Religions in the Modern World

Traditions and Transformations

Linda Woodhead, Christopher Partridge, Hiroko Kawanami, Linda Woodhead, Christopher Partridge, Hiroko Kawanami

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317439592
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, Third Edition is the ideal textbook for those coming to the study of religion for the first time, as well as for those who wish to keep up-to-date with the latest perspectives in the field. This third edition contains new and upgraded pedagogic features, including chapter summaries, key terms and definitions, and questions for reflection and discussion. The first part of the book considers the history and modern practices of the main religious traditions of the world, while the second analyzes trends from secularization to the rise of new spiritualities. Comprehensive and fully international in coverage, it is accessibly written by practicing and specialist teachers.

Chapter 1
How to study religion

Kim Knott

■ Introduction

■ The study of religion as a discipline

■ Theory, methods, methodology

■ Studying key issues in contemporary religion

■ Studying religion at different scales

■ Summary

■ Key terms

■ Suggested reading

Introduction

As Linda Woodhead and Christopher Partridge have suggested in their introduction, particular issues arise for religions as they engage with modernity; they cannot be treated separately from their contexts or indeed from one another. These points have consequences for how religions are to be examined in terms of the theories, approaches, and methods to be used, all of which are subject to development as religion itself changes. After a general introduction to how religions are studied and researched, some key issues in the study of religions in the modern world will be identified and their theoretical and methodological implications examined. These include religious traditions old and new, the connections between religions and between the secular and the religious, religious identity, and the place of religion in public life. After that, consideration will be given to the question of how we study contemporary religion at a variety of different scales, from the body and objects to the world and globalization. But we will begin with a particular case, the Danish cartoons crisis of 2006 in order to see how a modern event generates a range of issues and methodological considerations for the study of religions.

On 30 September 2005, Jyllands-Posten, a major Danish national newspaper published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which were later reprinted in newspapers in various countries and on the internet. They were highly offensive to Muslims, partly because they breached the Islamic teaching that the Prophet should not be depicted, but also because they portrayed him as a terrorist. In February 2006, the publication of the cartoons became the subject of international protest resulting in more than fifty deaths worldwide. There were many political and diplomatic ramifications in Denmark and beyond. The popular and intellectual responses of Muslims, secularists, and other interested groups and individuals were varied, often measured but occasionally strident and accompanied by verbal or physical violence, and the issues raised were complex, from debates about human rights, freedom of expression and incitement to hatred, to the clash of cultures, integration, and the relationship of race and religion.

The crisis raised a great many potential issues for the study of religions. In terms of Islam, it revitalized the question of the Prophet and his depiction, in the Qur’an and Hadith and also in later texts and contexts. Modern secular Denmark provided a new theatre for this age-old religious debate and for the expression of religious versus liberal secularist positions and competing claims about human rights and ethics (including freedom of expression and the right to protection from religious hatred). The publication and its aftermath undermined community relations in Denmark and further afield as Muslims felt themselves to be ridiculed and vilified. The tension

Figure 1.1 Danish cartoons crisis

London, UK – 18 February 2006: A public demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square as Muslims react against the controversial cartoons in a Danish newspaper. pxl.store / Shutterstock.com.

between national and religious identities, the place of religious minorities in secular nation states, and the integration and cohesion of faith and ethnic communities came to the fore. In addition, mass protests in countries round the world raised issues of the defense of religion and, at times, of religion and violence. As we will see in the second part of this chapter, such issues are central to the study of religion in the modern world and invite a variety of theoretical and methodological responses. They require a range of scholarly methods, tailored to the particular case or problem to be examined, and raise complex questions about the standpoint of the student or researcher and the ethics and politics of their work. In the third part of the chapter, we will consider how religion can be the subject of investigation at the small scale (e.g. at the level of a cartoon or daily newspaper); at national and regional scales (e.g. in the Danish context and in subsequent developments across Europe); and at the global scale (in the media and on the internet and in various transnational movements).

