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

[Michael Joseph]

Important to remember Doug that Stark and the new paradigmists are working
within the field of sociology, which tends to remain separated from the
field of religious studies. Also, his broadside attack assumes a degree of
familiarity with the conceptualization of religion within sociological
studies and social histories, particularly within what is called
"classical theory." Hence, his oversimplifications are calculated to be
provocative, I should guess. Thanks for the posting!


Michael



On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, pynchonoid wrote:

> <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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