Religion in 50 More Words

A Redescriptive Vocabulary

Aaron W. Hughes, Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032052212
• eBook ISBN: 9781000478976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion in 50 More Words: A Redescriptive Vocabulary provides a succinct historical, social, and political examination of some of the key words used in the modern study of religion. Differing from the first volume's more theoretical focus, this volume analyzes more common first order descriptive terms that are used throughout the field, inviting readers to theorize their traditional vocabulary. Topics covered include:

• Atheism/Theism

• Conversion

• Cult

• Evil

• Fundamentalism

• Idol

• Magic

• Pilgrimage

• Ritual

• Sacrifice

Religion in 50 More Words submits such terms to a critical interrogation and subsequent redescription. This paves the way for a collective and more critical reframing of the field. The volume, along with Religion in 50 Words, provides an indispensable resource for students and academics working in the field of religious studies and cognate disciplines.

1 Afterlife

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196631-2

Virtually all of those social formations commonly known as religions offer their adherents some narrative that purports to give an account of what happens to them after death. More often than not, such claims about an afterlife often involve a variation on the theme of a promise of some type of beneficial continued existence for the righteous and an inferior future or maybe even outright punishment for the unrighteous. In fact, one could argue that claims about some sort of existence beyond death—and thus the existence of an immaterial source that outlives the physical body—is, for many, seen as a defining trait and thus a necessary condition for something even to be designated as a religion. Thus, we witness debates that took place amongst early European scholars of religion as to whether or not the groups they called Buddhist, whose goal seemed less about attaining an afterlife than the extinction of impermanence, was in fact a religion rather than, say, a philosophy. Regardless, the afterlife—alternatively called “life after death,” “the world-to-come,” “rebirth,” “the next life”—tends to refer to a post-corporeal existence in which some part deemed to be definitive of or essential to the identity of an individual (variously known as soul, spirit, consciousness, atman, or even self) is believed to continue living, in some fashion, long after the demise of the physical body, which is often (though not always, e.g., the Protestant denomination known as the Seventh Day Adventists) maintained to be non-essential. According to some so-called monotheistic systems, the dead are believed to go to a specific place when they die—e.g., heaven or hell—based upon the actions done and beliefs held in this life. So-called Asian religions, in contrast, are often grouped together inasmuch as they are seen to focus less on such notions and instead emphasize reincarnation in this or other worlds when people die, but with that rebirth again determined by the person’s actions and deeds in the previous life.

Thus, the question becomes: how do scholars study differing conceptions of the afterlife about which some people make claims when no one has had a direct experience of or encounter with that afterlife? One common way to go about such study, at least historically, has been to compare and contrast what scholars usually term beliefs in the afterlife, showing where such beliefs are similar and where they depart from one another—possibly inferring something from such comparative work. Not unlike the study of experience in the study of religion more generally, there is an unstated assumption that ideas can be true if religious people report them (especially if these reports exhibit cross-cultural similarity), even in face of a lack of empirical verifiability. We see this, for example, in the California State University (East Bay) scholar, Christopher M. Moreman, and his book, Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions (2008), which, while historical, also describes itself as practical: “even though we cannot know for sure what happens to us after death, our understanding of the afterlife can have a profound impact on how we live.”

The claims of Moreman, himself a scholar of religion, notwithstanding, it should be clear that the “afterlife”—or, more properly, claims about the afterlife—is less about happenings after death, something that should fall outside of the purview of critical scholarship, than it is about the ways in which the living think about that over which they have little or no control. Discourses about death and what is supposed to happen to those on the other side of it, thus become a convenient way to exert control over people’s lives while they are alive and in the present. What better way, for example, for elite classes to get others to fall in line than to tell them that, if they do not do what is required of them, they will be punished in the next life or when they experience rebirth? In like manner, we could point to Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his famous statement in the Introduction to the “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”(1844): “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions, it is the opium of the people” (see Robert C. Tucker’s edition of The Marx-Engels Reader [1978]: 53). Here, Marx famously argues that the collection of beliefs, practices, and institutions known as religion provide the underprivileged with a hope or a promise that if they do as they should, i.e., follow the bourgeois class that seeks to alienate them from their means of production and instead not try to communalize such means, then they will be rewarded in a future life with all they lack in this one. Marx, of course, was highly critical of such a sentiment because, on his reading, it meant that people were too often prepared to accept their poor working and living conditions in this world for the hope that things would be different in another one, the so-called afterlife. To rephrase: while a lottery ticket may provide one with hope for a better future, it does nothing to change one’s present, material circumstances.

