The Religion Toolkit

A Complete Guide to Religious Studies

John Morreall, Tamara Sonn

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444343717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This complete overview of religious studies provides students with the essential knowledge and tools they need to explore and understand the nature of religion.

• Covers the early development of religion, with overviews of major and minor religions from Islam to Scientology
• Considers recent developments including secularization; the relationship between religion and science; and scientific studies on religion, health, and mystical experience
• Uses humor throughout, allowing students to remain open-minded to the subject
• Explains what it means to study religion academically, and considers the impact of the study of religion on religion itself
• Contains numerous student-friendly features including photos, maps, time lines, side bars, historical profiles, and population distribution figures
• Provides classroom users with a lively website, www.wiley.com/go/religiontoolkit, including questions, quizzes, extra material, and helpful primary and secondary sources

1 INTRODUCTION

Prepare to Be Surprised

FIGURE 1.1 © Tom Cheney 1996/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com.

When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

BISHOP DESMOND TUTU

Religion is found around the world and may well be as old as the human race. Some of the earliest evidence of human life found by archaeologists seems to involve religious ritual. And throughout history human beings have developed a mind-boggling multiplicity of beliefs and practices that scholars recognize as religious. Today there are over 10,000 distinct traditions identified as religions, and many of these are divided into smaller groups called denominations and sects. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, Christianity alone includes over 9,000 denominations and over 34,000 sects. The diversity within some traditions is so extensive that some scholars do not even use terms like “Judaism” or “Christianity.” Instead, they speak of “Judaisms” and “Christianities.”

The sheer number of religious groups is only one of the surprises awaiting students of religion. Many are also surprised to discover how different learning about religion is from learning a religion. The goals and methods of the academic study of religion are quite distinct from those found in the devotional or normative study of religion. These are terms that describe the approach most people follow when they are taught their own religion. The scholarly approach to learning about religion is so different, in fact, that it is usually called Religious Studies, to distinguish it from the devotional or normative study of religion.

In learning a religion, people are trained to follow it. When people give children lessons in religion, these lessons are about their own religion (or denomination or sect or cult). This approach to religion is a kind of initiation into one tradition. Students are taught what their tradition considers true, so that they will be able to distinguish between that and what is false. And they are taught what their tradition considers right and wrong, so that they may do the one and avoid the other. They may learn some of the history of their group, but will probably spend more time learning stories, rituals, and prayers. If, in the process of being trained, they learn about other religions, it is often so that they will understand why their own tradition is right, and what is wrong with the teachings and practices of other traditions.

What is a Cult?

In ordinary conversation, we may say simply that some people belong to certain religions and other people belong to other religions. But in Religious Studies we make finer distinctions. Scholars have developed several terms to deal with the divisions and subdivisions within religions.

According to the standard vocabulary, a church is a religious group that exists in harmony with its social environment, and is sufficiently institutionalized to be passed on from one generation to the next. The term “church” is technically appropriate only for Christianity; people of other religions have different terms for their groups and houses of worship. But “church” is used generically here, so that even Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism count as churches.

A denomination is a subset of a church – also existing in harmony within its church and among other denominations, and institutionalized enough to be passed on through the generations. Again, scholars use the term “denomination” for subsets within all religions so that, for example, Reform Judaism is a denomination of Judaism, and Shi’ism is a denomination of Islam.

A sect is a subset of a church that does not exist in harmony within its environment or church, although it may eventually come to be accepted within its church and develop institutions to survive generational changes, thus achieving the status of a denomination. An example is The Society of St. Pius X, started in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to recent reforms within the Roman Catholic Church. Archbishop Lefebvre was excommunicated from the Catholic Church when he took upon himself the right to consecrate bishops – a right reserved for the pope. That was in 1988. But in 2009, the Church revoked the excommunication and started a process to integrate members of the Society of St. Pius X back into the Church.

A cult is a religious movement that develops outside an established church structure and often exists in tension with socially accepted religious institutions. Scientology is considered by some authorities to be a cult, since it originated outside an established church structure. However, followers of Scientology have organized themselves sufficiently to survive and prosper since their beginning in 1953, and they refer to themselves as members of the Church of Scientology.

While many scholars use these terms as defined above, some reject them as imposing concepts from Christianity onto other religions.

In Religious Studies, on the other hand, we are not trying to determine what is true or false or right or wrong about any religion’s teachings or practices. Our goal is to understand religious traditions, not be trained in them. In doing this, we examine many traditions that are identified as religions without judging any of them. We do study what certain traditions teach is right and wrong, and true and false, and why they teach what they do. But whether we agree with those teachings or not is not part of Religious Studies. When we study the teachings of a single tradition, we may well learn how they changed over time. There, too, we do not judge the truth or rightness of either the old or the new teachings. In other words, in Religious Studies we learn about diversity, both among and within religious traditions, but our goals and methods are like those of scientists rather than those of preachers.

