Religion, Discourse, and Society

Discourse Theory and Analysis for the Sociology of Religion

Marcus Moberg

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000530469
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Ciencias sociales
• Thema: Sociología de la religión

This book focuses on the utility and application of discourse theory and discourse analysis in the sociological study of religious change. It presents an outline of what a 'discursive sociology of religion' looks like and brings scholarly attention to the role of language and discourse as a significant component in contemporary processes of religious change. Marcus Moberg addresses the concept of discourse and its main meta-theoretical underpinnings and discusses the relationship between discourse and 'religion' in light of previous research. The chapters explore key notions such as secularism and public religion as well as the ideational and discursive impact of individualism and market society on the contemporary Western religious field. In addition to providing scholars with a thorough understanding and appreciation of the analytic utility of discourse theory and analysis in the sociological study of religious change, the book offers a cohesive and systematized framework for actual empirical analysis.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780367435837-1

The sociological study of religion remains centrally concerned with ongoing processes of “religious change” across the liberal democratic societies of the West, and increasingly beyond. A wide range of different types of modern changes, transformations, and mutations in the religious field have been studied under this general and somewhat ambiguous rubric. These include (but are not limited to) progressive long-term institutional religious decline; the proliferation of “individualized” religious outlooks and “alternative spiritualties”; significant increases in the numbers of people who self-identify as “non-religious”; the growing public presence and visibility of religion; the increasing commodification and/or marketization of religion; and changes in the environments, spaces, and “locations” of religion following continuous developments in new media and digital communication and information technologies. While several additional developments could be added to the list, taken together, these processes clearly point to the ways in which the Western religious field has been – and been perceived to have been – in a continuing state of flux over the past five to six decades, if not for longer.

The sociological study of religion has for some time already found itself in a transitional phase, marked by the rethinking and increasing abandonment of secularization theory coupled with a growing emphasis on the need for novel perspectives and further theoretical innovation.¹ While there is wide agreement among sociologists of religion that the general character of religion and religious life and practice has undergone significant changes and transformations in the late-modern era, there is less agreement, and indeed some degree of confusion, as to how these changes should best be approached and conceptualized. But although contemporary social and sociological theory has displayed a steadily growing interest in discourse and language and developed understandings of modernity which, in various ways, “center upon language or imply an enhanced role for language in modern social life as compared to pre-modern social life,” the sociological study of religion has so far rarely devoted any serious attention to the role of language and discourse as key components in processes of religious change.²

“Religious change” is, of course, not adequately understood as something that occurs in isolation from changes at broader societal and cultural levels. Rather, religious change constitutes a particular type of social change that, like all processes of social change, includes significant ideational and discursive components. As Norman Fairclough points out, from the perspective of discourse theory, “Discourse is part of social change, and no satisfactory account of it can ignore relations between discourse and other elements of social reality.”³ This is not least because “changes in the wider social reality commonly begin as, and are ‘driven by’, changes in discourse which are operationalized … in them.”⁴ In this perspective, “linguistic phenomena are social phenomena of a special sort, and social phenomena are (in part) linguistic phenomena.”⁵ This, however, is not to say that social change can be reduced to changes in discourse and discursive practice. Rather discursive and social change need to be understood in dialectical terms. While discourses are indeed expressed and articulated through the medium of language and other semiotic forms, they also become varyingly operationalized or “put into practice”: enacted in particular ways of acting, communicating, and interacting; inculcated in particular “ways of being”; and tangibly materialized in the form of actual places, spaces, and social organizational structures.⁶ Hence, as Lilie Chouliaraki and Fairclough point out,

It is an important characteristic of the economic, social and cultural changes of late modernity that they exist as discourses as well as processes that are taking place outside discourse, and that the processes that are taking place outside discourse are substantively shaped by these discourses.⁷

Discourse and discursive practice therefore need to be viewed “as part of society, and not somehow external to it” and as “conditioned … by other (non-linguistic) parts of society.”⁸

When viewed in this light, all of the abovementioned processes of religious change have been “discourse-driven” to a considerable degree. That is to say that they have been deeply implicated in changing ways of constructing and understanding social, cultural, and “religious” reality through the medium of language and discourse. For example, the accelerating “individualization” of religion and religious life since the early 1950s is directly and dialectically related to the increasing salience of discourses on the primacy of the individual, “personal autonomy,” and “personal choice” throughout Western society and culture as a whole. The “commodification” and/or “marketization” of religion is likewise closely connected to the wide proliferation and naturalization of economic, “market”-associated language and terminology throughout ever more social and cultural domains. The (supposed) growing public visibility of religion is, in turn, closely entwined with contemporary political discourses on the “secular” and scholarly discourses on the “deprivatization” of religion and the “post-secular.” These examples, moreover, all point to the ways in which late-modern society has become increasingly marked by discoursal hybridity, whereby the boundaries between the language practices of different social and cultural domains (such as politics, economy, science, and religion) have become increasingly porous.⁹ As broader changes in language use and discursive practice leave their imprint on the ways in which “religion” is expressed, practiced, and understood, “religious change” needs, in no small part, to be understood as consisting of changes in discursive practices on and about “religion.”

