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Cover

Title Page

List of Contributors

About the Editors

Introduction

Religious Studies as a Discipline

The Companion

PART I: Approaches

CHAPTER 1: Anthropology of Religion

Definitions and Perspectives

The Origins of Religion

Religious Experience

Modes of Thought

Bibliography

CHAPTER 2: Economics of Religion

Conclusion

Bibliography

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward‐thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition

Edited by Robert A. Segal and Nickolas P. Roubekas

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion

Second Edition

Edited by Robert A. Segal and Nickolas P. Roubekas

Edition History

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Segal, Robert Alan, editor. | Roubekas, Nickolas P. (Nickolas Panayiotis), 1979– editor. Title: The Wiley Blackwell companion to the study of religion / edited by Robert A. Segal and Nickolas P. Roubekas.

Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020036469 (print) | LCCN 2020036470 (ebook) | ISBN 9780470656563 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119092780 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119092766 (epub)

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Cover Design: Wiley

List of Contributors

Karl Baier. Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna, Austria

Guy L. Beck. Lecturer in Religious Studies, Tulane University and Loyola University, New Orleans, USA

Catherine Bell†. Hanley Professor of Religious Studies, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, USA

Fiona Bowie. Research Affiliate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford University, and a member of Wolfson College Oxford

Steve Bruce. Professor of Sociology, University of Aberdeen, UK

Simon Coleman. Chancellor Jackman Professor of Religious Studies, University of Toronto, Canada

Douglas J. Davies. Professor in the Study of Religion, Durham University, UK

G. Scott Davis. Lewis T. Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics, University of Richmond, USA

Lorne L. Dawson. Professor of Religious Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada

Yudit Kornberg Greenberg. George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Professor of Religious Studies, Rollins College, USA

Titus Hjelm. Associate Professor in the Study of Religion, University of Helsinki, Finland

Mark Juergensmeyer. Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Jens Kreinath. Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Wichita State University, USA

Roderick Main. Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, UK

Ian S. Markham. Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology and Ethics, USA

Tony Milligan. Senior Researcher, Cosmological Visionaries Project, King’s College London, UK

Henry Munson. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Maine, USA

Ralph O’Connor. Professor in the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland and Iceland, University of Aberdeen, UK

Paul Roscoe. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Maine, USA

Thomas Ryba. Notre Dame Theologian for the Aquinas Educational Foundation/Purdue and Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies and Philosophy at Purdue University, USA

Jesper Sørensen. Associate Professor at the Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University, Denmark

Rodney Stark. Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences, Baylor University, USA

Ivan Strenski. Holstein Family Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, University of California at Riverside, USA

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Charles Taliaferro. Oscar and Gertrude Boe Overby Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, USA

Paul‐François Tremlett. Senior Lecturer of Religious Studies, Open University, UK

Kocku von Stuckrad. Professor of Religious Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Michael Wilkinson. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Religion in Canada Institute, Trinity Western University, Canada

Robert A. Yelle. Professor of Religious Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany

Eric Ziolkowski. Helen H. P. Manson Professor of Bible and Head of the Department of Religious Studies, Lafayette College, USA

About the Editors

Robert A. Segal is Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Honorary Professor at the University of Essex, and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. His previous publications include Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (1987, rev. ed. 1990), Explaining and Interpreting Religion (1992), The Gnostic Jung (1992), Theorizing about Myth (1999), The Myth and Ritual Theory (1998), Hero Myths: A Reader (2000), and Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004, 2nd ed. 2015).

Nickolas P. Roubekas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Αναζητώντας

(2011), An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present (2017), editor of Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity (2019), and co‐editor of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography.

Introduction

Robert A. Segal

The first edition of the Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion appeared all the way back in 2006. The second edition, now named the Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, is revamped. The first edition consisted of twenty‐four entries. The second consists of thirty‐one entries. The differences are major. There are new entries: on cognitive science, emotion, esotericism, functionalism, globalization, history, law, music, science, sex and gender, and terror and violence. Three entries from the first edition have been dropped: heaven and hell, holy men/holy women, and mysticism – all dropped for idiosyncratic reasons. The comparative method has been switched from an approach to a topic. Five of the entries have new authors. One entry, that on ritual, has been retained unaltered because of the author’s sad death in the interim, but it now has a supplementary updating of the subject. All but one of the existing entries have been substantially revised.

