re "religious analysis": Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science

[pynchonoid]

<http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39b00701.htm>

Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science
By RODNEY STARK

If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods
are ignored in most recently written histories, it is
harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago
banished from the social-scientific study of religion.
But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes
to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in
shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting
and reformulating a sociology of Gods. 

[...] 	
 
>From the issue dated June 6, 2003


 	
Why Gods Should Matter in Social Science
By RODNEY STARK
If it is hard to believe that conceptions of the Gods
are ignored in most recently written histories, it is
harder yet to understand why Gods were long ago
banished from the social-scientific study of religion.
But that is precisely why I have devoted two volumes
to demonstrating the crucial role of the Gods in
shaping history and civilization, and to resurrecting
and reformulating a sociology of Gods.
If asked what the word "religion" means, most
religious people will say it's about God or the Gods.
Yet, for a century, most social-scientific studies of
religion have examined nearly every aspect of faith
except what people believe about Gods. When and why
did we get it so wrong?
Émile Durkheim and the other early functionalists, who
emphasized the uses of religion, dismissed Gods as
unimportant window dressing, stressing instead that
rites and rituals are the fundamental stuff of
religion. Seen from the perspective of "true"
sociology, the concept of God "is now no more than a
minor accident. It is a psychological phenomenon which
has got mixed up with a whole sociological process
whose importance is of quite a different order,"
Durkheim wrote. "Thus the sociologist will pay scant
attention to the different ways in which men and
peoples have conceived the unknown cause and
mysterious depth of things. He will set aside all such
metaphysical speculations and will see in religion
only a social discipline."
Fifteen years later Durkheim had not wavered in his
conviction that Gods are peripheral to religion,
noting that, although the apparent purpose of rituals
is "strengthening the ties between the faithful and
their god," what they really do is strengthen the
"ties between the individual and society ... the god
being only a figurative representation of the
society." Thus began a new social-science orthodoxy:
Religion consists of participation in rites and
rituals -- and only rites and rituals.
I have long suspected that the underlying "insight"
that directed our attention away from God and toward
ritual had to do with the fact that Durkheim and his
circle were militantly secular Jews who, nevertheless,
sometimes attended synagogue. In their personal
experience, the phenomenology of religion would not
have included belief in supernatural beings, but only
the solidarity of group rituals. Those personal
perceptions were then reinforced by their voluminous
reading of anthropological accounts of the impassioned
ritual life of "primitives" by observers who lacked
any sympathy for the objects of those worship
services. 
Indeed, some of the most famous anthropologists
advised against paying any attention to the reasons
"natives" give for conducting rites. A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown called it a "grievous error" to
suppose anyone but a sophisticated outside observer
could make sense of ritual activity. Thus, it was from
his external vantage point that Radcliffe-Brown
concluded that although "it is sometimes held that
funeral and mourning rites are the result of a belief
in a soul surviving death ... I would rather hold the
view that belief in a surviving soul is not the cause
but the effect of the rites." By the same logic,
cultures are said to "discover" the existence of rain
Gods as a result of performing rain dances -- never
mind how it was that they started doing rain dances in
the first place. One must be a highly trained social
scientist to believe such things.

[...] Clearly, Durkheim made a major error when he
dismissed Gods as mere religious epiphenomena.
Unfortunately, his error had severe, widespread, and
long-lasting consequences, for it quickly became the
exclusive sociological view that religion consists of
rites and ritual, and that those exist only because
their latent function is to integrate societies and to
thereby lend sacred sanctions to the norms. In
retrospect, it seems remarkable that such a notion
gained such rapid acceptance and went unchallenged for
so long. Stripped of its functionalist jargon, the
basic argument seems to have been that, since "we"
know there are no Gods, they can't be the real object
of religion -- the truism that things are real to the
extent that people define them as real failed to make
any headway in this area of social science.

[...] Rodney Stark is a professor of sociology and
comparative religion at the University of Washington.
This article is adapted from For the Glory of God: How
Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts,
and the End of Slavery, to be published this month by
Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2003 by Rodney
Stark.






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