethodical

• Anthropological approaches• Feminist approaches• Phenomenological approaches• Philosophical approaches• Psychological approaches• Sociological approaches• Theological approaches

Practical or Ritual DimensionExperiential and Emotional Dimension

Narrative or Mythic DimensionDoctrinal and Philosophical Dimension

Ethical and Legal DimensionSocial and Institutional Dimension

Material Dimension

Anthropological feminist

psychological

phenomenological

philosophical

sociological

theological

Psychological Approach

• The “hard” end:• Physiological psychology

• Behaviourism

• Cognitive psychology

• Social psychology

• The “soft” end• Psychodynamic schools

• Humanistic psychologies

• Existential psychologies

• Transpersonal psychologies

• The “hard” end—concerns• Religious attitudes—religious inclinations, religious

values, social-religious-political attitudes, religious concerns…

• Religious orientations—motivation (intrinsic vs extrinsic), proneness to religious beliefs

• Religious development—depth of religious experience, faith development/maturity…

• Religious commitment and involvement

• Religious/Moral values or personal characteristics

• Religious coping and problem-solving

• Spirituality and mysticism

• God-Concept

Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion

1. Jay L. Wenger, “Implicit Components of Religious Beliefs”

-the emergence of beliefs

Dual Process Theories

Automatic process

Controlledprocess

explicitprocess

Slow andConscious

Implicitprocess

Fast andnonConscious

Automatic activiation

Spontaneousapplication

ExperimentSubliminal

PrimingProcedure

Religious Beliefs

Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion

2. The Heuristic of Representativeness (e.g. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness”)

- the maintenance of beliefs•e.g.

Among the 23, my birthday is your

birthday!

The probability of having a birthday＝ 23/365 = 1/16

343 days left without any birthdayHighly

non-representative

Not random

God’s Act!

Highly representative

(like goes with like)

3. Self-Disclosure and Prayer (e.g. Larry VandeCreek et al., "Praying About Difficult Experiences as Self-Disclosure to God“)

– Expresssion of Insights– Expression of Negative Emotions– Expression of Positive Emotion– Causal Expressions

Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion

• Some Theoretical Concerns• Origin of Religion (e.g. evolutionary theory:

hypnotizability and Shamanic Trance)• Why do people believe? (e.g. low cognitive

ability, high stress level…etc.)• How are Beliefs sustained?• How are Beliefs discarded/changed?

Anthropological Approach• 3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus

• General sequence of thematic focus • Origin > Function > Meaning > ...

• 1860s-1900• Study of origin• Evolutionism• Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, Spencer, Durkheim

• 1900-1950• Study of function• Functionalism• Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard

• 1950-1980s• Study of meaning• Interpretive anthropology, symbolist anthropology, (structuralism)• Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Douglas, Leach, (Lévi-Strauss) etc

• 1950s-1980s• Ethnographic focus

• “primitive” religions• local forms of “world religions” (1950s)

• Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism• Religious movements in the “Third World”

• The context of culture contact

• Millenarian movements

• Revitalization movements• Eg. Ghost Dance, Peyote cult, cargo cults

Participant Observation—a frequently used Anthropological Method

• What:• It requires living with the community being studied,

learning its language

• and participating in its life without seeking to alter it.

• As a participant, the scholar simply observes and tries to get as close as possible to seeing a religion from the ‘inside’

• Thick Description: • Describing multi-dimensionally and multi-contextually

what a person is doing

• And what the person thinks s/he is doing

Phenomenological Approach

• Aim—Structure of Religiosity• Overall Task—imaginatively entering into

the world of the religious person• Understand as the religious person does• See the world thru eyes of the religious person• Make the subject of study speak with its own

authentic voice• Accurate description of what is seen and heard

Steps

1. Distancing fr researcher’s own position2. Bracketing—attitudes, value judgments,

presuppositions3. Crossing the cultural distance (as

researcher becomes the participant)4. Empathy5. Sympathetic imagination6. Seeing the essentials in the materials and

any situation being studied7. Essence of a religious phenomenon is

realised and understood in its manifestations

An example—my previous research in Charismatic Christianity

• The structure of charismatic experience• Separation – Liminality – reaggregation• Liminality and Sacrality