When the first edition appeared, I was a member of a department of theology and religious studies. Two years ago my department decided to drop almost all of religious studies and to rename itself sheer “divinity.” What the difference is between divinity and theology I have no idea. But the exclusion of religions other than Christianity from “divinity” – or even the past needed addition of “religious studies” to “theology” – is not quite a universal terminology. In the United States, not least at esteemed venues like the Harvard Divinity School, the Yale Divinity School, and the University of Chicago Divinity School, “divinity” covers all religions, not just one religion. Whatever the difference between an approach to, say, Islam in a divinity school and an approach to it in a department of religious studies, Islam is assumed to be a fit topic of study for both.

The Companion is a guide to all religions. No religion is singled out either for inclusion or for exclusion. Religion is used generically to encompass all religions, past and present. The assumption is not that all religions are the same. The assumption is that all religions are similar, and similar enough to be treated together. By no coincidence there remains a chapter on the

comparative method. The study of religion is like the study of, for example, revolution. One might well be interested in only the French Revolution. One might be the world’s greatest expert on the subject. But the French Revolution is still a case, just a case, of revolution per se. Who would imagine studying the French case without first studying the category? Who would be able to do so? For surely what explains the French Revolution is what explains all other revolutions – that is, insofar as it, too, is a revolution.

Interested only in Christianity? Likewise whatever explains it is what explains all other religions. (On the comparative method see my “In Defense of the Comparative Method,” Numen 48 [2001]: 339–73; and “The Postmodernist Challenge to the Comparative Method,” in Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils?, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos, Brian C. Wilson, and James C. Hanges, 249–70 [Leiden: Brill, 2006].)

The basic questions in the study of religion are those of origin, function, subject, and truth.

Origin and function are flip sides of the same question, and the answer is a need. Religion originates and functions to fulfill the need. The need can be for anything, and can range from a need for food to a need for meaning in life. Religion does not arise spontaneously. It arises to fulfill the need, which can be as old as humanity or more recent. Religion may not be the sole way of fulfilling the need and may not even be the best way. After all, science succeeded religion as a superior way of securing food. Views differ on how far back religion goes and on how long it will last. Some maintain that religion is dying out. Only if it were asserted that religion fulfills a need that everyone harbors and that only religion can fulfill would religion be guaranteed to be eternal. This view is that of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) and other “religionists,” for whom the need is to encounter God.

The subject matter of religion can be either the literal one or a symbolic one. God can be taken as either a superhuman figure or a symbol, of either a human being – for example, the human father for Freud – or a natural phenomenon – for example, the sun.

The truth of religion is ordinarily considered by philosophers and theologians rather than by social scientists. For social scientists, the issue is why humans believe in God and act accordingly, not whether the God in

whom they believe is real. Even atheists like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) usually separate their explanations of religion from their denial of the reality of God. They seek to explain why persons come and continue to believe in God. The reality for them is belief in God, not the existence of God.

One issue not discussed in the Companion is the relationship between “explanation” and “interpretation.” These terms have long been used variously in the humanities and the social sciences. Sometimes they have been deemed compatible, other times incompatible. In this introduction I use “explanation” to cover both terms. On the varying usages of the terms see my Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

Religious Studies as a Discipline

Does religious studies qualify as a discipline? According to one view, religious studies, to qualify, must have a distinctive method. Yet most disciplines harbor no distinctive method. Many either share a method –notably, the “scientific method” – or else employ a variety of methods – for example, quantitative as well as qualitative approaches or textual analysis as well as fieldwork.

Still, does religious studies possess a method of its own? Many of the classical defenders of religious studies as a discipline invoke phenomenology as the distinctive method of the discipline. But at least as practiced, phenomenology of religion amounts to no more than data gathering, if also the classification of the data gathered. In other words, the celebrated method of religious studies turns out to be mere taxonomy.

If a discipline must have a distinctive method, and if data gathering and classification are all that religious studies offers, then the field is on shaky grounds. Not only are data gathering and classification common to all other fields, but the other fields that claim to study religion happily utilize the data and classifications provided by religious studies.

Anthropologists of religion, sociologists of religion, psychologists of religion, and economists of religion all rely on the findings of specialists in religious studies. What social scientists proceed to do with those findings

seemingly distinguishes them from those who toil in religious studies. They seek to explain the data amassed and organized, and they seek to explain them in their own disciplinary ways – anthropologically, sociologically, psychologically, and economically. Unless religious studies, whether or not the phenomenology of religion in particular, not merely describes certain beliefs, practices, and objects as religious but also explains them religiously, it serves as a mere underlaborer.

