Description versus Sociology in Introductory Textbooks

Teaching Sociology editor Stephen Sweet has asked me to comment on Michael Carroll’s article, “‘World Religions’ in Introductory Sociology Textbooks: In Search of Sociology” (this issue). I think Steve asked me since I am coauthor of both a sociology-of-religion textbook (Religion in Sociological Perspective, 6th ed., with David Yamane, 2016) and a popular introduction-to-sociology text (Our Social World, 5th ed., with Jeanne Ballantine and Kathleen Korgen, 2016). My initial reaction to his request was that it might be awkward as the author of an introductory text to respond to a critique of such texts. However, since our text avoids the pitfall he identifies, I can respond without seeming to be defensive. Actually, I agree with the heart of the critique and think the core issue goes further than Carroll carries it.

At first look, it appears that Carroll is primarily critiquing introductory books for sloppy use of conceptualization of the idea of world religions, pointing out that the criteria for determining what constitutes a “world religion” are often imprecise and even ambiguous. He is correct, of course. In defense of authors, writing an introductory textbook is extremely challenging, since one has many audiences to consider. The primary audience is students who are not terribly interested in finer points of arguments and can easily be distracted by them. Including too much rationale for choices bores students and takes them away from the core points that need to be made. A second audience is scholars who review the text for the publisher and invariably want more precision and clarification (more caveats) but also call for conciseness and even brevity. A third audience is the editors at the publishing house that want the textbook to sell. A fourth audience to consider is instructors who are considering adoption of the book. Often these audiences have conflicting needs and interests. Providing too much rationale for one’s decisions in writing can distract from the core message. Still, the author(s) should have a clearer notion than often seems to be the case why a religion is included or excluded from the list as a “world religion.” Carroll’s fundamental point is valid.

Carroll proceeds to a very fine and important summary of how “religion” as a concept came to be constructed. His discussion of world religions is instructive, though I was very surprised that Huston Smith’s (1994) classic book World Religions—which has sold well over 2 million copies, mostly to students in religion courses—was not mentioned; it was formative for decades starting with its first edition in the late 1950s. His work profoundly shaped work in the history of religion and in comparative religion. In any case, the process of constructing the concepts of “religion” and “world religion” has been a highly ethnocentric journey. This is frequently ignored in texts. As discussed below, religion is certainly badly misunderstood by many in our society and within sociological circles.

As one looks more closely at Carroll’s core argument, the real issue is whether intro books are too purely descriptive and not analytical enough—not sufficiently sociological. Indeed, this is a major problem of intro texts and is the reason my coauthors and I decided to write yet another one—in the hopes of correcting this. Carroll cites Greenwood and Howard’s (2011) comment about “cafeteria-style” approaches to the gateway course. My concern along similar lines is that textbooks are too often a cross between an encyclopedia and a glossary—with about as much overall coherence as a series of articles in the S volume of an encyclopedia. For a text to have coherence and integrity, it needs a major theme that runs through the book, so at the end students can write a clear thesis regarding how sociology illuminates social life. Our model for introductory texts—which is clear from test banks provided by publishers—is to get students to memorize the meaning of key sociological terms. This is distinctly not the same objective as “developing a sociological lens.” Carroll’s critique is well taken about description versus sociological analysis, and it should not be limited to World Religion sections of textbooks.

In insisting that religion is a European and American social construction, Carroll points to misconceptions about religion as entirely private and interior and also as primarily about a set of beliefs. He writes that “many non-Western languages have no word that corresponds to ‘religion’” (p. 32). Robert Marett (1914:xxxi) similarly emphasized over a century ago that, in many cultures, religion is “not so much thought out as danced out.” The focus on beliefs—orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy—is clearly a Christian bias, and adherence to specific beliefs is considerably less pronounced in Judaism or Islam, let alone other faiths (Prothero 2010). Indeed, the focus on religion being about “beliefs” is true only of certain segments of the larger Christian faith community. John Wesley (founder of Methodism) stressed that in his understanding, Christianity is (or should be) noncreedal—that creeds matter much less than relationships and how one lives one’s life (Wesley 1990). A number of more recent progressive theologians make the same argument (for example, see Bertocci 1958; Borg 1994, 2003; Fernandez 2011; Niebuhr 1960; Spong 2007; Tillich 1957). The United Church of Christ also downplays dogma as relatively inconsequential—a sidebar—to the faith.

Carroll rightly points out that religion is more properly understood as a “way of life”—a culture that is living and dynamic and always in interaction with the larger society and culture. Religion (the social expression of the personal phenomenon of “faith”) is a meaning system that attempts to define reality, but it is also a belonging system (a set of interpersonal relationships and friendship networks) and a structural system (a stable pattern of roles, statuses, and organizational practices) (Roberts and Yamane 2016). Treating religion as a matter of beliefs (and mostly private) is not only unsociological; it is highly Christocentric and Eurocentric. Carroll’s point is well taken.

Carroll takes textbook companies to task for controlling what our textbooks look like. There is some justification for the critique, but this can also be overplayed. In our own text (Ballantine, Roberts, and Korgen 2016), we tried to substantially “break the mold” of what a text should look like by having a unifying theme, downplaying terminology in favor of more analysis, and utilizing the work on “deep learning” to inform the way we developed our text. The sociology editor at Sage Publications gave us significant latitude, but sociologists acting as reviewers made it clear that if we veered too far from the standard model, few would adopt the text. We were told by these reviewers that chapters on the key topics that already fit their syllabi must be in the book. The pressure for conformity to a singular model was more from sociologists in the teaching trenches than it was from our publisher. We as a discipline are collectively responsible for inertia in modifying texts.

Carroll’s discussion deserves our attention, for he raises important issues. I am a bit less comfortable with his prescription of how to fix the problem, only because I am aware how difficult it is to write an intro text. The way any section of a textbook develops needs to be consistent with the overall theme or thesis of the book. His example of Native American communities is insightful, but it may or may not work into the core message of the book. Still, Michael Carroll’s point that books need to take seriously the problem of how the concept of religion came to be constructed is an important one, and if it is not addressed explicitly in a text, it needs to be part of the author’s underlying grasp of the field of religion.