It is difficult to understand etymologically the term “afterlife” since all those a scholar of religion may study have their own word for the concept. Rather than examine the meanings of terms such as olam ha-ba (“the world to come” in Hebrew), samsara (“the cycle of life and death” in Sanskrit), or jannah (“world to come” in Arabic, i.e., the afterlife), we will look solely and explicitly at the etymology of the English term for which scholars generally see these others as equivalents. In this context, “afterlife” has a fairly simple derivation, since it comes from the combination of two words “after” and “life,” namely the period that occurs after we are alive. Although it gains considerable prominence across the mid- to late-twentieth century, it is attested as early as the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, where, in addition to its current meaning, it could also refer to “the later part or parts of a person’s life.” Thus, we read in William Cornwallis’s (1579–1614) Essayes: “My after life … is not without profit” (I. xv. sig. 18). Even in writings from this time period, in ones that would today easily be classed as religious, it has this sense of one’s “later years.” For example, in the Life of God, Henry Scougal (1650–1678), a Church of Scotland Minister, could write that the “lessons which afflictions teach us, are then most advantageous when we learn them betimes, that we have the use of them in the conduct of our after lives” (quoting Sermon III in John Jebb’s collection of Scougal’s sermons, Piety Without Asceticism Or, The Protestant Kempis [1836], 2nd ed., 153).

Coinciding with this earlier meaning, we also encounter our more familiar usage. As early as 1598, for example, we read in the opening to the dedication of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–1593) posthumously published poem, Hero & Leander (1598): “The impression of the man, that hath beene deare vnto vs, liuing an afterlife in our memory, there putteth vs in mind of farther obsequies” (quoting an 1821 edition). From this sense, the afterlife can then take on any number of characteristics—be it positive or negative—that fit the need of the interpreter or the group in question. This, for example, could rather easily enable those who wanted to emphasize, say, the chosen few—such as those Protestant denominations (e.g., those traced to the influential writings of the French theologian and so-called reformer, Jean Calvin [1509–1563]) that believe that God has already predestined some people to be saved and relegated others to eternal damnation. Or it could lead to additional theologizing, such as done in the Roman Catholic Church, that some people spend time in purgatory after death—occupying some sort of vague middle space between heaven and hell—and that they could eventually be purified and thus released through the payment, by the living, of “indulgences” to Church authorities. Or, in the case of Buddhism, which, as noted above, lacks the idea of a permanent self or soul, it could equate with the idea of some sort of spiritual energy that could be reborn into others or eventually released into an existence indescribable in contemporary terms.

The question now is how does the afterlife—or perhaps better, conceptions of or claims about the afterlife—play out in the academic study of religion? Since most members of the field tend to adopt a fairly descriptive methodology, there is a tendency simply to chronicle what people think the afterlife consists of, perhaps even with the implicit notion that such beliefs are somehow true or at least true to the people making the claims. This often takes the form of some statement like the following: “Jews believe that when the Messiah returns, the souls of the dead will be re-corporealized, the exiles will be ingathered in the ‘holy land,’ and then the messianic era will reign supreme.” Left out of such discussion, of course, is what fate will be met by non-Jews. We witness such an approach to the world religions in Moreman’s aforementioned Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions. He argues that it is important not only to understand the way various religions and religious people understand the afterlife (it is, incidentally, often referred to in the singular and with the definite article), but how they experience it. He writes that “[m]y aim … has been to fill that need in addressing the beliefs of major traditions and how experiences of the afterlife are incorporated or not into these religions” (ix). In this passage, Moreman seems to imply—in good phenomenological fashion—that there exists a universal concept of the afterlife that is somehow manifested in the various “world religions.” The critical student of religion here will see (as late as 2008, no less!) how the work of the University of Chicago historian of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), is still alive and well in the field. For religions, at least for Moreman as indeed for Eliade as well, can subscribe to some of the characteristics of a universal type (i.e., morphology in Eliade’s language) without ever fully exhausting them.