The second defense of religious studies as a discipline is that the field does in fact explain religion “religiously” rather than anthropologically, sociologically, psychologically, or economically. To explain religion from any perspective is to account for its origin and function as well as its subject matter. An anthropological explanation of religion accounts for religion as a case of culture. A sociological explanation of religion accounts for religion as a case of society. And so on. According to “religionists,” religious studies accounts for religion not as a case of anything else but in its own right – as religion. The origin and function of religion are therefore distinctively, or irreducibly, religious. This approach is therefore called “nonreductionistic.”

Now for religionists, no less than for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists, religion is a human, not a divine, creation. Religious beliefs and practices are concocted by humans, not revealed from on high. But humans purportedly concoct them in order to make contact with God. That is the irreducibly religious origin and function of religion. Humans do not happen to seek contact with God. They need to do so. Just as they come into the world with a need for food and for love, so they come into the world with a need for God. That need, like the need for food or love, is innate. Religion arises and serves to fulfill it.

The difficulties with this second defense of the autonomy of religious studies are multiple. To begin with, what is the evidence of any need to encounter God? Religionists infer from the existence of religion a need for contact with God, but the social sciences profess to be able to account for the existence of religion in terms of secular needs, which can be for anything. If religion reflects an innate need to encounter God, how can there be any individuals or cultures that are not religious? The rejoinder by religionists like Eliade is that there are not any. Religion is present everywhere, just not always overtly or consciously so.

Yet even if religion can be shown to be universal, and even if religion can be shown to fufill a need for God, why must that need be irreducible? Why can the need not be a mere means to some other, secular end? For J. G. Frazer (1854–1941), for example, religion is a means to getting food. No social scientist denies or must deny that religion serves to make contact with God. What social scientists want to know is why humans seek – let us even say need – to make that contact. Making contact is deemed a means to another end. Religion may be a useful means to that end, may even be the best means, or may yet be an indispensable means, as it is for Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), for whom religion serves to unify members of society. But no social scientist is prepared to take the need for contact as an end rather than a means. None is prepared to take a yearning for God as a sufficient, let alone necessary, explanation of religion. True, contact with God does not require belief in the existence of God. But it does require belief in a need to make contact with God. Why make that assumption?

Take Sigmund Freud. In Totem and Taboo (1913) he maintains that the guilt felt by sons toward their fathers over the sons’ parricidal wishes causes the sons to create a cosmic, divine father to try to love and obey, thereby placating their guilt toward their human fathers. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud maintains that the protection that fathers had given their sons and daughters alike in children is restored through the creation of a cosmic, divine father, who now shields them from the world at large. Freud hardly denies that adult adherents yearn for God. He denies that that yearning explains itself. Rather, it is the consequence of pre‐religious, childhood experiences or fantasies. Religion is an adult response to an ongoing child‐like need for paternal security. Religion is a means to a nonreligious end.

All social scientists start with the religionist perspective – that is, with religion as religion. They start with the beliefs and practices aimed at effecting the ideal relationship to God. But unlike religionists, social scientists venture beyond that perspective. They want to know why adherents seek a relationship to God. They rely on scholars of religion to document the fact of the quest for God. But that quest becomes the phenomenon to be explained, not the explanation itself. The claim by religionists to possess their own adequate, let alone necessary, explanation of religion thus fails.

The third defense of religious studies as an independent discipline is the appeal to other disciplines, especially to literary studies. It is argued that just as the study of literature is autonomous because of the irreducibly literary nature of literature, so the study of religion should be autonomous because of the irreducibly religious nature of religion. By the distinctively literary quality of literature is meant aspects of a work like genre, symbolism, plot, character, and point of view – all elements in the interpretation of a work of literature. By the distinctively religious character of religion is meant not only the interpretation of its meaning but also the determination of its origin and function. Still, the parallel to literary study is intended to argue that religious studies possesses the same claim to autonomy as literary studies.

Alas, the appeal fails. Literary critics do not merely declare that literature is literature but attempt to prove it – by showing that the interpretation of a literary work depends on the analysis of its literary aspects. By contrast, religionists simply declare that God is God and not a human father or the sun. That, once again, social scientists do not deny that for believers God is God but instead want to account for that irreducibly core of religion is a point continually missed. To match their counterparts in literary studies, religionists would have to show that God cannot be accounted for social scientifically. Instead, they declare that social scientists dare not even try.