Towards a discursive sociology of religion

This book outlines the contours of a discursive sociology of religion. This, first, is a sociology of religion that brings discourse theoretical and analytical perspectives into direct conversation with sociological perspectives in a transdisciplinary spirit. In particular, it views discourse analysis as providing a set of particular tools for broader “theory-driven process[es] of constructing objects of research… for research topics” which cannot be adequately analyzed through a focus on discourse alone.¹⁰ While discourse analysis will always be theoretically informed, what it brings to the table is a particular way of theorizing “the mediation between the social and the linguistic.”¹¹ This book does not, therefore, present a “revisionist” agenda for the sociology of religion in the sense of aiming to supplant previously established perspectives and argue that developments in the religious field can be reduced to a common core, i.e., discourse. Rather, the main purpose is to highlight and explicate how a sustained focus on the social function of discourse provides a valuable supplement and, in some cases, a crucial corrective to some of the most widely established theoretical perspectives and approaches in the sub-field. A discursive sociology of religion will therefore need to enter into a continuous, sometimes largely supportive, sometimes expressly critical, dialogue with various “non-discursive” approaches in the sub-field by bringing the perspectives and methodological tools of discourse theory and analysis to bear on the study of the construction, constitution, and social function of “religion” in modern society. In this, the approach advanced in this book aligns with previous language- and discourse-sensitive views on the discipline of sociology as a whole. For example, for Bryan S. Turner, “Sociology broadly defined consists of the study of social interaction involving the exchange of meaning, symbols, values, objects and occasionally persons. At the core of this notion of exchange is language.”¹² Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman and Tim May point out that sociological thinking is “distinguished by its relationship to so-called ‘common sense’”¹³ or the vast amounts of “tacit knowledge that enables us to get on with daily life.”¹⁴ There are few social practices or phenomena “which have not been endowed with meaning before the sociologists appear” on the scene.¹⁵ Each of the terms that sociologists use to make sense of social and cultural life – “family,” “nation,” “religion” – is therefore already deeply laden with “meanings given by commonsensical knowledge.”¹⁶ A discursive sociology of religion therefore pays particular attention to the central social function that language and discourse performs in shaping both popular and scholarly perceptions of the “real” and consequently approaches categories like “religion,” “religious,” “belief,” “spirituality,” and the “secular” as fundamentally discursive categories that always gain their meanings in the particular communicative, relational, and interpretive contexts in which they appear and are used.

Second, a discursive sociology of religion is also one that constantly strives to maintain a high degree of critical awareness of the multitude of ways in which scholarly theorizing itself contributes to the construction of particular “realities” about “religion,” the “religious,” and related social categories and phenomena. In the chapters that follow, several influential and much-debated theoretical perspectives in the sociology of religion will be subjected to critical examination from a discursive point of view. This is in order to highlight the notable extent to which our theoretical perspectives and their associated terminological repertoires supply us with particular ways of perceiving and understanding the “realities on the ground,” what we understand “religion” to “be,” how “religion” interacts with and entwines with other social and cultural forces and phenomena, how we set out to gather data on our chosen topics of research, what we count and/or perceive as data in the first place, how we eventually analyze and explain our findings, and so on. A discursive sociology of religion, in short, therefore invites us to view both the category of “religion” and its study through the prism of discourse and discursive practice. What is advocated, therefore, is an approach that strives to remain constantly self-aware of how it is itself situated within broader epistemic cultures and their associated genres of factual discourse.

In order to be able to explicate the perspective advanced in this book in sufficient depth and detail, the chapters that follow focus on a limited set of cases, and mostly (but not exclusively) on developments in the Western world. This is mainly because the theoretical perspectives that are critically engaged with in subsequent chapters have all primarily been developed in Western settings and (in most cases) also initially been intended to be applied in research on Western contexts. While this certainly reflects a longstanding and persistent Western bias in the humanities and social sciences more generally, there is no denying the fact that originally Western theorizations of the social place and function of “religion” in the modern era continue to dominate the sociological study of religion on an international level. But although subsequent chapters will primarily focus on Western contexts, the Western category of “religion” will be subjected to repeated critical scrutiny.

Structure of the book

The book consists of five main chapters, each of which plays their own respective parts in outlining, explicating, and advancing a discursive sociology of religion as envisioned in this book. While they focus on different themes, they include frequent cross-references to one another. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on theory and method and thus set the stage for subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 explicates the concept of discourse and outlines a framework for analysis particularly suited for theory-driven sociological research that incorporates elements from various perspectives, both Foucauldian and those focused more on text and social analysis. Chapter 3 provides a critical discussion of the Western category of “religion” in light of previous research focused on language and discourse in the study of r...