A second goal of Religious Studies is to understand what religion is in the first place. And this holds still more surprises about the field. When you take a course in Accounting, you know that you will be studying how to manipulate numbers for specific purposes. When you sign up for Chemistry 101, you know you will be introduced to the tiny particles that make up the world we see around us. But when you sign up to study a religion other than your own, you may find yourself studying things that you were not aware could be considered religious.

If you think of your own religion as consisting of certain beliefs, rituals, and values, you might expect to study the beliefs, rituals, and values of the other religion. So it often comes as a surprise to students in Religious Studies courses that they may be studying history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and even economics. In Religious Studies we study these things, and more, because many traditions do not confine themselves to beliefs, rituals, and neatly identified values. Some traditions consider themselves simply a way of life, so that everything in life is subject to religious teaching.

Similarly, you may have grown up with the idea that religion is about what is holy or sacred, as opposed to what is worldly or secular. And so you may expect to find that distinction in other traditions. But, as just mentioned, many traditions consider all of life as the domain of religion, and so they do not use the distinction between sacred and secular.

Because the study of religion gets into so many areas, it is necessarily multi-disciplinary. Experts in Religious Studies may have their primary training in any of the fields mentioned above, or others such as Art History and Classics. And this wide-ranging approach to the subject matter of Religious Studies is also why there is so much debate within the field regarding what “religion” is.

The 19th-century German scholar who introduced the term Religious Studies ( Religionswissenschaft ), Max Müller (see Chapter 3), is often credited with saying “He who knows one, knows none.” His idea is that people who know only their own religion cannot understand the nature of religion itself, just as people who know only one language are not qualified to explain the nature of language itself. Asking someone who knows only one religion what religion is would be like asking a fish what water is. “Compared to what?” would be a reasonable answer. Not until we have at least two examples of something can we try to describe the category to which the two specimens belong.

As we shall see, trying to figure out just what religion is began as soon as scholars started trying to identify religions other than their own. Should tribal practices associated with healing in pre-modern societies be considered religious? In modern industrialized societies we generally leave healing to science, not religion. Should practices designed to influence the thoughts or feelings of someone far away be categorized as religion, or should they be called magic or superstition? Should stories about events that modern science says could not have happened be included in religion, or should they be dismissed as holdovers from a pre-scientific era? Is it even possible to distinguish religious stories from myths, or religion from superstition or magic?

This quest, to understand what religion is, is made even harder by the fact that many languages have no word that means the same thing as “religion” in English. Scholars are not even sure where the term “religion” came from. We know that its root is Latin, but what did it mean in early Latin? The 1st-century BCE philosopher Cicero traces the term to legere, to read, so that “religion” would mean to re-read (re-legere), but the 4th- to 5th-century CE Christian thinker Augustine traces the term to ligare, meaning “to connect or bind” (the same root as the English word “ligament”), so that “religion” would mean “to bind again” or “to reconnect.” Many modern theologians favor this etymology, seeing religion as something that binds a community together. However, A Latin Dictionary by Lewis and Short traces our modern meaning, “reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, [or] piety,” only to the 13th century CE. So what word might earlier Christians have used for what modern Christians think of as religion?

To complicate things further, the term that the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam use for “religion” means something quite different from any of the Latin roots for “religion.” This term is din. (It might also be counted as a surprise that in both Hebrew and Arabic, the languages of Judaic and Islamic scriptures, the term is the same. Hebrew and Arabic are closely related Semitic languages, and Judaism and Islam are very similar traditions.) Din can mean “judgment,” as in “Day of din” or “Court of din.” It can also mean “way of life.” What is more, the same term is used in modern Persian, but that usage is traced to Zoroastrian (the ancient religion of Persia) texts, where it means “eternal law” or “duty.” Similarly, the term from Buddhist texts that sometimes is translated as “religion” is dharma. But dharma does not mean what “religion” means in English. Dharma means “cosmic truth” or “the way the world is.” It also means the teachings of the Buddha, and “duty,” too. Dharma is used in Hinduism to mean both “ultimate reality” and human beings’ duties.

Scholars may not agree on exactly what “religion” means, but they generally agree that the term is too narrow to refer to all the phenomena that are examined in Religious Studies. As a result, many scholars use the term tradition rather than “religion.” This may be not only surprising, but confusing. By “tradition” Religious Studies scholars do not mean simply something that people do because it has always been done that way. We use the term “tradition” to refer to the amalgam of a group’s beliefs, rules, and customs insofar as they are associated with that group’s ultimate concerns, values, and ideas about the meaning of life.

Because of its interest in understanding what “religion” is in general, Religious Studies includes both historic and comparative elements. Religious Studies scholars examine traditions not just as they are now but as they have developed over time. This aspect of Religious Studies is known as History of Religions. The comparative elements of Religious Studies may involve looking at a single religious tradition in various historic periods, tracing any changes that developed. As well, it may involve studying a number of religious traditions within a single historical period. It may also involve comparing and contrasting the ways several ...