The religionist appeal to literature is not only vain but also ironic. For in recent decades literary studies has become the most contested of fields. New Criticism, which reigned unchallenged in the English‐speaking world in the 1940s and 1950s, came closest to literary nonreductionism. But its heyday has long passed, and it has been succeeded by an array of reductive approaches – for example, feminist, black, gay and lesbian, and New Historicist brands of literary criticism. And long before them there existed Freudian, Jungian, and Marxist varieties of literary criticism, all of which continue to exist. It is not anti‐literary outsiders but literary critics themselves who employ these reductive approaches. Like their nonreductionistic fellow critics, they grant that the texts they scrutinize are manifestly literary. But unlike their nonreductionistic kin, they maintain that those texts are latently sociological, political, psychological, and historical. What for nonreductionists in literary studies is the end point of the study of literature is for reductionists – though this term is not used – the starting

point. Reductive approaches to literature are intended to account for the irreducibly literary level, not to deny it, just as reductive approaches to religion are intended to account for the irreducibly religious level, not to deny it.

At the same time the parallel of religious studies to literary studies shows that the quest for autonomy is by no means confined to religious studies. Just as contemporary literary critics like Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode strive to defend the study of literature against its collapse into cultural studies and other fields, so, for example, the philosopher Arthur Danto seeks to argue against the collapse of art into philosophy. Decades ago the philosopher R. G. Collingwood argued that history is not to be collapsed into a natural science. Not only established disciplines but also new ones must defend their turf. At the turn of the last century Durkheim asserted the autonomy of sociology by differentiating it from psychology. Psychology had already asserted its independence by differentiating itself from philosophy.

Religious studies does not require either a distinctive method or a distinctive explanation to be worthy of disciplinary status. It can be like an area studies, albeit one covering a worldwide area! Here religious studies is a subject matter, open to as many approaches as possible. On the one hand none of the approaches is likely to exhaust the subject. On the other hand not all approaches are compatible with one another. What counts is that the subject matter – religion – be connected to the rest of human life – to culture, society, the mind, the economy – rather than separated from it by the siege‐like defensiveness of religionists. For religionists, religion is what is left standing when everything else to which religion might be linked has been eliminated. They are wrong. Religion is best deciphered when it is connected to as much of the rest of human life as possible. Contrary to religionists, religion does not thereby lose its distinctiveness. Rather, it becomes a distinctive, irreducibly religious part of other domains of life.

The Companion

The thirty‐one chapters in this Companion are divided into approaches and topics. There are eight approaches and twenty‐three topics. The approaches cover disciplines: anthropology (Fiona Bowie), economics (Rodney Stark),

literature (Eric Ziolkowski), phenomenology (Thomas Ryba), philosophy (Charles Taliaferro), psychology (Roderick Main), sociology (Titus Hjelm), and theology (Ian Markham). The authors are professionals in these fields. They present the ways that their fellow anthropologists, economists, literary critics, and so on analyze religion. The authors do not worry about the collapse of religious studies into their disciplines. On the contrary, they seek to show what their disciplines contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of religion.

Two of the entries, on phenomenology of religion and on theology, deal with approaches that are by nature nonreductionistic. While Thomas Ryba traces the application of philosophical phenomenology to the study of religion, he shows that the phenomenology of religion arose at least in part as a reaction to the reductionism of the social sciences. While Ian Markham presents the various cultural influences on theology, he shows how theology has incorporated them, not how they have incorporated theology. Neither Ryba nor Markham contends that the approach each presents should, in religionist fashion, be immune to influences from other domains.

The twenty‐three topics vary in their origins. Many clearly hail from religious studies:

death and afterlife (Douglas Davies), esotericism (Karl Baier), fundamentalism (Henry Munson), magic (Kocku von Stuckrad), myth (Robert Segal), pilgrimage (Simon Coleman), ritual (Catherine Bell and Jens Kreinath), secularization (Steve Bruce), and terror and violence (Lorne Dawson). Other topics clearly come from elsewhere: body (Yudit Kornberg Greenberg), cognitive science (Jesper Sørensen), comparative method (Paul Roscoe), emotion (Tony Milligan), ethics (Scott Davis), functionalism (Robert Segal), globalization (Michael Wilkinson), history (Robert Yelle), law (Winnifred Fallers Sullivan), modernism and postmodernism (Paul‐François Tremlett), music (Guy Beck), nationalism (Mark Juergensmeyer), science (Ralph O’Connor), and sex and gender (Ivan Strenski).

Some of the categories are old, and some of them are new – for example, if not modernism, then postmodernism. The concept of secularization arose in the late nineteenth century, as Steve Bruce shows. Mark Juergensmeyer explains that the notion of nationalism, which originally meant secular nationalism, arose only in reaction to the Enlightenment. Henry Munson

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Table of Contents

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion

Forthcoming

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion

List of Contributors

About the Editors

Introduction

Religious Studies as a Discipline

The Companion