The study of religion as a discipline

The study of religion has developed substantially since the late nineteenth century in response to colonial expansion and interest in different places, peoples, and religions, as well as the growth of new academic disciplines and the impact of the sciences on the study of individuals, societies, and cultures. Prior to that, theology and philosophy were the preeminent disciplines; since then, historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological, and phenomenological approaches have contributed substantially to our understanding and interpretation of religion and religions.

In the context of schools and universities and their academic pursuits, the term ‘discipline’ refers to the way in which natural, social, and cultural phenomena are studied and theorized and how knowledge about them is organized. A discipline – geography for example – normally has a focus of attention (the earth, its places, and people) and a number of attendant theories and methods. It organizes its subject matter into categories (such as physical and human geography) and subcategories (such as demography, migration, urban studies, sacred space, and pilgrimage). The case of ‘the study of religion’, and some other disciplines or academic fields such as gender studies or postcolonial studies, is rather different. Like geography and sociology, it has a disciplinary focus, in this case, religion. Unlike them, it is poly-methodological insofar as it loosely includes a variety of different approaches to studying religion, such as those that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The poly-methodological character of the study of religions is evident in books on the subject, like The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion in which chapters describe many of the different approaches that constitute the discipline. The Religious Studies Project, a web-based resource designed for those studying religion, reflects this disciplinary and methodological diversity in podcasts of interviews with academics on their research.

Before going further, it is important to say a little more about religion itself. Scholars are generally in agreement that ‘religion’ is a historical and social construct. This is not intended to belittle people’s experience of the sacred or to judge the veracity of their religious claims. Rather, it recognizes that ‘religion’ is a concept used to identify, delimit, and describe certain types of human behavior, belief, organization, and experience. It has a global history (matched by terms in other languages) and is capable of being separated – not without disagreement – from other concepts, such as ‘society’, ‘politics’, and ‘culture’, and studied independently. From the late seventeenth century in Europe when the term ‘religion’ and the idea of ‘religions’ in the plural began to be adopted, many beliefs, practices, individual and collective experiences, bodies, groups, artefacts, texts, works of art, and performances have come to be associated with them. These provide research data for the scholarly study of religion all of which can be utilized in association with various approaches, theories, and methods. When we study ‘religion’ in the modern world, we focus on its contemporary and recent historical facets, looking in particular at how they engage with and respond to the conditions, processes, and issues of modernity. We look at what ‘religion’ means now and how religions differentiate themselves and interact in the broader context of science, secularism, capitalism, globalization, and identity politics. The case of the Danish cartoons crisis above illustrates this.

Theory, methods, methodology

These are common terms used to denote the various tools used in scholarly study, whether in research or in the preparation of an essay or paper. Theory is a term generally adopted to refer to concepts, laws, hypotheses, and explanations used to make sense of the natural and social world. The nature and reality of ‘the natural and social world’ about which people theorize, the ability of theory to represent that world, and the politics of theorizing are all contested. One interesting perspective on theory is offered by the American scholar Thomas A. Tweed. He presents the idea of theories as ‘itineraries’ and sees theories as journeys that scholars take from their own situated positions and then lay out as maps for others to use.

The theories in use in the study of religions are of different types. Some are metatheories or grand theories that present an overarching explanation for society, culture, or religion as a whole, their origins, and their purposes. Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, offered such a theory, and the works of Marx, Freud, and Foucault, among others, have been used in this way. One book that reviews some of these grand theories is Seth Kunin’s Religion: The Modern Theories (see Suggested Reading). In most scholarly work on religion, such theories are not used as hypotheses capable of testing but rather as theoretical standpoints that locate researchers within scholarly traditions and explain their perspectives on such matters as the fundamental nature of society or religion, their origins, elementary forms and salience, social and economic relations, structure and agency, or power and discourse. Feminism and postcolonialism also offer theoretical and ethical stances that function in a similar way. Other broad theories can be used more directly in planning research on religion and have been developed, critiqued, and amended in light of empirical evidence: globalization theory and secularization theory are good examples, as can be seen in the relevant chapters later in this book.

But theories can be useful in other ways too. In much scientific research, theories function as starting points, often taking the form of research questions or hypotheses that can be tested. Two relevant examples, thinking back to the case with which this chapter opened, might be the hypothesis ‘Community relations in Denmark deteriorated as a result of the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad’, or the question ‘Were the causes of the Danish cartoons crisis religious?’. They can be used as starting points in a deductive approach to research. Is the hypothesis about community relations proven in an analysis of the data? Does an analysis reveal that the causes were religious, or were they social, political, or a mixture of these?