We see something similar in the collection titled Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religion edited by Hiroshi Obayashi (1992), whose table of contents also reveals the field’s still current debt to earlier, and now outdated and troublesome, structures and categories. It is divided into three sections: “Death and Afterlife in Nonliterate and Ancient Religions”; “Death and Afterlife in Western Religions”; and “Death and Afterlife in Eastern Religions.” In his editorial introduction, Obayashi writes:

Questions about human life need not have a single true answer to be intellectually worthwhile and stimulating. Neither do they have to be scientific (about biological organisms, for example) to be able to claim their legitimate place in the domain of academic inquiry.

(ix–x)

Into this ambiguity, he situates death and the concomitant notion of the afterlife. Though we all have experiences with death, since we all have had loved ones who have passed away, less certain is what happens to us after our own death. He argues, quite legitimately, that how we structure what comes after life is ultimately based on what we encounter or are told to encounter in this life. Problems set in, however, when he puts such claims on a quasi-evolutionary scale, in which early people were “unable to understand death” whereas so-called Eastern and Western religions (a division still prominent but highly problematic) have more abstract and complex ideas about the afterlife.

More recent years, especially in the subfield known as the cognitive science of religion (CSR), have witnessed studies on the relatively widely reported phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDE). Here, the idea is that by comparing and analyzing the reported experiences of people who have had a NDE we can learn something about what is assumed to be a uniform religious experience of the afterlife. Those who claim to have had a NDE, for example, commonly report being transported to a different “realm” or “plane of existence.” Recent neuroscientific research has hypothesized that while an NDE is ultimately a subjective event, the result of “multisensory integration,” they bear resemblances to religious accounts. See the useful overview in Adriana Sleutjes, A. Moreira, and B. Greyson, “Almost 40 Years Investigating Near-Death Experiences: An Overview of Mainstream Scientific Journals,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 202 (2014): 833–836. What a “resemblance” consists of, for the researcher, is equally subjective, of course, and thus problematic from an analytic point of view—at least if it is used as evidence of an objective state. Thus, how we get from the study of such experiences to a better sense of an actual afterlife, i.e., something real as opposed to some form of wish fulfilment or narrative of power over one’s peers, is not entirely clear.

Unlike such speculative and often faulty comparative approaches to death and afterlife, we have more useful and rigorous analytic studies available. In his Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (2004), Alan Segal (1945–2011) informs his readers that his goal is neither to study death and the afterlife nor is it to teach his readers how to cope with it. On the contrary, it is to “show the connection between visions of the afterlife and the early scriptural communities who produced them” (3). He does this by examining the numerous maps—both literal and metaphorical—that premodern communities created of the afterlife with an eye towards understanding those communities’ (or select members’) very real and living ideals and realities. Or, in his Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (2016), the cultural historian Philip C. Almond uses the “afterlife” as a trope to examine how writers have tried to confront not only their own mortality, but also the fragility of the times and places in which they lived.

Studies such as these, that use the “afterlife” as a trope, a cultural construct, or as a map to understand the ways in which actors construct their social worlds—in the present as opposed to some other existential or metaphysical domains—would seem to offer the critical scholar a way forward that is much more productive and promising than arguing that the afterlife is a reality. If we, as scholars, simply reproduce the ideas that an afterlife is how a divine being(s) rewards the righteous or punishes the unrighteous, then we miss a real opportunity to understand how discourses of the afterlife are, in fact, discourses of the social worlds that people now inhabit. This is not unlike how studying discourses on the future, whether in so-called religious or science fiction literature, whether utopian or dystopian, are always about the present when they were conceived. In this regard, narratives of the afterlife are narratives of power that try to convince others that what one does here and now somehow influences one’s status in another world. When redescribed in this manner, the afterlife is less about what comes after this life, but the political and material conditions within this one.

