Abstract
In the past decade, several authors, most notably Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, have published well-received books arguing that religion and religious belief are harmful to society. They can be used to justify bigotry and obstruct progress; they rely on axiomatic acceptance of the unknown rather than scientific inquiry; they are irrational. A simplistic reading of the New Atheists’ work, as these writers have come to be known, is that religious belief is antithetical to knowledge. Western public discourse often compartmentalizes religion and knowledge, the former as the realm of faith and the latter as the realm of science. Ironically, as many volumes on the sociology of religion have shown, taking such dichotomization on faith (no pun intended) is a wholly unscientific perspective. Even if one believes that faith and science cannot mix or that religious belief is nothing more than fantasy, a basic tenet of sociology is that human beings’ understanding of social context affects their attitudes and behaviors. The tools of social science must be used to examine religion as a key source of the knowledge many people use to understand the world around them and their place in it. This volume is a worthy expression of that ideal.
The 15 essays in this book, one an introduction by co-editor Mathew Guest and the remainder case studies organized into three parts, were developed from papers presented at the 2009 annual conference of the British Sociological Association Sociology of Religion Study Group. The case studies are divided into three parts. The first focuses on examples of institutions—prisons, university classrooms, families, and religious movements—that legitimize knowledge and in which religion plays a key role. Part II, which constitutes the bulk of the book, includes eight chapters assessing the use of knowledge about and/or of religion by members of various religious groupings to generate or assess personal values and identities. Part III, consisting of the final two essays, examines the construction of religious knowledge, both from the lens of cultural capital development and as an academic research endeavor.
Although these groupings make intuitive sense, the intersection of religion and knowledge is not limited to operating on either the micro or macro level at any one time. Thematic links between chapters from different parts of this volume occasionally appear stronger than the connections within groups. Thus, for example, James Beckford’s examination of the practice of religion in the British and French penal systems (Part I, Chapter Two) illustrates the discrepancy between the lived religious experiences of individuals and the one-size-fits-all institutionalized varieties of Christian practice permitted within prisons. This discrepancy essentially empowers officials within the penal system to impose their own views of what constitutes authentic religion and constrain the religious choices of inmates to options that conform to broad stereotypes. In turn, the prisoners’ options to explore religious knowledge are similarly constrained. In comparison, Sylvia Collins-Mayo’s essay on young people’s personal Christian knowledge (Part II, Chapter Nine), addressing how young Christians choose to enact their religious identities, where and how they learn about their faith, and how their choices shape their future options, reveals that their life choices can have similar constraining and reifying effects on Christian practice. Although the committed church-goers in Collins-Mayo’s study developed deep personal knowledge of Christianity, the infrequent church-goers “stuck with what they knew from family and school and their own occasional private musings” (p. 162) and maintained only superficial knowledge. Having prioritized exploring identities other than their Christianity, they did not receive the institutional reinforcement of their religious identity that regular church attendance would have provided, and their understanding of their faith might be described as conforming to broad stereotypes. Ironically, the multiplicity of choices available to these young Christians ultimately led to a similar constraint on their religious knowledge as that of the prisoners described by Beckford, who had no such options.
Organizing a conference on “Religion and Knowledge” and collecting and editing the papers into a coherent collection inherently entails privileging certain perspectives on both key terms. There are scant references to any religion other than various forms of Christianity (though many forms are addressed) and, to a much more limited extent, Islam, with the latter framed in the context of assimilation and acculturation in a Christian-dominated society or how the faith is understood by Christians. Co-editor Elisabeth Arweck and Eleanor Nesbitt’s entry about young people in mixed faith families is a rare exception. This chapter is also notable for its assessment of challenges faced by children of mixed faith backgrounds in attempting to fit into multiple religious cultures. The negotiation of multiple identities, their conflicts, and the ways they coalesce into mixed identities yields significant insight into the layered nature of the relationship between religion and knowledge. Nevertheless, the narrow focus, though understandable given the British and American settings in which the authors conducted their research, limits the possibility of examining other faith traditions that achieve their “knowledge” differently (e.g., polytheism, naturalism, animism, etc.). Chapters on the identity politics of New Atheism and studying new religious movements as an outsider begin to address this deficit, yet their framings maintain the (generally unintentional and benign) sense pervading this volume that non-Christian traditions are to be regarded as other.
By contrast, the authors’ approaches to knowledge and how to assess it are much more diverse. Guest’s introductory chapter offers a nuanced presentation of current sociological approaches to the intersection of religion and knowledge, but the 14 subsequent case studies include a wide array of methods: quantitative and qualitative, ontological and epistemological, some privileging empirical observation and some privileging theology. Taken together, where the focus primarily on Christianity may tend to unify the collection of essays, the diversity of methods leaves little else in common between the essays other than a commitment to rigorous examination of the nexus between religion and knowledge.
The greatest value of this volume lies in the detailed case studies, three of which are described briefly above, and the insight they provide into the interaction of religion and knowledge. Despite the primary focus on Christianity, the case studies provide important lessons applicable more generally in the sociology of religion. The variety of methods used makes it difficult to discern a general trend beyond a relationship between religion and knowledge, but it does suggest opportunities to examine such a relationship more generally in non-Christian religious settings. I would recommend this book for courses examining the sociology of Christianity and knowledge, or as a methodological primer for courses seeking to address a variety of methods for researching religious groups.