Other scholars prefer an inductive approach, which, instead of relying initially on a theory, begins instead with an examination of a wide range of data on a subject. Once data has been collected and analyzed, it is then used in the development of theory for later use. For example, interviews could be conducted on the right to freedom of expression with a range of actors in Danish society – Muslim and other religious leaders, newspapers journalists and editors, representatives of government and civil society, writers, and so on – leading to the development of either a model of ideal types or a theory about the relationship between the nature of ideological commitment and attitudes to freedom of expression. These would be open to testing in other similar cases.

A further way in which theory may be employed in research on the case of the Danish cartoons is to start with the views of a particular theorist, either one who has worked on a comparable but different case such as The Satanic Verses controversy in the late 1980s to early 1990s, or one who has already offered a useful theory on the case in hand, such as Tariq Modood or Randall Hansen who debated the liberal response to the crisis in the journal International Migration in 2006. The relevant ‘microtheory’ can be applied or modified and used on new data. This is a useful and common approach among students in dissertations or theses: take a theory off the shelf and test it on new material in a different context.

Whether testing a theory or conducting inductive research, the researcher must nevertheless design her project, reflecting on what kind of methodology and methods to use to answer her research questions, what people or documents to research, and how to analyze the data that will be collected. Generally, she will have had some preliminary training in a particular methodology – the term ‘methodology’ refers to how we study, our way of doing things, the systematic approach we take to research – such as sociology or psychology of religion, history, or theology – and will be familiar with its associated theories and methods. A comprehensive guide to appropriate methodologies and methods can be found in Stausberg and Engler’s The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion.

As this book and others I have referred to show, contemporary theories and methods have been cut free of their traditional disciplinary moorings and are now used widely in an interdisciplinary way. The poststructuralist theory of Foucault, for example, has been drawn on by scholars in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, literature studies, healthcare studies, criminology, gender studies, and religious studies. Similarly, the interview method – and I’ll say more about methods below – is now used in research across the disciplines despite having its origins in social science, particularly sociology and social psychology. Likewise, documentary and discourse methods that may once have been associated primarily with history or other text-based subjects are now used widely, not least by scholars researching websites and other electronic resources and those using visual documents such as photographs and video.

Different problems and questions require different research designs, methods, and modes of analysis as is clear if we think about the two Danish cartoon crisis examples I gave earlier: the hypothesis ‘Community relations in Denmark deteriorated as a result of the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad’ and the question ‘Were the causes of the Danish cartoons crisis religious?’. Both of these could be addressed using existing primary and secondary sources of various kinds, but, equally, they are open to new research. Testing the first would require longitudinal social research (examining community relations before and after publication), though documentary research and discourse analysis may also be of value (looking at what people said about community relations in the media, for example). The notion of ‘community relations’ in the Danish context would need some examination, though it is likely that, in light of the centrality of Muslim and secularist voices in the crisis, ethnic, religious, and ideological groups and their relationships would be to the fore. The researcher might choose to focus on one or more places in Denmark, on particular communities, and/or designated timeframes. Narrowing down the research in this way would make it more manageable. Several social research methods could be used for examining community relations. Opinions about past and present relationships could be collected using questionnaires, interviews, or focus groups. Current relationships could be researched ethnographically, with the researcher spending time in communities, talking to people, attending meetings, interviewing leaders and community workers. The question ‘Were the causes of the Danish cartoons crisis religious?’ would require a historical analysis of events and opinions leading up to the crisis, involving textual methods applied to relevant documents (e.g. religious and secularist texts, government reports, bills and papers, newspaper articles and editorials, social media, etc.), though it would also be possible to conduct interviews with key public, civic, and religious leaders to obtain their views. In both cases, which methods to use would depend on how the research was focused, what it was for (essay, thesis, policy recommendation, or book) and how much time the researcher could dedicate to the task. In both, a review of relevant literature would shed light on wh...