In this volume see: church, East/West, priest/prophet, salvation, sect, soul, theology

In Religion in 50 Words see: authority, belief, cognition, comparison, description, experience, faith, ideology, methodological agnosticism, phenomenology, power, redescription

2 Animism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196631-3

Despite the fact that the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion describes animism as “an obsolete term employed to describe belief systems of traditional peoples that appear to hold that natural phenomena have spirits or souls,” it continues to be used by scholars to name either distinct items or a phase whose study is said to tell us something about religion in general. Indeed, its brief entry warns against its continued use either as a cross-cultural, comparative category or as the name of a stage of so-called religious evolution (1995: 51–52). Nevertheless, we still see it, e.g., in the British scholar Graham Harvey’s book Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005) and the UK social anthropologist Katherine Swancutt writing for the online Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology where she refers to the term as a “style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it” and “an immanent rather than transcendent form of sentience” (see the opening and closing paragraphs to the entry). We also witness in the American philosopher’s Stephen T. Asma’s online 2020 Aeon essay, “Ancient Animistic Beliefs Live on in Our Intimacy with Tech.” It seems clear that, despite the above warning, the category shows no signs of being dropped from our scholarly vocabulary any time soon. Its longevity can be linked to two seemingly divergent traditions. While one is a contemporary holdover from its well-known roots in the Victorian-era, the other is part of a renewed interest—by scholars and practitioners alike—in an aspect of what is now called Indigenous religious traditions or Indigenous faiths. (On the so-called old animism see Harvey’s comments in his opening chapter in his aforementioned Animism; on what is now called the new animism, of which Harvey’s work is a useful example, see both Darryl Wilkinson’s 2017 essay “Is There Such a Thing as Animism?” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85/2: 289–311 and Isabel Laack’s 2020 essay, “The New Animism and Its Challenges to the Study of Religion” in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 32/2: 115–147). Despite “animism” now being used by some to name but one more member of the larger family of world religions, a critical scholar may wish to heed that earlier caution and, instead, propose that studying how the term is used—both historically as well as today—tells us much about the people who are using it and the way that they think it is best to account for what they see as similarities and differences among people.

Although it may be a relatively unfamiliar word for some readers today, in the late nineteenth century “animism” was a shorthand for a popular theory on the origins of religion. It referred particularly to the “wide human propensity to understand human beings, and often nature more broadly, as bodies animated by spirits” (citing Pamela E. Klassen’s article “Medicine” in the multi-authored The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion [2016], 402). The term was used at a time when scholars proposed a variety of competing vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of consultants
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: a user’s guide
• 1 Afterlife
• 2 Animism
• 3 Atheism/Theism
• 4 Church
• 5 Civil Religion
• 6 Commentary
• 7 Conversion
• 8 Creation/Endtimes
• 9 Cult
• 10 Dialogue
• 11 East/West
• 12 Emic/Etic
• 13 Evil
• 14 Founder
• 15 Fundamentalism
• 16 God
• 17 Hagiography
• 18 Icon
• 19 Idol
• 20 Immanence/Transcendence
• 21 Initiation
• 22 Liberation
• 23 Magic
• 24 Meditation
• 25 Monotheism/Polytheism
• 26 Myth
• 27 Mysticism
• 28 Nones
• 29 Paganism
• 30 Piety
• 31 Pilgrimage
• 32 Prayer
• 33 Priest/Prophet
• 34 Reformation
• 35 Renunciation
• 36 Ritual
• 37 Sacrifice
• 38 Salvation
• 39 Sect
• 40 Sexuality
• 41 Shamanism
• 42 Soul
• 43 Spirituality
• 44 Symbol
• 45 Syncretism
• 46 Theology
• 47 Totem
• 48 Tradition
• 49 Understanding
• 50 Value
• Appendix: a word on etymologies
• Index